Inhabiting research through lived practice: A humanistic response to north–south ontological locationalities

Abstract

Drawing from my lived experiences as a scholar-practitioner navigating north–south binaries, this commentary offers a humanistic response to Narayanan's (2025) Ontological Locationalities. Emphasising the significance of embodied knowledge, relationality, and everyday rhythms, I mobilise the conceptual frames of Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis and Cindy Katz's idea of minor theory to invoke how a humanistic lens values biographical antecedents, emotions and affect, and the ways in which these entwine with the urban environment as the fertile grounds for urban research and planning practice. It is therefore not just where research questions arise but how these questions begin to be asked that also matter, with a conscious attentiveness towards the affective and material realities of place-making. In so doing, I offer humanistic urbanism as a complement in shaping the conversation around the need for pluriversalities as advanced by Narayanan (2025), where research is part of a lived practice sensitive to bio-spatialities, dwelling, situatedness, histories and multiplicities of the places explored. By inhabiting research, the humanistic perspective offers a challenging yet necessary pathway towards fostering inclusive and compassionate urban futures.

Introduction

Narayanan's (2025) Ontological Locationalities resonated, professionally and personally. The critique of metropolitan hegemony and how dominant knowledge systems of the West continue to structure what gets studied, and I would add, what gets practiced, even as peripheries are foregrounded, is significant. I have navigated these tensions – in who I am and how I dwell; and hence, in the framings of my research and ongoing policy practice.

Borrowing Huma Abedin's term ‘both/and’ in her memoir (Abedin, 2021) is apt, as I lived and practiced being both north–south, and more. Born and bred in Singapore, a city-state in Southeast Asia with the ambition to exceed the ‘tiny red dot’ that it is on the global stage, I am of part Chinese/part Peranakan indigenous ancestry, with cultural leanings that are local but learnings that are British. Given Singapore's colonial heritage, governance, policy and planning were practiced through expectations of Western instilled canonical instruction and ways of thinking, married with ways of doing that were cognisant of a unique socio-cultural context, befitting Singapore's ‘strategy of excellence’ as the ‘Giant from Lilliput’ (Kissinger, 2022). Alongside colleagues and bosses schooled in prestigious Ivy League colleges and OxBridge universities, I tried to navigate this sweet spot of ‘both/and’, sometimes schizophrenically, as I helped craft strategies, policies and plans to inform housing, community relations and infrastructure agendas throughout my public service career.

I crossed continents more recently, living and working in Metro Vancouver, conducting ethnographic research in the alleyways of cities, mingling with older adults and those living with trauma, addictions and homelessness. I struggled to make sense of what I am experiencing, figuring out my evolving ‘both/and’ identity of the moment, across a cumulative biographical trajectory traversing time, privilege, lived worlds, specific places, who I encounter and what I am reading. These urban intersections of bio-spatialities shape the morphing of my hybridised and oftentimes unfathomable mind via variegated multiplicities, traditions and sense-making. While I affirm Narayanan's suggestion of pluriversality, my trajectory has also taught me that urban research has to be necessarily complemented through a different posture and cadence; one that is not premised on abstract reformats and revisions, but an attentiveness to the humanistic register grounded in memory, relationships, experiences and the rhythms of everyday life.

Lived worlds and embodied relationalities

Research and practice are always situated in the urban bio-spatialities we inhabit. How the urban ‘seeps under the skin’ and moves us, is always relational and embedded in context, embodied in how we dwell (Khoo, 2024). Scholars may hold repositories of theoretical insights, empirical analyses and case studies in their heads, but more often than not, trenchant questions arise from the entanglements of literature with lived practice, enacted whilst walking alongside others, being immersed in landscapes, activities and ‘inscapes’, empathetically feeling the joys, suffering and challenges of people encountered. These moments afford possibility, especially when social realities collide, offering openings of asking the ‘why's’. Henri Lefebvre's writings are instrumental in this regard, where an understanding of the urban is situated in the constant mesh of rhythms jostling across the general level, comprising state workings of capitalism and the market, and the private level, where individual senses of habiting are shaped by everyday life (Lefebvre, 1970).

Urban research becomes the scintillating modicum of teasing out this conflict zone when rhythms grate and grind, holding the seed of transformative agency to instigate a prescient research question and enact the exploration. Research pursuits through a humanistic register pay attention to not just where but how questions emerge, taking into account the contradictions and immanence of urban lived worlds, their everydayness. In my ethnography of older adults aging through urban transformation in Singapore (Khoo, 2024), I became sensitive to how city rhythms disrupt aging bodies, and how individuals’ ability to adapt to change is uneven across the lifecourse. While we may embrace change and capitalist challenges in our thirties, by our seventies change can be disorienting as environments collide with lived worlds. Seniors who used to walk the streets with ease now hesitate at traffic junctions; sensory triggers cause confusion and the city's timetables mismatch biological clocks. In this context, what then does future-proofing a city mean and entail? Whose pace is the city keeping? This friction is the locus where pertinent questions stem, and theory begins.

By contrast then, I advocate lived ontologies attentive to presence, scaled down and turned inwards with a focus on embodied relationalities. Lefebvre (1992) understands this as rhythmanalysis, with the world as laboratory, everyday practice as critique and the body as a reflection of urban health. The urban researcher then, is akin to a rhythmanalyst with the uncanny ability to distil how rhythms become ‘arrhythmic’, how people become ‘broken-in’ and broken down by the rituals of capitalist living to endure suppressions and resistances with bodily effects. An embodied rhythmanalytical approach demands a fluency with the objective and subjective worlds, with the researcher resembling a physician who attends to functional disruptions in the urban, its malfunctions of rhythm, to understand and redress how a pathological situation could occur and be rectified ‘through rhythms, without brutality’ (ibid: 77).

Fuzzy place matters

Narayanan's proposal for revising formats and diversifying theory is thus necessary but emanating from a humanistic perspective proceeds from what Katz calls ‘minor theory’ (Katz, 1996); ‘minor’ not in its insignificance, but in its rejection of universalistic moves. The bond between people and place, as well as the visceral in the urban frequently gets dismissed in the structuralist manner in which research gets framed and studied. As Narayanan notes, situatedness matters. Yet urban theory too often forgets what place remembers – places created by pause, fidelity, dwelling, and care (Tuan, 1977, 1979). It is always about people and place as lived, endured and experienced, rather than locational co-ordinates. Imbued with memory, affection and anxiety, places matter because of who and what happens there, what lingers across timespace (Tuan, 1977).

People I collaborated with as research partners speak not of ‘the global south’ nor care about north–south hybridities, but of the blocks demolished and grieving endured, of areas gentrified and stores no longer found, of alleyways navigated through pain and fear, and of benches where grandchildren gleefully bounced on laps (Khoo, 2024). It is a reminder that urban research and knowledge productions are invitations to feel the pulse of the city from below and alongside, foregrounding proximity over macro perspective, acknowledging the density of emotions and affect, re-inhabiting the everyday through stories, smells, silences and murmurs.

More importantly, such humanistic urbanism gives voice to the coalescence of memory, grievances, hopes and aspirations, providing openings for reconciliation, forgiveness and possibility. Research, in a minor tenor respects temporality, the small-scale nature of research, its mundaneness and its humility. It celebrates fracture and irreducibility even as it does not replace theory nor systemic interventions. Rather, minor theory is a gesture of accompaniment with embodied histories, elevating situated knowledges and local rhythms as being insight generative, with a research practice that is authentic, participant centred and co-experienced. Pursuing urban research through a humanistic lens with Katz's conception of the minor key is therefore nonchalant about incompleteness and partiality; because that is reality – fuzzy, messy, always becoming, contradictory and irrational.

Humanistic practice as lived method

Urban research through a humanistic rubric is less a framework but more a stance offered. It is remembering that cities are not just sites of infrastructure, but of intimacy where recollections and sedimented rhythm, not just regulation and design, shape urban life. It means treating place not as setting or backdrop but one filled with connective social tissue and emotions. It means listening, inhabiting, caring. It means a deeper and earnest search of who we are as researchers, scholars and practitioners, how we show up, what our claims and purposes are.

In the search for big answers in academia and urban practice, rewards are meted on speed, intervention and solutioning. Inevitably, we lose grounded intimate knowings as they are considered nebulous, subjective, unattractive. It is precisely why Lefebvre insists that everyday life has to be critiqued for its possibility of an alternative urban other (Lefebvre, 1970). Mapping urban possibilities thus envelop being both/and through a humanistic outlook, grounded in listening and reactions, informed by theoretical insights not to scale what is uncovered, but to feel the intensity and sense its trajectory, with the body in place as a mirror of urban wellness.

I have lived in the East and West, learnt curriculums through North and South framings, navigated structure and story, policy and people. Schooled in efficiency, meritocracy, and planning rationalities, I have worked in institutions and in academia with a vocation towards harnessing urban planning to do better for communities. To do so, I have struggled to translate across epistemic registers of academic critique and policy pragmatism; lived reality and institutional ambition. What ‘doing better’ requires, how policies land, and how much it takes to just ‘move the needle’ continue to confound me even as I strive towards ‘better’. I helped imagine and build inclusive, sustainable cities. But my scholarship taught me to see how policies and plans carry the pecuniary effects of a capitalistic urbanism, which reverberate through streets and void decks; and in the hearts, bones and brains of lived worlds. The unmeasurable effects of scripted cities are felt in silences and the fabric of everyday life (Lefebvre, 1958/1961/1981).

The persistent and pervasive north–south binary we all hold intuitively dear is certainly accountable and endeavouring to blast the favoured ways of knowing open to include pluriversalities might provide an answer. Yet is this futile? Half a century after ‘Orientalism’ (Said, 1978), the status quo in urban scholarship, policy and practice remains little upended. The fervour of equity, diversity and inclusion, off to a promising start, is thwarted by its susceptibility to manipulation and abuse. My work and scholarship have exposed me to the uneven terrains of racial and cultural knowledges where people hold divergent standards of meaning and plural standards for inclusion and exclusion. Those of us working to navigate this north–south binary and its pluralities often find ourselves most vulnerable despite our literacy, as racial and cultural knowledges are selectively acknowledged, commodified, dismissed and weaponised, shaped by encounters of subjective individual biographical journeys, collective becomings and institutional illiteracy. Scrutinised for being ‘too personal’ and hence biased, or otherwise dismissed especially when insights contravene dominant narratives, I probably suffer from burnout trying to make sense and live a counter-praxis that carries the emotional, intellectual and interpersonal burden of constant negotiation between worlds, expectations, injustices, and ways of knowing.

Seeking to live a humanistic practice straddling worlds is hence hard and vexing, requiring courage and grit. The fragile rewards of inhabiting epistemic margins where fluency in race, culture and social justice exposes rather than protects, is also disillusioning. Yet, caving-in is not an option. The practice of humanistic urbanism offers the potential corrective of rewriting the conversation to embed bodies, affects and textures in how we know, live and care in the urban; or as Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin claims, channels us towards the ‘Omega Point’ (De Chardin, 1956). This, for me, entails a relationality that is east–west and elsewhere, planned intention and lived reality; a continued jostling of ignorance, arrogance and all in-between to translate, code-switch and mediate. This, for me, remains my blueprint and my comfort bench.