At the heart of knowing the city *

Abstract

In this commentary, we expand on Narayanan's argument for ontological locationality by drawing on our long-term South African project, Knowing the City: Urban Scholarship from Apartheid to Democracy, which drew together cross-generational groups of South African urban studies scholars to build dialogues across our field. Resonating with Narayanan's push for more diverse and plural ‘formats, methods, and theories’, in this project we trace multiple generations of South African scholars’ varied and changing theoretical approaches, methods, and imperatives of urban inquiry, exploring how the political and social, intellectual and even personal, environment in the South African context shapes the production and contribution of urban knowledge in (and from) South Africa and elsewhere. Rooted in the city and in our lives, this key provocation of southern urban theorizing for us extends in and beyond a conceptual notion of ‘ontological locationality’ and the binaries to which it responds.

To explain the limits of ‘what gets studied’ in the global field of urban studies, Nipesh Narayanan argues that despite the decade-long turn to the ‘south…the varied set of locations/positions that are peripheral to urban studies’ (2025: 2), the power of the ‘North Atlantic knowledge hegemony’ (2025: 1) means urban studies persistently and dogmatically remains metropolitan. In the recognition of ‘ontological locationality’, he suggests we might recontextualize the project of urban research to embrace a wider array of ‘particular kinds of research and research concerns’. In doing so, we might challenge the hegemony and presumption of universalism that shapes North Atlantic theorists and theorizing (2025: 5). A consciousness and appreciation of our ontological locationality, he suggests, will make possible a wider array of ‘situated positions from which subjects (researchers…) decide, what aspects of these worlds to render visible, that is what to study/research’ (2025: 4).

While not with this particular theoretical vocabulary, these questions, tensions, and contentions lie at the heart of the field of South African urban research. Why do we become researchers? What draws us to the (southern or northern) cities we commit to and to particular problem spaces or issues in and across them? What are the urban experiences and debates that shape the questions that these problem spaces elicit? The collaborations and relationships that shape our thinking and practice, to which we account? The questions that we feel we must answer or respond to and theorize? Rooted in our autobiographies, the intellectual and political contexts that shape us and the cities in which we research, as well as in the geopolitics of the field of urban studies, these are the questions that underlie – implicitly – Narayanan's push for engaging with what he calls ‘ontological locationality’. They are debates that have shaped South African urban studies in fundamental ways, teased out and engaged over decades.

Across the past 50 years, at least, for instance, with regime change from apartheid to democracy, the field of South African urban studies has debated the projects and modes of theorizing in it (Oldfield et al., 2024/2026). South African cities are complex, contested and fraught, exemplars of the global southern city and its contradictions, as well as a barometer on the South African nation, a measure of society, its inequalities, and its freedoms. On the one hand, cities have changed from Apartheid to democracy; on the other hand, urban problems are intransigent, deepened, and intractable. What is the project of urban scholarship in this context? How has it shifted? How have we shifted in these changing and challenging city contexts? On the one hand, as a fundamentally urban crisis, apartheid shaped urban research. At the same time, urban scholarship has been a key site for imagining the post-apartheid condition. On the other hand, the movement of urban ideas to and from South Africa has been a widely discussed topic in South African urban studies debates over the last several decades. South African cities have been key reference points for urban scholars elsewhere, as well as for thinking about other cities. Framing of positionality and locationality are threaded through the racialization of the academy and education systems, the hegemonic languages and modes of knowledge production that shape it, as well as national and global political economies of writing, publishing, and knowing. More recently, post 2015, student movements – such as #RhodesMustFall and #FeeMustFall – have mobilized to challenge radically the curriculum and professoriate, to question and change who's teaching what to whom. In short, in so many ways the field of South African urban studies grapples with and responds to its shaping from ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the country, through universal and particular forms of theorizing, entangled in southern and northern bodies of urban knowledge.

At the same time, the field of South African urban studies is shaped by so many theorists and thinkers – from ordinary people to policy makers, from scholars to practitioners of many sorts (Oldfield, 2023). At the heart of South African cities, for instance, are ordinary urbanites making do, against the odds, as well as the contested power dynamics shaped by elites, such as policy makers, officials, administrators, and visionaries. In this creative, rigorous and contested mix, urban researchers are only one slither of complex and invigorating conversations and practice. Not an ‘ivory tower’, isolated, solitary, individual, the field of South African urban studies is rooted in engagements in various publics and politics that shape cities and are the field's backbone, its norm. Rather than requiring a ‘re-centering of the researcher’, then, this rich reality calls for recognition of the complex layers of expertise and theoretical innovation and resonance, of which researchers are just a small part. In this context, our contextual, grounded approach to thinking and theorizing the city resonates with Narayanan's aim to refigure the field beyond a conventional academic-centric set of debates on research questions and methods. As he suggests, the field is prefigured in ‘researchers’ experiences’ (2025: 5), a move which works ‘to recenter the researcher in the research practice, that is, to enunciate where our research concerns are coming from’ (2025: 4), and to ‘acknowledge and investigate what Mignolo (2025: 122) describes as (4) the geo-political and bio-political nature of knowledge production’ (2025: 5).

In short, notions of north and south, of periphery and metropole, are relationally complex, entangled and actively contested. Reflecting this mix, South African urban debates exceed the limits of norms, conventions, languages, and practices of publishing shaped by the journals in our field, which is one of the dilemmas that Narayanan grapples with in this article. While not the direct focus of this commentary, in this context hegemonic –universal – ideas can be produced and travel in powerfully configured multi-directional conversations (for a recently reinvigorated example, for instance, see debates on racial capitalism – Oldfield and Selmeczi, 2024/2026: 431), which turn inside out ideas of a locationality determined by the North Atlantic ‘metropole’ and its multiple ‘peripheries’ and elsewheres.

The generation of urban ideas – taking a fresh look

While a vocabulary of ontological locationality that tightens the theoretical knots that bind us feels less productive, Narayanan's push for more innovative forms of dialogue is helpful. He suggests we reconfigure our formats – ‘how we discuss our knowledge outputs’, methods – ‘what we can employ to understand ontological locationalities’, and ‘theories’, which he hopes can ‘move towards pluriversality’ (p. 8). In this mix, he argues there are great opportunities ‘to interrogate what gets studied’.

It is here that our and Narayanan's projects find a parallel impetus and sensibility. In the second part of the commentary, we draw on experiences from a long-term South African project entitled Knowing the City: Urban Scholarship from Apartheid to Democracy (Oldfield et al., 2024/2026). The project drew together cross-generational groups of South African urban studies scholars to build dialogues across our field. It has influenced our thinking about dialogical methods that create ways to engage together, to remember and reflect, and to build and support creative modes of research practice and theorizing. While we are cautious of over-extrapolating from it, it certainly resonates in three ways with Narayanan's push for more diverse and plural ‘formats, methods, and theories.’

From binaries to ‘problem spaces’

In this project, we adopted anthropologist David Scott's (2014) concept of ‘problem spaces’ to trace multiple generations of South African scholars’ varied and changing theoretical approaches, methods, and imperatives of urban inquiry. We found rich resonances with his project to understand the intellectual and political visions of anti-colonial Caribbean thinkers from the perspective of his postcolonial generation (Scott, 2014). Conceptually, the theme of generations directs Scott's inquiry. He explains: ‘I am looking back through my generational experience of the ruin of the postcolonial and postsocialist present at what my interlocutors are remembering looking forward to as a horizon of future possibility’ (2014: 160). Inspired in this framing, for the Knowing the City project we shifted ‘the gauge of evaluation from a search for epistemologically or ontologically robust objects and frameworks of analysis to the emergence of particular problem spaces in the overlapping fields of inquiry and practice’ (Oldfield et al., 2024/2026: 20). We also took inspiration from Scott's corresponding method of the life-history interviews as a dialogical process of reconstructing the contexts in which ideas emerge and develop. This impetus shaped our dialogical approach in the project, the methods we developed to trace postcolonial praxis. Across the overall 6-year period of the project, we held five workshops, with altogether 50 participants, and conducted 16 in-depth intellectual life-history interviews. Our hope in this book is to show that this sentiment will help nurture dialogues across generations and approaches in the field of South African (and global) urban scholarship.

Creating and engaging dialogical methods

It was precisely the ‘how’ of this work which proved our deep learning in Knowing the City. To engage the situatedness of theorizing, we deployed a broader palette of dialogical modes of eliciting reflection and narratives around and across these generational dynamics. We believed that dialogical methods mobilised in a collective setting and combined with writing could make visible scholars’ various parallel, overlapping, colliding, or evolving problem spaces. Complementing Scott's approach, situated feminist epistemologies allowed us to expand our perspective and add the layer of the personal and embodied to our exploration. Richa Nagar's work, specifically, underscored engagement beyond academic scholarship as co-constituting knowledge (Nagar, 2014, 2019). We also drew on the project of Autobiographical IR (Dauphinee and Inayatullah, 2016; Inayatullah, 2011) in approaching writing as a process to tease out problem spaces whilst undoing the fiction of the absent author.

These dialogical methods shaped our questions, conversations, and the ways in which we argued, engaged, and wrote. They helped us track Narayanan's central provocation to ‘interrogate what gets studied’. Building on scholars’ decades-long grappling with the location, objects, and imperatives of theorizing in and from the South African city, these dialogical approaches helped us explore the multiple and shifting meanings of critical urban scholarship as a vocation, to show ‘the various imperatives of South African urban scholarship [that] shed light on how fluid those binaries are in urban scholars’ theoretical practices, and how precarious the division is between “ideas” and “life”’. (Selmeczi et al., 2024/2026: 9).

Plural modes of theorizing

Through this project:

Our claim is that dialogical methods mobilised in a collective setting, and combined with writing as a mnemonic technique that opens new pathways to reflections on scholarly practice, make visible the various parallel, overlapping, colliding, or evolving problem spaces, because they are able to tease out what problem spaces are made of. (Selmeczi et al., 2024/2026: 27)

What we show in and through Knowing the City is the role of the political (social, intellectual, and even personal) environment in the South African context in shaping the questions and projects that arise is crucial in understanding and re-evaluating the production and contribution of urban knowledge in (and from) South Africa and elsewhere.

The 76 short essays in the volume confirm the reciprocity between fields of action and inquiry (Barnett and Bridge, 2017): for the authors (and for many more southern urbanists), theorizing is situated in and shaped by practical engagements and experiments with urban inequality and injustice, and questions about what freer life in (postcolonial) cities would be like. At the same time, the essays narrate a plurality of unique routes to urban scholarship and practice driven by multiple translations of commitments to theory and practice. However, the multivocality – or pluriversality – of these trajectories still leads to what, even with its diversities, disjunctures, and debates, is a shared vocation. In doing so, we deepen postcolonial and feminist projects to provincialize and situate or locate theorising by engaging the intellectual, historical, political and personal as indivisible in shaping one's practice.

As a possible example of the diversified ‘formats, methods, and theories’ Narayanan proposes, dialogue and plural forms of theorizing, moreover, open up the conversation to those with whom we ‘know the city’, with whom we practice and whose theorizing and everyday lives and struggles inspire and situate us as scholars and researchers. Rooted in the city and in our lives, these key provocations of southern urban theorizing for us extend in and beyond a conceptual notion of ‘ontological locationality’ and the binaries to which it responds. In short, ‘[t]heorising is rendered here as a response to a situation that requires clarification – a response to a problem – and is thus situated, by definition’ (Selmeczi et al., 2024/2026: 38).