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South African cities are marked by the legacies of past practices, inscribed in fixed spatial patterns. They therefore play a pivotal role in shaping the possibilities and limits of changing imperatives of transition, transformation, development and sustainability. From the late 1970s, the ‘urban’ has been presented as both a key scene for visions of the reform of apartheid and as a site for the potentially revolutionary transformation of South African society. Knowing the City departs from this prominence of urban issues, which explains why South African urban scholarship has been a key reference point nationally and in urban studies elsewhere.
The book draws together 65 urban scholars of South African cities of different generations, from various regions and from diverse universities. The 76 essays of the volume are products of a series of workshops and interviews; each piece emerges from different modes of dialogue and writing work developed through these interactions. The aim of the collection is not to offer an authoritative historical survey of the field but to (re-)open and facilitate genuine dialogues about the theories and practices of both social inquiry and urban transformation as deeply lived commitments of multiple generations of scholars in South Africa and beyond.
There are two guiding premises of Knowing the City. First, in South African and global southern urban scholarship, more conventional registers of scholarly expertise and critique are deeply interwoven with practices of engaging beyond academia in the form of, for instance, activism, consultancy and co-production. Second, knowledge about South Africa has not been and is still not produced only in South Africa but across more stretched-out geographies. Just as importantly, knowledge about and conceptualisations drawn from South Africa have been and continue to be ascribed more general (that is, more-than-local) significance. What the project’s dialogical research process revealed is that, aside from being located geographically, socially and politically, urbanists’ field of practice is embodied, personal and relational. The book reassesses the geographies and commitments of South African urban studies and, paying attention to scholars’ distinctive forms of engagement and the problem spaces that have shaped it, tells a novel story about the generation of ideas and (knowledge) practices in urban studies, and in social sciences more broadly.
Sophie Oldfield is Chair and Professor of the Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, and a Professor in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town. Her most recent book is High Stakes, High Hopes: Urban Theorizing in Partnership (University of Georgia Press, 2023).
Anna Selmeczi is Senior Lecturer at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. She is co-editor (with shine choi and Erzsébet Strausz) of Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics: Creativity and Transformation (Routledge, 2020).
Clive Barnett (1966–2021) was Professor of Geography and Social Theory at the University of Exeter. His most recent book is The Priority of Injustice: Locating Democracy in Critical Theory (University of Georgia Press, 2017).
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