Urbanists today are provoked by overwhelming amounts of specialized knowledge about the urban, produced in diverse academic disciplines, by varied types of urban institutions, and different groups of people in and beyond the city itself. As students of the urban, we are deeply immersed in the messy and often contradictory realities of urban life. This position begs the question: What knowledge do we produce and engage with, and to what end? What is the “doing” of urban research, and how does it shape our insights, practices, and projects? How, as urbanists, do we learn from the past, from our own modes of practice, from collaborations and confrontations, and from the unabated creativity of urban life?

These questions have inspired What Is Critical Urbanism? and the forms of urban research, practice, and pedagogy we share in it. Rooted in a productive intersection of humanities and social science methods, our work offers an approach to urban studies that works in and across disciplines, debates, and cultures of expertise, and across cities north and south, east and west. In this book, we share how we have cultivated and embraced a notion of critique that is open and nimble, grounded and propositional; one that combines thinking and doing, writing and engaging, caring and challenging. It shapes a pedagogy in which we aim to turn our assumptions—the things we think we know—into questions.

In doing so, we embrace an intellectual agility that enables us to see things both up close and from afar, to pivot between perspectives and across city spaces. In these practices, we develop an ethos of thinking, doing, and teaching rooted in questions of justice, situated in the contingencies and contradictions that shape our urban worlds.

To articulate the shared ethos of Critical Urbanism, we propose that:

Critical urbanism challenges cultures of expertise and decompartmentalizes urban knowledge. Extending from the university as a dominant site of knowledge production, we embrace the different, unexpected, everyday, minor, major, forgotten, banal, and neglected ways of knowing and experiencing the city. If urban life contradicts the separation, compartmentalization, and specialization of knowledge produced in and around the university, we aim to take these contradictions as a starting point to develop new ways of thinking. If the city prompts us to question dominant cultures of expertise, critical urbanism opens up disciplinary containers to rewire urban studies with reflexivity and precision.

Critical urbanism is built on reciprocal and relational learning through an ethos of engagement. Placing oneself into the picture is not an act of solipsism; it is a way to move out of the center to make space for others. Critical urbanism means building horizontal relationships with urban actors and thinkers in a way that leaves space for incommensurability and disagreement. Beyond tired oppositions between objective fact and subjective understanding, between pure knowledge and mere technical application, we start from an engagement with partial perspectives to develop new insights and practices.

Critical urbanism fosters new narratives and publics through creative experiments. Disentangling urbanism from the purview of planning and policy opens up a range of positions between the university, the urban professions, and the multiple publics that make up the city. Critical urbanism means experimenting with urban publics to build new political spaces of expression and transformation. It means communicating with the senses in space, marshalling the aesthetics to build collective transformation. Critical urbanism is creative as it moves in the tension between the urgency to intervene and the merit of reflection, between the impetus to resolve and the privilege to problematize.

Critical urbanism reimagines the past to build an alternative future. Because the past is never settled, it can be reread to make a difference in how we experience the present. And since our experience of the present shapes how we orient ourselves to the future, any future is always shaped by the past. Starting from the openness of the past rather than master-planning the future, we mobilize history as a verb. Against forgetting and erasing, critical urbanism nurtures past struggles to imagine alternative futures.


Excerpted from “Elements of Urban pedagogy” and “An Ethos of Critical Urbanism” in What is Critical Urbanism? (Park Books, 2022).

“Learning through "Highway Africa"” by Kenny Cupers and Manuel Herz
From “Elements of Urban Pedagogy”

With the end of colonization in Africa came unprecedented ambitions of modernization. Key to such modernization was the development of new infrastructure. For members of the elite, infrastructure development was first and foremost an economic measure to facilitate the production and movement of goods and materials across Africa. At the same time, political actors saw in some of the projected infrastructure networks opportunities for nation-building, and for forging a new era of Pan-African cooperation and transcontinental development. For a fledgling African middle class, infrastructure conjured imaginaries of upward social mobility, and for entire communities it opened up hopes of movement and prosperity unlike anything experienced before. But can such infrastructure make Africa rise from the development caused by European colonial rule? Can what once was a key tool of colonialism—the railways built by European powers to extract resources—also be used to undo its results and reshape Africa’s relationship with the rest of the world?

“The State at Home: Housing and Uncertainty in Eastridge, Cape Town” by James Clacherty
From “Ways of Knowing the City ”

Acts directed at bringing about the ideal home—slow incremental improvements such as building flowerbeds, hanging curtains, polishing kitchenware, or even just acts of imagining the ideal home—are, on the one hand, a way for the residents to assert ownership over their houses and make them their own, and, on the other hand, an assertion of political personhood. Acts of homemaking become an assertion of the dignity and respectability that is denied them by the state when it withholds tenure to their houses and relegates them to the delinquent category of “illegal occupant.” The state project becomes an intimate part of people’s lives. They encounter its various elements on a day-to-day basis and respond to it in strongly emotional and corporeal ways. If we are to understand these processes of state formation and reproduction and the process of citizen subjectification in a way that engages honestly with their complexity, we need to be sure not to lose sight of the spaces in which these processes become most real and where they are most keenly felt: in the everyday lives and homes of ordinary people trying to cope with extraordinary circumstances.

“Video Activism as Bottom-Up City Making” by Jacob Geuder
From “Ways of Knowing the City ”

“Peace without a voice is not peace, it is fear”; these were the words on a favela resident’s poster at a protest filmed in Maré, Rio de Janeiro, in February 2015, after a series of lethal police attacks that left eleven victims dead or injured. The police responded to this street demonstration with live ammunition, injuring at least one of the activists in the protest. Since the early 2010s, the exponential growth in the availability of smartphones and social media in Brazil and South Africa has increased the number of potential videographers dramatically. With the importance of filming as a “repertoire of contention” for urban movements and urban citizens, video activism has become a critical way to make visible the realities of city life for those who bear the brunt of systems of violence and marginalization. Videographers’ audio-visual testimonies make visible evidence of violence, showing the ways in which violence is inextricably entangled with city space.

“Madjermans” by Lea Nienhoff
From “The Urban beyond North and South”

When the Eastern Bloc disintegrated, it was not only hegemonic powers that collapsed, but also the close cooperation that the so-called brother countries had built up across the North-South divide. Those political alliances had shaped processes of decolonization and yet reinstated forms of exploitation. The agreement of temporary work migration from Mozambique to East Germany was settled in 1979. Though announced as an education program that would prepare a young workforce to realize Mozambican industrial development, only a small number of workers actually received the training they were expecting. The high-minded phrases of GDR state officials on international solidarity and their fight against neocolonialism was countered by the fact that Mozambicans’ work was exploited in the mines and factories of East Germany.

“Worlding Goma” By Maren Larsen
From “The Urban beyond North and South”

The force I am staying with and the collection of armies we symbolically greet on this early morning jog are a reflection of shifting geopolitical priorities since the end of the Cold War. Such historical shifts have resulted in a retreat of the West in UN peacekeeping missions and an overwhelming reliance on “Southern” soldiers to fill the ranks.Deploying troops from the Global South to participate in peacekeeping missions such as MONUSCO acts as a continuation of imperial and colonial patterns and logics of military deployment, argues Philip Cunliffe. For the UN, contingent troops from these countries offer the advantages of cost efficiency, lessened political costs of interventions (due to troop-contributing countries being less powerful states), and legitimation of large deployments that might otherwise look too analogous to neocolonial occupation. Beginning an analysis of Goma from a particular context like that of the peacekeeping camp immediately calls into question the boundaries between the provincial and the cosmopolitan in ways that escape the accusation that postcolonial urban theory from the South advocates for a provincialization of knowledge.

“On the Coloniality of Infrastructure” by Kenny Cupers
From “The Presence of the Past”

Imagine a giant, thirty-five-kilometer-wide dam crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. Now imagine a similar dam at the Dardanelles, the much narrower strait that divides the Aegean Sea from the Sea of Marmara and ultimately the Black Sea. These two feats of engineering would have allowed engineers to hydrologically close off the Mediterranean Sea and was a vision of a continental merger whichHerman Sörgel spent most of his life working toward. The project, which became known as “Eurafrica,” aimed to bring about a new world order by merging two continents on fundamentally unequal terms, entrenching colonial control in Africa in order to perpetuate Europe’s privilege. Eurafrica was a proposal for a more advanced, coordinated form of colonialism in this continent , the conquest of which European powers had already begun to coordinate since the Berlin conference of 1884–1885. Even though it is almost entirely written out of the official histories of the European Union, the project of Eurafrica was central to the history of European integration.

"Notes on Heritage (Re-)Making" by Emilio Distretti
From “The Presence of the Past”

The question around the role of colonial architectural heritage has always been a thorn in the side of state and identity formations and transformations, in both formerly colonized and colonizing societies and spaces. On the one hand, in the postcolony, the dilemma has been framed around different solutions: either the appropriation of colonial official buildings as sites for newly independent governments, for practices of memorialization, or as abandoned to collective forgetfulness. On the other hand, in the “ex-metropole,” the question around buildings, institutions, and monuments is transmitted and articulated through the paradoxical coexistence of amnesia of the colonial past with the hyper-visibility of urban designs of colonial origin. This dual direction, rather than creating a contrast, opened up the question of whether it makes sense to inquire into the “loss of meaning” of colonial architecture. What do these buildings really represent and mean today?

“Nation-Weaving” by Manuel Herz
From “In and between Theory and Practice”

What type of statehood does the Western Sahara represent? The Sahrawis declared independence of the Western Sahara (officially: the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic—SADR) on February 27, 1976. To date SADR has a constitution, a functioning government with a president, a prime minister, several ministers with distinct portfolios, and a parliament consisting of fifty-three seats whilst also being a full member of the African Union, and being recognised by forty-five member states of the United Nations. he architectural and urban production of the Sahrawis was presented at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016, and was sited within a National Pavilion, w in front of the Central Pavilion, as a as a powerful statement for a nation without territory.

“Rooted in the City” by Sophie Oldfield
From “In and between Theory and Practice”

Working with community organizations, social movements, and ordinary residents, challenges researchers to pay attention to diverse practices that shape housing access and its city politics. This approachroots research in the expertise of ordinary residents,their movements and in their daily struggle to find and secure a home. Collaborative research work is an approach to theory and research practice that, as Edgar Pieterse suggests, “demands immersion into profoundly fraught and contested spaces of power and control.” Experimenting with varied types of partners and forms of collaboration has been central to thisresearch journey and thinking. In this short piece, three Cape Town–based collaborative research projects are shared as part of the City Research Studio, in which students from the Master’s in Critical Urbanisms at the University of Basel and the MPhil in Southern Urbanism at the University of Cape Town are taught.