Co-producing Knowledge for Sustainable Cities

Joining Forces for Change

Merritt Polk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317604563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

At the current time, many issues and problems within sustainable urban development are managed within traditional disciplinary and organizational structures. However, problems such as, climate change, resource constraints, poverty and social tensions all exceed current compartmentalization of policy-making, administration and knowledge production. This book provides a better understanding of how researchers and practitioners together can co-produce knowledge to better contribute to solving the complex challenges of reaching sustainable urban futures. It is written for academic and professional audiences working with urban planning and sustainable cities around the world.

Co-producing Knowledge is presented, by way of introduction, as a non-linear, collaborative approach to knowledge production which combines interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, cross sector and policy approaches to societal problem solving. Examples are taken from Cape Town, Gothenburg, Kisumu, Manchester, Melbourne and a selection of cities in Southeast Asia. Each city chapter discusses the drivers and motivations behind knowledge co-production and gives concrete examples of activities and approaches that have been used to promote sustainable urban futures. Each chapter is written to promote mutual learning from the approaches that are already in use. Building upon these city cases, the conclusions outline an international practice and research agenda aimed at strengthening the promotion and implementation of the knowledge co-production for sustainability across diverse urban development contexts.

This book provides an overview of the diverse driving forces behind co-production, and their specific contexts and constraints in a variety of cosmopolitan urban contexts. Some of these include institutional and cross-sector barriers to co-production, the need for learning across diverse levels and contexts, and strategies for balancing scientific excellence with the needs of societal change. This book offers valuable lessons regarding the concrete implications and potential impact that co-production processes can have for different user groups, such as planners, politicians, researchers, business interests and NGOs in different urban development contexts.

1 Co-producing knowledge for sustainable urban futures

Merritt Polk and Jaan-Henrik Kain

DOI: 10.4324/9781315748030-1

Introduction

This book is about producing knowledge in urban areas. More specifically, it focuses on how decision-makers, civil servants, private actors and civil society come together with researchers to co-produce knowledge that can be used to contribute to creating more sustainable urban futures. This is by no means a new topic. What is new in the pages that follow is the breadth of examples of how different urban actors create knowledge together in cities around the world. Based upon first-hand experiences from researchers, planners, and officials working with urban development, we present concrete examples of projects, strategies, programs, and other activities that engage diverse voices and sources of expertise and experiences in Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. All of these examples show both the added values and critical issues that arise in knowledge production processes that attempt to bring together diverse actors, organizations, and spheres of activity to address current urban challenges.

From a historical perspective, serious environmental and social problems in cities are by no means a new phenomenon (Frank 2002; Hall 1988; Jacobs 1965). However, the scope and speed of change of current economic activities and resource consumption present hitherto un-faced challenges in understanding and dealing with the causal links that cut across continents, governing bodies, and value systems. Local governments are expected to provide services, promote economic and social development, and ensure safe and healthy environments within the constraints of short-term mandates, increasing social and environmental problems, and worsening financial conditions. International agendas connected to sustainable urban development similarly place formidable demands on cities not only to provide services locally, but also to promote participation in decision-making, environmental conservation, and social justice. While sustainable development and sustainability are well-established goals worldwide, different uses reflect a variety of underlying political worldviews and values, from market-driven mechanisms within neo-liberal political agendas to ones that call for a total transformation of society based on social and environmental justice. This sets the stage for the discussion of sustainable cities that will be developed in this book.

What means do cities have at hand to meet such challenges and address such conflicts, both potential and actual? At the current time, cities are arenas for a variety of overlapping, mutually dependent, competing, and conflicting objectives. They are beset by essentially contested problems that are mired in uncertainty. They are the physical site for conflicts involving diverse value commitments from politics and bureaucracy, residents and business interests. While cities are managed within traditional organizational structures, many urban challenges such as climate change, resource constraints, poverty, poor health, and social tensions exceed the boundaries of the current compartmentalization of policy-making, planning, administration and academic knowledge production. Such challenges, by their nature, affect or engage a variety of stakeholders, decision-making levels, local–global contexts, disciplines, and sectors, as well as their respective social values, political ideologies, concrete urban conditions, and academic and bureaucratic structures. No single actor has the capacity or power to fully grasp or address this complexity. Nor is the knowledge needed to navigate the many challenges, uncertainties, and commitments readily available. It has to be created, or assembled, in dialogue between diverse users, political agendas, and interest groups. Creating spaces and processes that can support dialogue and collaboration, and complement existing governance and research capacity, is thus crucial to our ability to negotiate diverse value positions, capture relevant sources of knowledge and expertise, and better ground potential solutions in their specific contexts. Doing so is, however, far from simple.

This book highlights one approach to addressing the challenges facing all of us who are working with sustainable cities. It focuses on the need to include a wider range of actors in research processes in order to create novel forms of urban research that can better grasp the multidimensionality of the problems that are being faced. Sustainable development is a highly contested term. Consequently any discussion of sustainable cities must start from the perspective that sustainability means different things to different actor groups. It is therefore equally important for research on sustainable cities to be based on inclusive processes which can better capture the situated understandings of sustainability that exist in particular contexts by a variety of urban actors. We call this knowledge co-production. While co-production is used in many different areas and fields, here it is used to describe nonlinear, collaborative approaches to knowledge creation that draw upon interactive and participatory research approaches to societal problem solving. More specifically knowledge co-production refers to collaboratively based processes where different actors and interest groups come together with researchers to share and create knowledge that can be used to address the sustainability challenges being faced today, and increase the research capacity to contribute to societal problem-solving in the future. Knowledge co-production can thus be seen as a way to address the needs for democratic participation or more inclusive political processes called for within the sustainable development debate. For sustainable development to succeed, it needs to be grounded on social, political, and economic equity, but it needs greater equity in knowledge production processes as well. Thus the co-production approach developed here starts from the contested and inherently political nature of sustainable development, and shows how we can contribute to creating a more equitable political economy of knowledge production through different types of co-production processes.

Concrete examples of knowledge co-production are taken from Mistra Urban Futures, an international center for sustainable urban development based in Gothenburg, Sweden. The bulk of this book consists of five chapters written by practitioners and researchers from Gothenburg, Cape Town, Kisumu, Greater Manchester, and Melbourne. While the city of Melbourne is not officially affiliated with the center, as the other cities are, a researcher from Melbourne has been highly involved in the establishment of the center, and works with similar types of processes that add additional examples of relevant approaches to co-production. All of the city chapters describe and analyze different examples of co-production within their specific historical and social contexts. This includes researcher-practitioner-led projects in Gothenburg, a program for CityLabs in Cape Town, inclusive visioning processes in Kisumu, new relations between municipal governments and the university in Greater Manchester, and strategies for university–city engagement in Melbourne. As these examples show, at the center, knowledge co-production is viewed as essential for addressing complex challenges and problems in the urban environment. The work at the center thus addresses urban complexity through a focus on new modes of co-produced research that are used to promote mutual learning and action across diverse urban development contexts and conditions.

This introductory chapter lays the basis for why co-production is put forward as an important complement to traditional forms of knowledge production given current challenges and conditions of sustainable urban development. It starts by discussing the complexity of urban challenges and how current responses are most often compartmentalized and addressed within separate sectors, decision-making levels, and disciplines. We problematize how such traditional policy cultures and sector boundaries are closely linked to traditional models of knowledge production. We also discuss how these obstruct in-depth collaboration between policy-making, planning, and research, and limit genuine participation of societal interest groups from the private and civil sectors. All in all, this leads to a mismatch between critical urban challenges and the ability to develop research approaches that are tailored to address them. The penultimate section presents a more in-depth discussion of participatory approaches in planning and places co-production within the wider science–policy discussions. This includes the shift in planning from consensus and collaboration to more interactive research approaches. The chapter concludes with an outline of the remaining chapters in the book.

The challenges of sustainable cities

Promoting societal change in a sustainable direction is a topic that has been on policy-making, planning, and research agendas since the 1987 Brundtland commission report Our Common Future launched what became a global movement around sustainable development, and the work with Agenda 21 brought this global vision into local governance and research (United Nations 1992; WCED 1987). However, despite a close to thirty-year history, definitions and meanings connected to sustainability and sustainable development are still highly debated within policy, practice, and research. Different interpretations of sustainable development and their applications reflect a variety of underlying political and ideological worldviews and values (Kates et al. 2005; Owens and Cowell 2011; Robinson 2004). They show different degrees of connectivity between social activities, economic growth, and their resultant environmental impacts, and represent different beliefs about how such impacts are best addressed. Importantly, the importance of equity, especially the weight given to social justice issues at both global and local levels, varies greatly. To make things even more complicated, sustainable development is also interpreted and operationalized in conflicting and incompatible ways within the same local context by different political actors, business interests, and civil society organizations, as well as in different sectors and disciplines (Castro 2004; Robinson 2004).

Because of such differences in use, many have criticized the vagueness and ambiguity of sustainable development, arguing that the concept is purely rhetorical (Adams 2001; Castro 2004). Others describe this plurality of possible interpretations as constructively ambiguous, arguing that the “lack of definitional precision of the term sustainable development may represent an important political opportunity” (Robinson 2004: 374). In a similar vein, despite the many failures of sustainability and sustainable development to live up to their expected potential, their opportunistic use can also be seen to unveil the diverse value claims that exist in society, creating much needed arenas for political debate (Owens and Cowell 2011). Sustainable development can therefore be seen as not just a means for promoting a specific political agenda; it is equally a tool for exposing ideological beliefs, a space for conversation and collaboration, and a framework for creating incentives and participatory platforms for debate and action.

On top of such discursive challenges, applying the concept of sustainable development to cities also brings a number of other issues to the foreground. Reports on the millennium development goals show a number of improvements in urban areas around the world: fewer people living in extreme poverty, better access to clean water and sanitation, and a smaller proportion of slum dwellers around the world (United Nations 2012). However, important as they are, these gains mask deteriorating situations caused by the overexploitation of habitats, global economic instability, climate change, and the failure of technocratic and market-based interventions to reduce emissions (Griggs et al. 2013; IPCC 2014; Wikman and Rockström 2011). Social inequalities and misery continue to grow, while urban areas around the world are afflicted by severe environmental problems and resource degradation (Brugmann 2009; Davis 2006). Such trends show no sign of abatement. Despite the great amount of time and energy spent on promoting sustainability, for ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Co-producing knowledge for sustainable urban futures
• 2 Co-producing knowledge in Gothenburg through political collaboration, cross-sector programs, triple helix science parks, and Mistra Urban Futures
• 3 Co-producing knowledge for whom, and to what end? Reflections from the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town
• 4 Tracing Kisumu’s path in the co-production of knowledge for urban development
• 5 Lessons on the research–practice relationship: from critique to co-production in Greater Manchester
• 6 Multifaceted engagement for urban sustainable futures in Melbourne and Southeast Asia
• 7 Formative evaluation at a transdisciplinary research center
• 8 Critical issues and challenges for co-producing knowledge for urban change
• Index