The politics of “urban expertise”: shifting horizons for critical urban scholarship?

ABSTRACT

Expertise and experts have been at the heart of the last few years of pandemic crisis. Yet, their role in urban governance is still a broadly uncharted territory. This special issue explores what a research agenda on the politics of urban expertise could look like. Presenting a mix of diverse geographical viewpoints on the challenges of expertise in cities, we argue for moving beyond a fruitful critique, to reflect more deeply on how critical urban scholarship can support progressive knowledge practices. In this introduction, we situate these contributions by discussing the emergence of an “industry” for urban expertise and the rise of “urban age” intellectuals over the past two decades. We highlight how contemporary global discourses on cities are reshaping how urban scholars engage with urban expertise politics, notably through a proliferation of partnerships with non-academic urban actors, aiming to set out possible avenues for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban expert
• policy advice
• urban science
• knowledge economy
• critical urban scholarship
• partnership

Introduction

Expertise and experts have been at the heart of much of the last few years of pandemic crisis. Invoked as daily referent points of a deluge of data and information about contagion spread, called up to project possible futures in the disruptions and downturns caused by the crisis, and in some cases targeted directly by reactionary and conservative views (Merkley & Loewen, 2021), they have regularly populated news and discussions across most cities around the world. Urban experts, more specifically, have been altogether quite visible in discussing publicly, advising decision-makers and providing insights as to the state and development of severely impacted urban areas where most of the pandemic unfolded. In short, the presence and politics of expertise, and urban expertise more specifically in our case, are front and center today. Yet expertise and its knowledge translation dynamics do not unfold in a vacuum. In a “global” urban condition, knowledge and power are intrinsically intertwined and prompt us to examine even more closely those who work explicitly at their intersection (Lancione & McFarlane, 2021). We are, as recent urban studies work on the role of engineers in urban development put it, called upon to better attend to the “social imaginations, forms of knowledge and regimes of expertise” (Björkman & Harris, 2018) that underpin expertise. Urban expertise, in turn, has certainly become more and more central, where not contested, for those working in and on cities.

This is still a broadly uncharted territory. Urban research across the social sciences, and geography in particular, has attended to the ways in which particular experts and scientific techniques shape urban processes. Critical explorations of the politics of “urban expertise” have animated various debates in urban studies. Urban policy mobilities studies (UPMS) have looked at the power relations behind how experts, urban policy prescriptions and knowledge travel from one place to the other, across cities of the Global South and North (e.g. McCann, 2008; E. McCann & Ward, 2012; Prince, 2012; Wood, 2015). Others have explored the logics of control induced by the increasing automation of urban knowledge and information (e.g. Coletta & Kitchin, 2017; Kitchin et al., 2015; Marvin & Luque-Ayala, 2017), as well as the place of expert-led decision-making in urban politics (e.g. Colven, 2020; Goh, 2019; Robin, 2018; Swyngedouw, 2009; Vogelpohl & Klemp, 2018). In unveiling such processes, critical urban scholars have sought to call into question the adequacy of policies and urban strategies based on an exclusive reliance on technical expertise as well as the power dynamics behind the circulation of particular kinds of experts and “best practices.” However, existing critiques of contemporary urban expertise have rarely happened as a dialogue, or in the translation zone, between scholars and the so-called urban experts. Unlike planning scholars (e.g. Sandercock, 1998; Healey, 2008; Miraftab, 2009), much of urban studies exploring the politics of expertise have to date rarely assessed the extent to which their own work can hinder or advance more inclusive knowledge practices in dialogue with the experts they engage with, although this is progressively being addressed by the “co-production” turn in urban research (Marrengane & Croese, 2021; May & Perry, 2018). This is where our collective intervention comes in.

With this special issue, we explore what an expanded research agenda on the politics of urban expertise could look like. In presenting a mix of diverse geographical viewpoints on the challenges of expertise and expert advice mobilization in cities, we argue for the need to move beyond what has already been a fruitful critique of the politics of urban expertise in contemporary city-making (Parnell & Pieterse, 2016) to reflect more deeply on the ways in which critical urban scholarship can support progressive knowledge practices, as Andrew Harris (2022) stresses in this issue’s concluding commentary, and contribute to reshaping the ways in which the urban is known and acted upon (May & Perry, 2018). This requires reflecting on the position of urban scholarly work itself within contemporary networks of urban expertise, alongside expanding our understanding of how different forms of knowledge are valued, produced, and used by different actors and coalitions in urban decision-making. The papers gathered in this special issue represent a collective attempt to highlight future important directions for scholarly inquiry into the politics of urban expertise, namely (1) continuing to unveil the emergence of hegemonic forms of urban expertise, (2) exploring in more depth the role of academics within broader networks of urban expertise and their contribution to the (re)production/dismantling of urban injustices, (3) studying the role of new forms of expertise in struggles for urban justice, and (4) offering self-reflexive accounts on the promises and pitfalls of academic-policy-civil society collaborations.

In this introduction, we situate these contributions first by discussing the emergence of an “industry” for urban expertise and the rise of “urban age” intellectuals over the past two decades. We then review the main orientations of past and current urban geographical research on the politics of urban expertise. We then discuss how contemporary global discourses on cities and sustainable development are contributing to reshaping how urban scholars engage with urban expertise politics, notably through a proliferation of partnerships with a myriad of non-academic urban actors, from policymakers to private sector, communities, and social movements (McArthur & Robin, 2019). In a final section, we reflect upon these old and more recent developments to examine the blind spots of existing research and to highlight possible avenues for future research on the politics of urban expertise, drawing on the rich insights provided by the scholars gathered in this special issue. Building on that we encourage the reader to consult the special issue’s two concluding commentaries, kindly penned by Bath Perry (2022) and Andrew Harris (2022), that provide perhaps better than we could have an overarching picture of not only contributions but also open avenues for further work that emerge from the cast of essays presented here.

The rise of the urban expert

Different experts professions – engineers, surveyors, planners, architects, to name but a few – have shaped urban developmental trajectories throughout history. Today, an even wider range of experts are involved in producing urban knowledge to inform how cities are built and governed. With the relative retreat of the state in urban development since the 1980s, new kinds of private actors are now leading urban transformations across much of the global North but also parts of Asia, the Middle East and Latin America (Fainstein, 2001), with similar moves taking hold in Africa, the Pacific and Eastern Europe since the 1990s (Watson, 2014). In short, at the outset of the last century, it was already clear that we were witnessing an expanding range of actors involved in the ways cities are known and managed – beyond traditional public sector planners and engineers – with an expanding genus of urban expertise, multiplying the sources of its production and its use across a range of urban policy domains such as housing, climate adaptation, utility infrastructures and service delivery (Harvey & Knox, 2015). This also went hand-in-hand with a marked growth in the role played by consultancy firms, with the private market for urban expertise encompassing most urban sectors from environmental issues to city leadership, social policy, health and economic development – to name only a few (Beveridge, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2009; Vogelpohl & Klemp, 2018).

Management consultancies expanded their influence in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, with both major firms and highly influential individual experts playing an increasingly marked role not just in local politics but also on the national and international policy arena, contributing to set the scene for the shape of current urban politics. Today, urban experts include a myriad of organizations including private consultancies, architectural firms, local economic development specialists, heritage and environmental experts, community consultation agencies, engineering and infrastructure companies, IT companies as well as of course major real estate actors (including developers, investors, surveyors, appraisers) (Raco & Savini, 2019). The list is long and complex in what has emerged more and more as an “ideas industry,” to borrow from a similar analysis of foreign policymaking (Drezner, 2017), shaping urban policy in various places (Robin & Acuto, 2018; Slater, 2021). The type of expertise produced by these different actors in, for and across cities is at present mobilized in many different ways, from direct policy application to capacity building, institutional reform or transnational action, guiding a multitude of interventions across all policy domains.

This intricacy is compounded by the internationalization of urban governance not just via the private sector and the global economic flows that intertwine cities (May & Perry, 2018), but also by the emergence of global agendas more and more engaged with the contemporary urban question (Parnell, 2016). Global transformations such as climate change and worldwide urban growth driven by rapid urbanization in Africa and Asia have contributed to position cities as a new site of intervention for public, private, philanthropic and civic actors, local and international NGOs and multilateral organizations such as the UN, the World Bank and regional development banks, contributing to expanding the range of organizations interested in taking part in offering expertise on today’s planetary urban condition (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2020; Bigger & Webber, 2020; Fuentenebro & Acuto, 2021; Montero, 2020; Webber et al., 2020). Both rapid urbanization and climate change contribute to the rise of the “urban question” in global policy discourses. Cities are portrayed both as sites of decay and opportunities, responsible for environmental degradation and innovation hubs for progressive interventions and the reinvention of human life under climate change (Castán Broto & Westman, 2020), further calling upon urban experts to provide evidence and strategic advice with the ascent of city diplomacy to the multilateral arena (Acuto & Leffel, 2021). This in turn propelled local leaders, and prominently mayors, to be more visible on the international stage as key commentators of the urban age. International policy discussions and multilateral decision-making have progressively gotten used to the circulation of urban actors and knowledge beyond the confines of municipal policy-making (Cociña et al., 2019).

Many academics and academic institutions have also been part of this expanding landscape of urban expertise (Acuto et al., 2018). Yet we still know little about this institutionalization. Beth Perry (2022) puts it fittingly in her concluding commentary to this issue: “systematic consideration of the institutions of knowledge production is missing from many debates on the politics of urban expertise.” This is central in our view because urban research centers across the global North and South have been playing important roles in advising, mustering evidence for and even reforming the institutions at the heart of urban development. They have intervened at different scales of governance by engaging with local and multilateral organizations, but also with the private sector and community organizations, even though their involvement has been subject to less academic scrutiny than other knowledge providers (Robin & Acuto, 2018). In this evolving landscape, urban scholarship, particularly in geography, has developed strong critiques of the contemporary rise of various urban experts, stressing their influence over the post-politicization of urban decision-making (Swyngedouw, 2009), as well as their role in promoting neoliberal approaches to urban management, and in contributing to the financialization and standardization of urban developments (Robin, 2018). We take stock of these scholarly developments in the next section.

Urban scholarship as a mode of critique

Critical urban geography scholars have long studied urban experts and their role in urban transformations. For the most part, existing research has attended to the ways in which different experts shape urban processes. These studies offer a critical understanding of uneven power relations shaping the production and use of urban expertise and can be grouped into five interrelated lines of inquiry: (1) studies looking at the global mobility of urban expertise and ideas; (2) studies exploring the “technocratization” and post-political condition of urban decision-making; (3) studies exploring civil society and communities’ resistance to expert-led urban decision-making; (4) studies looking at the importance of real estate management and financial expertise in contemporary city-making; and (5) studies exploring the advent of new technologies and their implications for the governmentality of urban subjects. The following paragraphs connect these different strands of research and the key insights they provide.

A prominent body of research in urban geography has looked at the mobility of urban models and of the experts that promote those. The global mobility of particular ways of understanding cities, and related ways of intervening in cities, is not a new phenomenon (Harris & Moore, 2013): through colonization, war and domination, colonial powers have disseminated urban planning and management techniques across the world (e.g. Myers, 2003). Research pertaining to the field of urban policy mobilities studies (UMPS) has explored how globally fashionable urban models and interventions emerge and become popular (e.g. González, 2011; Hoyt, 2006; Pow, 2014; Ward, 2006) and how these travel to different locations, often undergoing significant changes as they arrive in particular places (Peck & Theodore, 2010). Urban models and policies have been shown to travel across different sites through a variety of “transfer agents’ (Stone, 2004) including engineers, planners and architects (e.g. Bunnell & Das, 2010; Goh, 2019; Healey & Upton, 2010; Larner & Laurie, 2010; Nasr, 2005; Ponzini, n.d.; C. Pow, 2018; Rapoport, 2015; Sklair, 2013; Wood, 2018); management and policy consultants (Prince, 2012; Vogelpohl & Klemp, 2018); national and local governments (Béal et al., 2018; Bok & Coe, 2017; Croese, 2018; Robin & Nkula-Wenz, 2020; Temenos & McCann, 2012); city networks (Acuto & Leffel, 2021; Clarke, 2012); real estate developers (Brill & Conte, 2020); international aid and philanthropic organizations (Fuentenebro & Acuto, 2021; Leitner et al., 2018; McFarlane, 2011a; Montero, 2020; Roy, 2010; Stone, 2004) and finally, academics (Jacobs & Lees, 2013). Jacobs and Lees (2013) draw attention to the role of scholars in the dissemination of urban models, and the controversies that surround this position. Specifically, the authors explore the case of British geographer Alice Coleman’s role in the translation, and dissemination of Oscar Newman “defensible space” concept in UK, which ended up influencing the country’s housing policy under Margaret Thatcher. Through this example, the authors explore how academic work that found little traction (and peer-validation) within academic circles became highly influential, from a political standpoint. To date, however, policy mobility studies have paid very little attention to the role of academics themselves in the movement, reconfiguration, and implementation of particular urban prescriptions (we come back to this point in the next sections). More broadly, UPMS have found resonance with work on the post-political and post-democratic urban condition, characterized by the marginalization of non-technical expertise and the prominence of public and private technocrats in urban decision-making (MacLeod, 2011, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2009). However, some have critiqued the “post-politics” framework for being too reductionist and not accounting for the ways in which expertise and policy-making can actually shape urban trajectories towards more just outcomes (Beveridge & Koch, 2017).

Additionally, UPMS research has highlighted the importance not just of individual and organizations in the mobility of urban ideas, but also that of scientific techniques, material objects and artifacts and digital media. For instance, Pow (2014) explores the ways in which the Singaporean model became a blueprint for contemporary urban planning, highlighting the importance of “scaled architectural models, glossy brochures and high-tech ‘policy showrooms’” (Pow, 2014, p. 298) in its global circulation (also see Huat, 2011). This work highlights how the production of urban expertise emerges out of complex assemblages of individuals, subjectivities, techniques and objects (McFarlane, 2011b). This attention to the work of particular knowledge techniques, embodied in architectural models, modeling tools, mapping, etc. has not been unique to UMPS research. Indeed, researchers interested in the “financialization” of urban development have been particularly attentive to the relationship between knowledge production and the increasing influence of real estate and financial actors in urban decision-making. Several authors have shown the importance of technical devices – such as consultants reports and financial viability modeling – in the planning process, highlighting how report writing and evidence production enable developers to get planning permission for their projects (Fainstein, 2001; Robin, 2018). Research on the use of financial viability appraisals (Christophers, 2014; McAllister et al., 2016; Robin, 2018) and valuation techniques and modeling (Murphy, 2020; Weber, 2020) has shown their importance in urban planning processes in the UK and the US. Real estate markets (locally and globally) thrive on the reduction of urban space to a set of metrics that allow comparison across space and can support investments decisions – this requires constant knowledge work to make different spaces commensurable and investable (Searle, 2014). Beyond the financialization literature, work looking into smart and data-driven urbanism has shown how technological advances (e.g. internet of things, sensors, connected devices, real-time dashboards and big data) reshape the planning and management of cities towards an increasing reliance on the monitoring of flows, movements and behaviors, and the use of surveillance technologies (Kitchin, 2011; Kitchin et al., 2015; Marvin & Luque-Ayala, 2017). These different strands of work have offered a critical appraisal of the ways in which data-driven, technocratic and financial expertise exacerbate uneven power dynamics, anti-democratic decision-making processes, and how this plays a role in the standardization of urban interventions globally.

Critical urban scholars have also been attentive to the ways in which urban dwellers and communities self-organize produce and mobilize knowledge in attempts to contest and resist top-down decision-making processes. This has been explored in studies looking at self-enumeration movements in informal settlements (Patel et al., 2012), and in research analyzing conflicts over urban planning processes (e.g. de Souza, 2006; Healey, 1998; Hölzl, 2018; Miraftab, 2009; Tironi, 2015). In taking the role of critical observers of the politics of urban expertise production and mobilization, urban scholars have developed a critical vocabulary to unveil the role of urban expertise in the (re)production of urban injustices. However, beyond offering this much-needed critique, the different strands of work summarized here have rarely reflected upon the ways in which their own work can contribute to undoing and contesting the unjust power dynamics they observe. In the next section, we summarize the work of scholars that have taken more active role in working directly with a variety of urban actors to mobilize knowledge production processes as a way to achieve urban justice, particularly in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals. Fittingly, in his concluding commentary for this special issue, Andrew Harris (2022) encourages us to take this line of engagement even further and consider striding beyond a dichotomous view of the expert–non-expert. As he puts it, it is true that “expert” in many inquiries, not least some of the essays here and to some degree this introduction too, tend to be easily contrasted against “community” or “non-expert” recipients, and that is a dynamic we should aim, as critical urban scholars, to overcome in some measure. Still, we concur with Beth Perry’s closing remarks to the issue in so far as we believe a key strength of all the papers is to challenge and unpack forms of expertise and identify how struggles for urban justice mobilize new forms of expertise (Perry, 2022), and thus that social justice-oriented angle to abating the dichotomy is a productive one we hope to encourage with our issue.

Critical urban scholarship as partnerships

The expansion of the business of urban expertise is not alien to scholarship and academia, as it shapes both the context and content of academic inquiry (May & Perry, 2018). As Matti Siemiatycki (2012) had already underscored regarding planners, it is increasingly important for scholars in the built environment to acknowledge the different roles they adopt beyond the so-called “ivory tower” – a metaphor more and more out of sync the ways in which academia functions in the twenty-first century. From this perspective it is essential for our discussion of urban expertise to appreciate how, alongside the emergence of consultants, city leaders and the whole edifice of urban expertise production detailed above, the role of urban scholars has been object of transformations in the recent years.

Calls for more active presence of academic urban experts in practice and policy found fertile ground in much of the trends of the early 2000s. On the one hand, this was taking place at a time of marked growth in the prominence of an “informed cities” agenda (Acuto, 2018) around the world not just driven by smart city agendas but also by demands for evidence to inform much more explicitly the ways we govern urban areas. The environmental movements behind the impetus for cities to act transnationally on climate change, but also resilience, also did much to connect and intersect with urban environmental scholars who in turn took more and more “engaged” roles in this process. This was for instance crystallized in the formalization of an “urban” interest in the proceedings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which went hand-in-hand with a joint academic-municipal effort in holding the first “Cities IPCC” conference in Canada in 2018 (Parnell et al., 2018). On the other hand, the increasing involvement of urban scholars in urban affairs was further driven the mounting efforts to expand co-production modes of research connected to the concerns of communities and dwellers who might not be readily heard by some of the multilateral, public and private sector actors leading urban policy (Culwick et al., 2019; Cociña et al., 2019).

More recently, many critical urban scholars have been proactive in advising and lobbying global agenda setting (Parnell et al., 2018). This move certainly finds resonance with twentieth-century environmentalism but also goes much deeper historically – and beyond urban research – as illustrated by the well-established role of academics in international disarmament. More recently, urban scholars have engaged in processes of global agenda-setting crystallized in 2015–2016 with the launch of the likes of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Paris Agreement on climate change, Sendai Framework on disaster and risk reduction, or New Urban Agenda (NUA). Involved in lobbying for the inclusion of urban challenges in these global commitments, and in the production of much of the NUA through various Policy Units, urban scholars from a range of disciplines have sought to underscore the need for sound urban academic expertise to inform today’s major international agendas. This was reflected in calls for urban “scientists” to have a say in the future of cities and to play a more explicit role in informing the direction of urban development worldwide (Acuto et al., 2018; McPhearson et al., 2016). This approach has of course not been free from critics, mainly centered on whether the “urban science” trope was an appropriate rallying call for this involvement of scholarly urban researchers in managing cities (Derudder & van Meeteren, 2019). In addition, academics have been increasingly involved in attempts to localize such commitments in various cities, engaging in co-production efforts to support progress towards the SDGs at the local level (e.g. Moore & Woodcraft, 2019; Simon et al., 2016).

From this point of view the first two decades of the 2000s have seen a repositioning of much urban scholarship towards more explicit partnership-driven approaches, moving beyond scholarship as (solely) a mode of critique (Perry & Atherton, 2017), to engage with practitioners, policy makers, international organizations, urban dwellers and community organizations (Mitlin et al., 2020; Perry et al., 2018). This has been taking place in the context of broader transformations in the higher education sector in some countries, with increasing institutional demands for social scientists to prove the social relevance and impact of their work (May & Perry, 2018). This has also thrived in work around urban innovation (Nesti, 2018), living labs and urban experimentation, making on both front vast advances in the ways we understand the mobilization of urban knowledge but also feeding back in the way urban researchers practice societal engagement. Much has already been said about the challenges of co-optation, compromise and independence of the urban scholar when taking positions of “expertise” and an advisory role to those actors who define, whether top-down or bottom-up, the directions of urban development (May & Perry, 2018). At the turn of the last century, it was already clear that higher education had been on a trajectory of diversification with a vast proliferation of sub-disciplines, specialisms and cross-disciplinary fields. Certainly, owing much to mid-1900s expansions in urban sociology, anthropology and geography, the variety of scholarly urban expertise that we see today results in great part from the proliferation of viewpoints on the urban question from across a now nearly boundless populace of specific academic stances. On top of this, the continued production of urban expertise in disciplines such as civil engineering means that we end up with a large field of urban knowledge currently produced in universities and associated institutions, through both research and teaching. This in turn drives a mounting diversification of the types of scholarly advice urban actors can mobilize in practice, in addition to public, private, and community-based forms of knowledge.

These trends have been intertwined with the surge in philanthropy and commercial/private sector engagement with academia not just as funders and clients but also in many instances, not least in urban research, as agenda setters and partners in the co-production of expertise (May & Perry, 2018). Beyond these developments, much advancement in the mobilization of scholarly urban expertise in practice has also taken place beyond the policy, corporate and philanthropic sectors. For instance, the expansions throughout the 1990s and 2000s of trans-local movements for, and of, the urban poor in favor of a right to the city have driven a deepening of the ways in which urban geographers, planners and other social scientists studying urban processes have mobilized urban research in advice to and service for the global urban majority (Mitlin et al., 2020). This has taken varied forms, as with support to housing and informal settlements coalitions, but has also been intertwined with the other “worlds” of global agenda-setting, city networking, philanthropy or “urban science” depicted above – and not always in an antagonistic relationship.

Overall, the twenty-first-century mutations of the role of scholarly urban experts attest of the transformative potential of urban research in shaping agendas and developmental trajectories. Yet, contrasted with the important role of traveling consultants, financiers, international organizations, IT companies, or real estate developers, we have to recognize the relatively marginal role played by critical urban scholars in urban development today. Urban scholars themselves have stressed the challenges of their own positions in the context of ongoing mutations in the higher education sector, including shrinking space for independence, lack of permanent jobs to conduct long-term, meaningful engagement with particular places and groups of people, short-term research funding, and the difficulty to embrace advocacy roles in a resource-constrained and neoliberalized academia, to name but a few (May & Perry, 2018). In the next and final section, we highlight future horizons for critical urban scholarship, drawing on insights from the contributions gathered in this special issue.

Conclusions: future horizons for critical urban scholarship

With this special issue, we offer to expand some of the debates highlighted in the previous sections to explore the contemporary transformations of urban expertise. Specifically, we highlight four avenues for future research on the topic. Firstly, it important to reiterate that critical urban scholarship should continue to explore the political economy of urban expertise, and to develop critical vocabulary to analyze how urban experts and the knowledge tools reinforce or maintain uneven power dynamics, to explore how those shape urban trajectories worldwide. This is particularly important to keep track of the emergence of new technological developments and techniques of knowing to analyze their impact on urban development processes in different locations. Secondly, we need more research on the ways in which struggles for urban justice mobilize new forms of expertise. These questions have been prominent in urban planning research and studies of self-enumeration movements and counter-mapping. In this special issue, Luisa Sotomayor, Sergio Montero and Natalia Ángel Cabo (2022) tackle this angle with an eye to the rise in legal action around urban policy and planning. Offering an insight into Bogotà, Colombia, they stress the increasing mobilization of legal expertise and the challenge it poses to the established leadership of cities. Jamie Doucette and Laam Hae (2022) pair this insight with their account of “post-developmentalist” urban expertise in Seoul, South Korea, at the nexus between political and civil society activism. Critically, they show how the story of expertise mobilization is by no means a clear-cut one. Through a series of cases, they point at how it can lend itself to promote progressive policies through engaging in what they call “strategic forms of localism,” but how it can become a policy fix for neoliberal and developmentalist agendas. Thirdly, we need further research on the role of academics themselves within broader networks of urban expertise, questioning how different forms of disciplinary knowledge within academia are valued and used by a broad range of urban actors, and with what effects on urban trajectories. Here, the special issue paper by Loan Diep and colleagues (2022) steps in by problematizing the political-economy of urban expertise embedded in green infrastructural “fixes,” and how that plays out in the knowledge dynamics that bind us to conventional routines of urban space management. Fourthly, critical urban geographers need to engage more deeply with reflexive work on the practices and challenges of coproduction. This includes work looking at academic-community partnerships and casting a much wider gaze than we have typically had in a domain often still dominated by “metrocentric” (Bunnell & Maringanti, 2010) views. Taking us to an often too peripheral reality like that of the urban Pacific, Alexei Trundle and Vanessa Organo’s paper (2022) for the special issue brings us to the boundaries between traditional and state systems, highlighting the justice “brokerage” that urban experts can offer. At the same time, academic-local government partnerships stand out to us a similar “boundary” space worthy of closer attention and experimentation. A pertinent example of this is provided in this issue by Sean Fox and Allan Macleod (2021) through the case of the localization of the Sustainable Development Goals in Bristol, UK. They sketch both challenges but opportunity space for expertise in this context by recounting a process of “translation” achieved through a form of “embedded advocacy” and reflect on the dynamics of expertise that are at play in a university-city partnership. This is fittingly followed by the reflection of SDGs implementation by Sylvia Croese and James Duminy (2022), who reflect on their parallel experience on this front whilst working co-productively with South African municipalities through the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town. They follow a personal account of policy mobilities by stressing the need to grasp localized “constellations of actors,” processes and pathways underpinning the production and exchange of urban policy and knowledge. To date, this type of work has featured prominently in journals that are intended for both an academic and policy audience (e.g. Urban Research and Practice, Environment and Urbanization, Habitat International). Yet, efforts to theorize the politics of urban expertise cannot ignore the role of critical urban scholars themselves in challenging or reproducing existing power dynamics. Self-reflexive accounts are one way of overcoming this issue and should be more broadly featured and integrated into current debates on post-politics, urban policy mobilities – particularly as urban scholars themselves intervene in the localization of international development agendas, such as the Sustainable Development Goals – and in explorations of alternatives to technocratic, top-down urban decision-making.

By embracing and strengthening collaborations and dialogue across these four research avenues, urban geography and critical urban studies more broadly will provide very useful critiques of how particular forms of urban expertise – including academic expertise – contribute to the reproduction of urban injustices, legitimizing exclusionary forms of urban developments; whilst also examining how those dynamics can be challenged; and actively contributing to design more just urban futures, through partnerships and self-reflexion. These four dimensions, critique, search for alternatives, partnerships and self-reflection are essential to critical urban scholarship if it is to take an active role in the production of more just urban futures.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Leverhulme Trust [grant number ECF-2020-013].