High Stakes, High Hopes: Urban Theorizing in Partnership (University of Georgia Press, 2023) by AAP's Department of City and Regional Planning Chair and Professor Sophie Oldfield documents more than a decade of research and teaching done in collaborative partnership with the "Civic" (a local community organization) and its leader Gertrude Square in the Cape Town township of Valhalla Park. Rather than study community challenges at a remove, Oldfield built a partnership with Square and other activists in the neighborhood. Working together on research questions deepened the lessons and space they could share and document. Operating across the violence of durable South African apartheid divides and inequities, it opened up insight-filled paths for exploring complex urban issues. Presented in the text through reflective narrative and stories of collaboration, Oldfield captures the joyful, heartbreaking, and profound moments that came with the work and refigured the academic and on-the-ground impact of this approach to urban theorizing.
Molly Sheridan: What motivated you to dedicate your research to approaches to collaborative urban theorizing? Were there specific issues that you were seeking to address?
Sophie Oldfield: This book is rooted in Cape Town, a complicated, contested, unequal - as well as beautiful - South African city, like many in the Global South. In Valhalla Park, a formerly segregated "coloured" or mixed Black neighborhood, residents have to fight against evictions and for every right, service, and resource. They have rights on paper under democracy, but they still have had to fight for everything. These are layers that urbanists in South Africa and across the Global South study: How do cities manage? How do neighborhoods claim rights and engage and mobilize?
But in High Stakes, High Hopes, through partnership, there's a third critical part: the place and role of the university. Our collaboration was built and run while I was working at the University of Cape Town, high up on the mountain slope, with a mission "to theorize the city and to teach its past and its present and to think about its futures." But in South Africa - and in many places in the world today - the university's legitimacy to do so is contested directly through societal and student mobilizations, which question: What is the university? What should it be doing? Who is teaching? As an urban scholar and professor, this period reshaped how my colleagues and I think about research: How do we theorize? How do we conduct research that is not extractive? How do we shape a city that is democratic, where people have rights and voices? For a neighborhood that was segregated and treated in so many violent ways, how do we reimagine research as participation and collaboration? The partnership between me, my university and students, and Gertrude Square and the Civic, worked in this problem space. It was a beautiful conjoining that I share and reflect on in this book.
MS: Since this book tracks a decade-long research and teaching partnership that changed over time, I'm curious when the idea that there would be a book emerged and how it evolved. What was its place in and importance to the work overall, and how did you land on telling it through narrative and stories?
SO: The collaboration with the Civic and Gertrude Square started because they needed research completed and I needed a real place to teach my students, in the city where the issues we were engaging with in class were concrete, happening daily, and shaping lives. We didn't plan to work together for a decade. We tried one project, and it took two years. Then we tried another and another. We published lots of things. Some were for the neighborhood, some were for the university, and some were for both and for audiences in between.
This was an amazingly precious, rigorous, and committed process. The book emerged because I wanted to document it and to address a gap in scholarship. In the university, the literature shapes how we understand urban studies and its theorizing. Then - in South Africa, at least - there are ways we teach that are rooted in the city, in its complexity and creativity. My partnership pulled these parts together. The book gave me a space to reflect on this work, to document our collaboration. The process of writing the book was generative and challenging. How could I represent our collaboration in a way that was absolutely resonant for urban studies academics and for my partners, local activists, and residents in the neighborhood? I couldn't write in a normal scholarly mode. Instead, the book is a series of stories of collaboration, of everyday lives in the city that shaped our struggles, written in ordinary words that share our work together, our process, our learning, our neighborhood analysis. These stories are a form of theorizing in partnership. They so are written in ways that are readable and legible in the university and in the city, and critically, resonant way beyond the "ivory tower."
MS: It was a level of gatekeeping that you removed by approaching the book in this way.
SO: I love that as a metaphor for what it did. Participation is key, but what is the practice of it? In the book, stories show the complex ways we worked together. The research work had to travel between the university and the neighborhood, and this book does that too. I think that's maybe the thing personally I'm most proud of. To have something that worked like that in this place, in a neighborhood in Cape Town and in the University of Cape Town. That for me was essential.
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