Overview

High Stakes, High Hopes tracks the building of urban theorizing in a decade-long urban research and teaching partnership in Cape Town, South Africa.An argument for collaborative urbanism, this book reflects on what was at stake in the partnership and its creative, and at times, conflictive, evolution. High Stakes, High Hopes explores what changed in learning when teaching and assessment occurred inuniversity classrooms, township streets, and ordinary people’s households.Oldfield explores how research and assessment were reshaped when framed in neighbourhood questions and commitments, and what was reoriented in urban theorizing when community activism and township struggles were recognized as sites of valid knowledge-making. Oldfield traces the multiple personal and political relationships at play, exploring the shifting patterns of power in this productive, yet always negotiated, collaboration. This innovative methodologyreveals the ways in which activists, residents, students, and the author experienced and reworked the differences between them. High Stakes, High Hopesshares forms of practice, grounded in teaching, to train a next generation of urbanists to engage the city embedded in multiple publics and politics across the city. The book builds upon an archive of alternative kinds of urban knowledges, experiments which work to inspire more varied forms of urban theorizing.

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9780820365008

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"The location of the work in a community in Cape Town is an essential feature of this book and speaks to our current moment of rethinking knowledge production and the relationship between universities and other communities. Sophie Oldfield answers the call for more relational and embodied theorizing, including (and especially) from cities in the global South. She contributes to the contemporary impulse to reimagine scholarship as acommunity-engaged practice and to experiment with narrative form.--Geraldine Pratt ""coauthor of Migration in Performance: Crossing the Colonial Present"" High Stakes, High Hopes is a compelling read. The text is very well crafted, with a lively and personal style. But it does not sacrifice critical or analytical rigour in the process. . . . The book's highly original contribution rests on the proposition that urban knowledge, and urban theory, can arise from a collaborative, community-based methodology, including innovative pedagogical practices developed in the context of a long-term, richly rewarding community partnership.--Jennifer Robinson ""author of Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies"""

Author Information

Sophie Oldfield is a professor in City and Regional Planning at Cornell University and in Environmental and Geographical Science at University of Cape Town. She has authored and coedited more than ten books, including What Is Critical Urbanism? Urban Research as Pedagogy and The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South.

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