Case for Support: Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW)
Vision and Objectives:
‘Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality’ (KNOW) will address the challenge of achieving urban equality in cities in the Global South. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, the ‘Urban SDG’, calls for cities that are safe, inclusive, resilient and sustainable. The New Urban Agenda (NUA) adopted at Habitat III in Quito, 2016, calls for cities that “leave no one behind”. Both emphasise inequality as one of the main obstacles to achieving prosperity and resilience in cities. KNOW focuses on building capacity to research urban equality in cities in the developing world and among ODA researchers in the UK. The project brings together a collaborative, interdisciplinary and international team to develop innovative long-term programmes of knowledge co-production for urban equality among governments, communities, businesses and academia. While in the medium-term KNOW will deliver a structured programme of research on urban equality, in the long-term it will extend research capacities in the UK and overseas, and consolidate a network of Urban Learning Hubs. Since 2010 half of the world’s population live in urban areas. By 2050 66% of the world’s population will be urban. Improving living conditions in every country depends on humanity’s capacity to address urban challenges. According to UN-Habitat, 75% of cities are now more unequal than in 1996. Fainstein argues that a focus on urban equality raises questions of justice. In theoretical debates, Young and Fraser emphasise distributional aspects of inequality alongside aspects of recognition and participation. Urban equality is a multidimensional experience for urban dwellers encompassing their access to income and services, recognition of diverse social identities, and inclusion in decisions that affect them. It is top of the agenda because growing inequality directly impacts on the ability of cities to deliver prosperity and resilience for all their citizens. KNOW will deliver research and institutional capacity with the aim of achieving urban equality in cities including Lima/Cuzco (Peru), Havana (Cuba), Cali/Medellin (Colombia), San Jose/Heredia-Belen (Costa Rica), Freetown (Sierra Leona), Kampala (Uganda), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Jaipur (India), Colombo (Sri Lanka). These are cities where more than a third of the population live in slum-like conditions, with limited access to secure housing and services. In these cities, the urban poor, especially women, depend on precarious employment in the informal sector. According to UNDP in 2013, income inequality in developing countries, as measured by the Gini coefficient, increased by 11% from 38.5 (early1990s) to 41.5 (late 2000s). Regional trends vary: inequality increased in South Asia, but in some countries in Africa, and in Latin America and the Caribbean progress towards more equal societies has begun. However, these two latter regions still have the highest inequality gaps globally. The Gini coefficient in our case study cities varies between 0.35 and 0.5 and is increasing, which indicates income disparities but masks the different constraints to urban equality in each city. The road towards greater urban equality requires evidence-based policy and planning which actively engages all stakeholders. Such policy and planning will explicitly address differential power relations on the basis of class, gender, ethnicity, age, race, caste, sexual orientation, and differential abilities. Such evidence needs to reflect the realities of living in contemporary urban areas, particularly engaging with the experiences of the urban poor. We propose a process of ‘knowledge in action’ which: 1) focuses on knowledge that is immediately relevant to address global and local challenges building on the tradition of action research in development studies; 2) is sensitive to the diversity of conditions in which urban dwellers find themselves; 3) recognises the multiple ways in which expertise may be produced amongst all actors including vulnerable communities; 4) recognises the transformative capacity of stakeholder engagement in the process of research and institutional-capacity building; and 5) based on all of the above, embodies an ethics of practice for urban research.
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The objectives of KNOW are: 1) Transformative Research for Urban Equality: to co-produce knowledge to activate transformations towards urban equality in selected cities in the global south, with a focus on redistributive and integrated actions to address prosperity, resilience and extreme poverty. Objective 1 will focus on an overarching research question: how can knowledge coproduction support the development and implementation of policies and planning that will put urban areas onto trajectories towards urban equality? Focusing on people-centred approaches to urban policy and planning, KNOW will generate knowledge production processes with transformative agency to remove structural barriers to inequality. Such policy and planning is integrated, recognising the multi-dimensional nature of urban inequalities, and the synergies and trade-offs between different sectors. It also involves multi-level forms of governance, understanding the multiple ways that governments, businesses, civil society organisations and communities can enable each other’s action and advance collective goals. There is a gap in urban research related to people-centred forms of planning and governance. National data is rarely disaggregated at the local level to monitor the SDGs and NUA. Local governments currently lack the capacity to deliver on these data requirements. Expert-led assessments are often detached from people’s experiences, resulting in stereotype-dominated policies and planning which worsen people’s lives. KNOW will engage with diverse groups of people and aspects of their lives, which often go unrecognised, unmeasured, or made invisible. KNOW will work with in-city teams who have formulated cityspecific research questions to address the overall research question. KNOW will engage with local perspectives, while being attuned to global debates on urban development. 2) Building Research Capacity: to build and strengthen research capacity in selected DAC countries and the UK to tackle the challenges and opportunities of vulnerable urban communities through partnerships of equivalence between networks and organisations of the poor, government, the private sector, and academia. Achieving urban equality is a persistent challenge that requires building upon existing capacity for research on urban equality, and the development of future capabilities to address emerging challenges. This also means that local actors can mobilise expertise to deliver agile responses to emergencies. KNOW will develop research capacity to increase the ability of a wide variety of actors to participate in the process of knowledge production. This throws up the challenge of developing a suitable ethical approach to such collaborative work. According to UN-Habitat, such research capacity should help “cities learn, know, and understand their own needs”. This requires partnerships of equivalence that ensure reciprocal trust and respect between partners in achieving the shared goal of urban equality. Engaging with key urban challenges, such as prosperity, resilience and extreme poverty, collaborative research opens opportunities for pathways to impact. Building capacity for such research maximises impact opportunities. This relies on identifying ‘strategic intermediaries’ that can bridge the gap between research, policy-making and the process of implementation. 3) Developing Urban Learning Hubs: to jointly build responsive Urban Learning Hubs in target countries to co-produce relevant knowledge to analyse, plan, monitor and compare city progress towards national and global goals on urban equality, in particular the SDGs and the Habitat III New Urban Agenda. Through the programme of research, KNOW will strengthen Urban Learning Hubs (ULHs) in selected cities and regions, involving the consolidation of networks of actors with the interest in and capability to address multiple dimensions of urban equality. The outcome will be context specific ULHs that can act as strategic intermediaries between multiple actors delivering research, collaborative decision-making and action for urban equality. The development of ULHs is a means to deliver research and impact for urban equality beyond the lifetime of the project. To do so, KNOW will build on previous attempts to deliver forms of institutionalization, which bridge between local and global decision-making, such as UNHabitat’s Global Urban Observatory (GUO); the African Urban Research Initiative; the
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European Action Planning Networks operating under the learning programme URBACT; the networks under the umbrella organisation United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG); and the higher education efforts of the Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS).