Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on the key concepts, methods and experiences of two parallel course modules, centring on ways of teaching and exploring modes of thinking and researching that shift conventional approaches to understanding the life of cities in the South.

Paper long abstract:

This paper builds on and extends the co-authors' conversation on the key concepts, methods and experiences of two parallel course modules based at the African Centre for Cities. Although in different ways and from different vantage points, both modules seek to offer a learning experience and facilitate the development of research practices that together shift conventional approaches to making legible and intervening into the life of cities in the South. Whether with the intention of drawing provocative, experimental and surprising links with urban and planning theory by mobilising arts-focused methodologies, or the aim of rethinking the notion of urban publics via research practices that centre on an increased awareness to the affective aspects of inhabiting, sharing and knowing a city, both modules turn to the arts and aesthetics as the sources and sites of finding non-habitual ways of understanding city-spaces. Core questions that guide the discussion are: How can we learn to think through the arts and expand the lexicon of urban imaginaries? How do we incorporate non-rationalist epistemologies into a discipline so heavily influenced by the imperatives and metrics of tangible development outcomes? How do we learn to pick up traces of urban life and being-in-common that conventional social science and planning methodologies discount, yet which ubiquitously shape our everyday experiences and aspirations? How can/do we evidence new thinking in the terrain of planning and in the life of cities in this era of putative decolonisation?