Paper short abstract:

High Stakes, High Hopes builds urban theory in the political and physical realities of everyday southern cities. It examines the creative and conflictive evolution of a decade-long research and teaching partnership and its practices that have collaboratively created urban theory.

Paper long abstract:

High Stakes, High Hopes builds urban theory in the political and physical realities of everyday southern city life. The paper examines the stakes and hopes at play in a decade-long research and teaching partnership, which has brought this university and the neighbourhood's civic organisation in Cape Town to research the city together, to collaboratively create urban theory. What is at stake in this partnership and its creative, and at times, conflictive, evolution? What is reoriented in urban theory when civic activists and community workers open up their struggles to university scrutiny? In narrating the project and partnership, the paper explores collaborative ways of creating urban theory, immersed in the registers, inspirations and meanings of everyday struggles and learning across the city. Through stories of our work together, it traces out the multiple personal and political relationships and legitimacies at play, and our navigation of these varied trajectories that shape this productive, yet always, compromised collaboration.