Addressing urban inequalities I: co-creating pathways through research and practice

This special issue brings together papers from sites of action in Mumbai, Freetown, Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Cali, and networks in Latin America & Asia. The papers share original research, practices, experiences and theoretical reflections about the construction of pathways towards urban equality. Although operating in distinctive and diverse ways and sites, these pathways all invite us to reflect on the ways in which the different dimensions of urban equality are advanced, and to interrogate both urban planning practices and knowledge production processes. Some of these papers were produced under the international research programme Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW), which reinforces an overall focus in this issue on questions of the co-production of actionable and transformative knowledge.

The issue also contains four Feedback papers. These include a field note that follows previous research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic’s first wave for residents of “slum” settlements in Bengaluru and Patna, India, exploring the impact of the second wave and the differences over time. A second paper examines the impact of the pandemic from a global perspective, identifying emerging trends in the responses of local city governments and speculating on some likely outcomes. The final two papers offer fresh perspectives: one, from Iran, by focusing on the views of urban planning professionals on children’s participation in local planning; another, from Kampala, through documenting internal divisions within a civil society partner involved in a settlement upgrading co-production initiative.