Whose knowledge counts? The meaning of co-productive processes for urban development and urban research
We presented our paper entitled "THE URBAN TRIALOGUE: PARTICIPATORY ACTION EXPERIENCES FROM ANKARA, BELGRADE AND SAO PAULO" under "TRACK B: CO-PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN URBAN DEVELOPMENT". You can find the book of abstracts through the following link: https://www.trialog-journal.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/TRIALOG_Book-of-abstracts.pdf
By focusing on the agency and the contingency of the process of co-production of knowledge, and by paying attention to the power structures at play in these processes, the research question of our paper is; “Who has the power to decide and actualize the gained knowledge and what other possible context-based methods/strategies can be implemented to subvert the established power relations on production of knowledge?”
Our paper most notably discuss and reflect upon: the power relation between stakeholders; the dialectic nature between responsibility and power; the communication channels and their relevance; the idea of authorship and its flexibility; and the enthusiasm of those taking part in processes of co-production of knowledge in urban development. The paper finally bring some practical experiences of how being persistent is a distinctive quality of actions that bring change.
The Conference
Whose knowledge counts? The meaning of co-productive processes for urban development and urban research
This was the motto of the TRIALOG Annual Conference 2019, which took place 7th-9th of November 2019 at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
The conference explored urban research and development approaches that go beyond conventional forms of knowledge production and include the complex landscape of actors in urban development.
The Call
Recent policy discourses about sustainability and grand transformation, which became manifest in the Sustainable Development Goals, the New Urban Agenda or the Paris Climate Agreement, center around the role of cities and urban development. However, aligned approaches can only be successful if they go beyond conventional forms of knowledge production and include the complex landscape of actors in urban development. This calls for knowledge production in urban development to be questioned and newly conceptualized. Current scientific discourses on co-production of knowledge in urban develop-ment are centred around three arenas: A) the sustainability discourse which promotes a transdisciplinary approach in urban research; B) developmentstudies that review forms of co-production of services and knowledge forempowerment and C) discourses in planning theory which partly acknowledge and partly criticize participation in planning, however move towards discuss- ing means of co-production. All three strands take the reflection on the city or urban development processes as their starting point and have developed their sets of methods.