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A growing consensus suggests that urban scholarship can benefit from engaging with knowledge in multiple sites in and beyond the academy, for instance with activism central to politics in cities worldwide. This paper explores narratives of urban politics produced with activists to reflect on how we account for knowledge and practice in theorising the urban as political terrain. Research conducted with activists in a community-based ‘Civic’ organisation in Cape Town, South Africa highlights the everyday toil that shapes resistance and its politics, the frictions and engagements behind protest headlines. In opening up theorisations of activism and revolution to the knowledge practices of movements, the paper argues we may more cogently take account of the strategic and intimate politics that characterise contemporary activism, and reshape notions of ‘revolution’, urban politics and research practice in contemporary cities, a project broadly relevant in the Global South and North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the lens of South Africa’s informal settlements, this paper explores the intersections between plans, practices and materiality. These three arenas are each presented as uniquely agentic, contributing to plural configurations. In doing so, this work questions a prevalent tendency to frame governance/government solely as relationships between state and non-state actors. By reintroducing the agency and power of matter and materiality, not as adjunct or background, but as a critical technology of government and/in place, this work contributes to a growing debate within the (emerging) urban socio-technical systems literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals how urban theories traditionally rooted in northern cities and academies are challenged and redeveloped by southern perspectives. Critiques of urban theory as narrowly northern (or Anglo-American) have recently emerged, spawning the comparative urbanism movement that calls for urban theories to be open to the experiences of all cities. Using the example of the sale of state-subsidised houses in South Africa, this research uses two parallel concepts, gentrification and downward raiding, to challenge the northern empirical focus of urban theory. Despite describing similar processes of urban class-based change, the concepts are rarely considered analogous, entrenched in divergent empirical contexts and academic literatures. While gentrification debates largely reference the northern central city, downward raiding is reserved for the southern ‘slum’. In contrast, this research develops ‘hybrid gentrification’ as a concept and methodological approach that demonstrates how non-northern urban experiences can and should create and refine urban theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The multiscalar challenges associated with urban energy policies are the cause of extensive interaction among multiple levels of government and social forces. However, these multilevel systems of action tend to reflect complex and unstable power and resistance patterns rather than stable co-operation processes. Thus, in this paper, a multilevel governance perspective is used as a starting point for understanding where and how multilevel interactions arise in an energy system as well as which issues are creating political conflict and the related consequences for the governance of urban energy policies. This approach is illustrated through a case study of Cape Town, which exemplifies a situation of conflicting policy and agendas at different levels of government, thus creating a great dispersion of initiatives across different scales. Integrating these initiatives within a broader coherent framework, however, is not only a technical matter. As urban energy policies deal with multilevel issues, they imply negotiating dynamic and complex compromises between different types of organisations and authorities while shaping their governance is also a matter of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]