Editorial: Addressing urban inequalities II: discursive and material practices through scale

I. Introduction

This is the second part of the special double issue of Environment and Urbanization that seeks to advance our understanding of urban inequality and how it can be addressed at different scales. The first issue in October 2022 proposed a framework for assessing pathways to urban equality based on the recognition of two fundamental conditions. The first is the importance of a multidimensional approach to poverty and inequality. The second is the necessity for bringing together multiple ways of knowing, crucial not only for a deeper understanding of inequalities, but also for the transformative potential of such “knowledges” when they are co-produced. In this second issue, these themes are explored further by focusing on the discursive and material practices at different scales that can reinforce inequalities, but that when co-produced with the aim of fulfilling the rights of urban residents, can also construct and reproduce pathways to urban equality.

As we noted in the first issue:

“Pathways are trajectories that are made up of intersecting systems that shape what Leach and colleagues refer to as ‘alternative directions of intervention and change’. These trajectories – as well as the institutional structures they seek to navigate and transform – are embedded in power relations of class, gender, age, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and ability. In this context, shaping pathways towards more equal futures involves strategic engagement with both material issues and discursive practices at different scales.”⁽¹⁾

Discursive practices frame the way urban (in)equalities are approached, reproduced and/or responded to, creating alternative trajectories for change. The language and communication devices embedded in discursive practices are shaped by values and assumptions about how, in the context of wider societal processes, the city works, how urban residents live and how alternative visions for the future are articulated. They influence and are influenced by material practices of actors in civil society, the state and the market in different organizational forms and at different scales.

Intertwining discursive and material practices permeate and shape the insights about pathways to urban equality discussed in the October 2022 first part of the special double issue: systemic, reflexive, future-oriented, agency-oriented, the governance of possibilities and institutional change. A particular set of systemic relations are always embedded in discursive practices, whether this is recognized or not by the purveyors of the discourse. For example, contrary to the traditional negative labelling and treatment of informal settlements by planning in many cities, others have argued that informal settlements make a positive and important contribution to cities, and planning should seek to tackle the way they are legally defined and their material inequalities rather than, at best, avoid addressing or, at worst, bulldozing informal settlements.⁽²⁾ Similarly, the notion of urban risk, closely tied to notions of informality, is also implicated in particular discourses, which can present risk as the problem of informal settlement dwellers or as a result of wider socioeconomic, environmental and political processes. Such discourses reflect the material interests of the range of actors acting on the city, which together galvanize the power to reproduce urban inequalities at local, national and global levels.

When different actors organize and challenge inequalities in the city in a reflexive manner, making visible the values and assumptions, alongside the powerful interests and state actions that together reproduce urban inequalities, this can also open up opportunities for change in a future-oriented perspective. At the heart of such alternative future trajectories of change are discursive and material practices that lay out an alternative vision for change. This vision has the potential to not only frame but also inspire and motivate agency-oriented actions initiated by individual actors or jointly from civil society, the state and/or the market to create or consolidate alternative pathways to urban equality. These deeply political processes are fraught with resistances and opportunities which may be expressed at intra- or inter-scalar levels, requiring different strategies to create alliances to negotiate the governance of possibilities. Ultimately, consolidating pathways to urban equality requires the fusing of discursive and material practices that bring about institutional change. This involves expanding the room for manoeuvre for a networked set of changes that encompass discursive practices like the articulation of political commitment, and its translation into material practices like the allocation of resources and changes to regulations and legal frameworks.⁽³⁾

Together, the papers in this second part of the special double issue reveal that addressing inequalities is often expressed in scalar tensions which can reinforce disparities. Thus, addressing inequalities will most often require the negotiation of scale as part of wider strategies to address urban inequality. It may also often require breaking “traps” generated by this multi-scalar character. These traps have material and discursive manifestations: for instance, the bureaucratic traps that different levels of government impose in order to deal with multi-sectorial issues; the ways in which framings and discourses about informality translate into labelling large portions of the urban population as illegal;⁽⁴⁾ or the mismatch between the scales at which inequalities are produced, and where they are manifested or made visible.⁽⁵⁾

In what follows, we discuss three ways in which the papers in this issue shed light on discursive and material practices that navigate scales to respond to (or reproduce) the complexities of urban inequalities: one set of shared approaches reflects on co-production strategies that seek to break discursive and material traps that reinforce inequalities; a second theme explores the making and remaking of discourses from a scalar perspective; and the third set is about the negotiation of discursive and material practices through institutional and legal systems at different scales.

II. Working together: co-production strategies to reshape discursive and material practices

In recognition of the multi-scalar manifestations of inequalities, a set of papers in this issue discuss experiences that seek to deal with scalar traps through co-production strategies. Co-production – of knowledge and/or of urban services – has become a key theme and approach in current urban debates,⁽⁶⁾ and has been seen as a fundamental device to challenge both discursive and material practices. The politically contested nature of research and knowledge co-production is beautifully captured by the poem, “Tired”, by Tina Cribbin, included in this special issue. In her text, she challenges the role, motivation and impact of researchers working with low-income communities, while rightly claiming that “we are capable enough to create our own show”. The poem is an important provocation for those aiming to engage with meaningful knowledge co-production practices that are able to address underlying inequalities, including those disparities existing between researchers and those who are “being researched”.

In their paper about sanitation challenges in an informal settlement in Dar es Salaam, Christopher Yap, Colin McFarlane, Tim Ndezi and Festo Dominic Makoba discuss the potential of co-produced strategies for local simplified sewerage systems in contrast to formal sewerage provision often undertaken at city level. They focus particularly on understanding simplified sewerage as a “socio-technical system” and its social and economic medium- and long-term impacts on informal settlement residents. Simplified sewerage systems are built on the assumption that co-production strategies can be not only more efficient in delivering sanitation responses but might also enable communities to build systems that are appropriate to their context. The paper shows the importance of partnerships (between NGOs, residents and local state actors) that work together on the delivery of successful solutions that respond to the needs and aspirations of marginalized groups and, in turn, address material inequalities. By looking at and reflecting on the impacts of these localized co-production strategies, the authors also tackle important questions about the distribution of costs and impacts in processes like this. Furthermore, this paper approaches crucial questions of governance and maintenance, which we see as critical issues to deal with discursive and material practices that sustain and reproduce inequalities in cities.

From a different standpoint, Belen Desmaison, Daniel Ramírez Corzo Nicolini and Luis Rodríguez Rivero analyse two experiences of co-production “from above and below” in Lima, which have involved the university, NGOs, communities and different agencies in the state to advance a co-produced understanding of urban inequality. One of the experiences involves work with marginalized groups promoting collective kitchens as infrastructures of care as a response to COVID-19, and the other the collaboration in the development of a National Housing and Urban Planning Policy with the Peruvian government. These two experiences shed light on how different types of fragmentation (spatial, public-institutional and political-social) act as mechanisms that reproduce inequalities, and the need for co-produced, multidimensional and multi-scalar approaches to deal with them. The paper describes how discursive and material practices have shaped those fragmentations historically – that in turn have translated into different forms of inequality – and discusses the difficulties and tactics that these co-production experiences have faced in their efforts to challenge these.

In their field note on COVID-19 vaccine rollout in informal settlements, Kate Lines, Stanley Dzimadzi, Edris Lubega, Patience Mudimu-Matsangaise Vinodkumar Rao, Junior Alves Sebbanja, Happiness Zidana and Diana Mitlin report on a study from Harare, Kampala, Lilongwe and Mumbai conducted by national affiliates of Slum Dwellers International (SDI). This piece highlights rich information from 21 informal settlements across these cities, to better understand how global vaccine inequalities have played out locally. Drawing on community data collection, this Field Note shows the importance of co-production strategies in challenging the way knowledge is built and valued in responses to crises such as COVID-19, as it is “critical to the improved understandings that underpin good policy, and strengthen existing community systems, such as [those of] SDI networks”. This paper not only underlines the importance of “working together” for data collection, but also the crucial role of framing national vaccine campaigns and discourses in ways that can better reach underserved urban communities and challenge inequalities. To do so, co-producing strategies that involve working together with community leaders and community-level information networks is crucial.

III. The making and remaking of contested definitions

Another thread emerging from the contributions of this special issue relates to the disputes associated with the making and remaking of key definitions associated with urban inequalities. The papers of this issue highlight that definitions matter, as they condition the discursive and material practices responding to and/or producing urban inequalities. Furthermore, the papers explain how these disputes over definitions are not located solely at particular scales, such as the global or the local. The processes of making and contesting definitions take place through multi-scalar trajectories.

Sadaf Sultan Khan, Dolf te Lintelo and Hayley MacGregor undertake a fascinating discourse analysis about the assumptions associated with inequalities within the definitions of slums and informal settlements by key international multilateral agencies. It is argued that as those agencies continue to emphasize the material and legal aspects of slums and informal settlements to highlight material deprivations, they overlook “the rich socio-spatial complexity and heterogeneity of daily practices in rapidly urbanizing settings where the state provided only limited and highly contested resources and services”. These international discourses and assumptions impact the ways in which informal settlements are approached, framing local responses that assume that they are spaces where problems need to be solved. Formal governmental responses tend to lack the recognition of the diverse conditions within and among these territories, while also invisibilizing their contribution to wider urban development processes. While this critique of the conceptualization of slum and informal settlements by multilateral agencies has been made since the 1970s,⁽⁷⁾ Khan et al. make a key contribution by demonstrating how this discourse still persists in current planning and policy thinking and practice, but also more broadly across other sectors, in turn contributing to the ongoing reproduction of urban inequalities.

In a similar way, Efadul Huq and Tanzil Shafique explore how the discourses embedded in international as well as national urban development agendas fail to address the needs of climate migrants living in informal settlements. By focusing on experiences in Bangladesh, the paper sheds light on how epistemic injustices play a role in generating discourses that reproduce climate injustices in cities. Huq and Shafique make the point that the voices and experiences of residents of informal settlements continue to be excluded from urban-level resilience policy- and decision-making processes, as they are perceived as less or non-credible holders of knowledge. Through a multi-scalar analysis, the paper articulates a process of discursive partition, which “nationally promotes but locally excludes climate-impacted dwellers’ experiences, practices and knowledge” from urban climate-related responses. By naming this particular dynamic of misrecognition and discussing it further with migrant communities living in informal settlements, the authors argue that such co-produced knowledge production strategies can be a productive means for the emergence of new imaginations and actions that promote climate justice in cities.

Finally, the paper by Raffael Beier opens up a discussion about the contradictory state expectations around “inclusive pro-poor housing policy”, through the case of South Africa’s national housing programme. The author explores the multiplicity of discourses and reasons which might inform why people are “leaving” state-provided housing, and the implications for addressing the legacies of inequalities embedded in the apartheid state. The paper highlights a state discourse that contradictorily frames housing as a financial asset to be leveraged – and “leaving” as an assumed positive sign of asset accumulation as residents “move up the ladder”, or alternatively as a negative indication of a moral failing as a result of ingratitude. The author finds a multiplicity of structural and personal reasons for why people may have to leave their houses, which variously reflect the complex realities of “progress” and “failure”. As such, the author redefines “leaving” as neither inherently positive nor negative, but rather as people-led reconfigurations of pro-poor housing policy – entailing necessary adaptations of policy under contextual constraints. In doing so, this paper advocates for a reframing of the definitions of and understandings for “leaving”, calling for alternate conceptions of “housing pathways”, which can play an important role in building resilience and negotiating structural constraints for individual households.

IV. Negotiation of institutional and legal systems

Another set of papers engage with the interplay between and negotiation of discursive and material practices in institutional and legal systems at different scales and across different organizational actors, which may open up opportunities or condition the ability for efforts at the city level to advance urban equality.

Allan Lavell, Angel Chávez Eslava, Cinthya Barros Salas and Diego Miranda Sandoval’s field note makes the case that for disaster risk control and reduction to address urban inequalities, it needs to be mainstreamed into urban development planning and practice. However, in their analysis of the city-wide dynamics producing risk in Lima, the authors argue that disaster risk reduction continues to be approached as an “externally conceived set of disaster risk instruments”. The paper calls for a more integrated form of institutionalization of disaster risk responses to overcome the siloed approach through which risk has been addressed in cities. Sharing similarities with papers in the previous category, the authors argue that the pathway of “introducing the concern of disaster risk into the DNA of development practice” requires a redefinition of disaster risk. Instead of approaching it as a purely technical and physical phenomenon, the field note argues that urban planning and practice need to understand that risk is socially constructed. The adoption of this redefinition of risk by institutions and legal systems at different levels requires navigating several institutional challenges, but would allow the development sectors and agencies to address the causes and drivers of risk, rather than only its manifestation in cities.

Meanwhile, the paper by Andri Heidler, Sharmin Khan Luies, Abul Kamal, Mahbub Ul-Alam, Christoph Lüthi and Olivier Crevoisier explores the challenges for city-wide inclusive sanitation (CWIS) efforts in Dhaka, Bangladesh – a flexible technological approach which integrates sewered and non-sewered sanitation solutions. While the CWIS approach offers opportunities to address the inability of networked provision to reach coverage at scale, particularly for informal settlements, the authors reveal “fierce” negotiations over the regulation of non-sewered sanitation, as spatial and institutional responsibilities are reconfigured – moving from the utility to NGOs or the municipal government. Crucially, the authors open u supporting community- p a discussion of how global priorities – particularly the World Bank-drafted WASA Act (1996), which aimed to transform the Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (DWASA) into a fully commercial utility – conditioned the financial and organizational viability of the CWIS model in Dhaka. In parallel, the authors point to more “radical” innovations pioneered by local NGOs, such as Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK), in supporting community-based organizations to organize around sanitation provision. The authors reveal that for CWIS to scale successfully and inclusively, flexibility must also be adopted for the organization and financing of sanitation, but remains a challenge given these different vested interests operating at different scales. In particular, the authors point to the opportunity to strengthen and scale locally adopted solutions, such as supply-driven, community-based approaches of the DSK. However, this requires challenging the wider discursive and material framing of the international donor community on bankability and cost optimization.

Similarly, taking an infrastructural lens, the paper by Maya Lubeck-Schricker, Anita Patil-Deshmukh, Sharmila L Murthy, Munni Devi Chaubey, Baliram Boomkar, Nizamuddin Shaikh, Tejal Shitole, Misha Eliasziw and Ramnath Subbaraman explores the intersection of legality of informal settlements with water provision in Mumbai. It demonstrates how the discursive production of legality – via the labelling of “notified” (legally recognized) and “non-notified” (legally unrecognized) slums – shaped which settlements were able to access water provision, revealing the need for a nuanced understanding of inter-slum and intra-slum water disparities across the city. Crucially, the authors also open up a discussion of how legal exclusion intersects with, and is shaped by, other forms of social disadvantage, with particular reference to migration, caste and religion. The authors explore the case of Mandala, a settlement comprising pockets of neighbourhoods which are variously notified and non-notified. While acknowledging that safe and adequate water provision remains a challenge across all informal settlements, they also demonstrate significant insufficiency in terms of accessibility, cost and reliability for those residents of non-notified neighbourhoods. In this case, it is clear that legal stipulations outlined at the State and city-scale – itself shaped by legacies of disadvantage in relation to identity – unroll at the neighbourhood level in ways that severely constrain equality outcomes.

These papers each demonstrate that building pathways to urban equality thus entails necessary changes not only in the discourses about housing in informal settlements and state-led housing provision, but also in material practices like the legal, organizational and financial systems within and outside the city-scale, which shape the everyday experiences of housing and infrastructure.

V. Conclusion

As we stressed in the first issue of Environment and Urbanization that we convened, addressing inequalities is one of the biggest challenges that cities and societies are facing today, not only as a challenge in its own right, but also as a key condition to deal in just ways with the acute crises we continue to experience, ranging from the climate emergency, to ongoing global health crises, social conflict and wars. The inequalities agenda we tackled in these two issues becomes ever more pressing as these crises are compounded and more and more interlinked insofar as they can no longer be addressed, if they ever were, in isolation.⁽⁸⁾ This collection of papers – alongside those included in the first part of this special double issue – highlight the complexities embedded within this challenge and the multiple efforts that are being made to address them on the ground. Importantly, they showcase that these efforts are intimately tied to the framing of appropriate diagnoses of inequality. These are key as to how we might be able to recognize diverse lived experiences of inequalities by urban residents, communities’ needs, aspirations and knowledge, institutional conditions and the narratives and assumptions that underpin them.

In particular, these papers reveal not only the important role of the underpinning narratives and values that shape the diagnosis of inequality, but also demonstrate how those narratives can affect the way in which policy and planning are formulated. When shaping diagnoses to construct more equitable pathways, it is crucial to look at how the redefinition and remaking of narratives can affect the trajectory of such pathways: a shift in the narrative can completely deviate the shape and outcomes of material practices. For example, when narratives of criminalization of informal practices are reinforced, policy trajectories are unlikely to move towards just outcomes. Likewise, though in contrast, where efforts in research and practice – such as those represented by the papers in this issue – seek to reframe discourses around the issues such as the production of “legality”, “climate migrants”, or informality, via collective and co-produced strategies, we can see important shifts in and re-valuing of material practices which can advance urban equality. Therefore, these reflections inevitably highlight the importance of building narratives collectively, and in ways which seek to grant greater visibility to those voices and visions that are traditionally excluded, to ensure that the discursive and material practices reflected in a diagnosis capture the complexities and diversity of lived inequalities.

We see this special double issue as part of a constellation of efforts that are seeking to mobilize this approach in the co-construction of pathways to equality. This range of initiatives offer examples, debates, research and experiences from which relevant and actionable knowledge can be built: Environment and Urbanization itself has for decades been a key infrastructure for the continuous re-making of collective discourses and narratives that recognize the voices and experiences of the urban poor. Likewise, our engagements through the Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW) programme – which is behind the production of this special double issue – have put in motion several channels to enrich these debates. In the context of the localization of the SDGs, for example, there have been important efforts to highlight that it is only through this kind of collective shaping of discursive and material practices that the 2030 Agenda will be meaningfully localized to address inequalities.⁽⁹⁾ More recently, the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has opened up important reflections on the impact of the pandemic on the reproduction of urban inequalities, and the narratives and material practices that have shaped its consequences – including the publication of a sister special issue in Urbanisation Journal, under the title “Urban Inequality and COVID-19: The Crisis at the Heart of the Pandemic”.⁽¹⁰⁾ These efforts have been joined by international agencies, for instance through the publication of the latest GOLD Report of United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), which focuses on alternative pathways to equality advanced by subnational governments (such as commoning, caring, connecting, renaturing, prospering and democratizing). The report showcases hundreds of experiences that reveal the diverse ways in which alliances between civil society and local governments can reshape diagnosis and action in cities and regions.⁽¹¹⁾ Together, we see this range of efforts and publications, alongside many others, as an invitation to researchers and practitioners interested in addressing urban inequalities to engage with questions about the collective construction of pathways to urban equality, and with the underpinning efforts this implies in terms of constantly reshaping collective discourses, knowledge and action.

VI. Feedback – from the environment and urbanization editors

We have four very diverse Feedback papers for this issue. All of them resonate in interesting ways with this issue’s attention to inequalities, although this focus is not primary in the case of these papers.

The first, a Field Note from Chennai, India, by Fathima Rayammarakkar Fasal and Swathi Manalodiparambil, describes the situation of a fishing community of over 1,000 families. They are the descendants of some of the area’s earliest residents, although they are increasingly treated as encroachers. Their hamlet, Nochikuppam, has gradually been engulfed by the growing city and its infrastructure, and they face efforts on the part of the city to relocate their beachside fish vendors to a more distant and yet-to-be constructed market. The stated objective is to decongest coastal traffic, but “beautification” and the leisure needs of Chennai residents are clearly high on the agenda. The hamlet has already undergone drastic changes. Residents have been moved from their traditional beachside homes to multistorey apartments across what has become a busy coastal highway separating them from the beach where their boats, equipment and vending stalls are located. Despite these challenges and the growing number of its younger residents who now work in the IT sector, the community maintains a strong sense of commitment to the place and their traditional routines. The Field Note discusses the community’s resistance to being further uprooted, its solidarity with other fishing communities, and the effectiveness of the local hamlet council in asserting its land claims.

The paper by Giuseppe Forino, Arabella Fraser and Neven Tandarić looks at the role of funds-based mechanisms for addressing urban climate change adaptation. Mitigation, the authors point out, continues to receive more investment, primarily because the more easily quantifiable solutions also lend themselves better to financial returns. Adaptation measures in addition have to cope with greater complexity and uncertainty, especially in the face of urban realities. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating urban responses, focusing on the complexity, uncertainty, vulnerability and transformation needs of urban adaptation. It applies this framework to an analysis of 39 Climate Adaptation Funds (CAFs) and the projects they have funded across the global South. Findings point to the clear dominance of national governments as adaptation actors, but also to the potential for responding to urban complexity by mobilizing multi-stakeholder involvement. Fewer funds were found to explicitly address the management of uncertainties, whether in climatic, temporal or spatial terms. As to vulnerability, while it is well established that poorer and more marginal groups are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, these authors also point to the potential for adaptation measures to further heighten inequalities, increasing the vulnerability of both groups and individuals. Transformational adaptation, on the other hand, involves responses that address the root causes of these vulnerabilities, making it possible to achieve greater resilience and sustainability, ideally scaling-up and catalysing project effects. Most of the projects investigated express commitment to vulnerable populations, yet appear to focus specifically on climate-related vulnerabilities rather than on the root conditions that underlie these vulnerabilities, attention to which might underpin genuine transformation.

The field note by Jutta Gutberlet, Adalberto Mantovani Martiniano de Azevedo, Leandro Morais, Miguel Juan Bacic and Maryellen Silva de Mesquita examines the activities of waste picker organizations in Brazil in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although social movements such as waste picker networks are more commonly associated with a confrontational stance towards authorities and the status quo, this research draws attention to the high level of collaboration that took place between these organizations and various levels of government and the private sector over the course of the pandemic. The collaborative actions undertaken by the waste picker organizations included measures to keep their own members safe, healthy and financially and materially afloat, but also ways to contribute to the more general care of the public by ensuring that cities were kept clean, and detriment of the recycling educating the public about risk reduction strategies, in many cases filling a gap left by government neglect. This is not solely a story of collaboration, however. Although the interests of waste pickers, government and corporations converged in some instances, this was not always the case. Especially troubling for the waste picker organizations was a political shift during the pandemic, with capital and technology intensive solutions for waste being prioritized to the detriment of the recycling and resource recovery approaches advocated by the waste pickers.

The paper by Kathleen O’Reilly and Jessica Budds brings an interesting perspective to the provision of community toilets in unserved informal settlements as part of India’s national urban sanitation campaign, Swachh Bharat Mission–Urban (SBM-U), intended to eliminate open defecation. This initiative is considered by many critics to have failed, resulting as it has in so many cases in dilapidated, unusable toilet blocks. The government’s plan was to construct these toilets and then withdraw, leaving daily cleaning and regular repair to the users. This strategy has backfired and has resulted over time in residents returning to open defecation in preference to using these filthy, broken-down latrines. Where the state assumed that the provision of sanitation hardware was sufficient to address the deficiencies, residents saw upkeep over time as integral to provision. Their refusal to comply with the state’s impractical expectations has in effect forced the state to reconsider its stance. Centring their discussion on an understanding of sanitation infrastructure not simply as hardware but as an ongoing material process, these authors draw attention to this mismatch in the perceptions of state and citizens, and to the implications of this contention for the citizenship contract between them.

As editors we note that there are also many examples of community-managed toilets that work well and deserve our attention – including those built and managed by Mahila Milan (‘women together’, the federation of women slum and pavement dweller savings groups).