By Patrick Schuster
At the recent Urban Land Justice Gathering 2025 organised by Ndifuna Ukwazi and partners in Cape Town, research from the MPhil in Urban Studies – Southern Urbanism programme’s City Research Studio 1 formed part of an exhibition of collective work produced by students and residents of urban occupations Cissie Gool House (CGH) in Woodstock and Singabalapha in Observatory, Cape Town. Building on off earlier collaborative work with CGH by Suraya and Andreas Scheba of the City Occupied Collective, students and scholars from Sociology, Architecture, Geography and Urban Studies partnered with these occupations in knowledge production. As a reflection of the studio’s pedagogy of co-production, the exhibition’s making demonstrates the Urban Studies programme’s commitment to inculcate in students the ethos of socially responsive scholarship.
The exhibition was a collaborative effort of residents and students, academics and activists. Rather than fully design the exhibition in advance, negotiating its layout happened piece by piece the afternoon before the Gathering. Navigating the complexity of hundreds of hours of research produced with residents, across classrooms, and with different academic supervisors and projects required that each piece be evaluated and selected before being placed in the constellation of moments gathered together.
The result is a product that is only possible when the power of authorship and knowledge-making exceeds the boundaries of the university. As dense networks of relations, cities are complex spaces that require research tools able to recognise knowledge created beyond the academy. Co-production forms a key principle of the MPhil in Urban Studies — Southern Urbanism as it seeks to raise the next generation of urban scholars from Africa and the global south.
In the first module of the year-long City Research Studio, students engage with housing struggles and hone their research and writing skills with the assistance of residents and activists affected. This year we have worked with residents and leaders of urban occupations in Cape Town. The work exhibited is a recognition of the generosity of residents and activists as they share their labour and knowledge to students’ education, and a desire – on the part of collective of teaching programmes at UCT under the banner of the City Occupied Collective – to reciprocate.
