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Claiming the university for critical urbanism

urban studies. Alex Schafran’s (2014, 2015) and David Madden’s (2015) recent debate in these pages, in particular, has elevated a concern with the capacity of critical urban theory—and the wider urban academy—to catalyze emancipatory and democratic social change. Both of their interventions seek to leverage the latent potential of critical urbanism beyond narrow academic debates, but they diverge on questions of epistemology and tactics. Schafran argues critical urbanists need to think more concertedly about building power in order to serve as a vanguard for social and political change. Madden, by contrast, posits our energies ought to be focused on empowering community groups, activists and marginalized city dwellers beyond the walls of the ‘ivory tower’. Both positions offer political opportunities and novel modes of engagement, but both also have their blind fields and dangers. Steer too close to the former and power and claims of urban expertise remain cloistered in elitist, exclusionary institutional spaces. Veer towards the latter and the cycle of rigorous critique and piecemeal impact continues as we swim against a vortex of neoliberal tides inside and outside of academia. In the following commentary, I present a twofold response to this debate. First, I argue that we need to pay more attention to the impact that the overarching political economy of higher education and entrenched academic cultures have in perpetuating the limited efficacy of critical urbanism. Rather than engaging in a debate on the practice of critical urbanism per se, my intent is to highlight, and challenge, the institutional infrastructures of the university as a vital context through which the work of critical urban theorists and scholar-activists is operationalized. Not only are universities—and urban academics—under increasing pressure to demonstrate their social utility and relevance in an age of austerity (Christopherson, Gertler, and Gray 2014), but there is also a growing emphasis being placed on their perceived obligation to contribute to their urban locales as strategic partners, economic engines and data factories supporting smart solutions to the problems of the 21stcentury city (Harding et al. 2007; Leydesdorff and Deakin 2011; Pugh et al. 2016). Although experiences vary across national and institutional contexts, many universities are now actively assuming the task of driving knowledge-based growth in the neoliberal city. This has profoundly shaped expectations surrounding what type of urban knowledge universities should be generating and the criteria through which its usefulness is judged. As May and Perry (2011, 353) put it, understanding the politics of urban knowledge ‘is no longer a question of what the city means for the researcher but what research means for the city—and how those concerns are mediated by the university as a site of knowledge production’. Building from this critique, my second argument is that the wealth of critical urban knowledge generated in City and elsewhere should be concretely applied to the task of understanding and reimagining the university as a progressive urban actor and context for more socially just modes of urbanism. In