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The purpose of this paper is to share our experiences – as academics andprofessionals – in co-producing knowledge to improve urban development outcomes in the Global South. The focus of the paper – urban research and practice – is a context in which academic work influences policy and programming, and professional knowledge – validated and certified by academic institutions – forms the basis for urban planning and management. Collaborative research – co-produced with social movement activities – suggests that four issues need to be addressed to establish more equitable relations. First, alternative theories of change about how research leads to social transformation must be recognised, even if they cannot be reconciled. Second, the contribution of social movement leaders to university teaching needs to be institutionalised. Third, the relative status of academics vis-à-vis non-academics must be interrogated, and better understood. Fourth, researchers’ accountability to themarginalised needs to be established. We argue that academics are insufficiently selfcritical about the power dynamics involved in knowledge production with social movements, and that long-term relations enable understandings to be built and some of these tensions to be alleviated. Our conclusion highlights the unequal power relations that lie behind these challenges, and summarises key measures to address inequalities and their negative consequences.

In this working paper we seek to contribute to debates about the scaling up of citizen participation in towns and cities of the Global South through a focus on participatory planning. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we discuss existing experiences of integrating participation into citywide planning and urban governance processes, highlighting that such efforts often do not adequately consider the views of low-income communities, and restrict participation to the level of the neighbourhood. Second, drawing on these experiences, we outline what we mean, theoretically and practically, by scaling up participation and summarise the ways and extent to which the scaling up of participation has occurred as discussed in the literature, and the factors that emerge as significant to its progress. We consider government, academic and civil society-ledefforts. Third, we identify factors perceived to be significant challenges and potential opportunities to scaling processes, focusing specifically on experiences in three African cities: Bulawayo (Zimbabwe), Johannesburg (South Africa) and Nairobi (Kenya). In the concluding section we summarise the implications for the next stage of an action research programme to advance our understanding of how to achieve citywide participatory planning.

Societies build for reasons, including and, beyond the need for shelter. The layers of meaning that make up the building process include status, power, social convention, values and ideas on aesthetics. This inherent layering of meaning through building ensures that every built work as a deliberate act – consciously or unconsciously – communicates meaning and gives shape and identity to those that build. While some contexts call for an occupation of open space as opposed to building, it must noted that in these cases the decision not to build can still be considered an architectural decision. Architectural history traditionally deals with individual buildings, yet historically building rarely exists outside the creation of multiple structures within some form of collective. Here the daily face-to-face interactions of dynamic social networks and patterns of interaction in these collective spaces ultimately define what we recognise as settlement. To comprehend the values that underpin settlement, the expression should be seen through the ‘collective’ rather than an ‘individual’ form of expression. How one intervenes in such collectives and how to provide a relevant and appropriate service that facilitates the needs and wants of multiple authors through architectural design has challenged the very principles upon which the profession is built. This need for more effective and considered approach to design has seen a global shift in practices and institutions to devise ‘alternative’ processes of design that acknowledge multiple authors, employ user-centered methods that ultimately allow for the ‘facilitation’ of collective expressions that aim to give way to shared and distributed decision-making in systems that should be critically participative. From this position the authors propose that the collective or ‘community’ should be considered as the basic architectural unit of design when architects and designers work in dynamic contexts of housing and informal settlements. By embracing complexity and uncertainty, strict traditional design control is replaced by fluid design processes. Lessons learnt while teaching the post graduate Alternative Practice module at the University of Johannesburg’s Architecture Department will be presented as well as experiences with the Architecture Sans Frontiere’s ‘Change by Design’ methodology workshop/training in Ecuador, Quito. The theoretical basis of this study draws from diverse literature sources, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of the topic of participative design and professional practice through collective authorship. The paper concludes by identifying ways to rethink spatial design practice based on concepts of co-production