Modes of Engagement for Urban Research: Enacting a Politics of Possibility

Cities are increasingly cast as being shaped by globalization and related neoliberal policies. While these diverse literatures have provided needed theoretical advancement to rethink the city in relation to political–economic change, they also run the risk of conceptualizing, studying, and representing cities without sufficient attention to the spatial copresence of multiple actors. The result is that some treatments of the city reproduce a unified story line that conceals human agency, reads as if there is only one trajectory on which all cities are moving, and does not engage in imagining alternative urban futures. In this paper we suggest that there is a continued need to critically examine the spatial narratives mobilized both by researchers as well as by the other actors they encounter. Drawing on the widespread idea that the stories which researchers tell are intimately linked with the conduct of research itself, we advocate a researcher mode of engagement that permits collaborative critique of projects that aim to transform urban space. We report on our experience with two research practices—grounded interviewing, and the public research memo—to provide empirical examples of our perspective.