It seems obvious that the way we think about things in the first place goes a long way to shaping the conclusions we make about them. Leslie Kern’s comments in this regard really highlighted this to me. In particular, she talked about her approach to doing research, which, for her, begins with a critique of epistemology, in other words: what you do is based on what you think you know. 

For instance, Leslie said that her training in feminist studies gives her the tools to tackle urban research from a different perspective. This is because feminist epistemologies engage with everyday lived experience and treat subjective knowledge as valid knowledge, for example in the areas of work, production and politics, which often ignore private, domestic spaces of everyday life. She said that everyday life in particular tells us a lot about macro processes and it is through a feminist perspective that we are able to see this. 

This got me thinking about my own PhD research, in which I encountered several different ways of framing urban life. In my thesis, I explore ways that urban theorists have tried to overcome the term ‘city’ and talk instead about ‘the urban’ in a more general sense. This is in fact a central concept of nineteenth-century Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà, who believed that the word ‘city’ was an inappropriate term to use when studying urban life. This is because it comes from the Latin word civitas and is therefore associated with rigid social hierarchies (‘citizens’ of a city-state would have rights that others would not). 

Instead, Cerdà thought all areas where there is human settlement should just be called ‘urban’. He thought rural communities with few inhabitants were just as urban as communities in more built-up areas. In order to make this argument, he made a critique of epistemology by characterising urban life in light of the interactions among groups of people rather than the physical spaces they inhabit. He changed the way he looked at the problem.

I was intrigued. I thought: this is an idea no one else is talking about! Not so. As it turns out, the idea that all life is essentially urban surfaced again a century after Cerdà, and has been enthusiastically debated ever since…

Let’s fast-forward to 1970. Henri Lefebvre has just published The Urban Revolution, whose first page starts with ‘I’ll begin with the following hypothesis: Society has been completely urbanised’. The industrial city, a product of the nineteenth century, was now an outmoded concept as urbanisation transcended the borders of the city, extending its infrastructural reach to increasingly rural areas. The whole of society had therefore become urban.

More recently, this has been developed into the concept of ‘planetary urbanisation’. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid formulated this idea in their article, ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’. The article theorises a new way of understanding urban life in the context of a world in which conceptions of the city as a fixed, bounded entity are questioned. They contend that urban studies is undergoing a crisis of ‘epistemic perplexity’ and aim to work towards resolving this crisis by positioning the urban as: 

1) a theoretical category, 

2) a process, 

3) a collective project, 

4) unfolding through pathways of uneven spatial development, 

5) multidimensional and – crucially – 

6) planetary. 

The division between urban and rural that for so long underpinned our understanding of urban studies has become so blurred to the point that it no longer exists. This is very much in line with what Cerdà proposed back in the 1860s.

Now – a counterpoint to this. Other scholars in urban studies have argued that ontology is a better starting point for understanding what ‘the urban’ actually is. In other words, why are things the way they are in the first place? Sue Ruddick et al. point out that feminist, anti-racist, post-colonial and queer theories of the urban are missing from general urban theories like Brenner and Schmid’s. They believe that ‘[i]t is through generative, messy ontological struggles that new ways of seeing and being emerge, thereby reshaping epistemology’. 

Within the epistemological framing, such ontological struggles can only be seen as urban, with subjectivities emerging as a response to urbanisation. They argue for the inverse: that subjectivities (which are not necessarily urban in character) are first formed and these then go on to make up ‘the very ground upon which urban futures are fought out’.

It is these kinds of different ways of seeing things, different ways of framing research questions – in short, critiquing epistemology – that Action for the Arts and Humanities’ series of talks and workshops aimed to call attention to. Through overlooked perspectives (such as the feminist approaches Leslie Kern and Natalya Palit discussed) to the alternative means of doing and sharing research (the focus of the video, blogging and feature writing workshops) we can draw on the immense critical resources we have as Arts and Humanities researchers to investigate problems in ways that conventional ways of thinking (and, indeed, academic institutions) often discourage.