Participation and collaborative approaches to planning have become central in urban debates and practices. Critiques to the limitations of 'participation in planning' , however, have led to the development of a series of approaches that build beyond 'collaborative' understandings of planning. Approaches such as insurgent or post-collaborative planning, movement-initiated co-production, socio-spatial learning, agonistic practices or participation as political have moved the understanding of planning towards a wider spectrum of city-making practices, beyond disciplinary and professional boundaries, and in which some forms of participation become the very practice of planning. This article builds upon those debates, proposing an understanding of 'participation as planning'. Building on Southern urban theory, and recognising the difference between a discussion about participation and one that looks at planning through participation, the article proposes to recognise that there is a range of experiences of participatory city-making taking place in urban contexts, some of which fall into one of the referred categories, while others have remained as a 'blind-spot' in planning debates. The article identifies and discusses a series of strategies that have emerged from Southern contexts, and that represent ways of dealing with planning limits: Collective forms of spatial production that respond to the inadequacy of planning instruments to engage with diverse processes of city-making situated beyond dominant practices; partnership-oriented practices that react to the neoliberalisation and financialisation of planning; and advocacy-oriented practices to contest abusive planning practices which violate human rights.

The relationship between planning research and practice plays a key role in shaping global commitments related to urban development. Arguably, this is the case for a 'global urban agenda' being articulated at an international scale via frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda. These multilateral commitments have been shaped by power relationships and assumptions about what kind of knowledge is valuable at different historical moments, a recognition of the local and global impacts of urban development and what sort of urban development is desirable at specific historical junctures. The pathways that have led to the present global attention to cities are as telling as the frameworks themselves. In this paper, we explore the history of multilateral and international networks that have shaped today's global urban agenda. We focus on the three United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat I, II and III) as milestones in the evolution of this agenda. Drawing on Southern urban theory and current debates on the interaction of practitioners and academics, we discuss the paradigms that have shaped the ways in which knowledge has been articulated, circulated and valued in those historical moments via the concept of 'knowledge translation' . We discuss the way in which 'urban equality' has been approached and explored in the praxis of these agendas. To do so, the paper discusses community-based cases that can highlight the different knowledge paradigms, and the power dynamics behind them, opening up questions about the challenges of including diverse voices and knowledges in the 'global' conversation on urban agendas.

This paper examines the dominant knowledge paradigms that have underpinned planning over time in Freetown, Sierra Leone and their implications for urban equality. Looking at the history of the informal settlement upgrading agenda, it presents this analysis through a historical mapping, outlining the knowledge paradigms that have informed planning approaches from the colonial era to the present day. It then outlines three strategic moments over the past 13 years, in which organized informal settlement residents and wider coalitions have mobilized diverse forms of knowledge. By engaging both with long-term trajectories and the intimacy of more recent experiences, it outlines what we refer to as the “slow anatomy of change” through which diverse knowledges have been consolidated. The paper offers reflections on the temporalities and geographies of change; the role of knowledge production as a historical site of power disparities; and what these strategies tell us about the negotiation of power and knowledge through planning towards urban equality.

This article explores the potential of housing policies to reduce economic, social, and political inequalities. Understanding inequalities as issues of distribution and recognition, housing policies have the potential to tackle them by encouraging more equal outcomes and processes. Presupposing the centrality of the urban dimension in current debates, this article puts forward the idea of housing as urbanism as a framework of analysis. This framework is used to discuss the Chilean case, a market-led housing system that is considered as a financial model by many countries in the global South. However, urban shortcomings have encouraged policy makers to incorporate explicit urban equality ambitions in recent years. Based on empirical work conducted in Bajos de Mena, Santiago, the article presents two programmes with equality aspirations, examining their economic, social, and political impacts. In order to draw lessons from the cases contributing to wider debates, it identifies the main challenges in addressing inequality, reflecting on the relevance of these conclusions beyond the Chilean case.

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