Rapid urbanisation is a key characteristic of the modern world, interacting with and reinforcing other global mega trends, including armed conflict, climate change, crime, environmental degradation, financial and economic instability, food shortages, underemployment, volatile commodity prices, and weak governance. Displaced people also are affected by and engaged in the process of urbanisation. Increasingly, refugees, returnees, and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are to be found not in camps or among host communities in rural areas, but in the towns and cities of developing and middle-income countries. The arrival and long-term settlement of displaced populations in urban areas needs to be better anticipated, understood, and planned for, with a particular emphasis on the establishment of new partnerships. Humanitarian actors can no longer liaise only with national governments; they must also develop urgently closer working relationships with mayors and municipal authorities, service providers, urban police forces, and, most importantly, the representatives of both displaced and resident communities. This requires linking up with those development actors that have established such partnerships already.

Participation is promoted as the main engine for transformation in urban planning and slum upgrading in Malawi, despite the fact that most projects never get beyond the planning stage. Serious participation fatigue has been identified in many areas, but little is done to change the dominant script. This article comes out of an action research project with groups of urban poor and their organizations in Malawi. It analyses existing spaces in which participatory planning and slum upgrading take place, and reflects on what combinations of participatory spaces that might serve to enable change. The authors define political agency and locate potential transformation in agonistic spaces that open up for rupture and for people's interest to be accepted as voice rather than noise. At the same time, participants in urban Malawi often wish to be included into existing frameworks rather than challenging them. The article therefore explores a third way between a programme of insurgent radical action and the more pragmatic consensus-based participation model practised in Malawi today. Here, the potential for transformation is to be found not within one group or one type of space, but in the ways in which different spaces of participation connect, overlap and partly constitute each other. To better understand the transformative potential of participation in the context of urban planning in Malawi, we thus propose a 'trialectics' of participatory spaces where 'claimed', 'invited' and 'invented' dimensions of participation connect, overlap, and open up for ways in which actors can meet.

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This collective editorial on the neoliberal university follows eight days of strike action at sixty UK universities called by the University and College Union (UCU) in two separate legal disputes, one on pensions and one on pay and working conditions. Anticipating the recent labor strike after previous industrial disputes in 2018 at UK universities, the work included here emanates from two dialogues at the Nordic Geographers Meeting (NGM) in summer 2019, a public meeting called Protest Pub and a conference session on the neoliberal subject and the neoliberal academy. After an opening statement by the editors, this collective endeavor begins with the urgent collaborative action of graduate students and early-career academics and is followed by reflections on life in the neoliberal academy from those involved in the dialogues at the NGM 2019 in Trondheim. Additionally, the editorial introduces the content of the present issue.

In this lecture, I discuss the role of academia in addressing “fast policymaking” on sustainability. I suggest that the co-productive turn, whereby universities are increasingly expected to engage with a diverse set of actors, including citizens, can provide checks and balances to top-heavy bureaucracy, political elites, and market power in sustainability processes. However, if research relevance continues to be defined in neoliberal terms as meeting the needs of the economy and industry, this potential will not be realized. Drawing inspiration from the “slow research movement”, the call for more reflexive co-production in sustainability science, decolonial scholarship, and alternative debates on research impact, I propose a critical reconfiguration of research relevance that would respond better to the multiple imperatives of research to be critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable. However, this reconfiguration would be contingent on active scholarly engagement with the politics that condition relevance. Drawing on my experiences from participating in a collective named New University Norway, I end the lecture by offering some thoughts about the ‘new’ university in co-producing sustainable solutions.