RESUMO Este artigo examina como e por que os educadores das universidades podem e precisam trabalhar como ‘um entre muitos’ para propor pedagogias críticas para a igualdade urbana. A discussão está embasada em duas experiências distintas: as escolas em rede da Habitat International Coalition América Latina (HIC-AL) – uma coalizão de organizações da sociedade civil, movimentos sociais e universidades que trabalham pela defesa de direitos humanos relacionados à moradia – e os processos de coaprendizagem com ativistas pelos direitos à moradia facilitados pelo Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) – uma instituição educacional nacional comprometida com a transformação igualitária, sustentável e eficiente dos assentamentos na Índia. Ambas as experiências enfatizam a criação de pedagogias críticas que procuram fundamentalmente romper, reformular e reposicionar relações institucionais de saberes e práticas de aprendizagem ao propor capacidades para uma transformação urbana transformadora. A análise demonstra como as injustiças epistêmicas – muitas vezes proliferadas em e por instituições de ensino superior – podem ser neutralizadas e porque promover a justiça epistêmica exige o reposicionamento das universidades como uma contra muitas em um ecossistema mais amplo de pedagogias urbanas, em diálogo aberto e produtivo com novas formas institucionais, definidas por Boaventura de Sousa Santos como a ‘pluriversidade’ e a ‘subversidade’.

In the Global South, urban space is appropriated through diverse informal housing arrangements, with characteristic inherent and relational temporalities. While these forms of housing often consolidate through incremental growth, change in materials and perceived security, they also exist precariously through changing circumstances. While some urban scholars have discussed the characteristic in-betweenness of informality, others have noted the conceptual tension that policy holds in addressing this temporality. This article builds on these discussions to argue that the temporality within and across diverse informal housing arrangements matters not due to the ways in which it manifests, but due to what happens within it as a space of transformation, that is, of socio-economic and political mobility. It draws from literature across disciplines on mobilities, poverty and capabilities to posit that a conceptual frame of choice and agency is key to policy engagement with housing temporalities. The article locates this discussion in the city of Delhi, where cycles of evictions have broken large ‘slum’ clusters, or bastis, into further spatial and temporal configurations. The article uses two distinct housing models to illustrate narratives of the state across two sites: Savda Ghevra, a case of peripheral resettlement; and Kathputli Colony, a case of in-situ redevelopment. It reveals how the state not only does not recognise the temporality of self-made housing practices, but also sets into motion temporalities that, through the absence of choice and agency, create conditions for precarity, highlighting the need to keep choice and agency central to discourses on housing and well-being.<br/><br/>Key messages<br/>Informal housing arrangements in the Global South have inherent and relational temporalities.<br/><br/>The temporality within and across housing arrangements holds within it a space of transformation.<br/><br/>A conceptual frame of choice and agency is key to policy engagement with housing temporalities.<br/><br/>The state often does not recognise the temporality of self-made housing, but rather sets into motion housing temporalities.<br/><br/>An absence of choice and agency in housing discourses creates conditions for precarity.

This paper describes the challenges facing urban planning higher education institutions in the global South that engage with knowledge production, education and training and the ways they are tackling urban equality concerns. Drawing on interviews with urban pedagogues and practitioners, and examining institutional histories across Asia and Africa, we use a five-point framework to analyse these challenges: what to teach, how to teach, whom to teach, who teaches and where to teach. We find that different institutional arrangements and choices made by educators affect the answers to these questions in different ways. These questions are also closely connected to the questions of planning “for what”, and planning education “to what end”, and relate to concerns regarding values and processes and to outcomes for urban equality in the South. Considering these cases together offers an opportunity to contribute to a Southern dialogue on the evolution of planning education.

Since 2020, pedagogues and learners in the field of urban planning and practice have rapidly responded to new demands and realities posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. These have included shifting the modes and sites of learning from classrooms to screens, developing new programmes to build urgently required local capacities, fostering partnerships and platforms that sustain remote ways of learning together, and facilitating multi-sensorial and inclusive learning practices. This plurality of pedagogic adaptation and innovation suggests complex and nuanced relations with urban (in)equality, going beyond the dominant narrative of the digital divide and distributive inequalities in higher education. This article reflects on three experiences of critical pedagogies undertaken by researchers and activists, social movements and organised civil society from India, Brazil and Argentina. As the impacts of the pandemic on the nexus between urban practice and pedagogy unfold, we argue that these reflexions-in-action on decisions made, along with their underlying principles, are important stimuli for pluralising questions of what, where, with whom and how we learn to respond to urban inequalities. Moreover, they open nuanced discussions to strategically reimagine future hybrid learning trajectories to support pathways to urban equality.