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The UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been conceived as a global roadmap for peace, dignity, and prosperity on a healthy planet (UNDP 2016). The SDGs challenge the dominant notion of prosperity as material wealth measured by GDP and rising household incomes; instead prosperity is reframed as a shared condition to be weighed alongside ending poverty, tackling inequalities, and safeguarding the environment. Cities are identified as having a critical role in generating and equitably distributing prosperity on these terms. Reframing prosperity in this way opens up space for new forms of dialogue about what it means for people everywhere to prosper, asking how material wealth, other forms of value, equity, and fairness, and the needs of humans and nonhumans are differentially understood and acted on. Yet this article argues that prosperity is understudied and undertheorized by social scientists. A new research agenda, driven by empirical studies in diverse urban contexts, must form the basis for new theoretical insights and policy formation that will drive action on prosperity in the years to come. Presenting new empirical work from communityled research in three east London neighborhoods, the article examines prosperity as a lived experience in comparison to policy goal, demonstrating how context-specific meanings and practices challenge the orthodox models and metrics that currently dominate policymaking. The authors demonstrate how situated and engaged research with local residents and citizen scientists provides the basis for developing new prosperity metrics that reflect issues of specific value and concern to individuals and communities in east London.

Residents of informal settlements in urban centres in Africa are known to suffer disproportionate burdens of environmental and socio-economic inequalities and are often excluded from macro-level visions and policies that seek to make cities safer and prosperous (Birkmann, 2007; da Silva & Braulio, 2014; Dodman et al., 2013). This tension undermines the validity of orthodox, ‘expert-led’ visions, policies and measures of prosperity that are distant from the lived-experience of marginalised urban residents. Based on new empirical work with communities in three informal settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, this article argues that novel methodological and theoretical approaches to co-producing context-specific policy-relevant knowledge about pathways to prosperity (translated by the communities as maisha bora, ‘the good life’) creates inclusive spaces for both community participation in processes of urban knowledge production and critical social enquiry that can lead to grounded theory building. By co-producing both an agreed and relevant methodological approach for the study, and its subsequent documentation and analysis, this work contributes valuable empirical insights about the capacities and capabilities of local communities to shape and influence urban policy-making and in this way speaks to calls for a global urbanism (Ong, 2011; Robinson, 2016) that brings diverse voices and geographies to urban theory to better account for the diversity of urban experiences and processes found in twenty-first century cities.

AbstractThe high-rise tower block is an ambiguous construction: a much-maligned architectural form yet a persistent symbol of modernity and aspiration. It is also a fulcrum for discourses about urban failure, broken communities, widening urban inequality, and insecurity. Recent tower block disasters, from the Grenfell Tower fire in London to high-rise collapses in Nairobi, have intensified such debates. In this introduction to the theme section, we explore “tower block failure” as both event and discourse. Engaging with scholarship on global urbanism, verticality, and failure as a generative force, we highlight the particular discursive, social, political, and material constellations of “failure” as it manifests in relation to tower blocks. We propose that exploring what failure sets in motion—following what failure does, rather than what it means—can help inform our understanding of urban transformation.

AbstractA powerful dystopian imaginary dominates political and cultural representations of Britain's postwar tower blocks, which continue to be linked to social dysfunction and alienation despite extensive empirical research that challenges such claims. This article asks what contested declarations of failure “do” by examining how “tower block failure” is discursively deployed by placemaking professionals—planners, architects, housing managers, regeneration practitioners—engaged in the construction of a “model” mixed-tenure neighborhood in London's Olympic Park. Examining how the aesthetic figure of the “failed” high-rise housing estate is configured in relation to the normative models of citizenship and community that infuse social and spatial policy, I argue “failure” is entangled with a speculative, future-oriented economy of risk management, which refracts wider questions about the nonobvious forms that power takes in the neoliberal city.