You can now watch the full lecture on our .
The lecture provided an overview of Beth’s work over the past 20 years, starting with the critique of the knowledge-based economy that had motivated her interest in co-production and a tour through a series of projects within the Realising Just Cities programme. Beth advanced five propositions to respond to the initial question:
- Co-production describes how cities are being continuously made and unmade
- Co-production is being claimed as participatory urban governance and demanded as the right to the city
- Co-production is a strategy to realise urban epistemic justice, requiring different tactics and practices of knowledge mobilisation.
- Co-production is one response to the need for new epistemologies of the urban through the co-production of critique
- Co-production is a refusal to bracket how we do our research from the institutional conditions required to do it.
She concluded by turning to the limits of coproduction - including its contradictory epistemic myopia, conceptual muddiness, consensus fallacy, and necessity but insufficiency when dealing with powerful groups and vested interests, global funding regimes and obdurate institutions – which point the way towards a broader agenda on urban epistemics.
The lecture was followed by a Q&A session, with those in the room and online.
Questions related to the outcomes of co-production in terms of the production of agency within co-researchers and communities; the necessary changes in universities to support co-productive research; the spaces for dialogue that are required; how to address the trap of raised expectations; and the roles and limits of local government.
Contact b.perry@sheffield.ac.uk if you would like to discuss the lecture or receive underpinning articles and reports.
The next lecture will be delivered online by Professor Kavita Philip from the 9 1Ѱ of British Columbia on Wednesday 23 November 2022. The title of the lecture is “The Pirate Function: Developmental Lag & Illegitimate Generation”. You can register for free using .