Abstract

These ideas, reflective of the connect between theory and practice and its institutional engendering, come from my own education in, variously, urban studies, development projects with elected councils, and urban activism against powerful elite groups mobilising planning and the ‘rule of law’ (under a rubric of ‘citizenship rights’) to disempower poorer groups. I see a combination of pedagogy via forms of grounded theory to make the connect between theory and practice, each co-constituting each other. The pedagogical possibilities make the city exciting and experiential, but they are also vital to empower students against the hegemony of departmental politics. Such regressive academia is in large part premised on a Brahmanical ‘high ground’ of theory (Schön 1983): theory to be applied, inform ‘field work’, and in effect purify an inherently contaminated realm of practice.