 Hello everybody and a very warm welcome to today's IED debates events. We are looking at creating pathways to urban equality in a time of crisis. My name is Juliette. I'm the events officer IID. I'm going to be behind the scenes today and providing some technical support. So if at any point you have a tech related issue, do get in touch with me via the chat. That is it from me on housekeeping, which means I now have the delightful job of introducing Alexander Apsan-Frediani, a principal researcher in IID's Cuban Settlements Group and our moderator for today's event. Alex, over to you please. Let's get stuck in. Great. Thank you so much, Juliette. So let me go straight into the topic of our conversation today. Growing inequalities are one of the most pressing issues for cities while threatening the fulfillment of the rights of millions of other residents. Three quarters of cities are now more unequal than in 1996. This trend has been conditioned by a series of policy decisions and urban development trends, such as the hyper-financialization of housing and continued evictions leading to further housing securities, commodifications of basic services, worsening access to water, sanitation and transport, as well as the precarization of work, as continued criminalization of informal economy, and emergence of unregulated gig economy have been making it harder to safeguard workers' rights to these symptom-secure livelihoods. And on the top of all of these ongoing processes, we have seen how global crisis have deepened disparities in cities. COVID, the energy crisis, combined with the climate crisis have had an uneven impact within as well as across cities, as the burden have been particularly experienced by those living in vulnerable areas in the cities of the global south. Well, for me personally, it has been shocking to hear from informal settlement dwellers in Freetown on how the increased price of petrol caused by the international energy crisis have meant that they could not expand or fix their homes, meaning that they had to live through leaks more overgroudness and uncertainty. And at the same time, we keep hearing about the rocketing profits of oil companies while growing inequalities perpetuates deep global injustices. Having said that, urban inequalities and the mechanisms to address them is a growing global agenda, research, advocacy and for policymaking. This special issue of environmental organization entitled addressing urban inequalities co-creating pathways through research and practice, emerged in the context of these efforts. This issue, which is the first in a set of two special issues, has been put together through a partnership between the environmental organization editorial team and the researchers involved in the Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality Program, also known as NOL, which is a four-year research project funded by the UK government led by the Bartlett Development Planning Unit of University College London. From the EU side, we had the fantastic work and collaboration of Diana Metley, Jenny Pavels and Sherry Bartlett. In the NOL program, we had Camila Cossinia, researcher at IID, Stephanie Butcher, lecturer at the University of Sheffield, Nikelia Kutu, director of the Melbourne Center for Cities and Karen Levy, professor at the DPU and principal researcher of the NOL program and myself, who was also involved in the editorial team. Some of the contributions to this issue are coming directly from research conducted through the NOL program. And we also included work from other authors who applied many principles and findings of the program to different contexts and experiences. But apart from this special issue, no researchers have also been involved in the recently launched special issue of urbanization, the journal of our colleagues at the Indian Institute for Human Sentiments. The special issue from them is entitled Urban Inequality and COVID-19, The Crisis at the Heart of the Pandemic, and I encourage you all to check it out. Meanwhile, this urban equality-driven agenda has also been at the core of the NOL's collaboration with the United Cities and Local Government, which led to the publication of their flagship three-annual Gold Report on Pathways for Urban and Territory Equality, addressing inequalities through local transformation strappings. This was a massive endeavor involving more than a hundred contributors from academia, civil society, and local governments. The report was just launched earlier this month at the AUCLG Congress, and it is a call for action outlining the role of local regional governments in advancing equality, focusing particularly on co-produced pathways for change. And finally, here at IIED, where I'm based for us at the Human Sentiments Group, addressing urban inequalities is at the heart of our activities and agenda. Recently, at the context of the 11th session of the World Development Forum, we launched our Better Cities vision, which focused at responding to the twin challenge of inequality and climate change. I encourage you to have a look at the document so that you can have a sense of our recent priority areas of work. Well, these different initiatives have a key thread that brings them all together. They recognize that while urban inequalities is a growing challenge, it has been also a key mobilizing agenda internationally as well as locally in cities to bring about pathways for change. So today, we will hear from authors that have been particularly involved in researching while also being part of such processes of change. When looking at the various experiences documented and analyzed in this year and new special issue, we identified in the editorial piece different entry points through which efforts to address inequalities will be mobilized. We call these sites of action through which pathways for urban equality will be activated. In the conversation today, we want to talk more about this. So we have here with us a fantastic panel. Now we have Taiza Komeli, researcher at QCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and author of the paper about the Rio de Janeiro. Neha Asami, Associate Dean for the School of Environment and Sustainability at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and co-author of the paper Exploring Planning Education. Then we have Joseph McCarthy, Executive Director of the Sierra Leone Urban Research Center based in Freetown and a lecturer at the Indiana University and also co-author of the paper about Freetown. And then we're going to finish with some reflections from Karen Levy, Professor at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at the University College London and was also the Principal Investigator of the No Program. And Karen has been also part of the editorial team. So let's go for it. So let's start with Taiza. Taiza, for us, it was quite interesting to learn from your paper how the processes of reframing narratives around grassroots practices have played a role in opening up possibilities to address urban disparities in Rio de Janeiro. Could you tell us more about this? So I'm passing over to you Taiza. Thank you, Alex. So hello everyone. I appreciate the opportunity to be here and share some findings and reflections from this paper, which as Alex said, are based on the experiences of three different grassroots groups based on the favela of Hacinha, which is an enormous informal settlement. It has between 150 and 200,000 residents and it is located between the south and the west zones of Rio. So it's a wealthy area in Rio de Janeiro. I'm going to quickly share my screen and show a picture just so you know what I'm talking about. Can you see my screen? Yes? Okay. Well, so Hacinha, as you can see, is not only a large and diverse settlement, but it is also a consolidated one, both from a built environment and from a political perspective. And it is consolidated from a built environment perspective, partly because of massive auto-constructed housing, as you can see. And later, for being also contemplated by several upgrading programs over time, which increased the legitimacy of its presence in the city, even though, of course, we still have many intense struggles with regards to housing, tenor security, sanitation, and so on. The list is long. But we're talking here about a visible and important favela for the city of Rio, which many times inspire actions in other peripheral settings. And this place has a lot to offer if one wants to explore the potentials and shortcomings of engagements with the state. And if you want to impact the diversity that we are referring to when we use the umbrella term informal settlements or informality. But hosting is also consolidated from a political perspective, as I said, mostly because it has a reach, although not always disseminated, history of community activism, a history that I alluded to in this paper by describing a few milestone events, and by describing and critically analyzing the actions and strategies of these three grassroots groups, which are, and this is a rough translation for me, Hossinha Without Borders, the Sankofa Museum and the Hossinha Resists. So these groups have found different niches of action and they have crafted different tactics, which is why they're described and analyzed separately in the paper. So Hossinha Without Borders is more of a space for critical dialogues and critical pedagogies related to the theme of citizenship. It is more a dialogical space for exchanges between researchers, predictioners, local residents and authorities. The Sankofa Museum is an open-air museum and it works with issues of local heritage, culture, and the Hossinha Resists, which is a Black youth-led group, a very recent one, touches a lot on issues of identity politics in intersectionality. And they also worked a lot with care and relief during the pandemic. So because Hossinha is so diverse and complex, I argue in this paper that we can only understand the pathway to urban equality chosen by these groups if we, instead of a snapshot analysis, take a longitudinal or a long-term gaze at what these local residents do and their rationales for taking certain actions which can be more conflictive or on the co-production side of the spectrum over time. I'm not going to expand too much on this point about the temporality of these actions, but it's important to mention it somehow because it is only from this long-term perspective that one can understand that despite your differences, which in the paper I refer to through the term hybrid insurgent citizenship, these groups actually have a similar narrative, a similar understanding of how social, political, and economic inequalities in Brazilian society have shaped their habitat. And this understanding and narrative is in stark contrast with the dominant narratives propagated in the city. So the tales that were told about Hossinha, about favelas in general, which are most of the time derogatory nature. So by relying on what they call the historical fights, which started to be pursued by old school activists and by, for example, collecting historical data by working closely and critically with residents and by taking themselves a long-term gaze at their settlements, they were able to craft this coherent narrative from Hossinha about Hossinha and from Hossinha about Rio de Janeiro and about Brazil. So just to give you a brief example before I finish because there's not a lot of time, but a lot of a museum provides in its source and talks factual evidence about how informality through, in this case, the illegal supporting of farms in the early 20th century was actually crafted by white elites as an act of speculation while passively sanctioned by the local government at the time. So therefore, this is not merely about refuting claims of illegitimacy in the territory. It is really about telling a different story about the city and by doing so, we are engaging in this sort of battle of narratives about how inequalities are produced, who produces them and about the multiple contributions of peripheral settlements to the city over time. So I should stop here and maybe allow time for my colleagues to talk about their papers as well, hopefully God's very short explanation gives you a taste of how these counter or alternative narratives are a key part of multiple pathways to urban equality, which in this case are about discourse, but it is a discourse that is deeply rooted in the material inequalities and spatial inequalities of the city. So I'll stop here and that's it from me, I guess, for now. Great days. We'll come back to a bit later again. But thank you so much about this connection between the refrain of narrative, but also historical struggles, which is also a feature that was very strong at the Freetown paper that Joseph has been part of. So yeah, Joseph, I wonder if you can tell us about your experience of building pathways to urban equality, particularly reflecting on this long history of collaboration with different organizations to engage with planning systems in Freetown. And Joseph, I think you muted. Thanks, Alex. Hello, everyone. It's good to be part of this conversation. Our work in Freetown in addressing urban equality has really evolved in response to the challenges of development within the city. Urban poverty and inequality are very serious issues affecting the development of Freetown. The city faces unplanned development with several pockets of informal settlements, and therefore the city authorities have always struggled, especially in understanding community needs, but more especially for those living in informal settlements. There is a critical knowledge gap, especially for policy and planning, but also much of what exists as knowledge is either inaccurate or is not really disaggregated across scale to understand the social, economic, and environmental fundamentals, especially those touching on informal settlements. So inaccurate data makes it difficult to actually locate and improve the conditions of the poorest and marginalized groups within the city, and the intractable nature of this particular problem means that diverse forms of knowledge gaps of knowledge are really required, especially one that includes the perspectives and knowledge of academics, but also of non-academics. This inevitably requires new ways of working, new ways of thinking, and new ways of acting. To date, city authorities struggle to really understand the community needs, especially for those living in informal settlements. So against this background, we evolved a particular kind of research activity and process that actually touches on some of these fundamentals. And the main strategy has been really on prioritizing co-production strategies. SLUX uses the production strategies, especially to bring people's concern into decision-making processes. It has usually involved working jointly with communities, community residents, and various other practitioners to produce knowledge and to work with residents to address their very needs within their communities. At SLUX, we strongly believe that co-production strategies are critical to advance different dimensions of urban equality, both in the city but also within the informal settlement. Our approach to co-production is based on a recognition that community residents hold knowledge about themselves, about their communities, about their aspirations. And that's based in co-production on these particular places where people live, allows the delivery of outcomes that actually can be of benefit to the community people directly. So our strategies in co-production has been threefold. One has been the creation of a learning platform. And this learning platform exists at both the community level but also at the scale of the city. The idea is for communities to rationalize, especially what the issues are with regards to the problematics within their spaces, but to see how this can engage with policy and decision-making processes at the level of the city. The platforms that we have created has served as open spaces to have a shared vision of the city, especially working with people living in informal settlements, but also scaling this up to the city authorities. It has been a means for us to collectively envision not only the city but also help the communities to envision the priorities, especially for development within these particular places. It has also created a space for us to learn from one another, but to also share the varying forms of knowledge and to build strong relationships, especially in terms of working together. And it has also helped in the process to help us to sustain campaigns. For instance, regarding the issue of eviction within informal settlements, how can we actually rally around this particular issue and to ensure that we facilitate collective action and engage the state? So the planning platforms have been very critical to that. But we have also been working with the community residents, especially in terms of designing what we refer to as the community action area plan, because this to us should be used as a tool, especially to advance a progressive kind of urban upgrading agenda within these particular settlements, given that these settlements are almost always under threats for eviction by the government. So how do we ensure that we provide a means of planning this particular space or we provide a kind of rationale for the city authorities to know that planning is possible within these communities and it is also possible for this planning to ensure that the lives of these people are being addressed? We also have worked by building reform coalitions, especially within these settlements. And this has actually involved helping to amplify the voices of communities, building especially on inclusive approaches, especially to advance development within these spaces. So over the period we have succeeded in shifting policy and planning, shifting policy and practice towards ensuring that there is effective planning within these particular places, but also to reframe the governance landscape. Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Joseph. I'm sorry for interrupting you a little bit there. A lot of things to go through. So please go back to the page with a lot of content there. But what Joseph started outlining here is how this historical engagement has been opening up possibilities of creating pathways for urban equality, but also through the process of knowledgeable production. And I think this is approaching to a topic that Neha really tackled in her paper, which is looking at the site of action, which is focused on learning, learning and creating new pedagogies as a means to create pathways for urban equality. Neha, could you expand on that to us? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I think I'd like to start by kind of saying that the work that we did in this paper sits alongside a lot of the work that was done as part of this work package for the NOAA program and so I'd encourage you to look at the work of our other colleagues across UCL and the IHS and the papers that are sort of emerging from that work as well. We began this research focusing particularly on the premise that the contemporary training of urban practitioners has an influence on urban equality through their professional practice. And this paper particularly focused on ways in which higher educational institutions can act as a site of change for planning education by equipping practitioners to deal more effectively with questions of urban equality in their particular professions and contexts. And so basically we thought that if we taught better, we would be able to do better eventually. However, as we conducted our research across Thailand, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and India, we began to find that while it was absolutely integral to look at sort of what was transacted in the classroom, to look at the nature of the curriculum itself, it became increasingly clear to us that this was just one part of the larger puzzle and that we needed to look at the larger political economy of higher education in each of these places to be able to understand really how to equip practitioners to deal with questions of urban inequality on the ground. And so it was not just about urban inequality in their practice, but also urban inequality in the space of education itself. And so this issue of thinking about sort of urban inequality in pedagogies depended not only on the content of the curriculum, but also on how students access learning and spaces of learning on who is teaching in the classroom. So on the kind of faculty that you have on the diversity of the students in the classroom itself, where the classroom itself is located, and this was particularly upended over the two years of the pandemic through which we did research and sort of brought out a lot of these questions of access to two spaces of learning and how to take learning really beyond conventional learning spaces as some of the work that we've done through the No Program has kind of demonstrated. And so what we eventually expanded our research to focus on was not only what to teach, but whom to teach, who teaches, you know, how this teaching actually takes place and where this teaching happens. And the various interventions that we discussed in our paper across our four sites of research demonstrate that while, you know, they're trying to improve and focus on particular sort of questions of inequality as they emerge in their own context, they are about addressing these larger questions beyond the curriculum itself that deal with the political economy of higher education. So for example, in the case of Thailand, new programs of learning were introduced in different languages. In the case of Sri Lanka, we had, you know, the Institute of Town Planners in Sri Lanka trying to find ways to bring in non planners into planning practice. And in the case of India, the IHS admissions model sort of focused on expanding diversity in the classroom. And so I'll stop there and encourage you to look not only at our paper, but also at the other work done through WP5. Great, Neha, thank you. Not to giving all the sweetness away and keeping the audience here willing to download the paper. So what a supersonic trip we had through cities in four different regions to Brazil, Sierra Leone and India. And yeah, I call now on Karen to make sense of all of this and also to share with us what are the lessons learned here in relation to pathways, how pathways can be enabled or promoted to address urban inequalities. Karen, over to you. Thank you, Alex. A big challenge in the short space of time. But just to say that for us in the no program, pathways to urban equality, we're really looking at alternative trajectories of change to actually seek ways to navigate and transform the institutional structures, or in other words, the sites of power to bring about more equal futures reflected in the material and discursive practices of cities. And so I'm going to draw on my own work on the web of institutionalization which really reflects a mesh of different sites of power and action, which make up the interacting and the multi scalar institutional structures in a pathway. And I think what we've heard today and drawing on on on the material in the in the special issue is, I make reference to the citizen sphere and every certainly at Tisa and Joseph have talked very specifically about a citizen sphere, which attempts to both strengthen itself in terms of its own organization, but also to strengthen its capacities to deal with politicians, government policy makers and planners. And where necessary, as Alex said, in the increasing financialization of land and housing in cities also to deal with the private sector. And I think what Tisa showed us was the way in which over a long historical struggle in the favela Rosinha, we see a hybrid in hybrid insurgent citizenship which is deeply rooted and strong in its own right with a great series of capacities dealt up, built up in it to claim the right to the city, which, which exists. And at the same time, very interestingly a different way of doing things in free time, creating learning platforms, which represent informal settlements but also at the scale of the city to actually bridge the vision and the aspirations between residents and politicians and planners. And I think when the citizen sphere actually engages with the policy sphere. What we see is the creation of bridges to policymakers and here, I think I picked up at least two important things one is the way in which these different civil society organizations have attempted to reframe the narrative to to change the way the political commitment is formulated. And to do so, for example, in the context of of the informal settlements in in free town to actually recognize the existence of informal settlements, not to just go straight for the bulldozer, but to actually recognize the right of informal settlements to exist and to want to improve themselves. But also, I like very much the way Taisa put that in terms of making visible the aspirations of Rosinha and Rosinha's view of itself, of itself in Rio and of itself in Brazil. And I think those kind of aspirations are critically important in terms of engaging with policymakers, but we also saw the importance of engaging actually with the infrastructure of planning. And so in free town, we see the engagement with the so called community area action plans in free town, another kind of bridge into the policy sphere. And I think only with these kind of bridges of reframing the problems and the priorities and aspirations, and actually working with policies and plans. So we start to see the shift in government priorities and ultimately what one's looking for is the shift in budgets and the way that money is spent in cities to benefit all residents of the city. And we also saw the citizen sphere engaging with what I've called the organizational sphere and here I want to just specifically single out the capacity building, because what we saw in, in all the cases was the focus on co learning by doing. And here we see, for example, the learning which happens when you work together at over a long period of time in the case of Rosinha through the platforms in the case of free town. And as Neha said we're talking about both the formal and the informal educational structures here. In terms of the formal structures, recognizing the huge inequalities of the political economy of higher education as a global system of learning and valuing knowledge, and to ask some critical questions about that in the in the way that we rebuild alternative for change. And finally, of course, we want to see actual change on the ground. And so we need to look at the citizen sphere and its relation to what I call the delivery sphere. And what we start to see is a number of pathways here with community actions with implementers on the ground, exchanges with researchers who manage and control information. And, and I think both in the case of Rosinha and free town we heard that knowledge that is collected is not necessarily correct, accurate reflects the real aspirations of people the real needs of people. And central to that is the methodology, the methodologies through which we do all this. And I sort of put it very clearly when he says we're looking at new ways of working and thinking and acting. And I think that is something that worked that went through the entire no program, trying to open up the co production of knowledge in in in the way we actually produce knowledge for change. And with the ultimate aim of using that knowledge and that broad experience to build new theory, a post colonial Southern theory that better serves the understanding the strategies for transformative change, and also, of course, from the point of the DME also ultimately impacts on the pedagogies of change in planning education and practice. So Alex, I hope that kind of captures the various corners of the special issue, which I think raises some really important and illustrative examples. I've heard you talk about the web of institutionalization many times, but never that quick. So much clarity as well. So thank you so much. If people want to learn more about it, there's a working paper, a deep you working paper on the web that it explains a bit more in detail that the elements so thank you Karen for this. We have one question coming coming up, which is a combination of different questions. Thank you so much, Camilla and Stephanie for helping me out of this, that is really trying to ask was trying to get at the issue of social diversity. So the point here for our speakers, I think, as the question from Tasha and Alina that I could say is a Joseph, but I think they had this applies to your experience as well, that your, your work is really unpacking the issues around governance practical actions, but also trying to respond to diverse groups in informal settlements in ways of challenging the qualities. For example, issues around my issues related to migrants, youth and children to tend to be at the frontline of the consequences of inequality. So the question here is, what do you think the processes you have researched and engage with tell us about how to address inequalities in ways to recognize the diversity within informal settings. So maybe I go first to, yeah, would you like to start addressing this question then I go to Joseph and also give Neha. Yes, of course. So I guess a thought for me is that. So when we talk about these counter narratives or alternative narratives about the city and how they're crafted by these informal residents. I think it's important to say that this narrative is a sort of umbrella that covers a lot of different perspectives about the city. So for example, in the case of hosting it, what some of these groups do through the collection of historical data and through this long term gaze that they take at the territory is precisely like unpacking how these identities are connected to particular characteristics of the territory. So just to give you an example. In Hossinha, well, it's a steep settlement. So in the, in the highest portion of the settlement, you have a highest rate of black residents, and the lower part you have a highest proportion of immigrants from from the northeast of Brazil. And this is something that usually do not appear in in the census that we get from the government. And this is something that does not appear in the spatial plans and the upgrading initiatives that come from the state government. And so precisely this narrative is not only about like a spatial narrative of how the settlement has been produced co-produced over time, but it's also about the different identity. So where are the different groups where they live. And it helps us especially to understand that we cannot address spatially the settlement in the same way. So you need to subdivide. We have created their own sub zones in Hossinha, for example. And this comes from this local knowledge of how this different. So even like issues of different income profiles or, you know, like demographics in general, like single mothers more concentrated in a sub neighborhood for some reason. So the point is that narrative is not only about telling a different story, a story that is in stark contrast with a dominant story, but it's also about unpacking that story and understanding what are the different identities, where do people live, what are the special needs. And I think Joseph talked about that when he mentioned that co-production emerges from this recognition of needs and aspirations and these needs and aspirations are different depending on who we're talking about. And this is a premise. So recognizing that these needs and aspirations are different is a premise for building meaningful co-production practices. So yeah, that's a reflection for me. That's great. Thank you. Joseph, over to you. Any thoughts on the issue of social diversity? Yeah. Firstly, our approach was actually about how do we scale up the idea of addressing deep and growing inequality, especially in informal settlement? And how do we ensure that that decision or action is not only based on partial knowledge, especially that knowledge that really lacks a lot of evidence? And we know, of course, that there are different pockets of knowledge, situated knowledge in different strengths, and so therefore the community and city learning platforms were really designed as curated spaces where diverse voices and actors can be mobilized, especially to interrogate, but also engage with some of the issues that they did to their experiences, especially within these informal settlements, and also ones that really speaks to voices that often excluded, especially in decision making. So there was more or less the provision of vertical linkages, but also horizontal linkages within the process of engagement. And so therefore it was possible to create that space where different actors of different interests of different different persuasions can be brought together to really converse and have a healthy and meaningful engagement, especially to see things and view things and feel things from the diverse experiences within the city. So more or less how do we ensure that we have a kind of shared vision, but also a kind of shared proposition in terms of what this means and how it can be dealt with? Thank you. Thank you Joseph. And then from your perspective, how did the aspect of social diverse played out in the learning experiences that you've been facilitating? I think in three key ways. One was the realization that, you know, access to learning is really important and the diversity of the class is actually a pedagogical imperative rather than just a question of, you know, an equal opportunity question, because we found that as the class became more diverse, the kinds of questions that were addressed and sort of, you know, planning students were forced to face were very, very different as compared to sort of a more homogenous class. The second was that the more diverse the faculty, the more diverse ways in which questions of inequality were being brought up in the classroom. And I think the third was to actually take learning outside the classroom. And so to say, including sort of a formal learners to take them into the city much more and to bring the city into the classroom much more allowed them to kind of come face to face with sort of inequality challenges that were kind of located on the ground, but also to actually engage with non conventional learners, as we've done through sort of workshops with housing activists through the no program allowed us to actually bring in sort of learning that was kind of situated on the ground that enabled communities of, you know, people we would not think of as conventional sort of learners and students to be able to kind of, you know, both learn and produce teaching and learning materials that have then fed back into more formal learning spaces, but have also been enabled us as educators and as researchers to think in a whole range of different ways about what actually counts and constitutes as learning. Great. Thank you. We have a very interesting question from Thomas and I, again, I'm going to start now the other way around and ask Neha to come first, but try to keep maybe your answers quite short to particular examples to what he's asking. The question is from the different sides of action, from what each of you are speaking about, what are some of the tangible actions tools and or instruments have been successful in your experience in supporting co-production with governance structures, I think we've been touching on some of this but just a quick highlight of some of those instruments or mechanism that you've touched on and maybe I start with you. Sure. So, again, in one of the examples that one of the cases that we looked at in the case of Sri Lanka, the Institute of Town Planners in Sri Lanka is sort of the former kind of accreditation body that you know enables planning graduates to work with the government. And so far, you know, there has been sort of one university that is certified to teach planning graduates but the ITPSL has sort of also devised a second track by which non-planning graduates are interested in working in planning can then be certified. And so they work with the government, they work with universities, they work with sort of other, you know, related disciplines to be able to enable, you know, the sort of broadening of some of this. In the end, that's just one example from Sri Lanka. In the case of Thailand, there were new programs that were introduced again that work very closely not only with the government but also with the private sector to be able to sort of enable some of this work to happen. Fantastic. Thank you so much. You can see how the region is of different examples across different countries and cities. So thank you so much. Joseph, from you, any ideas or suggestions around tangible actions, tools and instruments that have supported co-production with government structures? Yeah, I think one of the tangible action has really been especially in pushing for transformation within the city has been really the building of reform coalitions, especially because no one organization or individual has the answers to the city or has all the answers to the city. But at the same time also creating that space for engagement, creating that space for us to really take a reflection of what developments really mean for the city and for who and what kinds of knowledge has been really prioritized, what kind of assumptions have gone, especially in the development and planning of the city. I think building those coalitions for change, especially those that really attempts to bring people's concern to decision making or to bear on the authorities that actually make decisions for the city, I think those have been a lot transformative. But at the same time also getting the authorities linked to the realities on the ground, especially those particular realities that constrain informal settlement residents from really benefiting from the resources of the city, but also from having representation and recognition and all those kind of things. I think these have been very, very critical, but more especially in terms of the research itself, which has attempted to open doors, especially in terms of getting the city authorities to really understand some of the realities, especially within these places. But linking that upward capacity because it's one thing to know, but it's also another thing about how do we work towards ensuring that this gets improved. I think those are the essentials of fundamentals. Thank you. Brilliant. Taisa, from you. Any quick insights on instrument actions? Yes, so I can think of at least three practical examples. I don't know if they are applicable to other contexts, but I think from my research I've found that there are, for example, all of the actions from the Sankofa Museum, they emerge from this publication, which is the close lines of memories and from there to like currently YouTube channels that are focused on storytelling from the perspective of residents. Have been very useful to really ground these narratives and disseminate them across the city. And the very open air tours from the museum are also ways to build these bridges between these different spheres, especially if we're talking about residents from different parts of the city, from more wealthy neighborhoods, tourists, and people that are ultimately involved in discussions and decision making. And I think the third thing that comes to mind is the inverted way in which these groups have crafted or thought about coalitions and planning spaces. So what they do is usually they bring authorities into the settlement, so they set the ground for the discussions and the agenda instead of participating in spaces that have been created and led by the government. They're trying to invert the order and the way in which things usually happen and by doing that they gain some power over the narrative and over the planning trajectories to some extent, of course. Yes, that's it for me. Great. Thank you so much for your answers and we are now approaching the end of our webinar. We have one last big question. We had one question that came in at some point around looking at the intersection between inequalities and connections with climate resilience and it's clearly one of the big crisis that we are experiencing at the moment of the climate crisis. So we wanted to ask the contributors to the special issue and how can we maintain the momentum of pathways within this current context of acute crisis. So how do you keep nurturing those pathways in context that we are seeing a lot of destabilization, also increased fragility of coalitions, of the work of grassroots groups becoming even under more pressure. So how do we maintain those in ways that actually builds on equality outcomes and equality processes as well. So we start with Joseph this time. Joseph, do you have any thoughts on free time and how to maintain those pathways for inequality in the context of crisis? Yeah, Alex, I think there is no one answer to this, but at the same time also I think what matters so much is the issue of commitment and interest. And therefore I was talking about the setting up of reform coalitions because once the collective interest grows, there is a lot of value into it because it comes with a whole lot of in-build capacity, especially among the different actors, but also expansion, especially in terms of not only organizing around the problem issues, but also organizing around ways of opening up opportunities. And this I think has been a lot key for us because there can be donors or pundas who may be interested, especially in pushing particular kinds of agenda, but essentially how to go about this sometimes becomes a lot difficult, but also how to tap this within community priorities especially becomes a lot difficult when they don't have any idea how this can be pushed. And so it has been the case that we have not short but also scale up that particular kind of engagement in ways that have unveiled a lot of issues that now comes at new or gray issues that can be mobilized around, but also working with the city authorities, they also may have been in one way or the other thinking about doing particular actions, but they could not understand how to go about it. So the city learning platform provides those pieces for us to really know what are some of the new ways of going about things and how can we now possibly move around to really address such things and with what resources. So I think that's it. Great. Thank you so much, Joseph. That was wonderful. Neha, from what are your thoughts in this question? I think in some ways I agree with what Joseph was saying and just like to echo some of that is that there is no one specific answer to this, to this question but I think that, particularly in the context of planning education, it has to be contextual it has to be context specific. And it has to be sort of rooted in the realities of the challenges that, you know, practitioners are facing on the ground, but also that we need to recognize that is not enough just to fix one aspect of the education system and the political economy of higher education. We need to look at it as an integrated sort of epistemological as well as structural project. There are things that we could not address in this but are really important to relate to the structure of universities to the way in which financing models are set up, for example. And I think that it's really important to be able to kind of hold all of these different elements together, you know, in order to be able to move the conversation forward on dealing with sort of the relationship between pedagogy is higher education and urban inequality. Great. And I'm sure that a lot of insights also from the special issue of your organization on COVID-19 and inequalities where I think we can go into more detail about that. Taisa, what are your thoughts around this question? Yeah, so whilst this question was being asked, I could not help but think of the upcoming elections in Brazil and I guess that, especially now that we're living in this post-truth society and with so much fake news, I think that to engage and understand, confront these multiple narratives about the city and issues of mutual recognition that touch on different scales that come from different perspectives, of course. I think that's a crucial agenda for cities and urban residents and institutions at the moment. And in that sense, especially talking about institutions, I think there's an urgent need to recognize the legitimacy of some of these narratives. The groups that produce them and to really incorporate them into planning strategies with parity. I think there are efforts in that direction, but they have not been deeply democratic yet. So I think it's like, I think everybody has said that before, but I would like to really emphasize that when we talk about these narratives, we're not talking about narratives that exist in a vacuum, they're not floating in the air. They really emerge from this realization of materials patient for structural inequalities. So I guess that providing also the material conditions for these settlements and for the existence of these groups is also a practical way of keeping these works alive. And there's no civil bullet, of course, as everybody said already, but there are certainly good experiences in the past to learn from. And in that sense, I invite you to look at more practical examples in the papers that we have in the special issue. Great. Thank you for mentioning what is in mind of many Brazilians, but not only of the upcoming elections now that's keeping us awake in these last moments before what's going to be a hopefully a turning point in Brazilian politics. But yes, Karen, you have heard a lot of those inputs. I think the topic of addressing crisis and maintaining those pathways in the long term and continue making them responsive to big challenges that many cities are facing have been key for the no program. Could you share with us some of your thoughts that came from that experience so that we can close this meeting with some of those insights? Well, Alex, as I was listening to people talking about this in response to their particular situations, I was thinking very much of the way in which Michael Safia formulated the notion of the room for maneuver because I think that's the key for all of us. We have to continually assess this room for maneuver. And as everybody's indicated, it's not straightforward. And in assessing the room for maneuver, we need a collective understanding of what Patsy Healy called the cracks or the strategic openings, but also the resistances, the very, very real you know, constellation of interests which resist the kind of change that we're talking about. And what we've learned from today is the importance of citizens and social mobilization in that process over a historical long term period but also some very powerful things to do even within the short and medium term in order to strengthen the citizen and social mobilization. But I think what's also clear is that the organizational dimension is pretty important here too, in terms of influencing priorities, policies, budgets and capacities. The reframing of the way we're doing things and the way we delivering things and what we're delivering. So the organizational landscape that we're dealing with is to keep an eye and understanding of that. And finally, some people have alluded to that today already. There is a so called technical I don't like that word always because it's always political technical sphere. The sphere of new ways of doing things like the co-production of knowledge, which has been so central to know. I think it's only through those kind of tools and techniques and instruments where we collectively keep assessing the room for maneuver that we actually then begin to be able to steer and support this process in a longer term vision. So it is a complex process. But I do think that what what many of the examples have have shown is that it's one in which many communities have engaged with sometimes with the support of local government, sometimes not with the support of local government. But it is possible to to navigate that room for maneuver over time and to keep pushing forward for the kind of transformative change that we all think is so important. Thank you, Karen. That was a great way of bringing in a lot of the conversations to our close. And again, for me, it's quite fascinating to hear all of your experiences and the experience of engaged researchers, how they are not only learning from those struggles, those processes of dealing with the power dynamics that Karen has been mentioning to address inequalities, but they are part of that. And they try to create possibilities for change mechanisms through which we can get better recognition that participation and democratic practices in cities can be more equitable and that we can get better distribution of resources. So it's, it's great to hear from you. Thank you so much again for contributing to this special issue. Thank you for being in the debate today. It's, I think it's invigorating. It's a big challenge in front of us. It's one that keeps new challenges emerge new crisis, but it's one also that is is there's a growing movement internationally prioritizing this agenda and responding to it, being that from academia from civil society from local governments, and other way to national intellectual agencies. We need to keep talking about it. We need not to let this topic get out of the agenda. COVID brought inequalities into the agenda to its centrality politically has been an important and meaningful outcome of what we have experienced and to also with the climate crisis also inequality has been centering our discussions around distributions of burdens. So we need to keep reinforcing the message that inequalities and the drive towards a more equitable society is one crucial for the future of our cities and for our planet. So thank you so much for being part of this process. And, and yeah, I encourage all of us to continue talking about it, writing about it and doing things about it, that that is, it's, I think, re invigorating an important space of action. So thank you for all of you for being with us. This recording will become available online so watch that space so that you can also listen or share with others that you might wish and read the special issue. So thank you. And goodbye. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Bye.