About
The Decolonial Cities Collective is an interdisciplinary group of researchers interested in establishing a community of practice towards furthering our commitment to decoloniality, social justice, and care in cities.
Founded in 2022 as an outcome of a workshop organised by the British Academy and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, we aim to create opportunities for a community of practice through organising a series of periodic conversations called Decolonial Cities Dialogues and through using this website to archive key resources. These initiatives engage with knowledge production and political work in and on decolonial cities.
Decoloniality and decolonising continue to be debated topics and objectives in academia, across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. We are concerned by the expansion of decolonisation in the university and recognise that such initiatives may be better described as diversifying rather than decolonising. Our aim here is not to decolonise urban studies but rather use this platform to explore how centring coloniality/decoloniality may reframe praxis in and on cities.
As such, we are guided by the following questions:
How have colonialism, coloniality, and colonisation defined ‘the city’ and shaped its value as (a) ‘good’?
On what shared bases do we examine dispossession, violence, and extractivism in contemporary cities while recognising their different roles in (de)coloniality, whether as settler-colonial cities, postcolonial cities, colonial cities without colony status, and current and former colonial metropoles?
How are decoloniality, social justice and care entangled in cities? How do these concepts critically inform each other?
Who gets to conceptualise, narrate, and represent the decolonial city—and for whom? What are the ethical and methodological concerns at work in so doing?
We are looking for ways to expand our community. Please email us if you are interested in knowing more about our work and/or contributing to it.
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Decolonial Cities Collective was founded thanks to seed funding from the British Academy and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.