Introduction

Higher education institutions (HEI) are widely considered critical actors for addressing current challenges of urbanization and increasing inequality in the global South, an aspiration based on the role of the university as a producer and broker of knowledge for the public good, striving towards real-world impact, as well as academic excellence (^{Addie, 2019}; ^{Swartz et al., 2019}). In the field of urban planning education, institutional arrangements of teaching, practice and research come together in various constellations, including collaborative studios and learning alliances, where learners gain planning experience as they co-produce knowledge with grounded communities of practice. Conceptually, many of these efforts rooted in Southern urban theory bear the potential of contributing to an ‘urban turn’ in critical pedagogy, a field that defines the architecture of learning as a political and moral practice (^{Giroux, 2011}), stimulating critical thinking and reflective practice about how cities are read, understood, inhabited and shaped (^{McFarlane, 2011}). However, in pedagogic practice, siloed understandings of disciplines, institutions and professions, and the hierarchies in city-making processes they represent, bring about significant tensions that inhibit critical urban learning and tend to reinforce or exacerbate hegemonic Western, colonial and exclusionary epistemologies of the urban (^{Watson; Odendaal, 2013}; ^{Wesely; Allen, 2019}).

This paper addresses these tensions, drawing from three interconnected fields of inquiry: firstly, epistemic injustices in the context of the shifting locus of urbanization to the global South and the multiplicity of knowledges that are activated and mobilized in informal and popular urban development processes; secondly, the roles of HEIs in the global South in co-producing and brokering knowledges, and alternatives for pluralizing and unsettling the imaginary of the university; and, thirdly, the contribution of critical pedagogies for urban change to such endeavors. These three fields are brought into conversation through two contrasting experiences: the networked schools of Habitat International Coalition - Latin America (HIC-AL) as well as the co-learning workshops with housing rights activists at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements.

The Habitat International Coalition (HIC) is a global coalition that brings together more than 350 civil society organizations, research institutions and academia, social movements and NGOs working collectively for the realization of habitat-related human rights. The coalition has a nimble operational structure, and is governed by its Members and their advocacy and pedagogic strategies. Established in 1976, HIC has since been an active agent from local to international levels in making visible, producing and defending habitat rights for all (^{Habitat International Coalition, 2018}). A distinct characteristic of HIC in the Latin American region – HIC-AL¹ – is the explicit vocation to work through multiple networked, yet autonomous schools (^{Wesely et al., 2021}). These schools are an umbrella for a diversity of learning experiences run by individuals and groups of Members, such as schools of cooperativism, schools of community leaders, and schools of citizenship, among others. HIC-AL schools are networked and held together by the principles and practices which the Coalition commits to (^{Habitat International Coalition, 2018}; ^{Wesely et al. 2021}).

The Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS²) is a national education institution committed to addressing urbanization challenges in India and enable sustainable urban transformations at scale. Founded in 2008 with intellectual and financial contributions by a group of eminent Indians from all walks of life, the IIHS’s vision revolves around training a new generation of urban professionals through the delivery of a set of new degrees in Urban Practice as well as undertaking interdisciplinary research and practice to help build new knowledge. The institute is currently structured around four core programs: Academics; Research; Practice; Capacity Building. Interdisciplinarity is at the center of all programs at IIHS, aimed at institutionally breaking the limitations of the one-department-one-discipline model of the university – the prevalent education system in India – to create new cultures of teaching, research and practice. In this paper, we discuss one of the pedagogic experiences of IIHS: its ongoing engagement with housing rights activists working in different parts of the country.

This paper uses ^{Caldeira’s (2017)} juxtaposition of contrasting experiences as a method to ask: How do HIC-AL’s and IIHS’s pedagogic experiences challenge epistemic and institutional tensions in their respective contexts? In answering, we focus specifically on the contextual embeddedness, potentials and challenges of these experiences to disrupt, re-frame and re-position institutional articulations of the multiple knowledges and learning practices that make the ‘urban’.

The HIC-AL analysis is based on a literature review which synthesized a large number of published and internal reports. Empirically, it draws from remote and in-person fieldwork conducted since June 2019, which includes in-depth conversations with 21 HIC-AL Members, coordinators and affiliates in nine countries and, in some cases, participant observation of the schools. In this paper, we analyze particularly those schools which are run by, or in collaboration with, university Members of HIC-AL. The IIHS analysis is based on two of the authors’ participation in the design and delivery of these co-learning workshops. In addition to personal accounts and reflections, the analysis draws from process documentation, workshop archives, video testimonials, oral reflections of activists as well as discussions with other researchers, directly involved in these workshops and/or other pedagogic experiences at IIHS. All authors are researchers in the Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality program, which provides a platform for bringing these two experiences into a comparative conversation.

The following sections outline key debates in and across the three aforementioned areas of inquiry: epistemic injustice in urbanism and urban planning in the global South, alternative roles of higher education institutions, and critical pedagogies for urban change.

Epistemic Injustice in the Urban Global South

Urbanism and urban planning in the global South have long been sites of epistemic injustice (^{Fricker, 2007}), manifested, for example, in the structural marginalization of, and credibility deficit given to, informal urban dwellers in their capacities as knowers of their own reality (testimonial justice) and in social and institutional inability to respond effectively to their experiences (hermeneutical injustice). This has been partly attributed to the dominance of planning cultures and professional planning education in Southern contexts, which are largely rooted in colonial legacies (^{UN-Habitat, 2009}; ^{Watson, 2011}). Aggravated by the shift in the locus of urbanization to the global South, the relevance and sheer representativeness of dominant urban planning theories has come under intensified scrutiny over the last decade. Several calls have been made to theorize from the South and from practice (^{Parnell; Pieterse; Watson, 2009}; ^{Parnell; Robinson, 2012}; ^{Watson, 2009}) and to decolonize the education of future urban practitioners (^{Watson; Odendaal, 2013}). Making a case for expanding a vocabulary of Southern urban practice, ^{Bhan (2019)} argues that coming from unrooted disciplinary education, urban practitioners often struggle to articulate knowledge prevalent in their particular forms of practice. Furthermore, he contends that urban practice itself is too narrowly defined and interpreted, reinforcing the hierarchy and segmentation of practitioners and their modes of practice. This, he suggests, results in known things across various modes of practice missing from disciplinary canons that dominate professional practice (^{Bhan, 2019}).

Alongside calls to decenter urban theory, there has also been an emphasis on knowledge co-production, which foregrounds the need for recognizing multiple holders of knowledge in their capacities and agendas to articulate, negotiate and co-produce ways of understanding and acting upon urban change that truly advance more inclusive urban agendas. However, ^{Mitlin et al. (2019)} argue that co-production faces significant challenges, particularly in addressing the unequal power relations and status between academics and non-academics, suggesting that academics often remain insufficiently self-critical of power dynamics, thus, unwillingly reinforcing testimonial and hermeneutical injustices. What requires further elaboration in this debate is a discussion on the underpinning pedagogies deployed to co-learn the city, as highlighted by ^{Allen, Lambert and Yap (2018)} and ^{McFarlane (2018)}. In addition to the familiar questions of ‘what counts as knowledge?’ or ‘whose knowledge counts?’, ^{McFarlane (2018, p. 323-324)} suggests that urban researchers and planners need to interrogate “who [they] learn from, with, for what ends and under what conditions of power and inclusion”. ^{Allen, Lambert and Yap (2018)} argue that we also need to critically address questions of ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ we co-learn the city. In this regard, the concept of epistemic injustice provides a useful lens to highlight fundamental issues of power and ethics in urban pedagogy in the global South (^{Allen; Wesely, 2020}; ^{Boni; Velasco, 2019}), forcing us to think critically about whose and how knowledge is produced, translated, shared and appropriated in learning processes and with what outcomes.

In looking at how epistemic injustices can either be challenged or reproduced in Southern urban theory, practice and pedagogy, the following discussion unpacks the roles that universities play as one of many producers and brokers of knowledge and their potential to co-generate and transform urban learning practices.

Beyond Enlightenment: alternative roles of higher education institutions

Over the last century, urban disciplines have been institutionalized at universities in response to increasing levels of urbanization and associated demands to professionalize the sector, as manifested in the proliferation of degrees in urban planning, urban design and urban studies, amongst others (^{Davoudi; Pendlebury 2010}). With the intention to facilitate the production and brokerage of knowledge, and to build capacities to shape an increasingly urban world, the university relies on several functions, such as teaching or training, research, practice, consultancy, advocacy and community outreach. As a site of higher education, the university holds ‘institutional capabilities’ for contesting inequalities through articulated values, a portfolio of practices and spaces of opportunity (^{Frediani et al., 2020}). However, long-standing calls to decolonize the university highlight how it rather remains a site of embedded power that still today reinforces dominant Western and colonial epistemologies. In other words, the university actively creates ‘others’ and furthers the reproduction of epistemic injustices through three parallel, but separate projects (^{Boidin; Cohen; Grosfoguel, 2012}; ^{Santos, 2018}). First, through the creation of disciplinary silos with rational, scientific or technological hierarchies. Second, by failing to acknowledge and counteract what is systemically unheard through colonial or patriarchal oppressive frames. Third, through the university’s relationship with contemporary capitalism as a pedagogy, hence, as an entity within a political economy that valorizes knowledge recognized by the ‘market’ (^{Giroux, 2003}; ^{Santos, 2018}).

Advocating for alternate ways of thinking and practice, ^{Santos (2018)} calls for closer and critical attention to the collective and performative ‘epistemologies of the South’, located within “the production and validation of knowledges anchored in experiences of resistance” (^{Santos, 2018}, p. 4). He questions the Eurocentric Kantian-Humboldtian model of the university that valorizes a singular form of knowledge and suggests the concept of a ‘polyphonic’ university. As the term suggests, the polyphonic university recognizes an ‘ecology of knowledges’ and “exercises its commitment in a pluralistic way, not just in terms of substantive contents, but also in terms of institutional and organizational terms” (^{Santos, 2018}, p. 277). Furthermore, Santos argues that the polyphonic university can be actualized through two forms: the ‘pluriversity’ and the ‘subversity’ (^{Santos, 2018}). The pluriversity is located within existing institutional structures, with possibilities to reform and decolonize the institution of the university from within. Discussions on the pluriversity include the inter-connections across its various institutional functions of teaching, research and practice, and a range of methods that recognize diverse knowledges and positionalities, feeding back into institutional spaces (^{Martinez-Vargas, 2020}). The subversity, on the other hand, operates as a pedagogical space outside conventional institutional boundaries, for example through social movements, premised through a ‘pedagogy of conflict’ (^{Santos, 2018}, p. 281). The subversity locates the university as one of several actors and one among several sites of power, and recognizes it for its ‘counterhegemonic use’ - subversively intervening in its conventional workings as a broker and producer of knowledge (^{Santos, 2018}).

The debates and imaginations of the polyphonic university speak to the recognition of diverse knowledges, making the case for pluralizing the sites where knowledge is created, articulated, revealed and embodied. Connecting this argument to the urban realm, this resonates with the previous discussions on ‘learning the city’ (^{McFarlane, 2011}), knowledge co-production in urban practice, research and pedagogy (^{Mitlin, 2008}; ^{Mitlin, et al., 2019}), co-learning as a critical practice (^{Allen; Lambert; Yap, 2018}) and the relationship of universities and activism as an urban practice (^{Frediani et al. 2020}).

Critical Pedagogies for Urban Change

The field of critical pedagogy, as an explicitly political and moral practice (^{Giroux, 2011}), has been a key space through which higher education institutions, social movements and other urban actors provoke critical consciousness and contest epistemic injustices in urbanism in the global South. Although Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) was developed in the context of rural peasants’ struggles and liberation theology in Brazil, it has long been challenged to open up to different geographies and contemporary struggles (^{Tarlau, 2014}). Several scholars, for example, have explored how critical pedagogy and civic education have stimulated the agency of learners in the context of disadvantaged urban neighborhoods or urban social groups of the US (^{Kirk et al., 2007}, ^{Zápotočná, 2012}). In higher education, progressive urban planning degrees across the global South and North, have been engaging in grounded learning experiences, following problem-posing approaches such as studios, community engagements, and practica, to critically reflect and act on contextually specific urban challenges (^{Allen; Lambert; Yap, 2018}; ^{Watson; Odendaal, 2013}).

Moreover, critical pedagogies have seen an expansion to intersectional rather than a single social class understanding of oppressed learners (^{Lynn, 2004}). Black, feminist and indigenous scholars have pluralized notions of the oppressed in relation to structural, patriarchal domination (^{Gore, 1993}; ^{hooks, 2003}). This resonates with the work of many scholars in Latin America (see, for example, ^{Marzioni, 2012} as well as ^{Ortiz Ocaña; Arias López, 2018}), where, in addition, critical pedagogy has a long history of supporting the articulation of popular struggles and developing the agency of social movements and typically marginalized urban dwellers fighting for their rights to housing and to the city (^{Kane, 2012}).

The discussion that follows seeks to illustrate and compare the experiences of HIC-AL and IIHS to elucidate how their critical pedagogies for urban change disrupt, re-frame and re-position institutional relations of knowledges and learning practices, contributing to advance ideas and practices of the pluriversity and subversity.

Networked Schools of HIC-AL

HIC-AL schools are run by HIC Members, friends and allies with a high degree of autonomy, as the Coalition prioritizes foregrounding and strengthening the agency of the social forces supported by its Members. The schools are characterized by a high heterogeneity in terms of learners and pedagogues (community leaders, cooperativist members, youth, women’s groups and local government officials, amongst others), as well as a commitment to horizontal, counter-hegemonic learning. Pluralistic perspectives on knowledge (co-)production are central to these pedagogic experiences, often involving higher education institutions and academics as one of many actors. Moreover – aligning with Freire’s notion of the ‘movement as a school’ (1991, apud ^{Kane, 2012}) – HIC-AL schools are not one institution, but rather an assemblage of highly diverse pedagogic practices that place equal value on fostering critical ways of doing and knowing (saberes y haceres).

These heterogeneities mean that HIC-AL schools do not take place in a unique and defined institutional space, such as the university, but permeate multiple sites of learning, including neighborhoods, online platforms, community centers, and in some instances also formal education sites. Moreover, schools do not follow a pre-defined, commonly agreed curriculum. Rather, the curriculum is open, oftentimes collectively developed ‘on-the-go’, guided by the Coalition’s principles, and fundamentally responsive to the particular political, economic, social, cultural and ecological challenges faced by each school.

Nevertheless, what most schools – their pedagogies and rationales – have in common is their capacity to be responsive to epistemic and institutional tensions through pedagogic strategies that are analyzed through concrete experiences in the following paragraphs.

Co-Learning with Housing Rights Activists in India

Over the years, IIHS has conducted a number of short to medium to long-term courses. We focus here on our ongoing engagement with housing rights activists working in different parts of the country. This experience is embedded in the IIHS’s capacity building program that targets a wide spectrum of urban practitioners - including administrators, elected representatives, municipal engineers, planners, grassroots movements and activists. The collaboration had a modest beginning in 2015 with the running of a two-day workshop for activists on urban planning in India; and since then, it has evolved into a continued pedagogical experiment in co-learning. Operationalized primarily through workshops, this collaborative engagement is learner-centric, dialogical and incremental in its approach. At the time of writing this paper, a total of ten workshops, over a period of five years, have been conducted across four cities in India, with participation from approximately 80 activists and community workers, eight fellows enrolled in a 9-month fellowship at IIHS, and 15 academics and researchers at IIHS.

What can we learn from both experiences for addressing epistemic injustices through urban pedagogy?

Both pedagogical experiences highlight how higher education institutions are one amongst many actors in the urban realm, rather than authoritative knowledge producers and brokers. Inserting them into an ‘ecosystem of knowledges’ (^{Santos, 2018}) reveals the necessity to re-negotiate their roles in producing, shaping and using their professional knowledge alongside more popular and experiential forms of knowledges held by urban dwellers, activists, civil society organizations and others. The pedagogic repercussions of this re-positioning are manifold, as this does not only require questioning whose knowledge counts, but how different knowledge holders – learners and pedagogues within and beyond HEI – come together and learn from each other. Moreover, how in testimonial terms, beliefs, knowledges and assertions of different actors and their relations are given credibility, and in hermeneutical terms, whose and which concepts and interpretative tropes make a social contribution to treat the urban as a political space. Thus, activating the roles of HEI within an ecosystem of knowledges requires an explicit attention to and in-depth valorization and engagement of the underpinning ecosystem of pedagogies.

Obvious, but still important to highlight, is how both pedagogic experiences contest the ‘banking model of education’ (^{Freire, 1970}), whereby a knowledge holder deposits a singular knowledge into the brains of learners who are treated as empty vessels. Instead, HIC-AL and IIHS demonstrate how roles such as learners and pedagogues, laypeople and professionals are fundamentally questioned, blurred and juxtaposed with the purpose of strengthening intersectional positions, exchanging and validating pluralistic urban knowledges throughout the learning process. This goes beyond inviting activists or social movements as ‘guest lecturers’ into classrooms, or students visiting informal neighborhoods to study them and come up with solutions. Rather, such as in the experience of the Taller de Vivienda, problem-posing pedagogies are used to co-produce a transdisciplinary diagnosis of housing problems with grassroots movements and urban dwellers. In the experience of IIHS, activists are part of the contracted faculty at the Institute while academic and research staff have been one of many groups of learners.

Both experiences also rely on translocal learning tactics, by mobilizing pedagogic experiences across socio-spatial structures. In the experience of HIC-AL schools, particular attention is paid to networked and intergenerational learning, while the approach adopted by IIHS focuses on intra-and inter-city learning. Hence, the ecosystem of pedagogies gains temporal and socio-spatial dimensions, enabling dialogue across diverse forms and contexts of knowledges to reveal common values, principles and practices, as well as to make visible, confront and deliberate on paradoxes and tensions. It is this dialogue, and the space of iterative translation (^{McFarlane, 2011}) across vocabularies and hierarchies of codified-and-tacit, English-and-regional languages, urban-peripheries-and-rural, disciplinary-and-lived experiences, which allows to build a shared vocabulary and diverse set of practices. The translocal approach of both experiences also highlights the role of collectives as networks and partnerships across individuals and institutions, such that emergent practices and pedagogies are collectively held, mediated and facilitated, sustained and travel further across time and regions through dialogue with others, shared resources, and continued processes of translation and cross sharing.

The analysis highlighted the potential of these experiences to contest epistemic injustice through the process of co-learning and co-production of knowledge, as well as through the crafting of alternative institutional relations. The orientation towards the ‘social production of habitat’ in HIC-AL schools and ‘planning, housing and urban informality’ in IIHS workshops is strategic to not only disrupt dominant discourses of ‘how planning should be done’, but to valorise already existing, alternative institutional relations and practices. In their current avatar, with multiple groups of learners in IIHS workshops, parallels can be drawn with collaborative studios or knowledge co-production more broadly where students and researchers work with the communities to produce knowledge and research. However, while there is a recognition of plural knowledges in all these initiatives, primarily addressing one form of epistemic injustice - i.e. making ‘testimonial’ relations between speaker and hearer more equal - the primary purpose of IIHS workshops is to build technical knowledge of activist learners in conjunction with their existing knowledge and experience.

Thus, the workshops give activists a vocabulary to read and comprehend plans, and to articulate and communicate their knowledge and strategies in a language that has historically been spoken only by professional planners and policymakers. For example, one of the modules in the IIHS workshops focuses on violations by the elite and violations carried out by the state to unpack informality as a mode or urbanization (^{Roy, 2005}) rather than something that is only associated with the urban poor and often used to stigmatize, sideline, and threaten them. Hence, the social production of habitat and the planning vocabulary are both indicative of an approach that speaks directly to addressing hermeneutical injustices. This, in turn and over time, also has the potential of addressing testimonial injustice in broader urban planning and development processes. Through the experience of co-learning in the IIHS workshops and HIC-AL schools, sensibilities of learners and pedagogues have been developed to address testimonial and hermeneutical injustices in their own research, teaching and practice. For instance, as seen in Indore and through Main Bhi Dilli in Delhi, there is a shift in the way activists engage with the urban actors and processes in their contexts, strengthening their activism through strategic use of the planning instruments and their language to protect and make claims to the city. In the case of the Barrio Intercultural, the participatory process has triggered the self-identification of residents, who are not part of the indigenous community, as ‘mestizos’, and subsequently, led to nuanced reflections on their identities, ancestry and colonial history.

How does the mobilization of critical pedagogy and epistemic agency challenge and shift the role of higher education institutions?

In the pluralizing efforts of pedagogic experiences, it becomes important to be specific about the contributions and value added by university actors. One contribution by HIC-AL’s university Members relates to their ability to accredit learning programs, which in turn, adds visibility and legitimacy, firstly, to the social production of habitat as an alternative mode of urban development, and, secondly, to the qualifications of urban learners who might not otherwise have access to formal (tertiary) education. This opens up possibilities for professionalizing urban knowledges and skills which – although widely and popularly practiced – are still considered fringe issues in wider academic debates on Southern urbanism. For example, the work with activists at IIHS not only benefits the activists themselves to strengthen their capacities and skills to engage with formal planning processes. It also demonstrates to the fellowship participants that activism can be a career path for professional planners.

Furthermore, universities are important actors in nurturing the dialogic relation between theory and practice that is of essence for critical pedagogy, going beyond purely experiential pedagogies. For example, HIC-AL’s Working Group on Capacity Strengthening synthesizes the concepts, methods and practices developed across schools and theorizes from popular pedagogic practice to integrate these learning processes into formal educational spaces. Moreover, as we have shown elsewhere (^{Wesely; Allen, 2019}), it cannot be denied that the majority of universities and planning education institutions are located in cities, giving universities a central responsibility and opportunity to become a strategic ally of (popular or informal) urban development. In the case of UAM-Xochimilco, this important public role was imprinted since its foundation in 1974, engaging in the field of planning and architecture particularly on issues related to its peripheral location in Mexico City and popular housing in surrounding neighborhoods. IIHS, on the other hand, expands how an elite private institution can strive for researching and teaching equitable urban practice in the context of a highly unequal country.

What strategies, then, can universities employ to unsettle traditional teaching protocols, and activate their potential to create and support not only more equal learning environments but also building new sensibilities and sensitivities amongst learners? Critical in this endeavor is diversifying faculty as well as learners, as reflective of the ‘ecosystem of knowledges’ discussed above. However, while bringing in different actors is essential, it is not sufficient. As pointed out by other authors as well (^{Mitlin et al. 2019}), there is a need to interrogate and challenge traditional hierarchies in higher education, including the power relations between and within academic and non-academic faculty. Similarly, the site of learning needs diversification and an explicit recognition of its power and agency. For example, the IIHS experience and Taller de Vivienda show that there is a need for higher education institutions to recognize multiple learners’ modes of learning and practice, and also go to where learners are, and not just vice-versa.

The learning experiences of HIC-AL and IIHS draw attention to pedagogies that are iterative and dialogical, and that build on the idea of praxis, translation, plural knowledges and strategic action. As ways of thinking, these suggest epistemologies that speak to the purpose of education as a space of transformation, action, and shaping the world in a Freirean sense. Using these epistemologies as an entry point to reposition the pedagogic purpose, rather than the institution itself, is helpful to then open new sites and arrangements across institutional forms of higher education and social movements – as a bridge of the ‘pluriversity’ and ‘subversity’. Such bridging sites of higher education map and value demand beyond market goals, to strategically challenge epistemic injustices. In the case of IIHS, the demand for the pedagogic spaces emerges from the activists and communities, while the means of sustaining these are created from different funding sources. In the experience of HIC-AL, social movements and community-based organizations strategically work with universities towards collective pedagogic goals. Significantly, the experiences discussed suggest an influence on institutional processes and structures, as well as on the political economy of practices outside the university. They point to forms of learning alliances and practices, within the university and outside, through collectively held knowledges and notions of scale that extend across the relationships of what ^{Santos (2018)} suggests as a pluriversity and subversity.

Conclusion

The comparative analysis of two learning experiences offers insights into innovative tactics and strategies of the critical pedagogies of IIHS and HIC-AL, which unsettle the idea of the university and re-frame understandings and hierarchies of knowledge and practice. The paper has paid particular attention to epistemically marginalized urban dwellers, social movements and activists in the fields of housing and the social production of habitat in India and Latin America, revealing kernels of change and multiple entry points for reframing higher education institutions as one amongst many actors and institutions. Both pedagogic experiences suggest that advancing simultaneously the pluriversity and subversity is imperative to creating the spaces and abilities for often marginalized actors in an ecosystem of urban pedagogies to contribute to a pool of epistemic resources that reflect the diverse theories and practices of Southern urbanism.

The co-learning experience at IIHS exemplifies an effort to move towards a pluriversity. HIC-AL schools are born out of subversity efforts in the sense that from the onset, universities are indeed one among other actors. HIC-AL engages in networked pedagogies with full awareness and vocation to use its counter-hegemonic power to the full. Yet, both processes of reconstruction – the pluriversity and subversity – meet in their radical destination and objectives. The former constitutes a significant effort to reinvent the university from within, whereby ‘within’ means being, knowing and learning with others. More fundamentally, it requires ‘making space’ institutionally to other key mobilisers of grounded knowledge and learning, such as human rights activists in the experiences examined. The radical proposition lies here in the effort to create an institutional ‘us’, tackling head on radical changes in the political economy of HEIs that otherwise prompt them to unwillingly reproduce epistemic injustices.

In the case of HIC-AL the common objective driving the schools is the formation of subversive ways of knowing and doing, and of articulating these ways to effect transformative change. Here, apart from the experience of the Taller de Vivienda, the emphasis is not so much on transforming HEIs and their political economy but rather on preserving the capacity of the networked pedagogic efforts to have strong political incidence while keeping ears and eyes simultaneously rooted on the grounded collective experience of epistemic injustice and the moving relational map that offers resistance and openings to effect radical change.

Efforts to craft the pluriversity and subversity are not at odds with each other, but rather converge in the sites of struggle they target to advance epistemic justice. They position radical and transformative urban pedagogies as a field of moral and political practice, whose significance goes beyond the urban as a site of learning and rather calls for forging a reframed understanding and practice of Southern urbanism in two regards. First, by expanding the mobilization of epistemic agency to multiple urban actors, including higher education institutions, social movements and activists. Second, through exploring how critical pedagogies for urban change – as moral and political practices – address epistemic injustices that perpetuate colonial, exclusionary, and disciplinary urban planning practices⁴.