New commentary by Sophie Schramm

06/19/2024 -

in

Forschung
Fachgebiet

Small residential buildings and a street in Soweto in Johannesburg — Soweto, Johannesburg (2020)

The commentary explores the concept of co-production, highlighting its role in efficient service provision by citizens and state actors and its potential for transformative city-making. It emphasizes the importance of distinguishing co-production from the exploitation of marginalized people by analyzing co-productive efforts in their spatial and temporal contexts.

Commentary

'Co-Production Between Insurgency and Exploitation: Promises and Precarities of a Traveling Concept'.

The commentary published in Urban Planning takes a critical look at the term co-production.

Key-words

co-production/ heterogeneous infrastructures/ insurgent planning/ Southern urbanisms

Author

Sophie Schramm

Abstract

Co‐production has inspired planning practice and research in the past decades. Along with its appropriation in the planning literature it has undergone manifold translations and its boundaries have become blurry. In this commentary I propose a conceptualisation of co‐production not only as efficient service provision by citizens and state actors together but furthermore as a kind of city‐making that has transformative potential beyond concrete interventions in the present moment. This matters because it enables a conceptual discrimination between co‐production and the exploitation of marginalised people’s resources, time, and labour. I argue that the necessity of this discrimination becomes apparent when analysing co‐productive efforts in their embeddedness in space and time.

The full OA article is available here.