Enacting the Just (univer)City: Three Practices for Engaged Housing Research

In this paper, we reflect on our scholarly work on housing justice in Cape Town, South Africa, to discuss the opportunities and challenges of engaged research in contributing to more equitable cities. Specifically, we draw on our ‘City Occupied’ research project, which focuses on land and building occupations as a mode of housing self-provisioning, engaging in a relational comparison across North and South cities. The paper is primarily anchored in the Cissie Gool House occupation, a repurposed, abandoned hospital in the gentrifying neighbourhood of Woodstock, where we have worked for more than four years with residents, social movements and non-governmental organisations in support of their struggle for tenure security, affordable homes and access to the city. In valuing open engagement, modesty, and experimentation, our scholarship has, in many ways, mirrored the practice of occupation itself. We identify and unpack three core practices and related knowledge artefacts, which are at the centre of our scholarly practices: ‘resourcing prefiguration’, ‘bridging incommensurability’, and ‘critical institutional praxis’. We argue that despite challenges, aligning ourselves with struggles against systems of oppression is an important commitment in ‘enacting the university as we would want it to be” (Rasch et.al, 2022).