This paper offers a reflection upon the epistemological project that lives at the heart of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town, a young interdisciplinary space dedicated to rethinking urban things. ACC was established almost seven years ago with the explicit intention of opening up interdisciplinary scholarship on cities of the global South, from an African vantage point, thus the emergent experiment is a constitutive part of the larger debates on southern urbanisms (Endensor and Jane 2011; Robinson 2006; Roy 2008; 2011; Tonkiss 2011; Varley 2013; Watson 2009). This reflection is centrally concerned with some fundamental questions: How best can meaningful knowledge about the urban be produced? What should we produce knowledge for? And what do these questions mean for the politics of knowledge production in the global South?