Knowing the City: Urban Scholarship from Apartheid to Democracy, is a project coordinated by Sophie Oldfield, Anna Selmeczi and Clive Barnett (based at the University of Exeter).

The project draws on the South African city and South African urban scholarship as a laboratory to problematise stark divisions between theory and empirics, north and south, policy engagement and radical critique, or transformation and decolonisation. It seeks to bring to urban debates varied sites, practices and registers of theorising the city with the hope that in doing so it might enrich notions of urban theory, by locating them in the complexities of practice, in the field/our cities, and in the varied intellectual journeys that shape urban scholarship.