Exploring Critical Urbanities: A Knowledge Co-Transfer Approach for Fragmented Cities in Water Landscapes

The urban conditions of many metropolitan regions in the Global South are marked by growing informal settlements, growing inequalities, and socio-spatial fragmentation. They face alterations of their natural-spatial context imposed by climate change and new hydrological patterns. Knowledge is needed to direct their transformation toward more sustainable futures. Academia plays an important role in this knowledge production process that bridges disciplines and geographies. It ensures links to professional actors, public authorities, and civil society in their respective localities. This chapter introduces the adaptation of a more collaborative, trans-disciplinary, and multi-directional working method called “Beyond Best Practice” that raises research questions around ever-evolving, multi-actor collaborations from a design thinking perspective. These research experiences allowed us to promote an open-ended, co-transfer thematic, and methodological knowledge process by developing and testing ideas in real-world laboratory situations. Its results can be redirected to the Global North, where patterns of informality increasingly characterize hotspots of critical urbanity and, in turn, would benefit from knowledge sourced in the Global South.