About the Writer:
David Maddox

David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director.

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Introduction

How can professors better mobilize academic knowledge? How can professors get more engaged in practice knowledge? Or, in the prompt’s most provocative version: how can professors get out of the ivory box and into the streets? This was the theme of one of the Dialogues at The Nature of Cities Summit in Paris, with scientists and planners Thomas Elmqvist (Stockholm), Nina-Marie Lister (Toronto), and François Mancebo (Paris), and moderated by David Maddox (New York).

Scientists produce lots of knowledge, certainly. Is it connected to the practical needs of cities? Are scientists connected to practitioners in ways that produce useful co-productions? Well, yes and no. Most of the people at TNOC Summit would be deeply sympathetic to the idea of transdisciplinary co-production that includes academics. But it is not the norm. How might we make it the norm? What prevents us from doing so?

There were two common themes. One is the key idea of trust between scientists and practitioners. Trust is largely build over time, and with the shared understanding that ideas, credit, and benefits will be shared.

A second theme is the fact that academia is not good at incentivizing collaboration outside the academy. Reward structures are not build to credit work outride traditional scholarly venues. Long publication times are not conducive to the rapid needs to decision makers. Non-academics are rarely invited into the decision making of university leaders.

But there are ways forward, and the three speakers included here are experienced at created new venues for collaboration.

At TNOC Summit, we largely avoided long presentations in plenary—i.e. “Keynotes”. Rather, even when we gathered in our largest group, we met for “Dialogues”, similar to the Roundtable format at TNOC. For each dialogue there was a core question or prompt, such as the one in this Roundtable. We invited three people to participate, striving for a multi-disciplinary group, with diverse points of view, perspectives, and approaches. Each of the three delivered a short intervention (about 8 minutes), and then sat together for a longer conversation. We are publishing all of the Summit dialogues in oder to make  the ideas widely available and keep the conversations going beyond the Summit itself.

In this Roundtable, we present both their written texts (essentially a transcription of their presentations) and video of their presentations. Also you can find a transcription and video of the conversation below.

A transcription of the conversation

David Maddox, moderator: Fantastic. Fantastic. The somewhat provocative title that we have was about getting professors out into the streets. Another version of the title is how do we mobilize knowledge, or even how we might democratize knowledge? So, if you can imagine one thing you would change—whether it’s a reward structure or whether it’s some sort of engagement patterns or … —what is one thing you would suggest we could do to change the current state of lack of engagement between these different sectors. Absolutely many people and many people in this room do this, and you guys are great examples of people who do this kind of co-production. But it is not the norm. So, how do we make it the norm? What is the one thing we could do to make it the norm Thomas?

Thomas Elmqvist: Well, I think this conference should be one thing. You have to make it a fun event. It must be very enjoyable to be engaged. We really need to think carefully how we design this to get people to talk to each other and engaged in a way that feels enjoyable and productive and gives hope for the future.

Nina-Marie Lister: Give university tenure to young people who are employed part-time in municipalities federal government, provincial government, and the university. Why? Because it fosters long-term research. And, by the way, Thomas you inspired me to answer it this way because we have no reward structure for the incoming generation of professors who do this kind of work at all. At least not in North American universities. You have to be something else before you are everything. And we don’t have time. And it’s not to say that I don’t value the enormous depth of research that science does. I’m still a recovering ecologist. I still respect the data. We use it all the time in our work, but we cannot spend time being duly certified in two or even three professions before the university system rewards us to communicate our knowledge in meaningful ways with our publics and our cities simply. When they do cross appointments with university… that’s just called having two jobs, people. That’s not good enough.

David Maddox: And why would we get the universities to accept that sort of change in the reward structure?

Nina-Marie Lister: Maybe they need to start counting the money that a lot of us are bringing in with our NGO Partnerships and work that we do with The Nature of Cities, which frankly doesn’t count in the academy. 

David Maddox: Although I am gratified that some people I know, I think Timon [McPhearson] might have been the first one to actually use The Nature of Cities publications as part of his tenure review. [Laughing] I think he was denied tenure, wasn’t he? No. No, he wasn’t of course. He got tenure. Francois?

François Mancebo: Yes, to carry on with the metaphor: let the giant into the room. Basically, as an ecologist as well as an urban planner, and I have the feeling that when try to address an issue it is important, to involve from the start everyone concerned in the answer that will be given to his issue: all the stakeholders, residents, inhabitants. We have to get them into it and accept their common knowledge is significant and makes a lot of sense. I remember a colleague of mine working in Bangladesh. They were developing a program about how to protect areas from floods, using people’s common knowledge. Traditionally, when people saw sand-worms get out of the sand, it meant that flood was coming in within a few days, so they moved. So simple. But it was very difficult to make local scientists accept this common knowledge was more adequate than their expert knowledge about flood in this specific situation. More so to include the people who had this knowledge within their research.

I think that it is about building trust. It is not just a professor going out the “street”. It’s also about the “street” getting involved all along in the research. It is promoting more inclusive action research. Today, I have the feeling that the more we speak about going out and doing action research, the more we paradoxically stick to our own kind and our way of thinking.

David Maddox: Many people on this stage have talked about the idea that building trust in collaborations is a key factor, maybe the most important factor, and so from your side of the equation, as professors who are trying to build collaborations beyond academia and be useful in policy and planning from your side, what builds trust for you? And maybe on the flip side of that is what do you do to demonstrate that that you are trustworthy as a partner?

François Mancebo: Basically, people are very pragmatic. Inhabitants and NGOs want more decision-making power on their lives, scientists need some ideas and topics that they can develop in their own field and increase their recognition. Thus, any stakeholder that is not considered to have the provide what they expect and can be useful for them in real life, lose legitimacy even if he has great expertise. Then action research doesn’t work. How do you say: you are f****d, pardon my English. Thus, legitimacy has a lot to do with trust, and you build trust through common interests. Making sure that if people trust you then they can have something in return that would better their life. A research is not just a report that will end in a drawer, or in a publication. It has to have consequences in their life, and positive ones.

Nina-Marie Lister: We use Rules of Engagement that are fair for everyone. We don’t take more than we give. We reference and give acknowledgement to our community partners all the time. We make sure that if we’re working with vulnerable communities, they tell us what they need, not us telling them what we will give. So, some of it is what I would say is courteous. The other is what would be contractually, ethically required. We make sure that we are available for information to be asked of us. We share everything we make. We don’t keep it and we never publish or photograph without permission. So some of those are really basic rules.

The other thing we do is something that Thomas has already mentioned. We try to have fun. We try to host dinners. We try to go out into the community and have our students and our researchers working together with community members in a personal way, much as I think The Nature of Cities does to build trust. I don’t think I’ve ever received funding for a dance party though. So if anyone’s got a line on that, let me know.

Thomas Elmqvist: Well, just a few words to compliment. I think on building trust, one important part is to really show that you have a long-term engagement and that there’s something that is a joint goal you want to achieve in the long term. And also that there is some sensitivity of any asymmetry, whatever it could be in power resources and to address that asymmetry in a sort of in a trustful way.

David Maddox: And, I guess this could go for any kind of collaboration that you might build, what else, beyond the question of loss of trust, are the most common things that go wrong? What can go sideways in collaborations when they don’t work. I know there’s a long list of things that can go wrong, but what if…maybe the question should be: what are the things that could go wrong that that wouldn’t have to go wrong as much if we planned better these collaborations. 

Nina-Marie Lister: Where to start?

David Maddox: Nina-Marie’s mind explodes.

Nina-Marie Lister: Okay, just one thing would be the ill fit between community-based research partnerships and co-design / co-creation with traditional universities bureaucracies and their own siloed way of thinking, based very much on a kind of linear reductionist accounting that makes it very difficult for us to do things that are kind or nice for our partners. I mean, I used the example of a dance party, which is not really a line item on my grants right at the moment, but even for us to do things like pay honoraria to indigenous Elders with whom we work is a difficult thing to do and it takes so much time and energy from us, away from the good work of collaboration. So that you end up feeling simply clobbered by the work and it can be very draining. These are [individually] very simple things, one by one, but they stack up and they consume an enormous amount of oxygen, energy, and time.

David Maddox: So, the rules are stacked against you, against anything that’s unconventional.

Nina-Marie Lister: Absolutuely.

David Maddox: Even if you want to do it that way and everybody else wants to, the rules are stacked against you?

Thomas Elmqvist: Yes, one other thing we know is that a lot of projects fail and I think one way of handling that is important is that maybe you already from the start have the attitude: Well, we’re doing this together as an experiment and, whatever comes out, it will be a learning experiment rather than the feeling of sort of a joint failure, which I think could be a legacy that it’s hard to get over.

François Mancebo: Yes, and it is a matter of adaptation to structural perturbations. More than often, as researchers, we are on our track and anticipate from the beginning what what we are searching, how we are going to search it and what we are going to find. But in real life there is political struggle, personal interests, it is completely different. Besides people change constantly. Things are not the way they were supposed to be. And sometimes, we don’t adapt fast enough. It is about our incapacity to adapt to chaotic situations. And it is really weird because at the same time we expect that the people in the street adjust to us and our methods, but we don’t adapt to them and their needs.  It is very difficult, and a lot of research fails on that basis. We listen, but don’t really hear what is going on.

Nina-Marie Lister: I’d like to follow up on the idea about failure. We have written a lot about the idea of “safe to fail” experiments and design so that when they do fail, they’re not catastrophic and nobody gets hurt. But I’m not a bridge engineer. So, I’m allowed to talk like that. But I have to say, nobody rewards me for failure and there’s a lot of them [failures]. I mean some of you in the academic world might know about the CV of failures. It’d be a nice idea, rather than showing us your impressive CV, show all the things you tried and didn’t get. I would like to develop a casebook of failures for community-based partnerships because, boy would it be a great learning tool! But there is so little incentive to talk about your failure publicly. So that’s another thing we could do.

David Maddox: It feels like an another element that is stacked against these kind of collaborations is the length of time it takes to publish the work. If the work is very alive and on its feet, and you’re going to be writing about it but it’s not going to appear for a year, year and a half. For the practitioners it is really frustrating. Can that be changed?

Nina-Marie Lister: That’s why I would advocate for different models of tenure that allow for our community-based practice and co-design to have evaluative formulas. We certainly say that we value, in my university at least, experiential learning. We value scholarly research and creative activity. And those of us that are in the creative design disciplines and in the arts have [different]models for tenure as well. But they’re an ill fit. One of the ways to do that is to begin to change those formulas, and that means we have to sit on tenure committees. But sometimes we may be the lone voice that’s advocating for work that’s being done as valuable in tandem, with different kinds of peer adjudication.

Thomas Elmqvist: One other mechanism to address this could be: some journals have already started a sort of pre-publication process. You can put out your preliminary paper with the authors being fully transparent and that is open for comments from a wide community. And then the preliminary results can be used in some sort of process. Then that open review process and maybe some other more formal review process will eventually result in [a decision on] whether this paper will be accepted or not. But you still have some process where it’s out there discussed and scrutinized and the results could be used [immediately].

François Mancebo: One big problem is that officially there are incentives for interdisciplinary research—at least in France but I guess it is about the same everywhere else— more multi-disciplinarity … blah blah blah. But in fact, everybody keeps working inside his disciplinary field. Not that much when you are a city planner scholar, who is constantly involved in action research, but go meet a biologist, a chemist, or lawyer and ask him: “Hey come and work with me on this matter, it’s quite interesting”. What does he usually answer? “Well, they’ll never publish what we will do together. We won’t have any incentive for that. I’m not going to be recognized.” This is a big problem: sectorization. I would like the emergence of a synthetic, multi-disciplinary field, but it looks like it is not going to happen soon.

Nina-Marie Lister: Well, some of us just make a concerted effort to publish in applied sectors, or we publish our work in policy.

David Maddox: Questions?

Question from the audience: Thank you very much really stimulating session. My name is Polly Mosley. I went as a mature student to start PhD two years ago after having worked with the community one mile away from the University for 10 years. My question is about ethics. I think for me in a Natural Sciences Department, I found ethics a massive hurdle to get out and actually start the research. I think we need a new land ethic and I think the university’s role in our city is massive. It’s a massive land owner. Its Estates Department puts plastic trees in our foyer. We have enormous impact on city life. It calls itself and modern civic university, yet it feels like it is designed to break down trust with communities, to stop adaptive behaviors that can build on trust that’s already there, and the local feels a lot less easy to talk about for the natural scientists than the global, far away issues. So, I just wonder how can ethics be used in a much more positive, bridging way. I feel it’s really key to research.

Nina-Marie Lister: I would just like to ask a clarification question when you say ethics. Do you mean an ethical imperative for the University to bridge those gaps or do you mean research in ethics as a tool? Okay. Can you sit on the committee? But that really is of course the solution, in a serious way, that more people who are doing interdisciplinary, practice-based research have to be on those committees and that does take time and you’ve heard me say certainly and others echo in different ways, that we don’t have a lot of time. So we have to find some way of being creative to use existing rigorous methods that take a long time, that take turn around time, and journals combined with those universities that have an imperative for either community-based practice research. You often find it in the health disciplines. You’ll find it in the artistic disciplines sometimes, so there are strategic connections one can make with those departments.

This is not advice that I would necessarily give to untenured faculty. It’s much harder for you and for them sometimes. I think that’s our responsibility, for those of us who have tenure and are already on those committees. We need to take that up and make it very clear. And besides we can be as irritating as we like.

François Mancebo: I agree completely with what you are saying. Unfortunately, I think it’s not only about being in the committees. I am vice-rector of my university, with a special focus on sustainability. This is what I am supposed to do, but every time you try to achieve something in this direction… good luck. So, it is something that has to come in the long term.

Question from the audience: My late mother was an urban Anthropologist and Professor but also very much an advocate. If you wouldn’t mind, talk a bit about the role of professors as advocates going beyond the Ivory Tower out into the community and maybe taking a stand on something that could be political, could be about the subject manager research where you go out on a limb. Have you done that? And what do you think about that?

Question from the audience: I’m glad that you changed the title from getting me out of a box. I was feeling a little bit coffin-like. I was in my Ivory box earlier. I just wanted to suggest that perhaps there are some University environments and indeed national research cultures where this work is actually now pretty much institutionalized. For better or worse, actually. If you speak to any UK academic about the RED—the Research Excellence Framework—you’ll find that at least part of our research evaluation, which is done periodically about every five or six years, is on how much societal impact we are having as a university. We are evaluated on that. It’s part of our promotion criteria, progression, tenure appointments, everything now means that you as an academic have to be doing this kind of work, to one degree or another.

But the problem is that nothing else has gone away. So you also have to do all the other things as well. I also have the pleasure of convening a Horizon 2020 project and it’s absolutely essential that this is the kind of work that’s done within Horizon 2020 or you don’t get the research funding so, all across European universities this is embedded in what they’re doing. The Australian research grants Council funding and the Australian academic culture is the same; increasingly so in The Netherlands. And so there is a lot of institutionalization of this at the moment for good reasons, but part of the challenge is how that then becomes institutionalized, how it’s evaluated, what kind of things get to count, and how it’s basically done on the on the basis of the Ivory Tower rather than on what the Giants or the communities might suggest would be ways of evaluating what was actually effective in terms of impact.

So, in some senses institutionalizing this … yes, but it’s maybe a little bit of a cautionary tale to be careful for what you wish for, because it doesn’t always actually mean that you get better research or engagement or practice out of it.

Nina-Marie Lister: I was just going to clarify that I don’t think I know of a North American University—I can’t speak so much for the U.S.—but aross the Canadian landscape, this is totally institutionalized by requirement. What I should say is it is disincentivized in terms of promotion for the very reasons you suggest, and when we look at—frankly, I have to say it—the gender breakdown on service that’s related to Community Partnerships, it is overwhelmingly women who do it and, we are on average ten years later to apply for promotion to full Professor. So there are enormous built-in disincentives. I agree completely.

David Maddox: Can you be an advocate in addition to your role as a scientist?

François Mancebo: Of course, a scientist is not an ethereal and neutral person, without sex or opinions. A professor is a human being, completely, including his own opinions. What you have to do ethically, is to declare clearly what your biases are and where you are speaking from. If you do that explicitly in the prologue of what you are writing, your readers can discuss with you, fight with you. And it is normal. What’s your position from the beginning? Just distinguish your belief and your motivation, and how it impacts your scientific work. You cannot be neutral.

Thomas Elmqvist: I just want to reinforce that I think yes, absolutely, you could take moral and important stands, but declare transparency in where you’re coming from. I think that’s that’s a very important part.

David Maddox: Last word to Nina-Marie.

Nina-Marie Lister: Urban advocacy is what I think a lot of planners are trained to do but do it in a way that makes clear what both my colleagues have already said. I’d also say that there is a moral imperative. We are facing a biodiversity and climate crisis combined. We have an obligation as public servants in anchor institutions in our cities that shape and form our cities. I think it is in our code of conduct in Canada as planners. We are morally required to do public good. So, for me, I will say all the time: my role when I wake up every day is to think about making an urban agenda for biodiversity conservation. So, anyone who’s here from CBD in Montreal, please come and talk to me.

David Maddox: Thank you to François, Maria-Marie, and Thomas.

About the Writer:
Thomas Elmqvist

Thomas Elmqvist is a professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm University and Theme Leader at the Stockholm Resilience Center. His research is on ecosystem services, land use change, natural disturbances and components of resilience including the role of social institutions.

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About the Writer:
Nina-Marie Lister

Nina-Marie Lister is Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor in the School of Urban + Regional Planning at Ryerson University in Toronto.

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About the Writer:
Francois Mancebo

François Mancebo, PhD, Director of the IRCS and IATEUR, is professor of urban planning and sustainability at Reims University. He lives in Paris.

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