The expertise of urban expertise

Abstract

Expertise is a central and under-explored component of cities and urban life with increasing prominence in a politically populist and post-Covid era. Yet there remains a pressing need to investigate the particular ways that urban expertise is produced and circulated, and how it is involved in not only forms of control but can be enacted into more progressive knowledge practices. Crucial in developing a research and activist agenda around urban expertise will be greater efforts to blur distinctions drawn between so-called experts and communities, fuller accounts of the historical contexts and pathways shaping contemporary manifestations of urban expertise, and new efforts to use the politics of urban life to think afresh about the place and possibilities for the expert.