ABSTRACT
University-based planning programmes are at the forefront of a movement to build partnerships with various urban publics involved in governance, planning and policy. Such partnerships have the potential to politicise community development in constructive and practical ways, sharing empirical and research knowledge, shaping new understandings and exploring pathways for more equitable forms of urban development investment within place-based networks of planning and governance. This chapter uses the example of two partnership models at the University of Washington, USA to examine the role of the university in such networks – how are relations with other urban governance actors forged and maintained, and can assumptions about development goals be examined and influenced in empirical and normative terms? The chapter situates the need for politicisation in community development and illustrates the potentially transformative role of urban universities in its cultivation and enactment. It extends scholarship on boundary work in community-university engagement and collaborative networks, to develop the post-structural and hybrid, socio-material insights of a discourse-based framework. Understood as a boundary object in networks of urban development and governance, the community-engaged university can selectively invite, amplify and reproduce, or to unsettle and reconstitute, shared discourses of urban development and governance, and therefore contribute to the repoliticisation of the local agenda and practice.
