4: Prioritizing Principles of Justice and Collaborative Research in an African Higher Education Institution in Order to Advance Urban Sustainability: The Urban Futures Centre (Durban University of Technology) in South Africa

The African continent is confronted with multiple sustainability concerns that endanger the natural environment and the socio-economic well-being of its people, particularly in rapidly growing cities. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are recognized as crucial agents for enhancing the continent’s sustainable development initiatives. The mobilization of African HEIs’ resources, researchers, and graduates can assist in striving to meet the priorities for sustainable urban environments laid out in Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11), however, this requires shifts away from traditional academic practices in persistently challenging institutional and urban contexts. In this chapter, the authors focus on the Urban Futures Centre (UFC) at the Durban University of Technology (DUT) in South Africa in order to highlight the potential utility of alternative forms of scholarship and theory building in African HEIs. Foundational to the Centre’s work is a concern for the quality of life of the real people who live in cities, and their futures. To this end, a small multidisciplinary staff and post-graduate students undertake projects addressing, for example, harm reduction for homeless drug users; place-making and belonging in marginalized communities; and localized responses to severe urban flooding. These projects typically utilize collaborative, interdisciplinary, and applied approaches. The authors draw on a range of projects undertaken by the Centre in the last five years, encompassing numerous urban realities, varying goals, methodologies, and stakeholder engagement. These projects show how scholarship underpinned by principles of social and environmental justice and the prioritization of shared knowledge production is central to advancing the responsiveness of HEIs to the goals of SDG11 in African cities and beyond.