Holding the rift: reflections on collaboration from RISE Africa 2025

Participants at the RISE Africa 2025 Urban Action Festival. Source: RISE Africa

He wasn’t referring to system failures or service delivery gaps — the usual suspects in urban development conversations — but to something more fundamental. These cracks are the spaces where different histories, experiences, and ways of seeing the world collide. They are the points of friction, contradiction, and ambiguity that make up the lived fabric of cities, and they’re not just obstacles to be fixed. They present opportunities for deep listening, learning and reimagining.

Over the course of the week, that framing returned in various ways — not always directly, but as a thread running beneath many of the discussions. It reminded us that cities are not stable objects to be managed into submission; they are layered, dynamic spaces where multiple truths exist at once. They are places where grief, joy, memory, and imagination intersect, often uneasily. Trying to resolve all that into agreement is not just unrealistic — it risks flattening what makes cities alive.

The alternative, and what RISE Africa seemed to be inviting us into, is to hold that tension. To recognise it as real, and to keep working within it.

Not agreement — commitment

As partnering practitioners, we often encounter a misconception of collaboration solely as consensus building. The  view of collaboration as everyone around the campfire holding hands and singing songs. That to collaborate, people must put aside their differences and come together in perfect unison. But when you’re working across institutional mandates, disciplines, and lived experiences — and especially when there’s deep inequality and mistrust — easy agreement can feel out of reach.

But as Dr Akomolafe’s provocation reminded me that simple agreement is not the point. Sometimes, understanding and working with tension is important. That’s where Adam Kahane’s work on stretch collaboration talks about the kind of work that doesn’t rely on everyone agreeing before moving forward, and instead accepts disagreement as part of the process of working together. In contexts of low trust, pained histories, and conflicting objectives— in other words, most cities — that approach feels far more honest.

Agreement isn’t needed. A willingness to stay in the conversation is. As one participant said during the Festival, “transformation demands the courage of discomfort”. That kind of partnership stretches us across sectors, roles, and our own assumptions. It’s not neat and it’s rarely fast but it’s where the real work begins.

Rewriting the script on who holds knowledge

Rose Molokoane, a coordinator of the South African Federation of the Urban Poor (FEDUP) and Slum Dwellers International (SDI), highlighted that this kind of collaboration requires us to really listen and question assumptions about who holds knowledge: “We are the unprofessional professionals. We have a whole municipality in the settlements — we have architects, planners, technicians.”

It was a reminder that knowledge doesn’t only reside in formal institutions. Informal settlement residents are already planning and managing complex urban systems every day, whether or not they’re invited into city decision-making spaces. Too often, partnership frameworks frame these communities as stakeholders to be consulted rather than collaborators with agency and expertise.

Working with tension calls for a different kind of listening, the kind that creates space for ideas and strategies to shift. Not because we’ve ticked a participation box but because the people closest to urban challenges are often also closest to the solutions. Only by listening deeply will we really understand what’s happening in the ‘cracks’.

The role of art and narrative in shaping a city’s story

Sometimes, cracks can be barely visible. One of my favourite things about RISE Africa 2025 was how it integrated artistic expression as a legitimate way of exploring urban questions and making these ‘cracks’ seen. Through poetry, music, and visual storytelling, conversations about the city can come alive in different ways. As one artist remarked “If they can’t hear us, they will see us with their eyes.” Art communicates experiences that policy papers cannot. This idea reminded me that part of building inclusive cities is making space not only for technical knowledge, but for the knowledge that is more embodied – the feeling, imagination, and memory. This knowledge is not tangential nor can it be treated as such if collaboration to build inclusive cities is going to be inclusive. Itshapes how people move through space, where they belong, and what they hope for, and so becomes every part essential to the fabric of creating an inclusive city as urban designs

Where does this leave us?

Collaboration isn’t an outcome, it’s a practice. It’s slow, often uncomfortable, and never one-size-fits-all. It doesn’t always look like progress, and it doesn’t always feel productive in the moment. But over time, it creates the conditions for something else to emerge. This kind of work asks us to hold space for disagreement, to challenge the idea that progress only comes from consensus, and to trust that sitting in the cracks can be a generative act. With the right partners and capabilities, this complexity of collaboration need not be feared. It can be celebrated: as meaningful progress in our collective efforts to keep working within cities, and as a recognition of the fact that agreement isn’t the basis for collaboration.. Commitment is.

In closing

If you’re thinking about how to build partnerships across divides — institutional, geographic, social, or otherwise — we’d be interested in hearing from you. Reach out to Anna Du Plessis, the EDP’s Built Environment programme lead, to explore how we can work together.

Acknowledgements:
This festival was put on by Changing Cities, in partnership with ICLEI Africa.