As if on cue, the sun powered through the afternoon rainclouds. The camera crew quickly set up their equipment on the narrow footbridge. The community leader they were interviewing – a Rastafarian involved in a variety of disaster management and development activities in Trinityville, Jamaica – directed them to the best angle to capture a particularly hazardous bend in a river. With the perfect perspective set, the interview commenced.

At one level, the demand for linking academic scholarship more directly to wider social, political and economic concerns is welcome. It does not make sense for scholarship, especially in the social sciences and humanities, to be disconnected from what is going on outside of academia. However, in this commentary we would like to reflect on some concerns about the way in which impact is being conceptualised and pursued in the contemporary academic climate.

This post presents seven key provocations we see as drivers of a comprehensive critique of the new regimes of data, ‘big’ or not. We focus on why a critical approach is needed, what it may offer, and some idea of what it could look like.

The poem published in Society & Space is an eloquent and passionate cry from the streets, that combines anger, passion and empathy, but it is also a scholarly analysis, that deliberately works in (and reworks) academic insights.

Five days after Stuart Hall died, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed accusing academics of self-inflicted public irrelevance. That same day, Larry Grossberg, a student of Hall’s, published an essay reflecting on his former teacher’s intellectual influence around the world. Grossberg ended his tribute with the line: “It is a time to remember that ideas matter as we try to change the world, and that bad stories, make bad politics.”

The translation into English of Henri Lefebvre’s essay, ‘Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis’, prompts an opportunity to pose afresh some questions about the intersection of politics and space, the state organisation of space, and the production of space. While the history of capitalism is intrinsically linked to how the modern state organises space­­ — to engender social relations in space and bind itself to space ­— the attention to these concerns has been dawdling in historical sociology.

This forum includes five commentaries on Lefebvre’s brief, still-timely, and provocative essay. 

In my article ‘The right to infrastructure’ that appears in Society and Space 32(2), I report on fieldwork I have been carrying out with grassroots and guerrilla architectural collectives (Basurama, Zuloark) in Madrid over the past four years. These collectives have developed some original technical and auto-constructive practices that, I suggest, may be thought of as prototypes for a type of open-source urbanism.

I want to suggest a different kind of reading which focuses on two fruitful impulses that I think Lefebvre offers here: first a theoretical one, the concept of paradoxes; and second a practical (and meanwhile well known) one, the claim for a right to the city.

Just as valuable work has been done, some in the wake of Lefebvre, distinguishing between the overlapping yet non-congruent senses of ‘city’, ‘urban’ and ‘urbanisation’, so too should we seek to some clarification between ‘world’, ‘globe’ and ‘planet’.