Anderson and colleagues turn the city into a site of organised knowledge brokerage. The African Centre for Cities’ CityLab programme was designed to connect academic disciplines, government actors and practitioners around concrete Cape Town problems, making co-production an institutional practice rather than a rhetorical aspiration. The work’s iconic idea is that urban knowledge is produced in the difficult space between expertise communities rather than transferred cleanly from university to policy. Its methodological contribution lies in reflecting on six CityLabs as infrastructures of collaboration, identifying micro-politics, disciplinary bias, funder influence, leadership biography and even meeting space as factors shaping knowledge production. The bridge to STS is substantial: knowledge is situated not only geographically but organisationally. The laboratory metaphor is recast from controlled experimentation to repeated urban engagement, where observation, measurement, monitoring, negotiation and practice produce a geographically appropriate theory from sustained work within the city.