Globally, urban areas are viewed with great optimism and suspicion, as potential engines for development and destabilising vortexes of violence and degeneration. Both visions have traction in South Africa. Urban living has offered opportunities for some to better their economic standing, strengthen capabilities and expand freedoms. However, given the pace of urbanisation and problematic urban governance, urban areas remain spaces of inequality, degradation, crisis and conflict. This is particularly true for those on the margins, whose lives are profoundly shaped by the need to negotiate security and justice. The welfare of urban Others and their long-term prospects for socioeconomic development are intimately bound up in the outcomes of these negotiations, as recent waves of xenophobic violence demonstrate. Positive urban transformation requires understanding how multiple marginalities interact in urban areas. At present, this intersection has been neglected. This South Africa-UK Partnership forges an international academic network to build capacities to rigorously and innovatively address this issue. Our ambitious agenda focuses primarily on (internal and external) migrants and lesbian-gay-bi-trans-queer (LGBTQ) communities. Although the freedom to embrace diversity and difference is at the heart of a democratic city, these urban Others face the stresses of everyday prejudice and spectre of severe violence, like xenophobic riots or acts of 'corrective rape'. Security threats facing migrants and LGBTQ people are comparable, but the logics animating them are distinct, making them conducive to comparison. Our Partnership will strengthen capacities in South Africa to explore strategies individuals use to negotiate these varied marginalities, embedded in wider economic, social and political systems. It will also particularly build skills to explore roles that digital technologies play in this process, shaping flows of power, resources, and information in urban areas; and how policymakers and civil society groups are responding to complex challenges of urban wellbeing. The Partnership develops skills, knowledge, and networks, supporting cutting edge research that actively engages communities, civil society groups and government agencies. We will identify research synergies; provide methods training in Big Data, Social Network Analysis, Remote Event Mapping, and Visual Methods to push the boundaries of urban research; fund 'urban lab' pilot projects to encourage innovative methods and questions; organise visiting fellowships to provide time and space for meaningful collaboration; and provide impact training to ensure that our timely interdisciplinary research agenda has effective and wide-reaching influence. ODA statement: The primary purpose of this project is to promote the welfare and development of the partner country. It will do this in three primary ways. First, the topic of the collaborative research is crucially important for South Africa, where rapid urbanisation, entrenched inequities and uneven development risk positive urban transformation, especially in relation to vulnerable groups such as migrants or LGBTQ communities. Secondly, we will address these key concerns through drawing on the comparative and complementary strengths of our two partners, Wits University's strengths in detailed local historical, ethnographic and qualitative research and generating impact in South African policy networks and Edinburgh's strength in methods, especially interdisciplinary approaches. Thirdly, the project will draw on Edinburgh's expertise in quantitative methods and data science, and the project is designed to build the research capacity of Wits University researchers in new approaches and generate future collaborative research.