Response to Bas van Heur,‘What,where and who is urban studies? On research centres in an unequal world’

Abstract

Recognizing the unequal distribution of urban studies research should also spur us to think in more depth about the way we understand and communicate about our shared subjects: cities and urbanization.

I was intrigued and amused by Bas van Heur’s closing provocation. What would it look like to put it to work? Some kind of shared pledge, maybe? All tenured faculty working in the Global North – at the research centers surveyed in the U.S. and Canada, Western Europe and Australia, say, plus others who identified as part of ‘urban studies’ writ large in those areas – would have a year or two to finish up the research they have in the pipeline and send off a final flurry of manuscripts, and then enter into a voluntary moratorium on publishing for a period of, say, three to five years. Researchers at each of those centers (and beyond) would pledge to reorient some significant portion of their research budgets for that period into a common fund available for researchers in Mexico, Central and South America, Africa and Asia. Could this spark a global reset for the entire uneven geography of research production in Urban Studies? What might the field look like five or ten years later?

Let’s put aside all the objections and exceptions to this fanciful program, forego all the usual quibbles about the inevitable failure to disrupt the underlying structures of global inequality that shape that uneven geography of research production. All fair enough, but I’m interested in focusing on a follow-on question. What would all those urbanists in the Global North do instead?

My equally fanciful provocation may strike some as beside the point here, but I’d like to see some significant emphasis in urban studies shifted away from research production and towards a concerted focus on the impact of the field. What if these partially idled researchers all spent three years focusing on the broader ‘educational’ mission of urban studies, trying to sort out its particular contributions to knowledge of the world? (And pledged as well to draw specifically on knowledge produced in the Global South as part of this effort.) What if they reoriented attempts to bring coherence and pattern in this notoriously diffuse endeavour away from ‘research’ and towards ‘teaching?’ Or, more specifically, towards an effort to discern what accumulated years of research can tell us about how to think about urbanism, cities and urbanization. The results of these efforts could be many: curriculums; modular adaptable syllabi for a range of kinds of courses in urban studies; jointly written essays about the connections, faultlines and dissonances that structure the field; various other kinds of resources that helped urbanists, students and the world at large to understand where the field has been and why it might matter to continue studying cities and urbanization. AI could produce fairly comprehensive and ‘dumb’ versions of these now, of course, but what might be revealed by a more humanistic rather than machinic effort at collective intelligence? What if we all asked ourselves, in a formalized and concerted way, why does urban studies matter?

I realize this runs somewhat counter to the aims of van Heur’s illuminating survey and its quantitative spirit. Perhaps it also seems to return too forcefully to the ‘theoretical and epistemological questions’ that the author wishes to set aside (2). But maybe not. I am not really interested in a formal undertaking. Beyond any pie-in-the-sky programs of field-wide endeavour, what I am curious about is in keeping with the piece by Austin Zeiderman that inspired those remarks by van Heur. There Zeiderman asks us to deemphasize the theoretical turmoil that has roiled urban studies over the last couple decades in favour of close attention to how the urban is ‘articulated’, in Stuart Hall’s terms, to other problems by people living in cities and experiencing various processes of urbanization (Zeiderman, 2018). In a related sense, I wonder if some of the crisis in urban studies is produced by overattention to innovation in theory and research – the generation of typologies, norms, isolatable quantities of theory to name our endeavour, new paradigms that would sweep away old regimes of knowledge – and a lack of attention to how and why we’ve studied cities and urbanization. Cities and urbanization persist – and change – even as paradigms of research and theory come and go. Why is it important to keep studying them? I am not sure we still know.

My time in urban studies, and in the contemporary academy as a whole, suggests to me that interdisciplinary undertakings like urban studies could do with more rather than less shared investigation of their common subject. At a time of deepening crisis for the humanities and allied social sciences, part of the problem, it seems to me, is overinvestment in research production and a corresponding anemic attention to our overall mission.

By dint of my somewhat off-center position in the larger world of urban studies, I am less concerned with driving or characterizing research agendas than I am in figuring out how to communicate why what we do matters. Much of this is a matter of circumstance. Right now, I do not work in a major urban research center. I direct an undergraduate-only interdisciplinary urban studies program at Brown University that mainly works to organize and deliver an undergraduate major. My day-to-day relationship to urban studies tends to concern how to get our students to think in the most complex and broad-minded ways about the consequences, stakes and dilemmas of urbanization and city life – not how to shape a research agenda based on the latest turns in the field. (We do, of course think about the field when we get the rare chance to hire someone for our very small faculty.) I think our difficulties in doing this stem in part from the fact that we work in a field that is not only so disparate and dispersed but one that has tended to grow more interested in things other than cities, sometimes just seeing cities as passive settings for other topics, sometimes deciding that urbanization is not as important as other processes.

Meanwhile, my colleagues and I come from a range of disciplinary fields in the humanities and social sciences, but few of us have published in the journals surveyed by van Heur’s survey. This is in part due to the vagaries of time (it would have been less true a decade ago due to a retirement or two), the lack of geography or urban planning programs at Brown, the rising and falling importance of the urban in some departmental fields, and the implicit boundaries of the field as imagined by the survey.

My own case is instructive: I am a cultural and urban historian of the United States, trained in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. This leaves me in an odd position vis-à-vis the survey for two reasons. First, history seems to factor not at all in this survey as far as I can tell, despite the vibrant research culture in both U.S. and European urban and ‘metropolitan’ history over the past few decades. (Is history in the humanities or the social sciences? Nobody can decide, and that tends to leave it in a permanent in-between state.) Perhaps I have not looked closely enough at the data but the journals I have published in or looked to for state-of-the-art research in this sector of my work – Journal of Urban History, Urban History, Journal of Planning History, Planning Perspectives, to name a few – don’t appear to turn up. Maybe this is because these tend to lean, with the exception of Urban History, towards the U.S. (and the past), when Urban Studies is most concerned with the globe (and the present). (All do feature work from around the world, however.) Are there no historians employed by major urban studies research centers? No doubt people from many urban realms – the contemporary planning, built environment and architecture/landscape architecture circles, for instance – could claim to be overlooked here. That’s not quite the point. I’m more concerned with the fact that cities and urbanization have histories, and urban research itself has a history, too, and we appear to take both for granted.

The second issue cuts differently. I was trained in American Studies, a field that has over the last two decades largely abandoned the urban as a conceptual frame through which to understand U.S. culture or history. American Studies has also almost abandoned the U.S. as a subject, pivoting away from organizing itself around the study of problems germane to the U.S. as a nation towards transnationalism, ethnic studies and various forms of critical theory. Many of the so-called ‘studies’ fields in the humanities have tended to move this way, elevating theoretical and methodological and political approaches to their subjects, approaches that sometimes begin to displace their ostensible subject. This is well advanced in American Studies for a variety of complicated reasons I won’t go into here, but it could also happen in Urban Studies as well. One of the more prominent conclusions to have been drawn from recent debates in the field is to abandon the urban – or ‘methodological city-ism’ – as an organizing concept and replace it – or perhaps subordinate it to – studies of globalization, postcolonialism, race and justice or climate.

Space prevents full attention to this problem, but suffice to say that I think this would be a mistake. We need to concentrate on how urbanization is articulated to those other seemingly more important concerns, how it contributes something particular to our understanding of those issues rather than displace urbanism with any one of those.

Some might suggest that Urban Studies has seen plenty of navel gazing. The last two decades have witnessed a huge outpouring of writing about the object, scope and theoretical commitments of the field in the wake of decolonization, globalization, planetary urbanization and climate change. These have been instructive, maddening, repetitive and illuminating in turn. Investigations like these have tended to lead to frustration – witness the three exercises in throwing up hands that van Heur leads with – or more recently to the aforementioned suggestion that maybe it's time to abandon the field altogether.

What’s different here?

Perhaps nothing, but I think I start from the idea that I am not interested in identifying a singular or dominant mode or practice of urban studies or landing on a definition of what the city or the urban is. As a cultural historian, I am comfortable with the idea that the unquantifiable domain of meaning has power. The fact that many people around the world believe that they live in cities or are swept up in processes of urbanization matters. It has effects in the world. The point is not to isolate some definitive category but to enumerate shared and overlapping dilemmas and concerns that suggest why urbanization has mattered and still matters for the world today. Conclusions from that research – it should be seen as such – might be useful for articulating links between all the disparate fields urban studies folks work in, from the usual suspects – geography, sociology, anthropology and environmental studies – to the humanities to more applied fields such as engineering, public health and materials sciences and even, maybe, to history as well!

As I indicated earlier, I do think the history of the undertaking matters. How cities have been understood is important, not only because of all the blind spots and exclusions official urbanism has licensed but because it has shaped how cities themselves have evolved. Knowing how the conceptual regimes of urbanism have evolved is important. I do not want to simply revive the old Simmel-Park-Wirth-Lefebvre-Castells-Harvey-Smith axis that van Heur invokes, but I do not want it discarded either. There are still things it can teach us. But that’s mostly true if we force it into relationship with other situated, local, global, practical, vernacular and intellectual traditions, practices and visions. I don’t want to see one way of thinking or tradition displace another, but to understand the correspondences and fault lines between varied approaches to urbanism. What shared conceptual vision might emerge from the work – the research – required to put all this together?

I don’t know, but I imagine that thinking together with each other about varied worlds of urbanism, through whatever means, might give us some new ways of seeing how cities are, to alter a phrase from Jane Jacobs, problems in handling interdependence. And recognizing and handling interdependence is going to be vital to living on a warming, fracturing, and yes, urbanizing planet.