Multiple and regionally specific organisational forms of urban studies?

Abstract

This short contribution comments on Bas van Heur's article ‘What, where and who is urban studies? On research centres in an unequal world’, a highly original analysis of the state of the art in urban studies complemented by provocative propositions to challenge existing global hierarchies of knowledge production. While I am enthusiastic about this work, I also propose considering in greater detail the interpretational risks associated with van Heur's operationalisation of urban studies as the publication production of multidisciplinary research centres. Specifically, I underline the observation that the article already implicitly contends that the organisational form of multidisciplinary and cross-university urban studies centres may be less likely to emerge in some contexts than in others. Thus, mapping various organisational forms that urban studies take across the world, as well as their history, might usefully complement the project. Yet, the critical question remains – how to do this?

Bas van Heur's article is one of those works that put flesh on the bones of the argument that urban studies production, represented as peer-reviewed academic publications, is dominated by some world (sub)regions, whereas other regions are near to invisible or occupy peripheral positions in this endeavour. He postulates that the current debate about inequalities of knowledge production has predominantly focused ‘on theoretical and epistemological questions’, and little has been done to analyse the ‘organization and research practice’ of urban studies (p. 64). Pursuing the idea that ‘urban studies is what urban studies does’ (p. 69), van Heur identified and analysed productions of institutions around the world that self-identify as multidisciplinary urban studies centres.

The article, however, does more than just add new information to this debate based on a thorough bibliometric analysis. For example, van Heur joins other critical commentators in observing that common narratives of the history of urban studies and of the field's canonical works are oblivious to many locally embedded urban studies traditions (e.g., Jazeel and McFarlane, 2010; Robinson, 2006). Specifically, I support the idea that through understanding the production and histories of institutions embedded in various geographical locations (see author's Proposition 2), it is possible to better acknowledge what global urban studies consists of. Speaking of the history of urban studies and of urban theory, such a project could lead to discovering locally embedded debates, learning about regional engagements with theories and empirical findings adopted from elsewhere in the world or uncovering concepts that are or have been relevant in particular contexts but have failed to reach the international community (see, e.g., Robinson, 2006; Stanek, 2022; Zarecor, 2018). As to the present-day situation of urban studies, the focus on the institutional and organisational background of knowledge production may help explain some aspects of existing differences and inequalities in publication outcomes – speaking both of different thematic and methodological research orientations in different places, but also of the numbers of papers that eventually receive recognition from the international community.

However, such a project is also very challenging methodologically. The question of how to identify urban studies institutions around the world and how to reconstruct their relevant production for analysis is not easy to answer. Van Heur's bibliometric analysis focused on ‘centres that have a university-wide membership base and/or remit, or that at least cover multiple disciplines’ (p. 66) and that use the ‘urban’ label. He analysed publications by the members of these centres registered in the Scopus database and published between 2011 and 2021. This is a very reasonable approach given the interdisciplinary character of urban studies that we know from the past, but also one with some limitations that the author explicitly mentions.

Here, I would like to discuss two largely interconnected issues of this approach that generate some tension between the universal observations about the ‘what, where and who’ of urban studies (generally speaking) proposed in the paper and the selective definition of urban studies that it relies upon.

First, if we check the institutional affiliations of the authors, it seems that the multidisciplinary urban studies centres identified in this study generate only a minor share of the knowledge published in prominent international urban studies journals. The majority of the articles in top journals from the discipline, for example, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, are written by authors who are, at the time of publication, affiliated with other types of institutions. This suggests that urban studies knowledge production cannot be easily associated with the production of multidisciplinary urban studies centres as there are other organisational forms participating.

More specifically, in this case, of the multitude of journals in which members of multidisciplinary urban studies centres publish their work, Bas van Heur identified two journals, Urban Studies and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), which are used as publishing outlets by 80% of urban studies centres in his sample. Yet, taking IJURR as an example, only 28 of the 853 articles (including review articles, as recorded in the Web of Science database) published between 2011 and 2021 (3.28%) were written by authors of which at least one was affiliated with urban studies centres in the sample. Clearly, some of the authors may have included a different affiliation, for example, the department where they were based while also working for the centre, so this number does not represent the share of publications produced by the centres very well. Still, it seems that the majority of articles published in IJURR between 2011 and 2021 were written by authors affiliated with other types of structures at the time, be it departments of geography, sociology, or architecture or planning and other research centres.

This finding is unsurprising. Moreover, van Heur explicitly acknowledges that urban studies are also produced by members of traditional departments that were not included in the analysed sample of organisations and that members of multidisciplinary urban studies centres also publish in journals outside the field. However, it is not an insignificant finding, as it shows that the paper's operationalisation of ‘urban studies’ influences the resulting geographical representation of the field's production. For example, the countries where institutions host the authors publishing in IJURR suggests that in some of the regions where it was difficult to find multidisciplinary urban studies centres fitting the paper's definition, different organisations exist and produce urban studies knowledge. To give an example from the region I am most familiar with, 25 articles (2.9%) published in IJURR between 2011 and 2021 were (co)authored by scholars affiliated with institutions in one of the post-socialist/post-Soviet countries of Eastern Europe or the Baltics (i.e., Northern Europe according to the United Nations Geoscheme classification). Yet, this production slips beyond the article's representation of urban studies production if urban studies are defined solely as the production of multidisciplinary centres using the ‘urban’ label because such centres appear scarcely in the region.

This leads to the second ensuing issue, which is that, in some contexts, the organisational form of a multidisciplinary urban studies centre probably does not correspond to the reality of how urban studies knowledge is produced. There are two moments in the paper where this issue comes to the surface. First, van Heur explains that when constructing his sample of urban studies centres, he ‘de-emphasized’ centres from Western Europe and Northern America, ‘where we can find an enormous concentration of urban research in all sizes and shapes’ (p. 66). Second, observing the small publication outcomes of some centres in the Global South or Global East and their ‘relatively narrow focus’, van Heur concludes that these centres ‘are perhaps not best understood as urban studies centres in the strong multi-disciplinary and interdepartmental sense of the word’ (p. 74).

This is important. Besides unequal work conditions that may explain differences in publication outcomes, the very history of urban studies institutionalisation as cross-university centres that focus on the interdisciplinary research of cities is locally embedded. Van Heur's paper explains the American institutionalisation of urban studies in the 1980s and the academic debates about the practice of urban studies that accompanied this process. The debates about the pros and cons of organising urban research as interdisciplinary urban studies or, to the contrary, of keeping studies of the city within more traditional disciplines continued until recently. They focused mainly on the Western European and Northern American contexts and criticised the effects of the interdisciplinary urban studies’ orientation towards producing applicable knowledge instead of basic research and theory or the negative aspects of borrowing methods or concepts from a variety of traditional disciplines without being familiar with their origins or critiques (e.g., Beauregard, 2010; May et al., 2005; Mellor, 1989). And even if some urban studies centres have appeared only recently, their creation has often followed previous forms of interdisciplinary and/or policy-oriented urban research institutionalisation found at the university where they are currently based. For example, the history of the Manchester Urban Institute, created in 2016, is explained along similar lines (see https://www.mui.manchester.ac.uk/about/our-history/).

However, the institutionalisation of interdisciplinary urban studies centres did not follow the same path everywhere. For example, the situation was rather different in former socialist countries, where the development of social sciences was hampered in the second half of the twentieth century given the ideological control of political powers over universities. In socialist Czechoslovakia, for example, sociology departments – one of the disciplines that focused on the research of cities in the first decades of the twentieth century – ceased to exist in the 1950s. Still, the interdisciplinary research of cities and housing was established in state-founded institutes that created knowledge needed for urban and settlement planning and mass-housing construction organised by the socialist state. In these institutes, architects, technical engineers, demographers, geographers, medical experts and sociologists by training worked together on research projects that included, for example, the evaluation of housing conditions in large housing estates (e.g., Musil, 1985) as well as other topics relevant for planning (see also Ferenčuhová, 2021). These team projects were largely producing applicable knowledge published in internal research reports or short informative articles in professional media for architects and urbanists rather than as classical academic articles. Conceptual or theoretical debates based on empirical works, including, for example, those considering the specifics of the socialist model of post-war urbanisation, remained the domain of individual authors (e.g., Musil, 1980; Musil and Ryšavý, 1983).

Since the 1990s, the political and economic changes that followed the fall of socialist regimes influenced academic activities as well, and similar institutes either disappeared or underwent considerable reorganisation. Research of cities as well as housing and urbanisation processes first scaled down in number and ambition and then appeared anew in universities and research institutes. Scholars of social geography or within (reopened) sociology and (newly opened) anthropology departments often searched for new topics, orientations and theoretical inspiration in the international literature (see also Ouředníček, 2016) and only partially referred to the research tradition of previous decades (Musil, 2012). Moreover, social sciences based in universities remained separate from technical subjects, like architecture and urbanism based in technical universities (a separation that, again, has historical roots in the region). Despite the growing intensity of formal and less formal debates between scholars from different disciplines, facilitated by local as well as international events or joint projects, interdisciplinary research is still relatively scarce in this context (Ferenčuhová, 2013), as are interdisciplinary urban studies centres.

Undoubtedly, none of these comments challenge the arguments proposed in van Heur's article. His original approach makes visible institutions whose members publish outside of the field's leading international journals or in languages other than English and, thus, helps one see beyond the picture obtained by analysing journals instead of institutions that self-identify as belonging to the field of urban studies. Nonetheless, the specifics of van Heur's approach lead to further questions about the organisational forms that urban studies take around the world. For example, why are multidisciplinary urban studies centres more prominent in some world regions and subregions, and why do they hardly appear in others? What if urban studies knowledge is produced predominantly outside institutions that self-identify as urban studies centres? And, if so, why? Most importantly, as this last question is also a precondition for answering the previous ones, how can we proceed to identify different organisational forms that urban studies take in diverse contexts, especially knowing that the knowledge created in them may be published outside of journals labelled as ‘urban studies’ outlets?

It may be necessary to combine the analysis of publications categorised as ‘urban studies’ in existing databases in order to reconstruct their authors’ institutional affiliations with searches similar to those performed by van Heur and, finally, with reconstructions of locally embedded definitions, institutionalisations and productions of urban studies and their histories by using qualitative methodologies. The risk is, however, that the field of global urban studies, its institutional and organisational forms thus reconstructed, will show variations that may make any coherent and practice-oriented definition of urban studies truly cease to exist.