Fie,foh,and fum,smelling the work of other urban scholars

Abstract

Comments on Bas van Heur’s bibliometric article about urban studies as a global field of research, and how to improve their inclusivity and decentralization.

There is little doubt that, if social scientists and other scholars studying cities around the world want to fully understand what they have accomplished together and are still currently doing, they need to be reflexive and regularly examine themselves and the chaos of disciplines that is urban studies. Bas van Heur's forum article contributes to this collective endeavor in a stimulating way: by focusing on a specific subset of institutions—30 university-based “multidisciplinary” centers for urban research, selected worldwide for their global academic reputation—and by analyzing through bibliometrics their scientific production between 2011 and 2021. The approach leads to the empirical description of several significant aspects of the latter: through the analysis of co-authorships across the world, it shows how scholars working in North American and European institutions keep structuring and dominating the international conversation; while confirming that, during the period considered, among the recent publications and ongoing debates the most often referenced were those about the global turn in urban studies, the last developments in urban political economy and critical urban theory, or at the intersection between environmental studies and urban studies. But the article's research design and methods are also characterized by a few weaknesses and blind spots which compel us to nuance (if not reconsider) some of its results.

First and foremost, the “sample” of 30 research centers upon which the whole analysis is based is idiosyncratic in many ways. Why build it using restrictive label criteria that exclude de facto the majority of institutions and many countries that would otherwise have appeared, and widely contribute every year to the scholarly conversation and debates in urban studies? Why include three centers in England, and only one in France or in Italy, where many more (fitting those restrictive criteria…) actually exist? Why only two in the entire United States, where the number of scholars working on urban issues is several times higher than in any European country? In France, why has the research group of the Sciences Po Urban School, which has currently 22 affiliated faculty members, been selected, but not for instance the Laboratoire Architecture Ville Urbanisme Environnement (LAVUE) of the universities of Paris 8 and Paris Nanterre, which brings together many more academic disciplines and 56 members? Or the Centre Interdisciplinaire d’Études Urbaines at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, with its 24 members? In Italy, why has the UrbEur doctoral program of the University of Milan-Bicocca been included, when it is neither a research center nor particularly multidisciplinary? These are just a few examples from the national academic contexts that I know best (Authier et al., 2019; Cousin, 2015, 2017; Cousin and Demazière, 2014a, 2014b; Cousin and Lamont, 2009, 2020; Cousin et al., 2022), but I could have kept going on and am sure colleagues familiar with other areas of the world share similar interrogations. Furthermore, and as partially acknowledged by the author himself, the dataset of publications built using Scopus is skewed toward peer-reviewed articles in English, while it captures only partially other formats that might still be valued in several national contexts, especially when urban scholars try to participate in the public debate and influence policies.

These multiple selection biases and quirks might very well be a major cause of the marginality of many countries and academic disciplines (or “subject areas”) within the landscape of urban studies painted by van Heur. Social sciences might have ended at the center of the picture, not only because of the fuzziness of their disciplinary boundaries, but also because they more often favor the label “urban studies,” whereas for a variety of reasons the latter has not been adopted by several disciplines outside the English-speaking world, or simply because by design the article focuses mainly on research centers in the social sciences with interdisciplinary learning, while overlooking other sites of urban knowledge production. Arguably, to really infirm or confirm the hypothesis that the social sciences are being increasingly excluded from a growing number of scientific conversations among planners, architects, engineers, public health researchers, environmental scientists, and other urban thinkers, one should have proceeded the opposite way (looking at research centers with no social scientists or almost none); or at least both ways, as seem to suggest the specificities of the few cases in the dataset where social scientists work alongside a larger number of members from other disciplines. In a similar manner, the whole second part of the “Where” section encounters and repeatedly reports difficulties drawing conclusions because of the initial selection biases in data collection.

Therefore, because I think some of Bas van Heur's assertions (in this bibliometric paper) should be taken with a grain of salt, I would also like to react to his final suggestions with a series of counterproposals. His conclusive statement that “the theoretical and epistemological soul-searching taking place in current writing on ‘the state of global urban studies’ (…) concerns only a minor strand of debate in the rich and diverse publication ecosystem of urban studies” might very well be correct. But he has not proven it in this article. To do so, other bibliometric analyses would be necessary. For instance, detailing how the main books and papers that launched and still structure these controversies might be referenced widely in a vast array of journals and disciplines or, conversely, mainly by the small core of publications self-identifying closely with an interdisciplinary field of urban studies. Moreover, and more generally, building the citation graph between all the different journals might be necessary to objectivize and verify the actual position of this small core within the broader scholarship about cities. A geometric data analysis of the characteristics of the journals and/or the research centers would also probably give interesting insights (Lebaron, 2009). However, to really understand the inner workings of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity within a given academic institution or setting, and to be able to improve them, there is no easier solution than directly and systematically observing them through qualitative methods (Lamont, 2009). On this last point, I definitely agree with van Heur.

And, of course, this necessity of a qualitative (or multimethod) approach also applies to the national and local historiographies of urban scholarship that many of us are calling for, to help diversify the canon and counter Eurocentrism. In fact, several of these historiographies have already been written to some degree (see for instance: Valladares, 2010; Tosi and Vitale, 2016) and we probably need less to encourage urban scholars around the world to pursue this reflexive and retrospective path (they already do it) than to organize a more systematic translation and diffusion of its results: through flagship journals and book series in English, as well as in other languages. It is something that the promoters of the global turn in urban studies have also already started to develop (e.g. Le Galès and Robinson, 2023; Ren, 2018), but we are still far from having collectively written a reasonably comprehensive global and connected history of the production of urban knowledge and of the academic disciplines studying the city. That being said, if more multilingualism and multilateralism between the different national communities of scholars can only facilitate this enterprise, “attacking the dominance of the English language (…) to dismantle existing hierarchies of knowledge production” and “to ‘parochialize’ English in order to ‘de-parochialize’ and revalorize other languages” seems a very long shot. A more immediate and efficient strategy might involve the editorial boards of the most visible and prestigious publication outlets designing more proactive, inclusive (and therefore probably less standardized) procedures to find and select what they deem worth the attention of their readership. We should also remember that many countries do not show up on the world map of urban studies, and in particular of critical urban studies, because they have cities but no academic freedom, and often no social sciences at all (or barely) in their universities. This raises another set of issues that also need to be considered.

If urban studies exist in many ways as an organized interdisciplinary discussion, with its own history, institutions, hierarchies, and debates, if therefore we as urban scholars all sit on the shoulders of giants, it is also true that some institutional and national giants are taller than others. Those they support benefit almost automatically from better visibility and access, which—unavoidably—will cause some bad cases of the Matthew effect (Merton, 1968). One thing we can do to remedy that, however, is try to seriously commit together to a more omnivorous diet.