Centring urban studies among institutional regimes

Abstract

This commentary responds to Bas Van Heur's paper 'What, where and who is urban studies?' which assesses the structuring of global urban research by investigating the work of named university centres for urban research. The commentary offers observations and reflections on the historical development of urban studies beyond Van Heur's account and considers this through a discussion of Australian urban research groupings. In doing so the commentary notes the definitional challenges that apply to urban research formations in the context of wider institutional imperatives and dynamics that complicate their intellectual programs. The commentary notes the value of further narrative historical reflection on the discipline and particular historical experiences.

This paper by Bas Van Heur attempting to depict the structure and distribution of urban studies by analysing the composition of urban research centres is a valuable contribution to knowledge of the field, though mostly inconclusive.

My response to Van Heur's paper offers a mix of observations and reactions with an Australian focus. First I offer commentary on the historical development of urban studies as a field to augment and expand on Van Heur's brief account. In this section, I argue that a range of historical, institutional and structural factors must be understood if one is to comprehend the positioning and identification of local academic clusterings in relation to the ‘urban’. Second I consider the distribution and organisation of urban research within Australian academic institutions, with which I am broadly familiar. The final section offers some wider commentary on the patterns and relationship observable across the global array of urban research centres and the extent to which these allow us to infer or deduce insights into the wider foundations of urban studies.

The historical development of urban studies as a coherent disciplinary endeavour

Van Heur's analysis is founded in the notion that there is a delineable field termed urban studies and that this can be coherently identified, bounded and analysed. While Van Heur offers a short history of the field, it is worth reiterating this historical trajectory as I feel his version tails off too early. The conventional history of urban studies is as Van Heur describes in his introduction, one of European (especially UK) institutions establishing multi-disciplinary perspectives on the post-WWII transformations of urban settlements under capitalist regimes of fordist Keynesianism and (state) urban managerialism. North American institutions, often working with Chicago as a paradigmatic template, responded to corollary transformations (and irruptions) in US cities. Both streams broadly reflected divergent methodological positions founded in contrasting post-marxist critical analysis and positivist-technocratic approaches, often drawing on spatial (market) equilibrium theories, to understand the urban process. A further feature of this era was attention to global south contexts and post-colonial urbanisation under national development frameworks and accompanying rural-to-urban migration. Institutionally academics and universities responded by establishing urban studies centres or programs. In Australia, the initial example was the Australian National University's Urban Research Program which operated from 1964 to 1999 and broadly addressed urban policy and planning questions among a wider interest in urban issues ¹ . Van Heur ends his account with the propitious date of 1989, skipping to the contemporary moment to analyse current configurations of centres. Yet this account overlooks more than thirty years of subsequent transformative global urbanisation and of university institutions. From the late-1980s, North Atlantic urban studies shifted attention from the historical fordist-Keynesian city to the post-industrial (Dear et al., 1996) and urban-entrepreneurial (Harvey, 1989) formations emerging in the global north among the wider neoliberal globalising of economic activity, including across the global south, marked by flows of people, goods, finance and information. Urbanisation is now recognised as a global phenomenon, but with complex divergences and differentiations based on local, national and regional-continental contingencies.

While the nation state has been supposedly weakened by globalisation, urban loci – cities – gained renewed attention as competing nodes of production and control within global flows. Since the 1990s here has been a flourishing in global policy interest in the contribution of urbanisation to economic prosperity, represented by the attention dedicated since the mid-2000s to cities as policy objects by global technocratic observatories such as the OECD, World Bank and UN Habitat. This ‘cities turn’ in global policy has spurred novel intellectual challenges for urban studies which have widened and extended the field. Urban economic geography, in particular, has gained a new profile as questions about urban agglomeration and its enabling infrastructure and governance regimes have become prominent in policy debates. Gleeson (2014) describes this scholarly flourishing as ‘urbanology’ but its policy corrollary might be ‘cityology’.

The scholarly engagement with this historical development of cities is via a continuing but evolving tradition of theoretically informed urban studies scholarship that still attends to the continuing core concerns within debates in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, but which is overlain with, though not completely superseded by, a newer frame of widened and expanded urban studies focused on a multiplicity of cities as specific local manifestations of globally uneven urbanisation processes. Despite interest in informality and megacities his wider gaze has inadequately investigated the urban transformations in the Global South in recent decades, particularly that of China, which has undergone perhaps the most profound urbanisation event in history.

Adding to traditional foci, ecological concerns have grown from modest consideration in earlier urban studies inquiry to at least equivalence with social and economic questions. Climate change, for example, is now a manifest urban problem, due to both the emissions generated through urban processes, but also because the concentration of human societies in urban settlements makes those places the principal points of societal exposure to climate harms. Climate change also offers a new urban teleology of resilient, regenerative or ‘net-zero’ cities. Meanwhile the necessary vertical scalar extension of the urban frame to include earth systems processes and accompanying horizontal widening to encompass terrestrial ecologies has necessitated the broadening of disciplinary contributions to urban studies. Knowledges from disciplines that previously had limited engagement with historical urban process or the urban experience (under capitalism) are now essential to understandings of cities. Similarly those ‘non-traditional’ disciplines outside of urban studies have themselves been transformed through similar expandings of their own epistemologies and the problematics to which they are applied. Material and design questions in built environment disciplines often hew close to ‘the urban’ especially when social scientific problems, such as behaviour, governance, regulation and institutional processes are the objects of built environment inquiry. Lastly, and perhaps more mundanely, the increased prominence of cities as problem-objects has attracted a burgeoning literature that treats the city as a simple container of social, economic, health, design or ecological phenomena. And urbanology contains a totalising tendency: if humanity is now urban then everything human has an urban facet. Consequently, contemporary attention to the urban may thus not be founded within the traditional urban studies concern with urban process but it can nonetheless generate centres dedicated to studying the urban in attenuated ways.

As urbanisation and urban studies have changed over the past three decades, it is not surprising that the way the field is addressed in university institutional structures has also evolved. Contemporary academia, especially its the Anglophone variants, reflects the economic industrial regime in which it is positioned. Universities are expected to display a complex of performative positionings in relation to their target student market, their achievement measured in highly metricated publication registers, and via their contributions to ‘impact’. This display includes using organisational structures as means of representing specialties in which they have critical mass and can thus boast measurable strength, including topic areas that are attractive to students, funders and impact partners. Hence for those with scale in urban studies and attendant fields, establishing research centres with ‘urban’ or ‘city’ monikers is both an intellectual and a positional exercise. With such overdeterminations, it is not surprising that there might be a high degree of latitude exercised on the part of institutions in the definitional delineation of what constitutes ‘urban’ research.

Identifying, collating and analysing urban studies centres in Australia

Van Heur's methodological intent to identify, gather data upon, and analyse the performance of urban research centres across the globe makes sense in the context of a wider program of inquiry attempting to understand the makeup of urban studies. But it immediately runs into definitional and disciplinary problems that have historical and institutional foundations, as well as sampling issues. One definitional problem arises because urban studies centres are not always badged as such. Other terms may be used to describe their essential urban focus but using more concrete terminologies reflective of wider policy discourses. In Australia, the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University is collected in Van Heur's data, but the Centre for Urban Transitions at Swinburne University is not (despite until recently having been led by one of Van Heur's highly cited researchers). Likewise the Centre for Cities at the University of Melbourne and City Futures Research Centre at the University of New South Wales are not included despite operating in very similar terrain. Each can trace an intellectual and collegial lineage within the Australian tradition of urban studies, as described by Davison and Fincher (1998). Such knowledge is typically not apparent in contemporary website presentation but rather held in wider academic ‘field memory’. Similarly the focus on ‘centres’ also misses the Cities Institute at Griffith university and the Urban and Regional Research Program at Western Sydney University, as well as the Urban Futures Enabling Impact Program (a networked quasi-institute) at RMIT University.

Van Heur's centring of centres also misses significant further collaborations in Australian urban studies. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute in 2023 celebrates 30 years as a globally significant collaborative multi-institutional research agency dedicated to urban issues. AHURI was founded by traditional urban studies scholars working across geography, housing and planning but in its current configuration draws on the capabilities of all relevant disciplines across its universities network who respond to its annual research funding agenda. The AHURI final report publications series was rated as ‘Q1’ in urban studies by Scimago in 2021. Australian urban studies also enjoys its own (Scimago Q1) journal Urban Policy and Research, founded by practitioners and academics in 1983 and hosted by RMIT University thereafter, which enjoys submissions from a wide array of disciplines. And most of the centres above have collaborated at some point in hosting the biennial State of Australasian Cities Conference, established in 2003 by the now defunct Urban Frontiers Program at the University of Western Sydney. The SOAC is overseen by the Australasian Cities Research Network (ACRN), a governing body that also draws much of its membership from across these centres, plus equivalents in New Zealand. The ACRN performs a comparable, though much more informed role, to the US Urban Affairs Association with considerable overlap in membership with the Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG) and the Australia-New Zealand Association of Planning Schools (ANZAPS) The point of rehearsing this Australian history is to show that there is a more complex and interwoven threads of urban research in Australia than the single CUR twine drawn out in Van Heur's selective sample. And while in Van Heur's categorisation Australian urban research operates from a ‘global north’ position, each of UPR, AHURI and SOAC originated out of the recognition that Australian urban process is empirically different to that of the UK and US, and thus demands a dedicated literature, even if it remains Anglophone.

In addition to nomenclature, in the Australian context, Van Heur's aversion to treating urban planning as urban studies seems awkward. Urban and cities research centres in Australia are almost always associated with a planning or geography teaching and training program, as is the case at the universities identified above, and almost never exist without these disciplines. This reflects two factors. First, urban studies in Australia emerged as much within pragmatic post-WWII policy debates about the ongoing rapid development of Australian cities, and the need for trained professionals to manage them, as it did through purely scholarly considerations of the urban. The market overdetermination of the Australian university sector perpetuates this tendency. Planning and geography are both strong disciplines that attract sufficient student intake to justify their existence within neoliberal profit and loss accountancy. As far as this observer is aware the sole case of an urban studies centre not associated with a teaching program at an Australian university was the Urban Research Program at the Australian National University (1964–1999). Yet the URP was explicitly founded within the framework of the ANU as national university dedicated to the advanced technocratic research training needs of a growing post-WWII federal bureaucracy, including an expanding national interest in town planning and urban policy.

As mentioned above, the question of attracting students to taught programs is also a factor in the Australian university context, for which the terminology of urban studies alone is often difficult to market to pragmatic career-minded students. The research corollary of student fee income in the market-oriented metric-focused university sector in Australia is the achievement of high rankings in national and global ratings schemes. For these, both journal standing (also often metric-based) and income are the critical factors. For some institutions, the term ‘cities’ is selected as a more marketable substitute for urban studies or urban planning, especially if it can win funding from a technocratic sphere fascinated by cityology. And the formation of a centre or institute is always negotiated; any scholar with a purist notion of ‘urban studies’ will soon find they have to accommodate to perspectives of much less elaborately informed colleagues in relation to collective identity and nomenclature.

A further complicating factor is the structuring of the Australian Bureau of Statistics Field of Research classification codes used for Australian research statistics and rankings. Most urban research topics are categorised under the four-digit ‘FOR 3303 Urban and Regional Planning’ code, located within the higher level two-digit ‘FOR 33 Architecture and Built Environment’. Some sit as minor codes in other four-digit FORs, such as ‘440612 Urban Geography’ or ‘440714 Urban Policy’ which are located within two-digit ‘FOR 44 Human Society’. Universities chasing high rankings in fields in which they have strength may cluster researchers across these and related codes within urban or built environment centres or clusters. While this process generates apparently objective metrics, the tactical operational logics may be highly subjective.

The above-sketched survey of the expanding frame of the urban assists to understand part of Van Heur's methodological challenge. As multi-scalar urbanisation processes have proliferated within cities as manifest phenomena the array of scholars attending to their patterns and dynamics has increased and expanded. While there may have been an identifiable ‘core’ of urban studies, located in the UK and the US in particular, three or four decades ago, and in Australia as Davison and Fincher (1998) describe, it is unclear that there remains a fundamental centre around which a coherently defined and delineated field of endeavour can be easily and consistently identified. Van Heur's analytic table and his perplexity at its contents is perhaps representative therefore of the trajectory of the field. There are few consistent strong patterns to discern. And yet, the term urban studies retains an intellectual organising power to which scholars gravitate to discuss and debate urban questions and city problems.

This response has gone into detail on both the history of urban studies as a field and the multiple lines of flight taken post-1989 as well as on the urban studies experience in Australia. By adding a narrative perspective to Van Heur's inquiries, the response hopefully shows that the complexity discernible in the quantitative description of urban studies is reflected in the historical and institutional trajectory of the field. While I’m not convinced Van Heur's data has shown much that is definitive, it has nonetheless spurred reflection on the historical development of the field as a whole, and on its Australian variant, that is illuminating. There is further fruitful narrative work to be done on elaborating on the global historical institutional development of urban studies as a field of inquiry, both to understand the intellectual history of the discipline, but also to record its institutional composition among different conjunctures.