Studying the institutionalisation of urban studies: Fragmentation,the place of disciplines,organisational form

Abstract

In my original paper for Dialogues in Urban Research, I mapped the publication output of a set of multi-disciplinary urban studies centres across the world. The aim was to provide first insights into the (uneven) geographies of urban knowledge production and circulation. In this reply to the five commentaries on my paper, I will develop three observations in some more detail: urban studies as a fragmented field of research, urban studies as a place-based articulation of multiple disciplines and urban studies centres as a contested organisational form within university hierarchies.

Introduction

Let me start by expressing my gratitude to Bruno Cousin, Jago Dodson, Slavomíra Ferenčuhová, Kevin Ward and Samuel Zipp for investing their time and energy into not only reading my paper (van Heur, 2024) but also writing their insightful commentaries (Cousin, 2024; Dodson, 2024; Ferenčuhová, 2024; Ward, 2024; Zipp, 2024). Taken together, their replies address important weaknesses in my original paper, as well as providing useful elaborations of thoughts I could only hint at in a piece primarily dedicated to mapping the publication output of a set of urban studies centres across the world. At the least, this shows the value of the Dialogues format: creating a space for dialogue and engagement with each other's work, in an academic world increasingly evaluated and shaped by the quantity of output rather than the quality of the debate. I ended my Dialogues paper with the proposal that we should apply some of the lessons of the degrowth movement to the academic system itself and reduce our publication output. Zipp is the only commentator intrigued enough by this suggestion to start speculating about what this could mean for urban studies as a field of research activity, and what urban scholars in the Global North could be doing instead, with Zipp himself proposing a stronger focus on the ‘broader “educational” mission of urban studies’ (2024: 1). I do not disagree, but perhaps we should be hesitant to immediately replace one activity with another. Instead, slowing down may be needed; not in order to do less but to create space and time to engage with important questions that happen to lie outside of our own academic community of practice and ‘normal’ ways of doing science (Stengers, 2013). Practically speaking, this could mean many things. In the context of my paper on global urban studies, I would like to believe that slowing down could allow for more substantive engagement with modes of thought prevalent or emergent elsewhere, perhaps written in a different language to academic English, possibly outside of the ‘discipline’ of urban studies or closely related disciplines such as geography and planning, and possibly also expressed by those on the margins of or outside of academia. This is how I understand Cousin's call to ‘commit together to a more omnivorous diet’ (Cousin, 2024: 3). Slowing down, in other words, does not mean working less, but working differently.

In this short reply piece, I will need to leave further reflections on urban studies, degrowth and slow science for another day. Instead, in the remainder of the piece, I want to focus on three dimensions underdeveloped or only hinted at in my original paper: urban studies as a fragmented field of research, urban studies as a place-based articulation of multiple disciplines and urban studies centres as a contested organisational form within university hierarchies.

The fear of fragmentation

Dodson writes that my analysis assumes ‘that there is a delineable field termed urban studies and that this can be coherently identified, bounded and analysed’ (Dodson, 2024: 1), but this is certainly not what I aimed to get across. In fact, the opposite is true, in that I share Ward's ‘definitional indifference’ (2024) and wrote this paper to get a better sense of the diversity of urban studies research across the world (through the lens of publication output), not to delineate the boundaries of what urban studies is or should be. In its methodology, the paper also relies on a bottom-up approach that makes no a priori assumptions as to relevant disciplines, and that sidesteps definitional questions by assuming all the output by researchers affiliated with the 30 centres in my dataset can be understood as part of the field of urban studies.

This definitional concern resonates with a recurring debate in urban studies – that the field is (becoming) too fragmented and is not, or is no longer, coherent. As I indicatively showed by starting my paper with three quotes from others published up to more than 60 years ago, this fear of fragmentation has accompanied the institutionalisation of urban studies as a field of research from the beginning. Further, as I argued in a previous paper (van Heur, 2020), I think this fear of fragmentation can be partially explained biographically. Many researchers trained in the 1980s and 1990s (or before) could operate within relative disciplinary and institutional stability over time, thus making it easier and more ‘natural’ to identify with one particular history and set of debates that were in fact shared by many. However, this is less the case for today's researchers, many of whom are employed on temporary contracts and need to move regularly between institutions with different profiles. Another partial explanation for fragmentation is provided in my Dialogues paper: different places for research show similar but also different combinations of disciplines, departments and institutional priorities that substantially shape what is considered to be urban studies in each place. As Ferenčuhová (2024) very rightly identifies in her commentary, this substantially complicates any attempt to create a coherent definition of global urban studies. I will not lose any sleep over this, especially as ‘the urban’ (as a concept, as field of debate and research) continues to have a productive function for us (Ward, 2024: 4), both in terms of bringing together excellent researchers with various skills and creating the capacity to engage with societal challenges that matter. Nevertheless, this open understanding of urban studies, or ‘urban studies unbound’ (Leitner et al., 2020), should ideally be tied to regular reflections on the breadth and diversity of urban research and the strengths and limits of specific approaches, in order for us to learn from each other and improve the overall quality of our research. More ‘shared investigations’, as Zipp (2024) proposes in his commentary, are one possible way forward. Complimentary ways include more substantive synthetic reviews or bibliometric exercises that actively transcend the cliquish and self-referential nature of specific strands of urban studies.

The place of disciplines

My Dialogues paper does at least provide empirical evidence concerning the multi-disciplinary nature of urban studies. Of course, this should be no surprise to anyone with some knowledge of the field and has also been observed by many others before. More interesting and relevant is that my paper provides (possibly for the first time) a synthetic and global analysis of the similar and different ways in which urban studies centres combine different disciplinary inputs to create specific local articulations of urban studies. The commentators are certainly correct when they point to the weaknesses of my sampling strategy: Ward (2024) argues that my set of centres are formally not functionally equivalent; Dodson (2024) remarks that selecting centres self-identifying as ‘urban’ excludes many other centres also carrying out relevant urban research; and Cousin (2024) considers my sample ‘idiosyncratic’, as it leads to the exclusion of ‘the majority of institutions and many countries that would otherwise have appeared’ (2024: 1). In defence of my analysis, I would want to highlight that in my original paper, I explicitly identify the selection criteria and acknowledge these limitations. Further, my aim was never to offer a complete analysis of urban studies as a whole (as if this would be possible) but to conduct an analysis of a selected set of urban studies centres. I do agree with the commentators that this can and does create slippage between claims specific to the investigated research centres, and claims (assumed to be) relevant for urban studies more widely. However, while I agree with the commentators about the limits of my sample, none of them has proposed a concrete alternative analysis that debunks the global and regional trends identified. Would my results look substantially different if I had used a differently compiled sample? When drilling down to individual centres, certainly, but when adopting a synthetic and global perspective, I think my identified trends converge strongly with those also observed in other papers on the ‘state of urban studies’ (Bowen et al., 2010; Kanai et al., 2018; Kong and Qian, 2019).

That said, and in line with the ‘unbound’ understanding of urban studies adopted in the paper, other researchers are very much invited to continue the research and add additional data about individual centres and the histories and geographies of urban research within specific countries and world regions. This can only contribute to enriching our understanding of the various local articulations of urban studies traditions and will cumulatively also refine our global analyses. Place matters: we know the drill. In fact, the various commentaries on my paper already provide some additional empirical insights that are very valuable, as this kind of tacit knowledge is rarely codified in academic writing. Zipp (2024) emphasises that his current position outside of a major urban studies research centre and as director of an undergraduate interdisciplinary urban studies programme at Brown University implies that his main relationship to urban studies is via education. Dodson (2024) also offers a range of useful observations derived from the ‘field memory’ (2024: 3) of the Australian tradition of urban studies, highlighting among other things the key importance of planning and geography departments in producing urban studies output and in hosting urban research centres.

Zipp (2024) also questions why urban history journals do not seem to be visible in my dataset, but I can partly reassure him on this point. There is a much larger dataset behind the figures and tables presented in the paper. In the full list of journals, those mentioned by Zipp (Journal of Urban History, Urban History, Journal of Planning History and Planning Perspectives) do appear multiple times, though never with more than 24 publications each in the full dataset (the cut-off point to be included in the figure in the published article). Dedicated history journals also appear in the list of the top 150 journals: Historiallinen Aikakauskirja (no. 70), Stadsgeschiedenis (no. 110) and Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis (no. 147), with the first journal being a history journal publishing in Finnish (relevant for the centre in Helsinki) and the latter two in Dutch and partly English (relevant for the centres in Belgium and the Netherlands). This involves a sampling bias (the inclusion of other centres in other countries with strong research output in urban history would have made different history journals more visible) and also reflects the fact that many historians continue to publish in their own language. At the same time, as I also emphasise in my article, publications in the arts and humanities in particular are at risk of being ‘drowned out’ in a context in which other domains of urban research (engineering, environmental sciences and medicine) show substantially higher levels (in quantitative terms) of research output. The relative invisibility of urban history within my paper needs to be understood in this context. Lastly, I can also reassure Dodson, who remarks that I miss significant collaborations in Australian urban studies, such as the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) and the journal Urban Policy and Research. Looking at the list of top journals (or, more precisely, source titles), the ‘AHURI Final Report’ comes in at position number 34 and Urban Policy and Research at 45: high enough to also appear in Figure 3 of my published Dialogues paper. Similarly, various Australian universities – despite not being part of my original sample of 30 centres – appear in my dataset due to their role in co-authored research output: University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, University of Western Australia, Monash University, Deakin University, Queensland University of Technology and Griffith University (see Figure 5 and the accompanying discussion in my paper), providing evidence of intense collaborations between Australian scholars and with the world at large. That said, the geography of international collaborations puts Australia (or at least the investigated centre at RMIT University) squarely within the Global North and Anglo-American part of the world, with a clear dominance of co-authorship relations being directed towards (in this order) the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand and Canada.

Organisational form

In examining the institutionalisation of urban studies, we can observe not only in other words global and regional trends but also distinct, local articulations of the field. The multi-disciplinary and interdepartmental research centre is one organisational type that has emerged to organise locally urban research activity, but obviously – as most of the commentators point out – there are many other forms that collectively shape the present and future of urban studies research. These include university departments, journal and book editors, scientific associations, funding organisations, research projects, consultants, NGOs, social movements and government administrations. Cousin is certainly correct in criticising my paper for ‘overlooking’ these ‘other sites of urban knowledge production’ (2024: 2), but there is only so much that can be accomplished in one paper. My Dialogues contribution hopefully provides some useful insights into one type of organisational form that has seen a certain proliferation across the world in the last two decades, but clearly this remains a limited remit. Even with this limited terrain, my paper does not come close to answering the important question raised by Ferenčuhová in her commentary as to why ‘the organisational form of multidisciplinary and cross-university urban studies centres may be less likely to emerge in some contexts than in others’ (2024: 1). This is a key question, and one that I can only address with anecdotal evidence, mostly related to explanations concerning resources and institutional capacity, language and labelling, thematic research priorities and the relative importance attached to Scopus-registered publication output. Ferenčuhová herself points to the importance of geopolitics and the state (something I do not address at all in my paper) when describing how the socialist era in Central and Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia specifically in this commentary) obstructed the development of the social sciences, including urban research at universities, and how urban knowledge production was moved to state-founded institutes primarily dealing with applied knowledge relevant to local professional audiences.

The fundamentally political question raised by Ferenčuhová also reappears at the level of university politics and connects the debate on organisational form to the intra-university struggles concerning the visibility of urban studies in relation to university hierarchies (faculties and departments) and the whims of university management. As also observed by the Urban Agency network that provided the context for the development of my Dialogues paper, university leaders are themselves influenced by an ‘urban age’ discourse that puts cities at centre stage in economic development, leading them to consider multi-disciplinary urban studies institutes/platforms/centres as a ‘must have’ strategic asset. Not surprisingly perhaps, this dimension is picked up most explicitly by commentators based in two of the more commodified university systems in my sample: Australia and the United Kingdom. Dodson rightly points out that ‘establishing research centres with “urban” or “city” monikers is both an intellectual and a positional exercise’ (2024: 3). In addition, Ward offers useful insights into the practical organisation of the Manchester Urban Institute: as with other entities operating ‘in-between’ established disciplinary departments, there was always a ‘seeming need to perform its existence’, leading among other things to a ‘requirement to grow affiliated members’ (2024: 3). Balancing this top-down imposed (but often also internalised) growth imperative with substantive, intellectual concerns is challenging, especially as existing university hierarchies tend to allocate research funding, as well as research and teaching positions, to the traditional disciplinary departments, leaving only ‘a very narrow organisational bandwidth’ to interdepartmental research platforms (Ward, 2024: 4).

Conclusion

What all this means for the future of multi-disciplinary and cross-university urban studies centres remains to be seen. It may be that when the ‘urban age’ discourse becomes less popular in policy and administrative circles (and this is already happening), it will also spell the end of university support for the types of urban studies centres investigated in my paper. In my view and experience, this would be a loss, as the institutionalised framing of these centres enables us to engage locally (within a university or a city) with a greater diversity of research traditions and approaches than would normally be the case. At the same time, many of the investigated centres are also understood by their university leaders as strategic assets within the regionalised and globalised knowledge economy, since many of these centres tick the box of transdisciplinary, problem-oriented research units that are seen to be of key relevance in supporting innovation and gaining a competitive edge over other city regions and universities. This suggests a continued interest in the existence of these centres that will remain in the future, but creates its own challenges, with researchers increasingly submitted to a logic of growth and performance metrics related to publication output and funding acquisition that runs counter to the more substantive intellectual and societal concerns also described in my Dialogues paper and this reply. Within the interdisciplinary landscape of urban studies mapped in the paper, this could lead to the prioritisation of the triad of engineering, medicine and environmental sciences over the social sciences and humanities, as the former will always ‘outperform’ the latter with regards to quantity of output. Obviously, this is neither the future of global urban studies we need nor what we should want, as it would substantially constrain the possibilities to slow down and engage with urban research traditions outside of our (disciplinary and geographical) comfort zone and it would close down instead of open up urban studies as a space for learning from cities across the world.