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作者

Richardson Dilworth, Maureen Donaghy, […], Christina Greer, Mara Sidney, Timothy Weaver, Yue Zhang+3-3

来源

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.59,Issue1,P.

语言

英文

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作者单位

摘要

We are honored and excited by the opportunity to shape and promote research in one of the world's longest-standing urban social science journals. We are truly grateful and thankful to the outgoing team – Phil Ashton, Peter Burns, Jered Carr, Josh Drucker, Yue Zhang (also part of the new team), the editorial board, and assistant managing editor, Liz Motyka – for strengthening the journal. We have grand plans to enhance it and its companion website, urbanaffairsreview.com. Of course, by the time anyone reads this our grand plans will have met the maelstrom of manuscript submissions, contentious R&Rs, and the desperate search for reviewers. In the brief period before that happens, we wanted to take some time to chart the direction for this journal over the next five years. After that we have produced a brief introduction to this current issue, the first of Volume 59 – a new feature that will be included at the beginning of all issues.According to the journal's first editor Marilyn Gittell, the founding in 1965 of Urban Affairs Quarterly (it became the Review in 1995) was “a reflection of the national mood in the 1960s, an acceptance of the responsibility that faced us as a society to confront the needs of our cities through national urban policies” (Gittell 1985, 13). Indeed, the inside cover of the first issue included a quote by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson saying that “the development of plans and programs for the improvement of the urban environment are tasks of the highest importance for all Americans” (quoted in Hunter and Lineberry 1980, 131). But the journal's goal was always broader than to serve as a response to the emergent “urban crisis” in the United States. Gittell outlined its scope as being “(1) to ‘provide a forum for an interdisciplinary approach to urban studies’; (2) to pay attention to the ‘need for an interchange of ideas and information between the academic community and policy makers’; and (3) to ‘fill the obvious gap in comparative analysis’” (Hunter and Lineberry 1980, 131).1 We seek to maintain and advance these goals, though their substance has evolved along with the evolution of academic disciplines associated with urban politics and policy, and urban studies.It's a different world today but of course not entirely so. We face global urban crises, which also include elements of earlier challenges, especially around housing, energy, infrastructure, poverty, and race. Today the effects of climate change cannot be ignored, nor the realities of pandemics such as COVID-19. We live today in a more urban and quickly urbanizing world, and academics have created new methods and frameworks to capture these developments. Since the 1960s there is thankfully also a greater diversity of voices on urban politics and policymaking, and we look forward to fostering urban scholarship from a range of perspectives and positions. Though UAQ was largely the brainchild of Gittell and Sara Miller McCune, the founder and president of Sage Publications, 24 of the 26 authors of articles in Volume 1 were men. By comparison, the majority of the new editors are women and the article authors in the latest UAR issue as of this writing (Volume 58, Issue 5) are almost evenly split between men and women. We seek to continue the trend towards inclusivity across race, ethnicity, class, gender identity, among other historically marginalized voices.One constant since the advent of UAQ revolves around what is meant by “urban,” resulting in claims such as David Popenoe's (1965) thatthe proper foci of urban studies are the urban process and community phenomena as they are affected by this process, and… by community phenomena we mean inter-organizational integrative relationships and mechanisms associated with neighborhoods, municipalities and ecological areas. (p.32)Twenty years later, UAQ editor Albert Hunter continued the conversation, arguing that cities arephysical constructions… representations of the institutionalized values and power by which people organize their collective existence; and …artifacts in the true sense that they are socially constructed by people and therefore hold the promising potential of being subject to conscious manipulation, alteration, planning and control… things are urban to the degree that these characteristics of cities are seen as critical independent or dependent variables, as causes or consequences in theoretical explanations of modern social life. (Hunter 1985, 7)Most recently, in one of the UAR articles included in this issue, Althorpe and Horak (2023) describe how a Lefebvrian “right to the city” (RTTC) embodies key elements of “the urban”:Drawing on sociology and social theory, we suggest that despite the prevalence of inequality, hierarchy, and domination in contemporary cities, urban spaces—marked by the coincidence of social difference and physical closeness—can be a fertile ground for complex cooperation among inhabitants. The foundations for the positive vision of social cooperation across difference that underpins the RTTC, we argue, are found in the ubiquitous small-scale practices of cooperation that exist even in the highly unequal cities of today. While it can never replace state authority, self-managed cooperation has the potential to become a much stronger organizing principle in urban life than it is in today's cities.We welcome article manuscripts that continue the discussion about the meanings of “urban,” build theoretical frameworks, and address practical challenges and solutions for today's urban crises. Continuing the tradition that defined part of the original UAQ mission, we intend to publish work that makes strong theoretical contributions while also bridging the sometimes cavernous divide between the work of academia and research that is useful to urban policymakers.As such, we aim to publish work specifically about urban politics, though broadly conceived in at least five ways. First, our understanding of politics extends well beyond political science to include the political dimensions of planning, public policy, public health, economic development, education, transportation, housing, race, and the environment, among other things – as these topics are treated across the social sciences and humanities, and other disciplines. The goal, which continues a long tradition at the journal (see Hunter 1985, 8), is to publish articles that define a conversation about urban politics across topics and disciplines – defining “urban” and “politics” and “urban politics” along the way.Part of this effort to create a broader conversation includes some changes to article formats. In particular, we will revise the “symposia” – special sections with a set of articles that focus on one topic. We will solicit and review proposals from guest editors who will coordinate these sections and write brief introductory essays. We will seek to assign reviewers for entire symposia – which can consist of 3–10 articles – so that the work is assessed both individually and as parts of a larger whole. And we will focus on symposia that seek to define the “urban politics” of particular urban practices or phenomena – for instance, public health or urban informality.Second, as an intentionally interdisciplinary effort to publish work on urban politics, we welcome a breadth of methodological orientations. We think every methodology – from “large N” quantitative to single cases to autoethnography – can be valuable and at the same time offers a limited lens on urban political phenomena. Our hope is that every issue of the journal would contain a diverse methodological mix alongside a diverse substantive mix. Each issue will include a brief introductory essay by one or more of the editors describing the conceptual and substantive threads that tie the articles together – as we do in the essay following this one (Dilworth and Sidney 2023).Third, we want to encourage a diverse mix of conceptual, theoretical, and ideological commitments. Ideology is embedded in even the most “scientific” empirical studies, and ideological bubbles should be left to social media. For example, scholars who study local elections in the tradition of the early Progressives should be able to understand the work of scholars using frameworks such as assemblages, planetary urbanization, or, in the case of Althorpe and Horak (2023), “right to the city.” UAR should be a place where conversations and cross-fertilization across perspectives and frameworks can occur.Fourth, we want to publish studies of urban politics situated around the world that represent a broad range of comparative strategies, especially cross-national comparative urban studies that generate awareness and dialogue around the similarities and differences across cities and regions. There is vibrant debate about the extent to which forms of urbanism and urbanization in different parts of the world – most notably the Global South and Global North – are truly comparable (Randolph and Storper 2022). Voices also describe the generative possibilities of comparisons that “break” conventional rules and practices of research design (e.g., Robinson 2016). We hope UAR can be a forum for this discussion, especially through detailed case studies, such as the two on Medellin in this current issue (Betancur and Brand 2023; Restrepo-Mieth 2023).Fifth and finally, as noted above, the study of urban politics cannot be divorced from the actual practice of urban politics, globally. Practitioners rarely publish in the journal – and why would they want their material to be locked behind a paywall when they can write for the world on the Internet? Luckily, we have the separate but related companion website, urbanaffairsreview.com, where we can provide ungated content. In addition to its current content, we hope to make the UAR website a location where we can continue a meaningful interaction between the academy and the rest of the world. We will also use the website to revive an ungated version of UAR book reviews.We look forward to reading your work.Richardson Dilworth, Drexel UniversityMaureen Donaghy, Rutgers University-CamdenChristina Greer, Fordham UniversityMara Sidney, Rutgers University-NewarkTimothy P. R. Weaver, University at Albany, SUNYYue Zhang, University of Illinois ChicagoCo-Editors, Urban Affairs Review