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Urban Studies
http://usj.sagepub.com/content/50/1/3
The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0042098012469895
2013 50: 3 Urban Stud
Ronan Paddison
Editorial: Urban Studies at 50

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Editorial: Urban Studies at 50
2013 brings the 50th year of publication of
Urban Studies. Since its inception, the jour-
nal has become a leading outlet for urban
and regional research, perhaps reflecting
what its original Editors aspired to.
Recognising that urban research had
already become significant across several dis-
ciplines, dissemination merited the dedica-
tion of a new journal. Over the half-century,
the journal has developed significantly, not
least in its size. Size apart, the founding
Editorsonly one of whom is still alive
would probably be surprised by the flowering
of urban research and its reach across a mul-
tiplicity of disciplines that has marked the
past 50 years, and gratified that the journal
had been able to act as an important outlet
for such growth.
The journal had its origins in the creation
of what was then an innovative research
department set up in the University of
Glasgow in the mid 1960s, the Department
of Social and Economic Research. Dedicated
(in part) to the analysis and understanding
of cities and regions, the timing was propi-
tious. Urban and regional analysis was
extensively (but by no means exclusively)
caught up in the trope of modernisation
and the ability of, and need for, the state to
intervene in the economy and society.
Regional policy, in the UK and elsewhere in
the then global North, was still in its heyday
and urban policy, already deeply immersed
in the physical regeneration of cities, was
turning its attention to other problems such
as urban congestion and urban inequalities
which threatened to undermine the ability
of cities to act as key sites for accumulation.
The regional and urban problems of the
west of Scotland and of Glasgow in particu-
lar as the home base of the journal were all
too evident. Addressing them was premised
on a continuing belief in the ability of the
state to be able to rectify the economic and
social problems of disadvantaged cities and
regions. If the newly created Department
was innovative in being fundamentally a
research centre with a distinct policy orien-
tation, what was needed was a journal which
could provide an outlet for such research.
The gap in the journals market was
obviousjournals concerned specifically
with cities were dominated by those focused
in the physical planning field. While such
journals were also concerned with policy,
the city was manifestly more than an expres-
sion of physical planningits economy,
besides its social structuring and its meaning
for everyday life needed to be understood,
emphasising the place for a new academic
journal.
While in its early days the journal was
silent on its intended remitits objective
being clear from its titlethe first volume
was remarkable for its attention to policy. Of
the 10 articles published in the two Issues in
May and November, all centred on different
aspects of policy, albeit to varying degrees.
Many of the articles were concerned with
urban and regional policy in Britain, written
Urban Studies at 50
50(1) 35, January 2013
0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online
2013 Urban Studies Journal Limited
DOI: 10.1177/0042098012469895
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by researchers who were acclaimed in their
field, including Michael Beesley and John
Kain who wrote an insightful critique of the
report on Traffic in Towns which was to
become influential to the development of
urban motorways in British cities, Peter
Selfs reflections on regional planning in
Britain, and David Donnison on housing
research. Before the end of the 1960s, how-
ever, the journal was branching out from its
initial accentuation of British urban exam-
ples to consider urban issues and debates
from elsewhere. Increasingly, articles in the
journal were to become engaged with the
nature of the urban and of the urban condi-
tion drawing on examples globally.
In what in the contemporary age is a
taken-for-granted, globalisation, with its
attendant consequences for urban research
and its dissemination, the contrast between
the contents of the first and fiftieth
volumes could hardly be more striking.
Reflecting its origins and the geographically
narrower world in which much urban
research was conducted at the time and
often disseminated, the initial list of the 16
individuals serving on the Editorial
Advisory Committee were all from Britain.
Tellingly, given what was outlined earlier,
more than a third of the non-editorial
members, were from policy research or
urban practitioner worlds, physical plan-
ning and economic research in particular.
In contrast, the recently revisited editorial
structure has resulted in a committee com-
prising 25 in all, with the majority drawn
from beyond the UK and none of whom is
employed directly in a practitioner envi-
ronment. What is implied by the latter shift
is a moot pointmuch urban research
remains concerned with policy, but in
more critical ways than was the case 50
years ago. Less debatable is the way in
which urban debates and research have
become globalised, albeit often nuanced
through the lens of the local, so that
globalising the editorial input is both a nec-
essary and inevitable step in the history of
the journal.
Over the past 50 years, Urban Studies has
sought to be an outlet for what has been an
ever-increasing and, in disciplinary terms
more catholic, output of research into the
urban condition. In many cases, those sub-
branches of urban researchurban eco-
nomics, urban sociology, urban geography,
urban politicswere, if not in their relative
infancy, a shadow of how they have subse-
quently developed. As a measure of their
development, many such branches have
spawned their own specialist journals in a
trend which has characterised the social
sciences and academia as a whole. Such
developments, matched by the exponential
rise in the number of publishable papers on
urban research, have warranted the develop-
ment of more specialist journals in the
urban field. Paradoxically, their emergence
has not crowded out the field for the more
interdisciplinary journals; indeed, as a
recurrent theme within the social sciences,
the place for research drawing across
disciplinesand hence for journals reflect-
ing the demandhas if anything increased.
Hence, if the half-century has seen the emer-
gence of journals focusing on specific
branches of urban research, several have also
appeared that have a more holistic commit-
ment to understanding cities. In remaining
committed to an interdisciplinary interpre-
tation of cities and regions, Urban Studies
has been able to demonstrate the benefits of
taking the more catholic viewpoint and, at
times, the cross-fertilisation this can
generate.
Writing this short editorial has helped to
highlight particular themes that have a
broader resonance with the historiography
of urban research, and specifically of its
publishing, over the past half-century (and
to bring attention to a relatively unre-
searched area in urban studies!). As for the
4 EDITORIAL
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social sciences as a whole, a number of such
themes are clearly apparentthe rapid
growth in the volume of (urban) research,
its fragmentation and specialisation, the
development of global circuits within which
urban research is disseminated being among
the more obvious. Some other trends might
have been less predictable 50 years ago: the
rise of urbanisation in the global South; the
increasing emphasis given to process and
theory (certainly over patterns); the devel-
opment of new critical perspectives seeking
to dissect and disentangle policy, and the
configurations of power underlying it rather
than on policy analysis and its improve-
ments per se. Additionally, the journal has
witnessed and given voice to the emergence
of whole new research fields adopting, as in
the case of Lefebvre, ideas developed by
scholars whose intellectual origins lay out-
side the urban academy.
Such developments reflect the need for
eclecticism as to how cities need to be
explored and the intellectual excitement
that surrounds contemporary urban debates
and research. Urban Studies along with its
sister journals has played and will play a
continuing role in ensuring the dissemina-
tion of key research ideas and findings help-
ing us to understand the role of cities and of
city life. This understanding of the city is
considerably richer than it was 50 years ago,
although the dynamic nature of the contex-
tual environments in which the urban is
situated will ensure that new questions will
arise, posing challenges to our understand-
ing of cities and regions besides our ability
to live within them. The publishing world
within which Urban Studies is located is also
confronted by particular challenges, not
least those created by electronic publishing
and the emergence of social media.
Responding to these challenges, the journal
intends to make a number of innovations
whose instigation is dependent on the new
editorial team that has been put in place. In
an editorial to be published later in the year,
we will map out these initiatives more fully,
developments which endorse as well as
hopefully enhance the principles and aspira-
tions of our predecessors 50 years ago.
Ronan Paddison (and on behalf of the
editorial team)
EDITORIAL 5
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