International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

The International Journal of Urban andRegional Research: An Editorial Statement

JEREMY SEEKINGS and ROGER KEILijur_879 1..10

The first issue of IJURR was published more than 30 years ago, in 1977. It opened witha brief editorial statement in which the journal’s founders defined their project. IJURRwould be interdisciplinary. It would be open to diverse theoretical approaches andmethodologies, whilst seeking to understand urban and regional development in terms ofthe ‘fundamental economic, social and political processes which operate at local,national and international levels’. Such an understanding should inform ‘social action’and not be confined to intellectual debate.

The tone for the new journal was set by the inaugural issue, which opened with fourarticles (by Ray Pahl, Jean Lojkine, Enzo Mingione and Richard Child Hill) on‘urbanism and the state’. Other contributors to the first volume of IJURR includedManuel Castells, Edmond Preteceille, Chris Pickvance, Patrick Dunleavy, DoreenMassey, Martin Ravallion, Roger Friedland, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Alford, JosefGugler and William Flanagan. Pahl, Mingione, Preteceille, Pickvance, Piven and Castellswere all founding members of IJURR’s editorial board, together with Michael Harloe(the editor) and S.M. Miller. The founders of and initial contributors to IJURR compriseda remarkable generation of scholars concerned with the development of a radical orcritical approach to urban and regional issues that would be relevant to political andsocial change. Indeed, IJURR included a section on ‘Praxis’. In the first issue, this sectioncomprised articles on social or popular movements in the USA, Mexico and Spain, andon the civil war in Beirut. The impetus behind IJURR came mostly from sociologists, andthere was a considerable overlap between IJURR and Research Committee 21 of theInternational Sociological Association, but IJURR also drew on the efforts of politicalscientists, planners and geographers.

Change was central to IJURR’s identity. Drawing on egalitarian conceptions of socialjustice, IJURR’s founders sought to show that cities and regions could change in a varietyof directions. Marxist theory was especially appealing to scholars who combined activistand scholarly missions, although Marxist theory certainly did not go unchallenged (notleast by Ray Pahl and Patrick Dunleavy) and was never a precondition for publication.The scholarly practice of the journal was unambiguously embedded in an overall surgeof radical and even revolutionary politics across the world. The 1970s were the morningafter the 1960s explosion of critical theory and revolutionary practice. Student rebellionand scholarly debate fed and radicalized each other. IJURR was both a product of andprotagonist in this important shift, and was seen by its editors, authors, reviewers andreaders as such.

While we take full responsibility as co-editors of the journal for the views expressed here, we would liketo acknowledge the comments of our colleagues on the Editorial Board and elsewhere to an earlier draftof this statement. We have sometimes taken these comments on board verbatim and directly andare grateful for this input. Given the diversity of identity, geographical origin, methodologicalpreoccupation, disciplinary background and philosophical views represented on our Board, we must notfail to mention that various shades of difference exist among us as we approach our joint project ofediting IJURR.

Volume 33.2 June 2009 i–x International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchDOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00879.x

© 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by BlackwellPublishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

But the journal itself is not immune to changes of many kinds. It operates not onlyamidst rapid change in the cities and regions of the world, but also in the rapidlychanging worlds of urban and regional scholarship in the academy and of the businessand technologies of journal publishing. IJURR continues to follow the general pathchosen more than 30 years ago, emphasizing strongly the combination of criticalscholarship, a commitment to social justice, and an engagement with processes ofpolitical and social change. But we seek to follow this path in ways that are cognizant ofthe new challenges posed in the changing world around us.

Change in the journal and the publishing environmentThis reflection is prompted in part by changes in the editorship. At the end of 2004,Patrick Le Galès stepped down as the editor of IJURR. His editorship since 1997 hadmarked a significant generational change for the journal as IJURR was now in the handsof a younger editor who was only indirectly related to the upheavals of the 1960s and1970s that had given birth to the journal. During his tenure, Patrick invited onto theeditorial board a group of scholars who were diverse in terms of both academic disciplineand personal background. These included the book review and Debates andDevelopments editors AbdouMaliq Simone, Steve Graham and Roger Keil. WhenPatrick handed the baton over to Alan Harding and the two of us, he had edited thejournal for 7 years, steering the journal through a crucial period of change. Alan playeda major transitional role as co-editor for 3 years, before stepping down at the end of 2007.AbdouMaliq Simone took over as editor of the Debates and Developments section andTalja Blokland as book reviews editor, from the beginning of 2005.1

These changes in personnel entail a significant and telling geographical change also.For its first 21 years, the actual editors of the various parts of IJURR were all WesternEuropeans and the journal’s centre of gravity was in Britain. The editorial board wassomewhat more diverse, comprising some American scholars as well as British and otherEuropean ones. Under its second editor — a French scholar based in France — theeditorial board was ‘internationalized’ beyond Europe and the USA, adding scholarsfrom Japan, Brazil, South Africa, China and India. Now it is edited by a German-bornscholar who studied the American city and now lives in Canada and a British-born and-educated scholar who lives in South Africa with extended stays in the USA. The Debatesand Developments section is edited by a Chicago-born urbanist who works across Africa,the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The book review section is edited by a Dutch scholarwho has worked on neighbourhood change in the United States and now teaches inGermany. The globalization of academia has transformed journals like IJURR. Inaddition, whereas most of IJURR’s founders were sociologists, the board now comprisesa broader mix of geographers, political scientists, planners, and anthropologists also(although not, yet, an economist).

Much of the production of IJURR remains in Britain. For authors and reviewers, the‘face’ of IJURR continues to be the indefatigable and indispensable Terry McBride, ourmanaging editor, who lives and works near Brighton in the south of England. And, from1991, the journal was published (but not owned) by the British-based Blackwell. But, in

1 The full list of IJURR office-holders is as follows. Editor: Michael Harloe (1977–97), Patrick Le Galès(1998–2004), Alan Harding, Roger Keil and Jeremy Seekings (2005–07), Roger Keil and JeremySeekings (2008–). Editor of the ‘Praxis’ section (later renamed ‘Events and Debates’, and later still‘Debates and Developments’): Manuel Castells (1977–86), Chris Pickvance (1987–97), SusanFainstein (1998–2001), Steve Graham (2002–2003), Roger Keil (2003–2004), AbdouMaliq Simone(2005–). Review Editor (i.e. the book review section): Chris Pickvance (1977–86), Gareth Rees(1988–94), Patrick Le Galès (1995–97), Linda McDowell (1998–99), Steve Graham (1999–2001),AbdouMaliq Simone (2002–2004), Talja Blokland (2005–).

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a world of globalizing technologies, these British connections are less and lessmeaningful. The paper edition of the journal is printed in Singapore. Blackwell wasrecently bought by the American publisher Wiley, forming the new composite Wiley-Blackwell. The internet has transformed completely the production of the journal. Thesubmission and review of papers is now done entirely through our online system(ScholarOne’s ‘Manuscript Central’, http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijurr). A large andgrowing minority of our core institutional clients now subscribe to the online version,either with or without the print edition also. And more and more readers access backissues through online archives (until recently through Blackwell’s platform ‘Synergy’,and now through Wiley-Blackwell’s platform ‘InterScience’).

Changing technologies have allowed IJURR to expand its readership across the world.Over 3,000 institutions worldwide can access the current content of IJURR eitherthrough traditional subscriptions or via the Wiley-Blackwell sales programme toconsortia of libraries. About 3% of these institutions are in the UK, another 30% in therest of Europe, 21% in North America and nearly 40% spread across the rest of the world.Over 600 institutions in the global South have free or heavily discounted access to thejournal under philanthropic arrangements.

There is a slow but steady shift from print to online traditional institutionalsubscriptions. In 2007, the number of articles downloaded over the internet passed100,000 in a year. The most downloaded article (Jamie Peck’s ‘Struggling with theCreative Class’, in IJURR 29.4) was downloaded 2,600 times. More than 1,000 peoplereceive via email the ‘table of contents’ for each issue as it is published (and we think thatthis number should be far higher). Articles are published online prior to being printed.

Technological change poses constant challenges. When IJURR was founded, theepitome of high tech was an IBM Selectric typewriter with erasure function, and the ideaof an image was a 24/36 mm colour slide. Now, of course, all work is digitalized. Thedigital revolution has overwhelmed us with a rising tide of images both still and moving.Cities themselves have become screens for layers of textual and image-basedinformation, off which urban scholarship is ‘read’. IJURR now publishes photographs,maps and graphics, but we are a long way from realizing the potential imagery unleashedby the digital revolution. We are facing the challenge of the digital revolution and itsapparent opportunities with a broad range of editorial strategies ranging fromrepresentation inside and outside the printed journal (e.g. through our emerging website),through more engagement with visualization as a problematic of urban research, andthrough recognition of the role architecture, design and style play in the urban fabric ofthe twenty-first-century city.

Change in critical urban scholarshipWhen IJURR turned 21, its editorial board produced a short retrospective statement(published in IJURR 22.1). Four members of the board (Harloe, Mingione, Pickvanceand Preteceille) spelt out some of the concerns that had motivated them and theircolleagues. The first was the journal’s embrace of ‘a critical, or radical, approach tourban problems’. In the 1970s, urban and regional research was ‘largely dominated bythe interests and views of urban planning and state administrations’, and was generallyisolated ‘from current debates in the social sciences’. The vision for IJURR, as set out ina pre-launch planning document, was a ‘macro-sociological research approach, givingmore emphasis to problems such as the social structural class interests which are affectedby planning and state intervention, the accumulation and circulation of capital in theregional system, the ownership of land and other economic determinants of theurbanization process, and urban social movements as spatial reflections of the classstruggle’. At the same time, in the predominant view of the journal’s founders, researchshould not be subordinated to politics.

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The ‘sense of intellectual excitement’ around the founding of IJURR was alsodescribed by Ray Pahl. ‘The new currents of social theory and analysis that beganflowing in the late 1960s and early 1970s’ held out the promise of a paradigm shift in thestudy of the city. ‘Not that there was much to push out of the way’, Pahl addedacerbically, ‘since much previous work had been atheoretical and descriptive, oftenbased on a technocratic or planning perspective’ (Pahl, 1989: 709).

This original intellectual and political agenda was strongly Marxist in orientation,notwithstanding intermittent challenges from Weberian scholars (and a rather vaguecommitment to scientific method). Articles in IJURR focused on capital, class andconflict. In this it reflected the concerns of European urban sociologists, in contrast tothe concerns of (say) the Chicago School. Since the late 1970s, urban and regionalstudies have been transformed and expanded through both a general, relative retreatfrom explicitly Marxist political economy and an infusion of some elements of radicalanalysis into the mainstream of urban scholarship. Logan and Molotch’s UrbanFortunes, for example, took the spirit, if not the letter of radical political economy intodifferent terrain than had previously been staked out by neo-Marxist writers. Theseintellectual shifts have posed a challenge to the identity of self-consciously ‘critical’ or‘radical’ journals like IJURR. Urban and regional studies have experienced a numberof ‘turns’, including the postmodern turn, the cultural turn, the spatial turn, the scalarturn, the discursive turn, and perhaps others also, while political economy asserted itscontinuing relevance. Some of these shifts occurred primarily in one or more of theindividual disciplines that inform the multidisciplinary character of urban and regionalstudies, others are more specific to the overarching project of urban or regional studiesthemselves. The result is, on one level, a much more eclectic understanding of whatconstitutes ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ in terms of urban and regional scholarship, and one ofour ongoing discussions necessarily needs to be on what exactly ‘radical critique’entails in these changing times.

The core or defining elements of ‘critical urban scholarship’ persist. As Harloe et al.reasserted (‘emphatically’) in 1988, IJURR remained firmly committed to a ‘critical orradical intellectual orientation’. The task of ‘developing concepts and research methodsindependent of the dominant powers — the state, urban planners and capitalist producersof the city — is just as important today as it was at the time of the journal’s founding andremains just as difficult, because these powers influence the funding of research’. Theways in which we specify these core elements have changed somewhat as the paradigmschange and urbanism evolves.

Critical urban scholarship is above all concerned with issues of power and justicein the urban (and regional) contexts. For Marxists, these issues concerned the waysin which urban and regional political economies were constructed as spaces ofcapitalist exploitation through the direct or indirect efforts of capital and in the faceof resistance from class-based movements. For non- (or post-) Marxists, injusticesarose from a wider range of sources: from the practices of states that were atleast semi-autonomous of capital, from the practices of classes other than thebourgeoisie and of interest groups other than classes, from gendered, racializedor imperial dimensions of power, and through the power of discourse and theconstitution of difference. Critical urban scholarship is concerned with the injusticesof production and distribution, in economic, political and cultural terms; with themacro- as well as micro-social foundations of these injustices; and with thepossibilities of challenging them. This covers much of what might be viewed as post-Marxist political economy but extends beyond this. IJURR certainly does not have amonopoly on critical urban scholarship: many excellent critical urban papers arepublished in other journals (which have tended over time to become more welcomingof such papers, thereby helping to erode IJURR’s distinctiveness). But IJURR remainsspecial in its commitment to a scholarship informed by normative concerns and itsassumption that critical urban scholarship is an indispensable part of critical urbanpraxis.

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Many aspects of the reach of contemporary critical urban scholarship were noted inthe ‘policy statement’ penned by Patrick Le Galès and colleagues when they assumedresponsibility for IJURR in 1998 (see IJURR 22.1). They pointed to the importance ofcultural dimensions of urban political economy. In addition, the ‘forces, effects andprocesses associated with globalization’ had become central to IJURR’s agenda. Theyemphasized that the relationships between state and society needed to be understood interms of a ‘wider view of regulation’, or what we would now term ‘governance’. Thenormative agenda also demanded analysis of the ‘social fabric’ of the city. Le Galès et al.pointed to several specific topics on which the journal should focus: the changingposition of cities within national and international systems, the widening range ofpolitical struggles in and over the city, and the linkages between cities, new technologiesand urban infrastructures. IJURR thus combined a ‘more open, pluralist politicaleconomy perspective’ with various cultural and sociological traditions.

In practice, however, the shift from what was seen as a predominantly Marxistapproach to critical urban scholarship to a more eclectic approach has perhapsrendered less obvious the critical character of the journal. IJURR attracts manysubmissions which might have been sent to a number of other journals (and, in somecases, should not have been sent to any urban studies journal). Some of these papersare excellent contributions on one or other aspect of urban society, but fail to establishthe broader relevance of the analysis to the normative questions driving the journal.This is most obvious with respect to submissions analyzing quantitative data, thatpresent technically sophisticated and empirically careful analyses of topics such as thelabour market in a specific urban setting or interregional growth rates in a specificcountry, but do not explain to readers why the selected topic is of interest to a broaderrange of (critical) urban and regional scholars. Yet, clearly, as editors of the journal, weneed to be constantly aware of how we can reconcile quantitative analysis and thejournal’s normative traditions.

IJURR also receives some submissions that exhibit the opposite weakness, i.e. focuson issues with evident normative importance or political relevance, but do so without anyor sufficient scientific merit. From the outset IJURR has insisted that papers shouldsatisfy scientific and not just political criteria. Over time, IJURR has become moreaccommodating of diverse methodologies, although our record remains disappointing inpublishing papers that offer robust analysis of quantitative data on urban topics (paperswhich, we regretfully note, are too often submitted and published in US-based journalsassociated with the discipline of sociology). Too many submissions to IJURR take a topicof interest to the journal (such as how shifting public and private responsibilities forurban service delivery result in changing inequalities of access) and provide a case-studyof a specific city (that, for example, ‘demonstrates’ the inequity of ‘neoliberalism’) butwithout a thorough analysis of all available data using the full range of appropriatemethodologies. Such submissions risk spurious ‘corroboration’ of politically correctconclusions on the basis of insufficiently robust analysis.

The challenge to a journal like IJURR — and to contributors to such journals — ishow to balance normative concerns and methodological diligence. Critical scholarshiphas tended to neglect some methodologies, notably the analyses of quantitative data, justas some methodologies have tended to generate uncritical analyses. Technologicalchange has transformed the social sciences, as computing power has grown withastonishing rapidity and diverse quantitative datasets have become widely available. Ifcritical urban scholarship does not engage more fully with the analysis of quantitativedata, it will become more and more marginalized within the social sciences generally. Bycombining the analysis of quantitative data with ethnographic and other qualitativeresearch, however, critical urban scholarship will continue to make a substantivecontribution to the broader academic terrain. This will have to recognize, of course, thatqualitative research is also affected strongly by technological change, not so much interms of the availability and extent of datasets, but in terms of the capacity to produce andrepresent qualitative data through digital media.

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A concern with normative issues means that the kinds of scholars associated withIJURR run political risks. One of IJURR’s corresponding editors — Kian Tajbakhsh —was detained for more than four months in Iran in 2007. Authors in Germany working ongentrification were linked by the German police to alleged acts of terrorism. On a muchlarger scale, deep injustices persist in cities across the world, affecting millions if notbillions of people.

What does it mean to be an international journal?Whilst IJURR has long viewed itself as an ‘international’ journal, this has become moreof a priority for the journal in the past decade with the internationalization of the editorialboard. Internationalizing the editorial board is, however, just the first step in a morethorough-going intellectual ‘internationalization’, in which the goal is to transcendEurocentric intellectual traditions and practices and help to build an urban scholarshipthat is as cognizant of global diversity as it is of universalizing processes. A pessimistlooks at this challenge and sees Pandora’s box. An optimist sees a genie waiting to be letout of the bottle.

Being ‘international’ does not simply mean publishing papers on different parts of theworld, or on topics such as ‘globalization’ per se, or by scholars of diverse origins(although all of these may be worthwhile in themselves). Nor does it mean merelyapplying established wisdoms derived from the study of cities in North-West Europe orNorth America to the rest of the world. The critical application of such wisdoms iscertainly valuable, insofar as the case-studies are used to reflect on the merits of the‘wisdom’ at least as much as the wisdom is used to illuminate the case-study. Morefundamentally than this, internationalization is surely above all about acknowledgingthat theories derived from the experiences of North-West Europe and North America maynot be universally applicable, and that those regions may be exceptional from a globalperspective. Internationalization is thus a process of reconsidering and challengingtheory on a range of levels.

Many of the core concepts of urban studies ‘travel’ poorly, and understanding how andwhy this is so is a key challenge facing critical urban scholars. Is the concept ofgentrification useful in settings — perhaps including cities in Japan or Mexico — wherehousing has been less segregated historically by class than in Britain or the north-easternstates of the USA? What does ‘neoliberalism’ mean in contexts common across theglobal South where the public sector’s role in service delivery has rarely amounted topro-poor decommodification and the extension of private sector involvement in servicedelivery may have entailed real benefits to the poor? Are ‘Western’ models of land andhousing markets useful for understanding how contemporary China is changing? Criticalinternationalization entails avoiding uncritical celebration or undifferentiated gloom,acknowledging diversity within the global South just as we routinely do within the globalNorth, as well as interrogating the similarities and differences between the diverse sets ofNorthern and Southern cases.

The project of internationalization faces many practical challenges. One of these islinguistic, in that IJURR publishes only in English. Initially, IJURR published also inFrench, but stopped this in 1979. Abstracts were translated into French, German andSpanish until 1989, and thereafter in French only. We are considering translatingabstracts into other languages (specifically Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese) so as topromote access to articles more widely and evenly across the global South. In the face ofEnglish becoming the international language of academia, however, the publication oftranslated abstracts might facilitate readership of IJURR articles but will do nothing tochange the division of the world into English-reading (and writing) insiders and non-English-reading (and writing) outsiders. The second (and related) practical challenge isposed by the overwhelming dominance of academic production by universities in the

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USA, and to a lesser extent elsewhere in North America, North-West Europe andAustralia. The global South produces relatively few urban scholars, and the few there areoften end up employed at universities in North America or North-West Europe.

Together, these produce a dichotomous academic landscape. On the one hand,scholars at universities in the global North work within an intellectual environmentlargely defined by the study of the North. Many scholars — especially native English-speakers — have a limited understanding of the world outside the global North, and riskassuming that theories that make sense in the global North are universally applicable.Scholars who were born or conduct research in the global South often experienceinstitutional and intellectual marginalization. On the other hand, many scholars atuniversities in the global South face the challenges of conducting research inenvironments characterized by constrained material resources and intellectual isolation.Some of the contributions submitted to IJURR by scholars in countries such as Brazil,Nigeria, Turkey and (especially) China are weakened by a failure to link originalempirical research to broader theoretical debates and literatures. This delinkage seemswidespread in academic contexts which are isolated from global academic circuits andtend towards parochialism.2

IJURR is associated with a number of strategies to redress this dichotomy. Profitsearned by IJURR go to the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (FURS), acharitable organization that sponsors students and junior researchers from poor countriesof the world (see http://www.irc.essex.ac.uk/furs/). IJURR is currently working withResearch Committee 21 of the International Sociological Association in developing a‘summer’ or ‘winter’ school on urban studies (a ‘summer’ school for students andscholars from the northern hemisphere being a winter school for those from south of theEquator). The first such School is to be held in São Paulo, in Brazil, in August 2009, withfunding from RC21 and FURS and the generous assistance of a number of eminent urbanscholars. IJURR has also experimented with workshops for urban scholars in parts of theworld that are less well connected to the supposedly global circuits of academicproduction and publication. In line with this philosophy, IJURR’s publisher Wiley-Blackwell also grants subsidized or free distribution of the journal in certain countries inthe South. To us, the very existence of FURS, and the particular not-for-profit status ofIJURR — published by but not owned by a major globally active corporation — is adistinctive element that separates IJURR from most other journals. We consider it areason to commit to IJURR and to be part of its ‘community’ — as author, reviewer, orsupporter in other ways. As the whole publishing/knowledge industry evolves, it may bea model for others to follow, not necessarily in the same form but at least in concept.

Most importantly, perhaps, IJURR seeks to encourage comparative analysis, throughboth encouraging explicitly comparative studies and facilitating conversations betweenscholars with knowledge of diverse settings. Comparison does not mean theabandonment of theory through descriptive juxtaposition. On the contrary, the objectiveof comparison should be theoretical revision. Given that diversity might have deephistorical roots and cultural dimensions, so a comparative and critical urban scholarshipneeds to engage with setting-focused disciplines such as history and anthropology. Butgiven the pace of change in cities across the global South, the comparative project alsoneeds to confront squarely also global influences and dynamics. The comparative projectfaces many difficulties. Not the least of these is the existing dominance of knowledge of

2 This statement, which might offend some scholars from the global South, is derived from theexperience of editing IJURR. Papers based on strong empirical research too often appear to bewritten for national rather than international audiences, with insufficient explanation of eithernational debates or location in international ones. This is, of course, not true of all contributions fromthe global South, and IJURR is pleased to have published many outstanding papers by Southernscholars. It is less true of scholars from the global North who study the global South, and are betterplugged into international debates and literatures. The challenge of facilitating a larger number andbroader range of scholars from the global South to play a fuller part in international debates mustbe a crucial challenge facing journals like IJURR over the next few years.

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Northern cities and the theories derived from these, such that it is difficult to avoidlooking at Southern cities without employing lenses manufactured in the North. Butcritical urban scholarship requires that such challenges be tackled.

There is perhaps no part of the world which is as subversive of established urbanwisdom as contemporary China. IJURR has a long record of publishing articles onChinese cities, and in 1997 we published a symposium (edited by Michael Harloe). Inrecognition of the importance of Chinese urban studies, we have made a series ofappointments as Corresponding Editors of the journal and we look forward to appointingat least one Chinese specialist as a full member of the Editorial Board in the near future.In 2006, Wing-Shing Tang (from the Hong Kong Baptist University) became aCorresponding Editor. In 2008, we appointed three more Corresponding Editors withexpertise in East and Southeast Asian cities: Fulong Wu (Cardiff University), JiemingZhu and Henry Yeung (both working at the National University of Singapore). In 2009,Bae-Gyoon Park (Seoul National University) accepted our invitation to join the EditorialBoard. With the help of these scholars, IJURR is committed to helping to develop thecritical analysis of cities in East and Southeast Asia through an engagement with theanalysis of cities in other parts of the world. As urban scholars, we should be very awareof the risks of Chinese urban studies developing as either an enclave or a ghetto, isolatedfrom comparative urban scholarship. The book series ‘Studies in Urban and SocialChange’, linked to IJURR and published by Wiley-Blackwell, has also publishedrecently an edited collection on Urban China in Transition, edited by John Logan andSusan Fainstein, comprising chapters authored by Chinese and non-Chinese specialistsin collaboration. This seems to us to be a valuable model of one way in which Chineseurban studies can engage with broader literatures.

Overall, IJURR aspires to be international not simply in the sense of balancing theglobal North and global South (for example, in terms of its coverage or the compositionof IJURR’s editorial board), but rather through building a critical urban scholarship thattranscends ‘South-centrism’ as much as Eurocentrism or Americocentrism. Of course,realising this aspiration will not prove easy.

Continuity and change: format and contentSubstantively, urban and regional studies have come a long way since 1977. But muchremains fundamentally continuous and ongoing. Many of the topics and questionsanimating IJURR are old ones. Basic theoretical and epistemological issues persist. Howdo we go about understanding cities? What theories, methodologies and concepts have(re-)emerged to help us to understand cities and regions? But these concerns take on newforms in response to the changing global, intellectual, methodological and perhaps evenpolitical environments.

IJURR’s intellectual agenda and ambition are perhaps best illustrated with respect tosome recent and noteworthy contributions to the journal. In 31.1, we published acollection of papers put together by Andy Jonas and Kevin Ward on city-regions,prompting a response (in 31.2) by Alan Harding and a rejoinder (in 31.3) by Jonas andWard. At issue are the relationships between theory, evidence and praxis, and includingespecially economic data. Justin Beaumont and Walter Nicholls guest-edited asymposium on participation and governance in 32.1, and Colin McFarlane and JonathanRutherford edited a symposium on the politics of urban infrastructure in 32.2. Bothsymposia were explicitly comparative and cross-disciplinary. The first of these symposiasought to incorporate more fully insights from Habermas and Mouffe into analyses of thekinds of deliberative and participatory institutions associated with the Worker’s Party inBrazil. The second symposium explores some of the diversity of infrastructural politicsacross North and South. IJURR 32.2 also included a debate on gentrification promptedby an earlier article by Tom Slater (in 30.4). Slater had argued that the literature on

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gentrification was losing its critical edge, that a celebration of gentrification haddisplaced the study of the displacement of the working class. Slater’s argument attractedboth praise and criticism, but praisers and critics concurred on the importance ofanalysing gentrification in terms of its losers as well as winners, and to contribute to apro-poor political project. Both combined case studies from the global North and South.A rather different set of papers were included in a symposium on ‘Spaces of Modernity:Religion and the Urban in Asia and Africa’ in 32.3, edited by Mary Hancock and SmritiSrinivas. Drawing on ethnographic research in a variety of settings, the contributorsexamined the interactions between religion, modernity and the city. In addition, we haverecently published stand-alone articles on development mafias in Mumbai (LizaWeinstein, 32.1), the labour market consequences of mass incarceration in Chicago(Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, 32.2), the politics of urban growth in Korea (Yooil Baeand Jefferey Sellers, 31.3), and the character of ‘markets’ in land and housing in China(Anne Haila, 31.1).

Symposia and papers such as these provide some indication of the direction in whichcritical urban scholarship is moving. Whilst it is not up to IJURR (or any other journal)to seek to direct scholarship in any particular direction, some directions do seem to beespecially promising and worthy of whatever encouragement a journal like IJURR canprovide. One such direction is the critical analysis of urban process and form in light ofthe extraordinarily rapid changes sweeping across much of the global South. Criticalurban scholars of the global South engage with states, markets and societies that are, inimportant respects, very different to their counterparts in the global North, i.e. to thehistorical experiences on which ‘urban studies’ as a field has been constructed.Globalization and neoliberalism are certainly deserving of close attention, but it shouldnot be assumed that they entail or generate the same changes in diverse settings. Urbanscholars might pay more attention to the ‘ordinary cities’ of the world, and to theordinariness of all cities (as Jenny Robinson reminds us in her book and earlier article inIJURR 26.3). They might also pay more systematic attention to the diversity of ways inwhich states, markets and societies are being remade, not only in obvious settings suchas eastern and south-eastern China, but also in settings such as Brazil and South Africawhere the dynamics of accumulation and conflict are shaped by distinctive social andcultural contexts. Cultural sociology and social anthropology obviously have a lot tocontribute to comparative urbanism, but so too do geographers, political scientists andeven economists who are sensitive to difference.

The dialectics of continuity and change also force us to constantly monitor andreinvent the format in which we publish urban scholarship. We have long standingrubrics and sections but we also have added new features. Symposia play an importantrole in IJURR. Long ago IJURR resolved not to dedicate entire ‘special issues’ to themes,but rather to set aside parts of issues for symposia comprising (usually) between threeand five articles. These allow for groups of authors to tackle, together, a theme that isdifficult to accommodate in a single issue.

Ideally, we would also publish more essays that tackle large themes within a single,stand-alone paper. Such essays were common in the early days of IJURR, but are rarelysubmitted now. We are not sure why. Perhaps it reflects the institutional pressures onauthors to publish more rather than better papers. Some of our contributing authorssuggest that our review process is unfair on writers of essays, favouring the more limited,empirically-based case-study. Whatever the reason, IJURR decided to introduce a newoccasional section into the journal: ‘Urban Worlds’. This new feature will allow authorsto provide synthetic but critical reviews of a field in urban and regional studies. The fieldmight be an emerging sub-field (such as urban political ecology), a newly emergent issue(such as terrorism and the city, or infectious disease and the city), or new scholarship ona particular urban region or school (such as the Los Angeles School, or Africanurbanism). Contributions to this section may comprise literature reviews, but weanticipate that most will rather locate new developments in the selected field withinbroader intellectual and urban contexts. They will not include extensive reporting of

An editorial statement ix

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33.2© 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

original, primary research. Taken together, contributions will serve to take the pulse ofcontemporary urban and regional studies. The first two papers published in this sectionare Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin’s survey of ‘Urban Ecological Security’ (33.1) andBenjamin Goldfrank and Andrew Schrank’s analysis of ‘municipal neoliberalism’ and‘municipal socialism’ in urban policy regimes in Latin America (33.2). We anticipate that‘Urban Worlds’ articles will prove especially useful to teachers and students as well asresearchers.

IJURR is present in the world of urban and regional studies beyond the pages of thejournal. The Studies in Urban and Social Change book series retains editorial autonomyfrom the journal but is tightly linked to the overall IJURR project. Chaired by NeilBrenner (NewYork University), the SUSC board3 has consistently accepted only the verybest monographs and edited volumes that current urban scholarship has to offer. Weintend to make the ties between SUSC and IJURR even stronger in the future as wearticulate a coherent editorial program in joint discussion. Furthermore, the sponsoredIJURR lectures at RC21 and the AAG, for example, have been important in terms ofraising the profile of the journal within the broader social science community and haveincreased visibility for the entire project. Finally, we seek the input and advice of theIJURR community through reader surveys and inviting scholars to contributeintellectually in special sessions of our annual editorial board meetings.4

Format changes may also involve future exploration of other-than-print publication.First and foremost, digitization of all volumes of the back catalogue of IJURR is wellunder way. In our new website which is currently being built on the platform ofWiley-Blackwell, we intend to work as much as we can with interactive technologies asthey have now entered journal publishing. We are thinking, for example, of introducinga ‘meeting the author’ feature as it is practiced by other journals. Yuri Kazepov, who isa member of the IJURR editorial board as well as being a pioneer of technologicalchange in urban sociology, reminds us that IJURR has a readership that would accept andcontribute to an innovative shift in the use of technology.

In the end, our biggest challenge in the emerging, more competitive, morecommercialized, more accelerated international landscape of academic research andpublishing may be to stay true to our core belief in interdisciplinarity.Young scholars andestablished researchers in many institutions are already pressured to ‘bring home thebacon’ for their departments and universities, and many feel under pressure to send theirwork to a more clearly disciplinary journal than IJURR. We believe there is a continuingneed for critical interdisciplinary and comparative work, and we pledge to continueoffering an outlet for both. Finally, as one of our senior editorial board members, HarveyMolotch, reminds us, a commitment to interdisciplinary and comparative work makes itespecially necessary to keep assessing and reassessing what it means to be ‘critical’: asprior stances become accepted and as urban worlds change, so the assumptions of priorcritique are often undermined. What it means to be ‘international’ and ‘comparative’shifts as our own work changes the meaning of the units to be compared: What is anation? What is a region? What are cities? If none are what they once were, how does onenow do a comparison? With this puzzle, we invite your, our readers’, reviewers’ andauthors’ continuing engagement with the future path of this journal.

Jeremy Seekings ([email protected]), Department of Sociology, University ofCape Town Private Bag, Rondebosch 7701, Cape Town 7701, South Africa and Roger Keil([email protected]), The City Institute at York University (CITY), Room 228 York Lanes,Keele Campus, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada.

3 Current members beside Neil Brenner are Matthew Gandy, Patrick Le Galès, Margit Mayer, ChrisPickvance and Jennifer Robinson.

4 In 2006, Wing-Shing Tang presented his analysis of urban studies in China, and in 2007 we held aone-day seminar on the future of urban studies.

x Jeremy Seekings and Roger Keil

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33.2© 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.