The state of urban research? The state of urban research!

Abstract

This paper takes Wolman et al.’s 2022 assessment of the “state of urban research” in the Journal of Urban Affairs as its point of departure. While acknowledging the insights produced out of these reviews of the “urban” elements of five disciplines, we question their framing and to what the collection as a whole ultimately amounts. Of course, stock taking intellectual exercises of this sort are, almost by design, partial and selective. Moreover, this is not the first (and likely it will not be the last) of its kind both in the Journal of Urban Affairs and in other urban-facing journals. In the spirit of a sympathetic critique, we highlight three issues we argue might frame any future attempts to represent “the state of urban research”: those of disciplinary partiality, geographical partiality, and citational absences.

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