Revisioning Urban Pulse

The Urban Pulse series was launched under the direction of Helga Leitner in 2008, with a mandate to focus on emerging issues in cities and urban life across the globe (Leitner, 2008). Its original goal was to aid in diversifying the field of urban studies, building upon the critique that for too long there has been a disproportionate focus on the same topics and the same places (Robinson & Roy, 2016; Sheppard et al., 2015; Simone, 2020). This is especially true if one thinks about the disproportionate attention paid to many of the major cities in North America and Europe as well as those other sites that often jockey for position within world cities rankings and become aspirational models for urban development. The Urban Pulse series was meant instead to feature geographic locations, themes and authors that might not be quite as over-represented in urban scholarship and to highlight issues both significant and pressing in the life of the modern city.

The first articles in the series featured primarily emerging and junior scholars, as well as research in and on urbanisms in the Global South and a series of shorter articles (e.g., Bunnell & Das, 2010; Kanai, 2014; Karaman, 2008; Maringanti, 2009; Narsiah, 2011; Trumbull, 2012). Over the course of a dozen years the topics and authors in the series have expanded in terms of their range of subjects and the backgrounds, identities, and career stages of the scholars. I am particularly proud of the depth and breadth of articles that have come out as part of this series during this period, exploring topics including the construction of new cities and aspirational towns in China, Ecuador and Malaysia (Lyall, 2017; Moser, 2018; Woodworth & Wallace, 2017), the deployment of new technologies of surveillance, control and market logics (especially as catalyzed in the midst of a global pandemic) in India and South Africa (Das & Zhang, 2021; Datta et al., 2021; Odendaal, 2021; Söderström, 2021), contestations of space, territory and belonging within diverse urban spaces (Chitti & Moser, 2019; Giddy & Hoogendoorn, 2018; Mallick, 2018; Rosenberg, 2017; van Lanen, 2017), new forms of gentrification and transformation in Portugal, Turkey, Brazil and Nepal (Angeoletto et al., 2019; Carvalho et al., 2019; Hammond, 2019; Ruszczyk, 2021), the environmental politics of conservation and disaster recoveries in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Japan (Allen, 2019; Bicksler, 2019; Cosson, 2020), conceptual discussions of postcolonial urbanisms and racial politics (DeVerteuil, 2019; Gerlofs, 2019; Mordechay, 2020) and much more beyond these.

At the same time, one might argue that the de-centering of Anglo-American issues and locations has become a much more prevalent trend within the various fields of urban scholarship – and increasingly acknowledged and accepted as a necessary one. This is true within our own journal as it is across others in the discipline; perusing recent issues of Urban Geography one finds articles on mixed neighborhoods in Nanjing, displacements in Ethiopia, South Africa and Montreal, informal settlements in Djakarta, urban experimentation in Shenzen and London, alongside Urban Pulse articles on gentrification in Dhaka, Denver, and in the peripheries of African cities. The idea of a series focused primarily on urbanism in the “Global South” thus seems both irrelevant and outdated. That is not to argue that there is not more to do, particularly to ensure this empirical diversity is married with a conceptual openness (Roy et al., 2020).

As the series has created its own profile and prominence, an increasing number of established scholars have also published within it, to its great benefit. But this has raised its own questions regarding the objectives of Urban Pulse. It is no longer a series that primarily features junior or emerging scholars and certainly not only researchers from “the Global South”, another wholly unsatisfactory and deeply problematic set of categories given all we know about the production of such categories, the politics of knowledge production and who gets to claim which identities in which spaces and present themselves as an “authority” (Haug, 2021; Moletsane, 2015; Sud & Sánchez-Ancochea, 2022). Indeed, the question of where an author is located seems to have less and less relevance – even if a majority of the research published in this English-language journal still comes from researchers based in North America and Europe, wherever their field sites might be. Thus, the articles in this series have sometimes overlapped in presentation and style with other sections of the journal – Debates and Interventions or Special Issues or even regular articles, for example.

In all these ways, the mandate and mission of the original and evolving Urban Pulse series has increasingly become blurred. In recent years we have described the series as one that focuses on conceptual and emerging issues (rather than the geographic location of topic and the background, or the career stage or nationality of authors) through shorter articles grounded in particular cases. This has helped us to add some outstanding pieces to our collection, but for all the reasons enumerated above, we still feel the time is right to relaunch Urban Pulse with a renewed focus on a new mandate, one that recognizes the evolution of the field and directions of the journal while building on the strengths of the work that we have already published.

The new vision for Urban Pulse is to be a series that takes the pulse of research on cities, with an opportunity to emphasize and highlight methodological experiments and innovations through short research articles. These should take the form of “research notes” or “notes from the field” – contributions that are beyond a project report, initial findings or a grant proposal but perhaps not as fully developed as a full scholarly article. Urban Pulse submissions could thus be focused on a particular conceptual issue, urban site, or approach that helps to demystify research in and on cities. We are particularly interested in grounded research and approaches, as well as in creative methods – while we will continue to publish Urban Pulse articles within the print journal, we are also open to utilizing diverse forms of dissemination – including photo essays, video diaries, reflections on research processes, and other means to illuminate and interrogate research on the city. Community-based projects and interventions, the development of new tools and methods, or the reappraisal of existing orthodoxies would all be appropriate for the new series.

For examples of what we are particularly interested in, essays published in the second half of 2022 are a good guide, as we have begun to transition to this new vision. These include Weijie Hu’s exploration of hukou reform in Chongqing with a focus on migrant worker perspectives (Hu, 2023), Sergei Basik’s discussion of place-making and popular resistance to autocracy in Minsk (Basik, 2023), Stephanie Wakefield, Sarah Molinari and Kevin Grove’s exploration of pandemic-catalyzed cryptocurrency urban governance in Miami (Wakefield et al., 2023), Albert Orta Mascaro’s analysis of the contested nature of Madrid’s positioning as a global city region (Orta Mascaró, 2022), and Monika Streule’s examination of urban extractivism and megaprojects in Mexico City (Streule, 2023). Accompanying this editorial, we present five more essays in the Urban Pulse series that further exemplify our focus on research-in-progress.

In “Displaced for housing: analyzing the uneven outcomes of the Addis Ababa Integrated Housing Development Program” Fikir Haile explores a government-led attempt to address severe housing shortages in the Ethiopian capital (Haile, 2023, this issue). She argues that while this initiative has indeed profoundly reshaped the landscape of the metropolitan area, as in many other similar cases, inequality has deepened and delivered poor outcomes for the most marginalized of local populations. Hsi-Chuan Wang takes a comparative lens to his examination in “Cultural variables differ: informal settlement interventions in Accra and Buenos Aires” (Wang, 2023, this issue), arguing that contextual factors and cultural variables are crucial for understanding how perspectives on informal urban growth may appear so distinct. Perspectives and assumptions are also at the center of the contribution offered by Mohammad Feisal Rahman, David Lewis, Laura Kuhl, Andrew Baldwin, Hanna Ruszczyk, Md Nadiruzzaman and Yousuf Mahid, “Managed urban retreat: the trouble with crisis narratives” (Rahman et al., 2023, this issue). They take to task many of the most significant cultural anxieties – popular, scholarly, and policy-level – regarding climate change and forced migration and critique the notion that such displacement (potential or actual) can be effectively “managed”. Robbin Jan van Duijne is also interested in migration dynamics in “Injected urbanism: urban theory from India”(van Duijne, 2023, this issue). In this article, he explores the emerging context of rural-urban migration, labor migration and urban growth centers in India, and offers a schema for best understanding the complexities and nuances of the changes that the country is currently undergoing. Finally, in Max Woodworth’s “Freedom cities: Trump and an American new global city,” the author looks at the former US president’s campaign promise to build ten new cities on federally owned land (Woodworth, 2023, this issue). The purpose is ostensibly to bypass the struggles and supposed breakdowns of existing (primarily Democratic-led) urban centers and build homages to an imagined American glory of the past in a manner that Woodworth argues provides an insight into a contemporary moment of far-right nostalgia fused with particular forms of urban developmentalism.

We look forward to adding more work of this nature to our series. We would thus encourage contributors to submit short essays (up to 3000 words in length, following Urban Geography’s instructions to authors). Given the scope of the series and to ensure a proper fit with our new direction, please send your ideas for possible contributions in the first instances to the series editor (as opposed to submitting essays directly via the journal’s on-line portal) to: Pablo Bose, Department of Geography, University of Vermont (e-mail: [email protected]).