Hello! A Letter from the New Editors

Abstract

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). 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 Letter from the Editors