The slow dissolution of urban geography, the multiple lives of urban studies

This essay considers the end of urban geography as a more or less coherent (sub-)discipline with a substantive empirical focus and an underlying research community. I approach this proposition from two angles. First, I conduct a reading of Urban Geography publications from the past four decades. Second, drawing on Scopus data, I provide a descriptive account of the publication practices of scholars publishing in Urban Geography and how these have changed over time. Based on this, I argue that urban geography as a coherent (sub-)discipline has never existed – not now and not in the 1980s. Urban geographic research has always been so closely intertwined with research in planning and urban studies that we can only usefully speak of the geography/planning/urban nexus as exhibiting some form of cohesive identity, a nexus that has remained surprisingly stable throughout the decades. At the same time, however, we can observe the slow dissolution of urban geographical research into a more fluid and broader field covering much of the social sciences, humanities, and environmental studies. In the conclusion, I bring these observations together to reflect on the multiple lives of urban studies following the dissolution of urban geography.