ancient cities

932 Urban Studies
they set up the Urban History Association. A few
years later, the Urban History Association met
separately for the first time from the parent organization,
a move that has yet to occur in anthropology,
sociology, or political science.
Urban journals within the traditional social science
disciplines began to appear in the 1960s. The
first was the Urban Affairs Quarterly (later
renamed Urban Affairs Review), published in
1965. It was followed by Urban Anthropology in
1972 (a journal whose title was subsequently
changed in 1985 to Urban Anthropology &
Studies of Cultural Systems & World Economic
Development), the Journal of Urban Economics in
1974, the Journal of Urban History in 1975, and
Urban Geography in 1980. Within sociology, a
specifically urban journal, City & Community,
was not launched until 2002. Even the professions
took notice: The Journal of Urban Analysis and
Public Management first appeared in 1972. (Of
course, social work had a long history of involvement
with the city, extending back to the settlement
house movement of the early twentieth
century. Its major journal, Social Science Review,
was first published in 1927.)
Through sections and specialty journals, groups
within the social science disciplines negotiated
their intellectual marginality, the multidimensional
(and thus multidisciplinary) qualities of the
city, and the enduring pull of their home discipline.
In particular, researchers, educators, and
scholars attracted to urban issues recognized the
political wisdom of maintaining a disciplinary
base with its already-existing affiliations and status.
Consequently, they brought to urban studies
their disciplinary perspectives and methodologies.
Having made a bold move to declare themselves
urbanists, they were reluctant to throw aside the
theoretical and methodological skills that kept
them attached to their disciplines. The rhetorical
fix was to declare oneself interdisciplinary, a pivotal
watchword in urban studies. Urban researchers
and scholars acknowledged the city as
multifaceted but not the contradictions involved in
subordinating those facets to a disciplinary essentialism.
They were not about to commit academic
suicide.
For these reasons, the urban research centers
and urban studies “minors” and academic programs
that were set up within many colleges and
universities were staffed by researchers or faculty
who retained their ties to their home disciplines.
Faculty members were “released” from course and
administrative obligations by their departments to
support an urban studies (and university) agenda.
Much like African American studies and women’s
studies programs, urban studies programs were
maintained as an appendage to the traditional
social sciences. (Urban studies as a stand-alone
undergraduate major can be found in fewer than a
dozen universities in the United States.) Only later
did it become possible to obtain a PhD in urban
studies and thus for urban research centers and
programs to be staffed by people outside the traditional
disciplines. (Portland State University,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
Cleveland State University are three of the major
PhD programs in the field.) Urban studies programs
also benefited from the rise of public policy
schools in the 1960s and 1970s, with many of
them offering courses and training researchers and
scholars to address urban problems.
Indicative of the ambivalent intellectual status
of urban studies is the lack of a canon of literature
and of texts that epitomize the field. Almost all of
the writings normally deemed the field’s major
works were written by scholars from social science
disciplines. Robert Park’s famous essay “The City”
(1925) and Herbert Gans’s The Urban Villagers
(1962) came out of sociology, David Harvey’s
Social Justice and the City (1973) out of geography,
and Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? (1961)
from political science. Arguably the most widely
known text in the historiography of urban studies
in the United States is Jane Jacobs’s The Death and
Life of Great American Cities (1961). Jacobs was
a journalist rather than an academic, and the book
is most often associated with urban planning—the
object of her wrath—rather than with the traditional
social sciences. Noteworthy is that these
texts all appeared in the early years of urban studies
and have not been supplemented, or supplanted,
as the field has expanded and evolved.
The growing interest in urban studies in the
United States in the 1960s led a group of researchers
and educators in 1969 to establish the Council of
University Institutes for Urban Affairs. (The use of
the word affairs rather than studies is a subtle reference
to the group’s interest in public problems.)
Meeting in Boston, these directors of university