Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The first issue of IJURR was published more than 30 years ago, in 1977. It opened with a brief editorial statement in which the journal's founders defined their project. IJURR would be interdisciplinary. It would be open to diverse theoretical approaches and methodologies, whilst seeking to understand urban and regional development in terms of the ‘fundamental economic, social and political processes which operate at local, national and international levels’. Such an understanding should inform ‘social action’ and not be confined to intellectual debate. The tone for the new journal was set by the inaugural issue, which opened with four articles (by Ray Pahl, Jean Lojkine, Enzo Mingione and Richard Child Hill) on ‘urbanism and the state’. Other contributors to the first volume of IJURR included Manuel Castells, Edmond Preteceille, Chris Pickvance, Patrick Dunleavy, Doreen Massey, Martin Ravallion, Roger Friedland, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Alford, Josef Gugler and William Flanagan. Pahl, Mingione, Preteceille, Pickvance, Piven and Castells were all founding members of IJURR's editorial board, together with Michael Harloe (the editor) and S.M. Miller. The founders of and initial contributors to IJURR comprised a remarkable generation of scholars concerned with the development of a radical or critical approach to urban and regional issues that would be relevant to political and social change. Indeed, IJURR included a section on ‘Praxis’. In the first issue, this section comprised articles on social or popular movements in the USA, Mexico and Spain, and on the civil war in Beirut. The impetus behind IJURR came mostly from sociologists, and there was a considerable overlap between IJURR and Research Committee 21 of the International Sociological Association, but IJURR also drew on the efforts of political scientists, planners and geographers. Change was central to IJURR's identity. Drawing on egalitarian conceptions of social justice, IJURR's founders sought to show that cities and regions could change in a variety of directions. Marxist theory was especially appealing to scholars who combined activist and scholarly missions, although Marxist theory certainly did not go unchallenged (not least by Ray Pahl and Patrick Dunleavy) and was never a precondition for publication. The scholarly practice of the journal was unambiguously embedded in an overall surge of radical and even revolutionary politics across the world. The 1970s were the morning after the 1960s explosion of critical theory and revolutionary practice. Student rebellion and scholarly debate fed and radicalized each other. IJURR was both a product of and protagonist in this important shift, and was seen by its editors, authors, reviewers and readers as such. But the journal itself is not immune to changes of many kinds. It operates not only amidst rapid change in the cities and regions of the world, but also in the rapidly changing worlds of urban and regional scholarship in the academy and of the business and technologies of journal publishing. IJURR continues to follow the general path chosen more than 30 years ago, emphasizing strongly the combination of critical scholarship, a commitment to social justice, and an engagement with processes of political and social change. But we seek to follow this path in ways that are cognizant of the new challenges posed in the changing world around us. This reflection is prompted in part by changes in the editorship. At the end of 2004, Patrick Le Galès stepped down as the editor of IJURR. His editorship since 1997 had marked a significant generational change for the journal as IJURR was now in the hands of a younger editor who was only indirectly related to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s that had given birth to the journal. During his tenure, Patrick invited onto the editorial board a group of scholars who were diverse in terms of both academic discipline and personal background. These included the book review and Debates and Developments editors AbdouMaliq Simone, Steve Graham and Roger Keil. When Patrick handed the baton over to Alan Harding and the two of us, he had edited the journal for 7 years, steering the journal through a crucial period of change. Alan played a major transitional role as co-editor for 3 years, before stepping down at the end of 2007. AbdouMaliq Simone took over as editor of the Debates and Developments section and Talja Blokland as book reviews editor, from the beginning of 2005.1 These changes in personnel entail a significant and telling geographical change also. For its first 21 years, the actual editors of the various parts of IJURR were all Western Europeans and the journal's centre of gravity was in Britain. The editorial board was somewhat more diverse, comprising some American scholars as well as British and other European ones. Under its second editor — a French scholar based in France — the editorial board was ‘internationalized’ beyond Europe and the USA, adding scholars from Japan, Brazil, South Africa, China and India. Now it is edited by a German-born scholar who studied the American city and now lives in Canada and a British-born and -educated scholar who lives in South Africa with extended stays in the USA. The Debates and Developments section is edited by a Chicago-born urbanist who works across Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The book review section is edited by a Dutch scholar who has worked on neighbourhood change in the United States and now teaches in Germany. The globalization of academia has transformed journals like IJURR. In addition, whereas most of IJURR's founders were sociologists, the board now comprises a broader mix of geographers, political scientists, planners, and anthropologists also (although not, yet, an economist). Much of the production of IJURR remains in Britain. For authors and reviewers, the ‘face’ of IJURR continues to be the indefatigable and indispensable Terry McBride, our managing editor, who lives and works near Brighton in the south of England. And, from 1991, the journal was published (but not owned) by the British-based Blackwell. But, in a world of globalizing technologies, these British connections are less and less meaningful. The paper edition of the journal is printed in Singapore. Blackwell was recently bought by the American publisher Wiley, forming the new composite Wiley-Blackwell. The internet has transformed completely the production of the journal. The submission and review of papers is now done entirely through our online system (ScholarOne's ‘Manuscript Central’, http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijurr). A large and growing minority of our core institutional clients now subscribe to the online version, either with or without the print edition also. And more and more readers access back issues through online archives (until recently through Blackwell's platform ‘Synergy’, and now through Wiley-Blackwell's platform ‘InterScience’). Changing technologies have allowed IJURR to expand its readership across the world. Over 3,000 institutions worldwide can access the current content of IJURR either through traditional subscriptions or via the Wiley-Blackwell sales programme to consortia of libraries. About 3% of these institutions are in the UK, another 30% in the rest of Europe, 21% in North America and nearly 40% spread across the rest of the world. Over 600 institutions in the global South have free or heavily discounted access to the journal under philanthropic arrangements. There is a slow but steady shift from print to online traditional institutional subscriptions. In 2007, the number of articles downloaded over the internet passed 100,000 in a year. The most downloaded article (Jamie Peck's ‘Struggling with the Creative Class’, in IJURR 29.4) was downloaded 2,600 times. More than 1,000 people receive via email the ‘table of contents’ for each issue as it is published (and we think that this number should be far higher). Articles are published online prior to being printed. Technological change poses constant challenges. When IJURR was founded, the epitome of high tech was an IBM Selectric typewriter with erasure function, and the idea of an image was a 24/36 mm colour slide. Now, of course, all work is digitalized. The digital revolution has overwhelmed us with a rising tide of images both still and moving. Cities themselves have become screens for layers of textual and image-based information, off which urban scholarship is ‘read’. IJURR now publishes photographs, maps and graphics, but we are a long way from realizing the potential imagery unleashed by the digital revolution. We are facing the challenge of the digital revolution and its apparent opportunities with a broad range of editorial strategies ranging from representation inside and outside the printed journal (e.g. through our emerging website), through more engagement with visualization as a problematic of urban research, and through recognition of the role architecture, design and style play in the urban fabric of the twenty-first-century city. When IJURR turned 21, its editorial board produced a short retrospective statement (published in IJURR 22.1). Four members of the board (Harloe, Mingione, Pickvance and Preteceille) spelt out some of the concerns that had motivated them and their colleagues. The first was the journal's embrace of ‘a critical, or approach to urban In the urban and regional was by the and of urban and and was current in the social The for as set out in a was a more to as the social which are by and the and of in the regional the of and other of the and urban social movements as of the At the in the of the journal's should not be to The of intellectual around the founding of IJURR was also by Ray new of social theory and that in the 1960s and out the of a shift in the of the city. that there was to out of the Pahl work had and based on a or This intellectual and political was strongly Marxist in challenges from scholars (and a commitment to Articles in IJURR on and In this it the concerns of European urban sociologists, in to the concerns of the the urban and regional have transformed and through both a from Marxist political and an of some of radical the of urban and for took the not the of radical political than had out by These intellectual have posed a challenge to the of or journals like IJURR. and regional have a number of the the the the the and political its of these in or more of the that inform the of urban and regional are more to the of urban or regional The on a more understanding of or in terms of urban and regional scholarship, and of our to be on in these changing times. 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Seekings et al. (Mon,) studied this question.