Ronan Paddison (1945–2019): An Appreciation of an Academic Life

Ronan Paddison and Urban Studies

It is with great sadness that we record the untimely death of our editor, colleague, friend and for many years the leading figurehead and inspiration of the journal Urban Studies. For many years, Ronan’s name was synonymous with Urban Studies, such was his immense contribution over 30 years to its development and establishment as the leading international and inter-disciplinary journal of the urban condition. Ronan began as a Book Review Editor for the journal in 1987 before becoming a full editor a year later. Particularly in the 1990s with the late Bill Lever, but also in the early-2000s, Ronan played the lead role in the transition of the journal from its core focus around urban economics, planning, real estate and economic development to one that also encompassed political, cultural and social dimensions of the city. Time and effort devoted to the journal over these three decades cannot be overstated, and Ronan’s critical, thorough and robust yet always fair editorial input ensured a steady and stable presence, but always one open to new trends and developments.

With others on the Urban Studies editorial team and management board, Ronan also was instrumental in establishing the Urban Studies Foundation, an important pioneering initiative to use the funds generated from the journal’s success to support urban research and scholarship. The Foundation was established in 2008 and, very much in keeping with Ronan’s own ethos, has been at the forefront of supporting early career urban scholars through postgraduate and postdoctoral fellowships. Ronan was particularly instrumental in the setting up of the Foundation’s programme to support scholars from the global south.

Ronan’s pioneering academic contributions

Ronan’s knowledge of the urban condition and its scholarship was beyond encyclopaedic, with a knowledge of the area that was extraordinary in both its breadth and depth. Right up until his untimely death, he kept abreast of debates and new directions across an astonishingly wide canvas of interests. Complementing his editorial work for Urban Studies, he undertook a remarkable amount of high-quality editorial work, performing an unparalleled service for the intellectual infrastructure of urban studies (Paddison, 2000; Paddison and Hunter, 2015; Paddison and McCann, 2014a; Paddison et al., 2009a, 2009b). He was also a leading urban scholar in his own right, making pivotal contributions to debates about: post-industrial cities, their planning and governance (e.g. Kearns and Paddison, 2000; Kumar and Paddison, 2000; Turok et al., 2004); city marketing strategies and place competition in city-regions (e.g. Paddison, 1993a); culture-led urban regeneration (e.g. Paddison, 2009a; Paddison and Miles, 2007; Miles and Paddison, 2005); public art, public spaces and urban politics (e.g. Paddison and Sharp, 2008; Pollock and Paddison, 2010, 2014; Sharp et al., 2007); social cohesion, community participation and civic engagement (e.g. Docherty et al., 2001; Paddison, 2013); and urban quality-of-life (e.g. Rogerson et al., 1989). Latterly, he also made a much-cited and incisive contribution to the discourse on the ‘post-political city’ (Paddison, 2009b).

Ronan was the leading authority on, and indeed one of the most rigorous critics of, the changes taking place in his beloved home city of Glasgow as it transitioned from an industrial powerhouse as the ‘second city of the Empire’ to a not always positive or progressive property-led makeover in the 1980s to the 1990 European City of Culture and beyond. Indeed, Glasgow was the case study exemplar in several of the academic contributions already cited, but, significantly, he was passionate about engaging with and understanding ‘the urban’ in all times and places, sometimes historically (e.g. Gibb and Paddison, 1983) and certainly with a global outlook that led him to arguments about ‘the Arab city’, the ‘Third World city’ and even, before the term had acquired its current theoretical and political resonances, the ‘postcolonial city’ (e.g. Findlay and Paddison, 1986; Findlay et al., 1984; Paddison et al., 1984). For him, to be sure, when speaking about ‘the urban world’ (Paddison and McCann, 2014b), the focus was the urban – as material landscape, as social experience, as contested politics, as cultural representation – spread in all its complexity and richness across all the continents of the globe.

Beyond his contribution to urban scholarship, Ronan was a widely respected and internationally recognised scholar in other areas of human geography, especially political geography, and it is notable that Urban Studies was not his only major journal involvement, since in 1997 he also founded the journal Space & Polity as an exciting new outlet for work on politics, political formations and their spatialities. He co-authored an early state-of-the-art political geography textbook (Muir and Paddison, 1981) and soon after single-authored the influential and in many ways ground-breaking monograph The Fragmented State (Paddison, 1983). The latter underscored the extent to which ‘national’ states are anything but coherent, sectorally or spatially, and that to understand the state is to appreciate it as a complex entanglement of institutions, levels and jurisdictions, all mapped on to a hotchpotch of variably defined and bounded territorial (and maybe electoral) units. Ronan acknowledged the need to explore both devolutionary forces pressing at the national scale, on one occasion discussing Scotland as Britain’s ‘other’ (e.g. Paddison, 1993b), and decentralisation tendencies operative at scales of the region and even the city (e.g. Paddison, 1999, 2002). Tellingly, given his concern for the fragmentation of political entities and spaces, his last scholarly endeavour entailed co-editing – and also co-authoring an introduction for – a theme issue on ‘Brexit geographies’ for the journal Space & Polity (Boyle et al., 2018: also soon to become a book; see also Paddison and Rae, 2017). At many points, moreover, the political and the urban intersected for Ronan, so much so that his version of urban geography or urban studies was always at once political and politicised. Permeating all this work was an underlying fascination with what he termed ‘local power’ (e.g. Paddison, 1999), as connected to his broader concerns with how to theorise power and its multiple spatialities: the subtitle of his 1983 monograph was ‘the political geography of power’ (and note too his conceptual claims in the introductory essay in Sharp et al., 2000).

Ronan’s academic biography

Ronan took an undergraduate Geography degree at the University of Durham and then a PhD in Geography at the University of Aberdeen, and he also acquired Postgraduate Diplomas in both Statistics (Trinity College Dublin) and Town/Regional Planning (University of Strathclyde). From being an Assistant Lecturer in Geography (in Dublin) and a Lecturer in Planning (at Glasgow School of Art), he was appointed to being a Lecturer in Geography at the University of Glasgow in 1972, the higher-educational context where he was to serve for the remainder of his career (interspersed, it should be added, by visiting academic positions in many other universities spread internationally, from where many of his explorations into urban worlds beyond that of Glasgow were evidently undertaken). He was promoted to being Senior Lecturer in 1988 and then to being Professor in 1997, before formally retiring in 2010 and acquiring Emeritus status. In many respects, however, retirement was only from frontline university teaching and administration, since Ronan continued to be extremely active as a scholar, author and editor (as can be seen from the number of references below to his publications after 2010). Ronan served as Head of Department 1998–2002, as well as dedicating many years as Advisor of Studies and subsequently the Chief Adviser of Studies in Social Sciences.

Ronan was indeed an academic all-rounder who was an inspiration to generations of undergraduate and postgraduate students as a teacher and supervisor. Remarkably, and to his great credit, Ronan continued to take on a full teaching load even as he became a more senior academic and researcher, continuing to teach his Honours level urban and political geography courses, as well as contributing to pre-Honours electives, field trips and taught masters programmes up to his retirement. He was passionate about teaching urban geography in the field, and devised field walks and ‘ethnographic’ encounters in the likes of Paddy’s Market, Glasgow, as a crucial component of his option classes (Paddison, 2009c). He was commendably bereft of ego or hubris, happy to ‘muck in’ with colleagues as the commensurate team player in the more mundane academic tasks and duties, while always happy to laugh along with colleagues at life’s peccadillos.

Ronan was an inspiration for younger scholars and new generations of urban and political geographers in both his support and generous encouragement for their work both within Glasgow and beyond. Many now established scholars first developed their critical urban gaze through Ronan’s lectures and tutorials, while he was also a source of inspiration for those going into careers in planning and public policy, as well as in geography teaching in secondary education.

Looking up at the urban

In closing, it is instructive to borrow some words here from Angus Paddison, Ronan’s middle son, included in a eulogy given at his father’s funeral in July 2019. Mentioning one small part of what he and his two brothers recall about Ronan, Angus remarked as follows:

All of us have learnt in our own way from Dad the urban geographer that cities are endlessly interesting, vibrant places. ‘Look up’ Dad once told me as we were walking in Glasgow, and I always have since.

These are simple, poignant words for the student of urban studies. Not just for his sons but for all captivated by the challenges posed by towns and cities, academically and practically, the urgent charge with which Ronan leaves us is to ‘look up’ – to keep looking up at those ‘endlessly interesting, vibrant places’ that are the stuff of urban worlds.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Angus Paddison for permission to quote from his eulogy and Lesley Paddison for her input to, and generous approval of, this appreciation. Thanks as well to John Briggs: some material from his oration at Ronan’s funeral has also been useful to us here.

References