Special Issues

Informal pre-submission inquiries on whether the Journal has a potential interest in particular topic areas are welcome. Such enquiries should be emailed to the Journal administrator responsible for Special Issues, Ruth Harkin.

Formal proposals can be submitted at any time. All formal proposals should be emailed to the Journal administrator responsible for Special Issues, Ruth Harkin.

Guest Editors are required to use the Urban Studies Special Issue Proposal Form to make a proposal submission. This form is designed to elicit information specifically used by the Journal to assess the submission. The form imposes strict word limitations on question responses. All aspects of the form must be completed and in doing so word limits must always be adhered to.

After submission, an initial check is made by the Special Issue Editor and the Editor-in-Chief to ensure that the proposal as submitted meets submission requirements and standards. Proposals not meeting requirements may be returned to Guest Editors for revision, or they may be rejected.

Special Issue proposals that do meet requirements are then assessed by a panel of Journal Editors. The rationale, coherence and innovativeness of the proposal are key criteria used by the Editors in this assessment. All included papers will also be expected make an original contribution to urban studies beyond their empirical subject-matter; descriptive local case studies are not acceptable. Strong submissions will also demonstrate a wide geographical range of contributions in the sense of proposals incorporating papers that examine how the main Special Issue themes play out across a range of countries and regions, as well as a broad geographical range of authors. The track record of Special Issue guest editors and paper authors is also considered.

Once the decision has been taken to advance a proposal to panel assessment, we will respond to proposers with a decision within six weeks. On the basis of panel assessment, the Special Issue Editor will issue a decision letter with one of four outcomes (Reject/Requires Major Revision/Requires Minor Revision/Provisional Accept) together with feedback on the proposal explaining the decision.

Once a Special Issue proposal has been provisionally accepted, the designated Guest Editors will be issued with further guidance, which contains details of the administrative arrangements for progressing the Special Issue to publication, a publication timescale that includes important interim deadlines, and formatting requirements.

Prospective Guest Editors should note that they will be required to play an integral part in ensuring the quality of the Issue and thus of the articles comprising it. In particular:

• Guest Editors themselves must assess each paper and advise the author(s) on changes required before it is submitted to the Journal, to ensure that their paper is likely to come through the refereeing process successfully. Individual papers may still experience difficulty in the refereeing process, including rejection. But as the loss of several papers will undermine the viability of the Special Issue it is imperative that the Guest Editor(s) ensure as far as is possible that papers are robust pre-submission.
• Guest Editors are responsible for identifying reviewers acceptable to the Journal (active/expertise in the relevant field; absence of close links to paper authors – e.g. reviewers should not be at the same institution or have previously published with the authors) for each of the submitted papers. A minimum of 3 reviewers is required for each paper, but, as many choose to decline an invitation to review, Guest Editors should initially identify at least 6 potential reviewers per paper.
• Guest Editors are closely involved in the decision-making process following paper review. Once all the referee reports on a SI paper have been received, Guest Editors must consider the comments of the reviewers and draft a decision letter for consideration by an assigned Journal Editor, who will retain the authority to reject or modify Guest Editor decision recommendations.
• Guest Editors must ensure that, collectively, the individual papers submitted contribute to overall Special Issue coherence. Key will be ensuring that each of the papers clearly relates to the overall ambitions and purpose of the Special Issue. The introductory paper by the Guest Editors is pivotal here, providing the conceptual framework in which paper authors can position themselves. Papers must not read as separate case studies in which the connections to the ‘bigger issues’ raised in the Special Issue are left to the reader to identify.
• Guest Editors must ensure that all papers are progressed timeously, so that the final set deadline for the submission of all copy is met. This will involve being proactive in maintaining progression of the papers through the review system.
• Guest Editors must be proactive where the viability of the Special Issue is threatened by dilatory authors or by attrition of Special Issue substance through paper rejection. This will involve bringing problems to the attention of the Journal in a timely manner and discussing possible methods of resolving these problems.
• Guest Editors will be required to sign an agreement document that confirms they understand and accept their responsibilities and undertake to fulfil them to the highest standards of editorial integrity.

Guest Editors: Scott Hawken, Christian Isendahl, Keir Strickland and Stephan Barthel

Papers include:

Mesoamerican urbanism: Indigenous institutions, infrastructure, and resilience by David M Carballo, Gary M Feinman and Aurelio López Corral

Long-term trends in settlement persistence in Southwest Asia: Implications for sustainable urbanism, past, present and future by Dan Lawrence, Michelle W de Gruchy, Israel Hinojosa-Baliño and Abdulameer Al-Hamdani

Underground urbanism in Africa: Splintered subterranean space in Lagos, Nigeria by Abidemi Agwor, Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita and Paul G Munro

Urban development and long-term flood risk and resilience: Experiences over time and across cultures. Cases from Asia, North America, Europe and Australia by Duncan C Keenan-Jones, Anna Serra-Llobet, Hongming He and G Mathias Kondolf

Growth and decline of a sustainable city: A multitemporal perspective on blue-black-green infrastructures at the pre-Columbian Lowland Maya city of Tikal by Christian Isendahl, Nicholas P Dunning, Liwy Grazioso, Scott Hawken, David L Lentz and Vernon L Scarborough

Old cities, ‘new’ agendas: Swedish cities across time by TL Thurston and Claes B Pettersson

(In-)formal settlement to whom? Archaeology and old urban agendas for sustainability transitions in Ethiopia by Federica Sulas and Christian Isendahl

Guest Editors: Jochen Monstadt, Jonathan Rutherford and Olivier Coutard

Papers include:

The limits to the urban within multi-scalar energy transitions: Agency, infrastructure and ownership in the UK and Germany by Helen Traill and Andrew Cumbers

Bridging ‘infrastructural solutions’ and ‘infrastructures as solution’: Regional promises and urban pragmatism by Michael R Glass and Jean-Paul D Addie

Urban mobilities in Mumbai: Towards worker-centric platformisation beyond ‘urban solutionism’ by Tobias Kuttler

Fixing motorisation: The logics of infrastructure solutionism in Bengaluru by Sreelakshmi Ramachandran, Apoorva Rathod, Jacob Baby, Yogi Joseph and Govind Gopakumar

Everyday practices of administrative ambiguation and the labour of de-ambiguation: Struggling for water infrastructure in Mumbai by Purva Dewoolkar, Deljana Iossifova, Sitaram Shelar, Alison L Browne and Elsa Holm

Guest Editors: Antoine Courmont and Burcu Baykurt

Guest Editors: Lorenzo Vidal, Javier Gil and Miguel A Martinez

Guest Editors: Jane M Jacobs and Ofita Purwani

Guest Editors: Gareth Fearn, Güldem Özatağan and Ayda Eraydın

Housing the historical bloc: Civil society contestation of authoritarian neoliberalism in England by Gareth Fearn

Guest Editors: Daniel Muñoz, Jamie Arathoon and Jennie Middleton

Guest Editors: Zachary Lamb, Esther Sullivan and Andrew Rumbach

Guest Editors: Jonathan Corcoran and Rebecca Wickes

Guest Editors: Gabriela Debrunner, David Kaufmann and Justin Kadi

Guest Editor: Holly Randell-Moon 

Guest Editors: Lucilla Barchetta and Mathilda Rosengren