Accommodating a durable community

Abstract

To reflect on the future of Environment and Planning B (EPB), I had to dig into its past. This is in part because the journal only entered my radar about a decade ago, when fellow PhD students from our Geodiversity project managed to publish an Agent-based Modelling (ABM) piece in the journal (Schmitt et al., 2015). The joy and pride of the team made me feel like this journal was a special place to have your research featured. With the online archive,1 I attempted to reconstruct how the journal and the field developed, how people predicted where we would be now. And I found just what I was looking for! Indeed, when you read Mike Batty’s (1998) editorial for the 25th anniversary, you are given a free tour of the story of EPB’s origin, from a spin-off of EPA to tackle the architectural scale of design at its beginnings under the editorship of Lionel March, to its later development as an outlet whose broader goal was, in a nutshell, to understand how cities work in order to make them better. The first 10 years of EPB illustrate the transition from a quarterly journal to an established publication for urban research, with more issues per year, more editors, in a publishing landscape divided, from 1983 to 2018, between Economy and Space (EPA), Design and Planning (EPB), Politics and Space (EPC) and Society and Space (EPD).2 In terms of content, the journal experienced a transition from theories of design to ‘formal languages for planning’ (Batty, 1998: 1). Although the journal is now operated in a collegial way, with a team of editors covering dedicated sections and leading special issues, the 1980s were a time of even more distributed leadership, with the majority of editorials actually written by guest editors. These guest editorials document the growing potential of computer usage in planning and design (e.g. Johnson, 1986; Stiny, 1986; Yeh, 1988) – an ‘unashamed’ transition of the journal’s scope (Batty, 1998).