The role of the scholar in times of crisis

In its causes and consequences, the global financial crisis of 2008 was fundamentally an urban phenomenon. In this article, we survey the degree to which urban planning and other social science scholars have incorporated issues surrounding the global financial crisis into their research agendas. Through a content analysis of key journals in the fields of urban planning, geography, urban studies and economics, we demonstrate that the scholarly publication output of urban planners has largely not reflected the impact that the global financial crisis has had on Western cities. We argue that the limited response of scholars in planning and other proximate disciplines may be explained by a variety of factors including the existence of many different crises at any one time, the structure of academic publishing, the presence of disciplinary boundaries and the personal difficulties of developing new research agendas. In the context of a discipline particularly concerned with societal relevance and the interface between knowledge and action, we argue that urban planning scholars need to find innovative ways to provide real-time and real-world knowledge about urban economic, social and environmental crises.