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).In the 'photographic and pen portrait[s]' of the new team of editors in 1992 (I recommend looking at the photographic portraits!), Mike Batty is described as 'editing the journal since 1982 when he became Coeditor to the founding Editor Lionel March, and then Editor from 1988. His research interests involve computer and mathematical methods in planning and design, computer graphics in the representation of spatial systems, and formal models of the planning process' (Editors, 1992: 120). This description matches the change of focus of the journal in the 1990s which seems to culminate, both for Mike and EPB, with the creation of CASA, 3 where the journal administration eventually moves to in 2004(Batty, 2004. From the 2000s onwards, the main topics dealt with in articles published in EPB are urban simulation, cybergeographies, Cellular Automata and Agent Based Modelling (CA-ABM), urban data, urban scaling, participatory GIS