Urban Studies Foundation

The Urban Studies Foundation is a Scottish charitable organisation founded in 2008. Our aims and objectives include advancing academic research and education in the field of urban studies. We realise these outcomes primarily through the provision of grant funding for individuals and institutions engaged in groundbreaking urban research and knowledge mobilisation around the world. Below you can find out more about our aims, operations, awardees, and history.

Aims and Practice

The Urban Studies Foundation (USF) was founded in 2008. We are a charitable company, regulated by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) and run by a board of eleven Trustees.

The USF’s wholly owned subsidiary Urban Studies Journal Limited (USJ) generates income by publishing an academic journal in the field of urban studies. USJ donates profits arising from this activity to the USF. Using gifted monies from the USJ, the USF strives to support institutions and individuals engaged in the advancement of postgraduate academic research and education, principally through grant funding schemes. Our main objectives are:

• To advance academic research and education in the field of urban studies.
• To promote knowledge transfer, exchange and mobilisation in the field of urban studies.

We realise these objectives primarily by providing significant grant funding and support to individuals and institutions engaged in the advancement of postgraduate academic research and education through our current core grant-funding streams:

• Postdoctoral Research Fellowships
• International Fellowships (for early to mid-career urban scholars from the Global South)
• Seminar Series Awards
• Pandemics and Cities

In addition, we support a number of legacy grants (awarded pre-2016) awarded to researchers at the University of Glasgow. This includes a small number of Postdoctoral Fellowships, several postgraduate studentships, and one Senior Research Fellowship. You may read about current and past USF awardees and research investments here.

Governance and practice

The USF Board of Trustees meets biannually to consider grant applications, review the progress of existing awards, and to make decisions pertaining to all aspects of USF business. Much of the detailed work on particular grant-awarding schemes is conducted by sub-committees or panels of Trustees. Their actions and decisions are always reported in detail to the wider Board at annual general meetings, and the Board remains the sovereign body in approving all such actions and decisions. The profiles of the current Board of Trustees may be found here.

The USF makes grant awards and investments based on a rigorously competitive process whereby candidates for grant-funding schemes submit formal applications for detailed scrutiny by the awarding panel. This process is entirely run by USF Trustees who closely monitor the performance of applicants to all of its schemes through annual and final progress reports. This ensures that USF grants are being used correctly and as effectively as possible, and feedback (and, if necessary, censure/withdrawal of funding) is made to the relevant constituencies (e.g. fellows, mentors, host institutions). Whilst panel membership is liable to change year-on-year, the USF awarding panels are currently comprised of the following Trustees:

• Postdoctoral Research Fellowships: Rita Padawangi (Chair), Jie Chen, Desiree Fields, Loraine Kennedy, Donald McNeill, and Zarina Patel.
• International Fellowships: Loraine Kennedy (Chair), Jeroen Klink, Zarina Patel, and Hyun Bang Shin.
• Seminar Series awards: Desiree Fields (Chair), Jie Chen, and Donald McNeill.
• Pandemics and Cities: Linda Peake (Chair), Jeroen Klink, and Rita Padawangi.

The standards of transparency, equity, integrity and confidentiality by which the USF awarding panels abide in administering applications for research awards and other proposals for support are outlined in the USF Code of Practice (which can be downloaded here).

Individual Trustees also occupy a range of other roles in the essential functioning of the USF. For example, as the Chair, the Treasurer, and as members of internal subcommittees and working groups. It is essential that all Trustees are active in undertaking roles and tasks for the USF, in order that there is an equitable division of labour and that the USF is able to meet its mission as effectively and comprehensively as possible. Trustees are entirely unpaid for their USF work, including the Chair, although expenses are reimbursed for travelling, accommodation and possibly other small costs incurred while undertaking USF business.

Appointment to the USF Board of Trustees is made on an open competition basis, following advertisement for post(s) on the USF website (and via other channels as deemed appropriate). Such recruitment is conducted via an internal audit and survey of current board skills and attributes in order to develop criteria for appointment and nomination, as specified in the advertisement. Applications are then considered according to such criteria by a recruiting sub-committee, and a list of suitable applicants is then drawn up for deliberation by the full Board. Successful candidates will then be formally invited and nominated to join the Board. All incoming Trustees must agree to be bound by the USF’s Code of Conduct for Trustees, which outlines their duties and responsibilities to the organisation, and to disclose all relevant conflicts of interest prior to assuming the role. Breach of this code can lead to dismissal if the Trustee is found to have acted improperly and/or without due regard to the interests of the USF.

Our History

Whilst the Urban Studies Foundation was officially incorporated as a charity in 2008, its historical origins within the Urban Studies Journal emerged much earlier. The following introduction to the history of both organisations was originally written in 2016 by Professor Ronan Paddison (1945–2019), but has since been updated to reflect more recent changes.

History of the Urban Studies Foundation

The Urban Studies Foundation (USF) was established in 2008. The seeds for it were laid in the previous decade, however, when in the 1990s the editors of the journal Urban Studies began to fund urban research within the University of Glasgow through seedcorn grants. The scheme was accompanied by a Visiting Fellowships programme which had been initiated even earlier, in the 1980s, providing financial support to urban scholars world-wide who sought to spend a sabbatical collaborating with researchers in cognate fields within the University of Glasgow. Both schemes were successful in attracting leading urban scholars to Glasgow and helping to foster research projects, some of which subsequently attracted additional funding by research councils, as well as generating published outputs. This precedent demonstrated that added value could be created through judicious funding of research, a key lesson and catalyst for what was later to become the Urban Studies Foundation.

The USF has since evolved considerably – in effect becoming fully internationalised in terms of its Trustee membership and its funding programme – so that by 2016 it may be considered to have ‘come of age’. In its early years, membership of the Foundation reflected its origins in the University of Glasgow. The Trustees were drawn mainly from what were then the Departments of Urban Studies, Geography and Geomatics – which together accounted for more than two-thirds of the Trustees. They were complemented by three Trustees drawn from outside both the university and Glasgow, a deliberate move reflecting our intentions to support urban research beyond the University of Glasgow. By 2015, plans to internationalise the Trustee membership were agreed, accompanied by proposals that the number of Glasgow-based trustees also be significantly reduced.

The constitutional shifts of this period were accompanied by the extension of the Foundation’s funding projects so that they would later become fully internationalised in their reach and recognition. Initially, in the first five-year strategy (2008-2012), all of the Foundation’s funded Senior Research Fellowships, Postdoctoral Fellowships and PhD Studentships were located in the University of Glasgow. The first programme funding research outwith the University of Glasgow was the International Fellowship which was initiated in 2011. The aim of the programme was to fund promising early career urban researchers from the global south, giving them the opportunity to work with an established scholar most likely working from a global north institution. In the second five-year strategy (2013-17) the Foundation then sought to ensure that, by the end of it, the funding split between ‘investments’ in Glasgow and beyond Glasgow would be circa 50:50. This would be achieved primarily through an extensive programme of Postdoctoral funding to promising urban researchers globally, enabling support in a suitable research environment for up to three years. In 2014 the Foundation also assumed responsibility (from the journal) for funding an Annual Seminar series competition. Since 2016 the USF has now consolidated its funding into three core grant-funding schemes: International Fellowships, Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, and the Seminar Series awards.

Together, these funding programmes have been pivotal to the Foundation’s global vision and its transformation into a renowned supporter of innovative urban studies scholarship. Today the USF appoints Trustees and awards funding on a fully international scale, financing research investment around the world. We have an alumni of over one hundred individual awardees, and continue to grow annually in our organisational experience, ambition and reach.

History of the Urban Studies Journal

The Urban Studies Journal (USJ), for which the USF is a parent, was founded in 1963 with the first issue appearing in May 1964. As I noted in an editorial for the journal on its 50th anniversary in 2013, it originated with the creation of what was then an innovative research department in the University of Glasgow – the Department of Social and Economic Research. Since those early days, when it largely focused on urban and regional policy within a UK context, the journal has now become a leading outlet for truly global inter-disciplinary urban and regional research (a shift already occurring before the end of the 1960s), while also undergoing significant changes at the level of constitution and governance. Reflecting its origins as a research centre with a distinct policy orientation – and the geographically narrower world in which much urban research was then conducted and often disseminated – the initial Editorial Advisory Committee (sixteen individuals) were all from the UK with more than a third of the non-editorial members from policy research or urban practitioner worlds. By 2013, however, a then recently revised editorial committee structure comprised a total of twenty-five individuals, the majority of whom were drawn from beyond the UK, with none of them employed directly in a practitioner environment. These changes attest to the way that urban research and debates within the journal have become increasingly globalised on the one hand, and more critical in relation to urban policy on the other.

In its constitution, the journal was formed as a limited company in January 2007. The current structure of the Board is comprised of four Managing Editors (MEs), with each taking turns as Editor in Chief (EiC) on an annual basis. The present Managing Editors (in 2020) are Professors Jon Bannister, Andrew Cumbers, Yingling Fan and Tony O’Sullivan. In addition there are twenty-two further editors and corresponding editors around the world responsible for different aspects and streams of the USJ’s published output. The journal’s editors and operations are ably supported by an administrative team of four, managed by USJ Editorial Assistant Ruth Harkin. You may read more about the editorial board and the journal’s operations on the USJ Website.

It should be underlined here that, while the USF is legally ‘the parent’ of the USJ – with USF Trustees having oversight of USJ polices, procedure and overall well-being – in practice the USF delegates all operational practice and strategic decision-making (as well as personnel decisions) to the Managing Editors of the journal. A close relationship of trust and reciprocity has hence been the hallmark of relations between the USF and the USJ, and this relationship is underlined by an independence agreement between the two organisations. As part of this arrangement it is customary for the USJ Editor-in-Chief to attend USF Board meetings as a non-voting attendee, where they also present the annual USJ Business Plan for oversight and approval by the USF Board of Trustees.