It would be impossible (if not counter-productive) to provide a neat and tidy conclusion that summarizes the field of urban humanities. Like their object of study—the city—urban humanities are a dynamic, ever-changing work in progress. At the same time, in the preceding chapters we have articulated some of the interdisciplinary and experimental practices and multimedia projects for studying the urban through forms of engaged scholarship and pedagogy. These are not prescriptive but rather descriptive of a state of knowledge in an emerging conjunction of disciplines. At the core of urban humanities is the pursuit of spatial justice through a carefully contextualized attention toward the future.
While a definition of urban humanities will always remain provisional, the strength of this shortcoming is that the boundaries of this field fluctuate to embrace new subjects, methods, and objects, thus leaving open a range of possibilities as cities change and demand ever-newer strategies and approaches to documenting, understanding, and intervening in them. This openness is a key element of urban humanities, creating an alternative space where new ideas and propositions are explored and tested. We can jump into projects and activities that might not fly elsewhere; we can enact new models of community engagement; and we can develop experimental scholarly outputs and pedagogies. While grounded in the layered spaces of the past and the exigencies of the present, urban humanities have always been invested in speculative practices that imagine the possibility of a more just, more equitable future—and this openness ensures that futurity belongs not only to the city, our object of study, but also, self-reflexively, to the practice of urban humanities.
But there are shortcomings and tensions that remain. Foremost is the urban humanities’ lack of a strong disciplinary profile and preferred fusion of methodologies and practices from different fields. Disciplines come with an armory of epistemologies and methods that legitimize them, as they have been based on often centuries-long canonical practices of research, scientific inquiry, and know-how. Urban humanities’ insistence of selectively bor-rowing from other disciplines and “fusing” them into hybrid practices may appear as shallow and not rigorous enough to social science scholars, who might ask “where is the empirical evidence?” Similarly, humanities scholars may doubt the seriousness of an enterprise that speculates about an unknown future, and architects may find as constraining the type of justice-oriented criticality that urban humanities want to promote. As our formulation of urban humanities has thus far operated at the interstices of urban planning and social sciences, design and architecture, and the humanities, this is all to say nothing of the critiques that may be contributed by disciplines that have yet to (but may in the future) enter the fusion of urban humanities.
A second shortcoming or tension that may not be the fault of urban humanities per se but may certainly impact and put the future of this field at risk relates to the structure of the university. As we have already discussed, the university, as a centuries-old institution, has long established the operational rules of the academy. And while academic authorities have recently purported to value multidisciplinarity and collaboration, the structure of the university (from its intellectual and administrative divisions into distinct disciplinary and departmental units respectively, to its rewards system for faculty promotions and advancement) often counteracts or at least makes more difficult experimentation, disciplinary fusion, and the breaking of disciplinary and departmental silos. Collaborative, experimental scholarship and pedagogy are far from the norms at most universities. In addition, the university upholds the independence of disciplines, which in turn hinges upon boundaries that are definitive. Scholars in each field hold to their core constituent theories and objects, even as they may criticize their canon. Urban humanities seep across the boundaries, which at times appears as trespass. We have found this problem particularly challenging for our multidisciplined doctoral students, whose very task in graduate school is to come to terms with and situate their own work within their chosen fields. An unwritten academic convention is for novitiates to remain within a field's boundaries so that they may be trained and judged accordingly. Urban humanities respect these disciplines, but not the proprietary claims on which their projects for autonomy are based.
A third tension of the urban humanities relates to the privilege that accompanies each one of us as established faculty or doctoral students at first-tier research universities. We want to work with and for communities; we value community empowerment, participation, openness, and social and spatial justice. But our positionality puts us distinctively on the side of power. Why would less-privileged communities trust us? What do we have in common with them? How can they be assured that they are not yet another “academic inquiry,” that their neighborhoods are not mere sites for hosting a new academic undertaking, which in the end will, at best, have no impact on them or, at worst, may even bring along negative dividends? Urban humanities have become increasingly self-reflective, in an effort to avoid the neo-colonialist “parachuting in” model to study a foreign city or an underserved community in our own city. With the goal of spatial justice, every practice—be it scholarly research or activist intervention—carries an ethical dimension. The field of urban humanities is in a state of constant negotiation with itself and its collaborators, the realities that surround it, and the communities with which it engages, as it seeks to counteract the hegemony of expertise. It is effectively and constantly revising its intellectual and ethical parameters based on new information, most importantly by the new perspectives contributed by the positionalities of collaborators that join along the way. In many ways, it embodies intellectual inquiry at its best, which is never static, never self-satisfied, in a constant state of productive disquiet and dynamic self-scrutiny. In other words, it is a force ultimately that shakes academic complacency, and by doing so stimulates engaged teaching and learning to inspire students across disciplines.
The future of urban humanities is dependent on how we respond to and benefit from these tensions. The presently rather murky criteria of what constitutes a “good” urban humanities project—both in its process and outcomes—need to be more clearly delineated. Good in what ways, and for whom? What does it mean to truly see spatial justice manifest? Our visibility within the university world and our alliances with university actors need to be strategic to allow us to go against the grain of disciplinarity and “departmentality.” And, above all, our relationships with communities need to be profoundly and equitably bidirectional; we need to find a way to close the gap between scholarly expertise and expertise on the ground that is held by the various communities with whom we wish to collaborate. Further, this critical work must not come at the expense of abdicating our responsibility to use our privilege and scholarly expertise to see spatial justice manifest—an “easy way out” often deployed, even with the best of intentions, by those paralyzed by these important questions. Over the past years, engaged scholarship seems in greater danger of inaction than of misplaced spatial justice interventions. Prior to action, critical hesitation and mindful collaboration are absolutely necessary, but so is designing our scholarly practices to have real-world implications beyond the walls of the academy.
As such, it is important to think through two related pieces of the Urban Humanities Initiative: how can it redefine and shape the university, in an inward-focused sense, and how can it structure and sustain collaborative relationships and partnerships with nonprofit organizations and public entities, in an outward-focused sense. Urban humanities are a system of knowledge, relationships, values, and practices. The field challenges certain structures of higher education: it isn't a major, a course, a discipline, or a department. It temporarily brings people together (students, faculty, artists, community leaders, filmmakers, architects, planners, and more) to work on projects for which both the working relationships and the project outcomes are contingent, partial, and speculative. But despite good intentions, spatial justice cannot be achieved within an academic year, and projects almost always warrant more time. Urban humanities augment disciplinary perspectives but have not (yet) fully gained traction within the university or for that matter within communities; the urban humanist's work advances the more often it is practiced under a variety of conditions by a variety of actors (for example, through experiments in thick mapping, new configurations and conditions of engagement with community partners, and so forth). This alone is not sufficient, but also de-mands a setting for reflection and critique of urban humanist work.
To date, the contributions of the different fields and disciplines to urban humanities have been uneven. The city, for urban planners, is a multifaceted object and there is recent attention to diversity and environmental justice, but these concerns have not always warranted interpretation, polyvalent narratives, or artistic action. Urban planning has few connections to conventional humanist traditions. Unlike architecture, which has strong roots in the arts and cultural studies, planning in an academic context is tied to the social sciences, and has a presentist bias toward current problems that can be solved through its well-defined subdisciplines (transportation, housing, international development, urban eco-nomics, environmental planning, and so forth). It often privileges quantitative analyses and statistical evidence over qualitative research and ethnography, and urban humanities may have overcorrected this imbalance, instead overlooking the often valuable contributions of quantitative analysis. Such work in conjunction with explorations of big data and critical data studies represents an area where urban humanities can be pushed forward. On the other hand, notions of participatory planning represent a key contribution to urban humanities from urban planning.
In some ways, the humanistic fields have been most difficult to engage because they themselves are so diverse. The spaces between philosophy, art history, music, anthropology, and literature are already so vast—in terms of method, objects of study, and scholarly traditions—that there is no built-in coherence among the wide-ranging humanistic fields, in contrast to architecture and planning. But perhaps more urgently: The city is not a pre-given construct of study for any particular humanistic field (although any humanistic field may, of course, study the city). Perhaps this is because temporality—not spatiality—has historically been privileged in most humanistic fields. As the field of urban humanities takes shape in the coming decade within humanities divisions, where it is most likely to find an academic home, it is likely to be a magnet for individuals from many different fields. The disciplinary contribution from the humanities will thus be tied to the contribution of an array of humanists rather than to any established scholarly community.
Finally, contributions from the architectural discipline need re-inforcement. The city is certainly the site where architecture meets its intrinsic political nature, and urban humanities are capable of making architecture's social and cultural status explicit, which is a central interest of many architecture students. This is the “import” project for the architectural discipline (architecture imports urbanism and humanities). The “export” project, however, is also important for other disciplines. Studio methods, material culture practices (that is, building design and architecture itself), as well as aesthetic practices play two important roles: they construct a shared reality, and they offer critical and creative agency. The urban humanities project has incorporated a version of architecture's studio methods in its pedagogy, but less so its potential for a more substantive contribution. The damaging stereotypes within architecture (its collusion with capital, its privileging of aesthetics and form, its white maleness) must continue to be addressed, and more deeply. In the future, architecture's humanistic underpinnings (history, theory, art) should be made more explicit. At the same time, along with our colleagues within architecture, we can more fully explore potential means to address its problematic social history and contemporary position in order to raise questions about spatial justice, such as through recuperating positive architectural histories, or championing alternative forms of agency and political engagement in the built environment.
This may go hand in hand with the expansion of the geographic focus of the urban. While our approach to urban humanities has derived foremost from the study of the megacities of the Pacific Rim (Los Angeles, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Mexico City), there are certainly plenty of other cities and regions in the world that can be studied using an urban humanities approach. It would be interesting and useful to do a more macro-scale analysis of the flows that pass through Los Angeles (or other cities in comparison) in terms of capital, labor, goods, tourism, migration, and so forth in order to map out a more rigorous justification as to why we have focused on the megacities of the Pacific Rim beyond the obvious geographic logics. We have always had a sense of the particularity of Pacific Rim urbanism, but a theory as such has never been fully articulated.1 At the same time, we might productively examine geographies that would be considered “nonurban,” or at least not megacities, to characterize the intimacies that exist nearly everywhere in our globalized and urbanized world. Our work in the Tijuana–San Diego region and U.S.-Mexico borderlands at large, for example, has already begun to expand the practices of urban humanities to emphasize material culture, forensics, memory landscapes, migration, and fundamental questions of ethics and responsibility. How might urban humanities further shift and develop if we looked at regions in Central America, or Southeast Asia, which are part of the Pacific Rim but aren't necessarily urban cores? Or even the Global South in our own backyard, as found in the impoverished regions that are deeply interconnected with Los Angeles yet also astonishingly overlooked and marginalized, such as the Coachella Valley or the cities of California's Central Valley?
Finally, we might ask: Why are urban humanities situated at the university and not embedded, perhaps, within the city? While we may rightfully critique the history of exclusivity and elitism of the university, we believe that the university offers something exceptional that deserves to be defended and protected: namely, a commitment to knowledge and the pursuit of truth. To be sure, there isn't a singular truth out there but rather a multiplicity of truths, systems of knowing, and ways of creating knowledge—and the university gives us the space to pursue them. In every case, this knowledge serves to stave off falsehood, ideology, dogma, and prejudice. We believe that knowledge can—and must—be in the service of democratic ends, promoting justice and equity, especially in times when the distinction between true and false, and right and wrong has become utterly blurred and upended in certain sectors of society and political life. The university is a privileged site, to be sure, but one in which truths can—and must—still speak back to power. Such truths come from the accumulation of data, knowledge, history, culture, and language; they are found in the archives and libraries at the center of our institutions; they are disseminated in the pedagogical and communicative practices that encourage students and scholars to question, critique, interpret, convey, and extend the cultural record of our humanity; and they are debated but also credentialed in the disciplinary and departmental practices of faculty in research and teaching.
As the university has begun to change, it has become a more open, more public, and more engaged institution in which knowledge is created and flows in multiple directions. Knowledge can be dangerous to some because it exposes ideology, disabuses stereotypes, and unmoors conventional beliefs. Knowledge in the pursuit of justice not only hinges on ethics but propels social change and thus is inimical to the status quo. Even with all its faults and shortcomings, the university is a powerful generator of knowledge and ethical change. It is for this reason that urban humanities emerge from the confluence of disciplines and knowledge practices of the university, but will not remain in the university alone. Urban humanities have already begun to suffuse the city by bringing the city into the university and the university into the city. Indeed, we speculate about a future embedded in the present where these spaces that have long been set up in opposition overlap, eventually becoming one and the same. This is the transformative potential of urban humanities today.