It is extremely gratifying to learn that JPER has become so highly cited. JPER is a relatively young journal, just 22 years old. We try to publish the most important scholarship in each of the sub-fields of planning. Our aim—as well as that of previous editors—has been to position JPER as the journal of record, the world’s leading scholarly journal in urban and regional planning. The increased citation rate seems to indicate that JPER has reached maturity and is beginning to achieve that standing.

The emergence of JPER parallels the development of the field of urban and regional planning. Planning was almost exclusively practice-based until the 1960s. Though there were a small number of academic programs in planning, staffed mostly by practitioners, nearly all planners learned their craft in informal apprenticeships in professional offices.

The escalating concerns about urban and regional economic, social, and environmental issues in the 1960s and ‘70s transformed planning education. The role of social science research in analyzing issues and fashioning policy options led to the proliferation of graduate programs in planning. By the early 1980s most practicing planners held master’s degrees from academic planning programs. And most of the faculty of those programs held Ph.D.’s in planning. As a result, planning has been transformed from a practice-based craft into a theory-driven, research-based field.

In a related development, urban and regional planning scholarship has been internationalized in the last 10 years. There are regional associations of planning scholars in Asia and Europe as well as South and North America. It is common for scholars from one region to participate in meetings in other regions. And there have been joint meetings of the regional associations, culminating in the first global congress, held in Shanghai in 2001.

The emergence of international, theory-driven, research-based urban and regional planning created the need for a journal through which the work of planning scholars could be shared and rigorously critiqued. JPER was established in the early 1980s to fill that need.

As urban and regional planning has ripened into a global discipline, one area of scholarship has been especially important to the development of the field—the empirical study of planning practice as the basis for planning theory. JPER has influenced the shape of the field by nourishing scholarship in that area. A widely held viewpoint among planning theorists is that these empirical studies have led to a "dominant paradigm" in urban and regional planning. They are opposed by critics who offer a variety of counter arguments. All the participants in this lively and important discussion cite JPER’s articles on the empirical studies of planning practice, which is probably the major reason for the strong citation count.

Even as JPER has established itself, a number of new journals have appeared in various sub-fields of planning in recent years—planning theory, planning history, environmental planning, economic development, urban design, and so on. They are surely a sign of the robustness of urban and regional planning as a scholarly discipline. But they also create a new environment to which all the journals will have to adjust. The challenge for JPER is to maintain its niche as a broad-based journal in a field that is becoming both broader and deeper.

Journal of Planning and Education Research
Michael Hibbard, Ph.D. and Edward Weeks, Ph.D., editors
Sage Publishing, publishers