ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a short history of the Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF) and the political-economic context of the city-region, emphasizing drivers and motivations for engaging in a knowledge-based urban agenda from different perspectives. It highlights some of the tensions that can arise in engaged urban research practice and how it had been sought to make sense of these experiences through theoretical developments and methodological reflections. The chapter shows a missing middle in the research-policy-practice relationship, characterized by a mismatch in understanding the dynamics of contexts of knowledge production and knowledge reception. It reflects on recent changes in the urban research, policy, and practice landscape in the UK and internationally, such as Mistra Urban Futures, which offer the promise of a new approach to university-city-research relationships. SURF is committed to the production and dissemination of knowledge that adds value through informing meaningful and desirable changes in the cities and regions.
