Editorial: 'We are here'

'We, the sons and daughters of this land, are opening our doors, walking out into the streets and taking up positions in town plazas to say: We are here.'-super-1 A journey and an assertion made one morning in Jerusalem after the summer of 2014: 'We are here'. Or it could be a journey and a position taken on summer days in squares, streets, cafes outside banks in Athens and beyond in Greece in the summer of 2015, expressed in the assertion: 'We say No'.Universalising the steps taken above, 'we' can be, not just those who come from 'this land' but also 'those who came...from arbitrary and despotic lands'-super-2 or those decimated by 'development' across the planet. Such people are 'taking up positions in town plazas' and elsewhere. Who/what did or do they encounter? What support, obstacles, fulfilment, confusions that lead to what? To further 'arbitrary and despotic' responses and conditions, leading to liberatory movements, terminated through oppression and/or premature death, and/or transcendence, also possibly involving acute suffering, through radical change? Re-assembling the papers and reviews in this issue of City, in the light of recent events in Athens, Greece, Europe in the summer of 2015, in order to reflect on such journeys, testing and extending Academe-super-3 through explorations with multidisciplinary studies sometimes tending towards transdisciplinary ones that take in the spaces of the Agora and beyond, we construct a four-stage exploration. The first is from Jerusalem to the planet, 'reinterpreting our contemporary challenges for socio-spatial development'. The second takes in two British cities and six cities classified as European and 'in crisis' (the latter grouping concluded with a comparison with Singapore). We move in the case of the British cities from notions of modelling urban futures in Liverpool to the unrealised semi-fiction of an abandoned comprehensive transport plan in London. In the case of the European 'crisis' cities the move is towards understanding affective encounter (s). Third, taking up notions of gentrification and fascism, reconsidering London, drawing on City' s 'holistic and cumulative project'-super-4- itself a journey that has extended, in a reverse process from the Agora of its founding years in the late 1990s to its occasionally uneasy encampment on the borders of Academe from 2000 whilst seeking to retain and develop the disturbing urgency and vitality of the Agora. Fourth, we return both to the planet and to some questions raised by the assertions 'We are here', made one morning in Jerusalem, and particularly by 'We say No' made one day in Athens: who are we, where are we, how should we act, what knowledge do we need, how can we ensure that we are here to stay?