Doing Global Urban Research

Whether you are an urban geographer, an urban sociologist or an urban political scientist, and whether you take a qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods approach, the challenge that confronts researchers of our increasingly "globalized" urban studies remains fundamentally the same—how to make sense of urban complexity. This book confronts this challenge by exploring the various methodological approaches for doing global urban research, including Comparative Urbanism, Social Network Analysis, and Data Visualization. With contributions from leading scholars across the world, Doing Global Urban Research offers a key forum to discuss how the practice of research can deepen our knowledge of globalized urbanization.

What is the current spatial form and structure of our urban environment, and how can we study the factors and forces that account for the specific structure of urban space, its social and political processes, population distribution and land use? Addressing these and other issues, the authors highlight specific research questions and the ways in which they can be approached by offering a framework for considering the various ways in which to do urban research. Covering such topics as how to choose a research design, secondary research methods for data collection and how to enhance research utilization, the authors demonstrate ways to pair research questions with specific levels of analysis, such as neighbourhood, city or national level.

COMPARATIVE URBANISM ‘Comparative Urbanism fully transforms the scope and purpose of urban studies today, distilling innovative conceptual and methodological tools. The theoretical and empirical scope is astounding, enlightening, emboldening. Robinson peels away conceptual labels that have anointed some cities as paradigmatic and left others as mere copies. She recalibrates overly used theoretical perspectives, resurrects forgotten ones long in need of a dusting off, and brings to the fore those often marginalised. Robinson’s approach radically re-distributes who speaks for the urban, and which urban conditions shape our theoretical understandings. With Comparative Urbanism in our hands, we can start the practice of urban studies anywhere and be relevant to any number of elsewheres.’ Jane M. Jacobs, Professor of Urban Studies, Yale-NUS College, Singapore ‘How to think the multiplicity of urban realities at the same time, across different times and rhythmic arrangements; how to move with the emergences and stand-stills, with conceptualisations that do justice to all things gathered under the name of the urban. How to imagine comparatively amongst differences that remain different, individualised outcomes, but yet exist in-common. No book has so carefully conducted a specifically urban philosophy on these matters, capable of beginning and ending anywhere.’ AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Research Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield The rapid pace and changing nature of twenty-first century urbanisation as well as the diversity of global urban experiences calls for new theories and new methodologies in urban studies. In Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies, Jennifer Robinson proposes grounds for reformatting comparative urban practice and offers a wide range of tactics for researching global urban experiences. The focus is on inventing new concepts as well as revising existing approaches. Inspired by postcolonial and decolonial critiques of urban studies she advocates for an experimental comparative urbanism, open to learning from different urban experiences and to expanding conversations amongst urban scholars across the globe. The book features a wealth of examples of comparative urban research, concerned with many dimensions of urban life. A range of theoretical and philosophical approaches ground an understanding of the radical revisability and emergent nature of concepts of the urban. Advanced students, urbanists and scholars will be prompted to compose comparisons which trace the interconnected and relational character of the urban, and to think with the variety of urban experiences and urbanisation processes across the globe, to produce the new insights the twenty-first century urban world demands.

Global Urbanism is an experimental examination of how urban scholars and activists make sense of, and act upon, the foundational relationship between the ‘global’ and the ‘urban’. What does it mean to say that we live in a global-urban moment, and what are its implications? Refusing all-encompassing answers, the book grounds this question, exploring the plurality of understandings, definitions, and ways of researching global urbanism through the lenses of varied contributors from different parts of the world. The contributors explore what global urbanism means to them, in their context, from the ground and the struggles upon which they are working and living. The book argues for an incremental, fragile and in-the-making emancipatory urban thinking. The contributions provide the resources to help make sense of what global urbanism is in its varieties, what’s at stake in it, how to research it, and what needs to change for more progressive urban futures. It provides a heterodox set of approaches and theorisations to probe and provoke rather than aiming to draw a line under a complex, changing and profoundly contested set of global-urban processes. Global Urbanism is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students in geography, sociology, planning, anthropology and the field of urban studies, for whom it will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across the range of disciplines and practices which converge in the study of urbanism. Chapter 36 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429259593

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. This book provides a critical assessment of key areas of urban scholarship. In twelve stimulating chapters, expert contributors examine a range of important pressing topics from sustainability and gentrification to feminist interventions and globalization to security and food issues. Six more regionally informed expert reviews examine recent urban research in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, East Asia, the Middle East, Australia and Eastern Europe. The chapters provide polemical assessments and signposts for future research. The book will be an indispensable and accessible guide to urban research across the globe.

At a time of intense theoretical debates in urban studies, the research practices underlying such theories have not received the same attention. This original and creative text interrogates the methodological underpinnings of contemporary urban scholarship, with reference to different global sites and situations, as well as to recent debates around postcolonial, planetary, and provincialized urban theories. Rather than reducing methodological questions to a matter of tools and techniques, it unearths the complex connections between theory, research design, empirical work, expositional style, and normative-ethical commitments. Innovatively co-produced by faculty and graduate students from a variety of disciplines, Urban Studies Inside-Out it is comprised of three parts. Part I: An introduction to the field of urban studies and its changing theories, methodological norms and practices. Part II: Features a collection of methodological essays co-authored by graduate students, deconstructing the research designs, the methodological practices, and the modes of presentation and representation across recent urban monographs. Part III: Consists of informative keyword primers which explicate the key concepts and formulations in the field of urban studies. This volume offers a welcome intervention within urban studies, and stands to make a valuable contribution for graduate students and researchers.

Arguing that the focus in global urban studies on cities such as New York, London, Tokyo in the global North, Mexico City and Shanghai in the developing world, and other major nodes of the world economy, has skewed the concept of the global city toward economics, this volume gathers a diverse group of contributors to focus on smaller and less economically dominant cities. It highlights other important and relatively ignored themes such as cultural globalization, alternative geographies of the global, and the influence of deeper urban histories (particularly those relating to colonialism) in order to advance an alternative view of the global city.

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Global Urban Studies is a timely intervention into the field of global urban studies, coming as comparison is being more widely used as a method for global urban studies, and as a number of methodological experiments and comparative research projects are being brought to fruition. It consolidates and takes forward an emerging field within urban studies and makes a positive and constructive intervention into a lively arena of current debate in urban theory. Comparative urbanism injects a welcome sense of methodological rigor and a commitment to careful evaluation of claims across different contexts, which will enhance current debates in the field. Drawing together more than 50 international scholars and practitioners, this book offers an overview of key ideas and practices in the field and extends current thinking and practice. The book is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students for whom it will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across the range of disciplines which converge in the study of urbanism, including geography, sociology, political studies, planning, and urban studies.