Doing Global Urban Research

John Harrison, Michael Hoyler, John Harrison, Michael Hoyler, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781473978577, 9781473978560
• eBook ISBN: 9781526416766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1 Making Sense of the Global Urban

John Harrison

Michael Hoyler

It goes without saying that urban research has become increasingly global in its outlook. Irrespective of whether you are an urban geographer, urban sociologist, urban political scientist, urban historian, urban economist, favouring a qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods approach, the challenge that confronts researchers as they attempt to participate in and engage with our increasingly ‘globalized’ urban studies remains fundamentally the same – how to make sense of urban complexity.

One quick and easy observation is that the quest to understand our globalizing and urbanizing modern world has seen urban scholars leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of new theory production. From Ananya Roy’s (2009) call for new geographies of urban theory to understand the 21st-century metropolis through to the emergence of a new critical urban theory (Brenner, 2009; Marcuse, 2009) and a more internationalized urban theory (Parnell and Oldfield, 2014; Robinson, 2011a) it is impossible to ignore how urban studies has been experiencing its own globalizing tendencies of late.

One reflection of this is how the prefix ‘global’ has been attached to all manner of different urban ideas, concepts and processes. We can reflect how in the 1990s cities research, which traditionally focused on cities as part of national urban systems, gave way to a new wave of ‘global cities’ research examining how cities are connected into international circuits of capital accumulation and political decision-making in globalization (Sassen, 1991; Taylor and Derudder, Chapter 3; Neal, Chapter 4; Acuto, Chapter 7). We can see how in the 2000s erstwhile spatial concepts such as the ‘city-region’ became reimagined and rejuvenated as ‘global city-regions’ (Scott, 2001), while classic urban processes such as gentrification and suburbanization were recast as global urban processes through the lenses of ‘global gentrifications’ (Lees et al., 2015; Smith, 2002) and ‘global suburbanisms’ (Keil, Chapter 12). The transition from ‘cities’ through ‘globalizing cities’ to ‘globalized urbanization’ is today being extended as urbanization is increasingly reframed as a planetary process through notions of ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner, 2014; Katsikis, Chapter 2) and ‘planetary gentrification’ (Lees et al., 2016; Shin, Chapter 10).

But what, we ask, can be said about the current state of empirical research and the methodological approaches we possess for doing global urban research? And what does it actually mean to do global urban research?

Now you might be thinking that this is a somewhat peculiar set of questions to ask at this point. If we are all part of the globalization of urban research then intuitively we must know when we are doing it, where we are doing it, how we are doing it, why we are doing it and what it means to be doing it. Surely the current state of urban studies guarantees we are all doing global urban research and, by virtue of this, becoming global urban researchers? We may well be but these are some of the seemingly straightforward questions we are often guilty of overlooking as researchers.

For all of the talk surrounding the move towards more globally oriented urban studies there has been a notable silence regarding the practice of doing global urban research. Attaching the prefix ‘global’ to established theories and processes is an easy, often neat, conceptual move, yet translating this into the practice of actually doing urban research presents many more challenges. Indeed, if you are reading these words then it is a challenge that you are most likely facing. The problem as we see it is that the practice of doing global urban research is often implied, lurking in the background, or largely hidden from view. This is our point of departure: in this book we aim to put the practice of doing global urban research centre stage.

Our beginnings

How do you research planetary urbanization? This seems to be another one of those simple questions. But as we discovered a few years ago, it can be rather more difficult to answer. Picture this:

• The question ‘How do you research planetary urbanization?’ comes from a group of final-year undergraduate students, many of whom are also doing their undergraduate research project at the time.
• The students asking the question are in the last week of the two semester-long modules we teach: ‘Globalized Urbanization’ and ‘Regional Worlds’.
• The final part of both modules sees students exposed to current research agendas and new frontiers in urban and regional studies respectively.

At the time ‘planetary urbanization’ was just emerging to be one of the hottest topics in urban studies. Unbeknown to us, but perhaps not too surprisingly in hindsight, we each changed our lectures that year to talk about the emerging recent trends in urban and regional studies, as they are embodied in concepts such as ‘planetary urbanization’, ‘global suburbanisms’ and ‘megaregions’. So here were a group of students being taught about the latest big ‘global’ ideas in urban and regional studies and logically they wanted to know how they could do it. This left us faced with a question which should be relatively straightforward to respond to but in many ways it does not avail an easy answer.

Part of the challenge is that neither of us had done actual research on planetary urbanization – or, for that matter, many of the topics covered in this book. This means we cannot fall back on an answer reflecting our own research experience. Part has to do with the globalization of urban studies and whether it is feasible to do primary research on urban concepts and processes prefixed with the words ‘global’, ‘planetary’ or ‘mega’. Here is a challenge. Ask yourself the question ‘How do you research gentrification?’, ‘How do you research urbanization?’ or ‘How do you research regions?’. The answers you come up with will most likely arrive quickly and afford you with a range of options. Now ask yourself the same questions but add the aforementioned prefixes (‘How do you research global gentrifications?’, ‘How do you research planetary urbanizat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Illustration List
• Table List
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Making Sense of the Global Urban
• 2 Visualizing the Planetary Urban
• 3 Exploring the World City Network
• 4 Analysing Cities as Networks
• 5 Examining Global Urban Policy Mobilities
• 6 Tracking the Global Urbanists
• 7 Engaging with Global Urban Governance
• 8 Evaluating Global Urban Sustainability
• 9 Scrutinizing Global Mega-Events
• 10 Studying Global Gentrifications
• 11 Researching the Global Right to the City
• 12 Constructing Global Suburbia, One Critical Theory at a Time
• 13 Comparative Ethnographic Urban Research
• 14 Doing Longitudinal Urban Research
• 15 Historical Approaches to Researching the Global Urban
• 16 Advancing Global Urban Research
• Index