Doing Research in Urban and Regional Planning

Lessons in Practical Methods

Diana MacCallum, Courtney Babb, Carey Curtis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317818236
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Doing Research in Urban and Regional Planning provides a basic introduction to methodology and methods in planning research. It brings together the methods most commonly used in planning, explaining their key applications and basic protocols. It addresses the unique needs of planners by dealing with concerns which cut across the social, economic, and physical sciences, showing readers how to mobilise fresh combinations of methods, theoretical frameworks and techniques to address the complex needs of urban and regional development. It includes illustrative case studies throughout to help planning students see how methods can be operationalised on the ground and connect research with urban and regional planning practice to build foundations for action.

The book pays attention to contemporary trends – such as the growth in information technology, and general shifts in urban and environmental governance – that are affecting the practicalities and protocols of doing planning research. Doing Research in Urban and Regional Planning also encourages ethical reflection and discusses the ethical issues specific to planning research.

Each chapter begins with a chapter outline with learning outcomes and concludes with take-home messages and suggested further readings. It also suggests a range of learning activities and discussion points for each method.

Part 1

Conceptualising Research

1 Introduction

Why a Special Textbook for Planning Research?

This book is about doing research in urban and regional planning. It is intended to help planning students and practitioners who are new to research by providing guidance, firstly, on some core principles for designing and talking about research and, secondly, on the concrete steps for carrying it out.

Research – broadly defined as the generation of new knowledge – is fundamental to sound planning. No matter what the scale of our attention (from the assessment of a local development to a spatial strategy for a region), we need good knowledge of the relevant issues, places, communities, economies and policy environments before we can shape and communicate our responses in such a way that decision makers and citizens can trust them. Yet, to date there have been few research methods books that focus specifically on planning, and even fewer that target undergraduates and beginners. This means that planning students have often been directed to texts grounded in other disciplines (Geography, Sociology or Policy Analysis, among others), or which describe specific methods in the abstract rather than with reference to the particular concerns of planning practice. And practitioners, grappling with ever-changing planning questions in their various places of work, are even more poorly served.

As instructors with many years’ experience in teaching courses in planning research methods, we see first-hand that this matters. Researching in planning is special. Although many of the research methods used in planning are, indeed, shared with other disciplines, planning has some unique features that are, as a rule, not addressed in the generic references. For example, planning cannot unambiguously be characterised as belonging to either the social, economic, or physical sciences;¹ it deals with a range of concerns which cut across all of these areas, and consequently needs to develop novel combinations of methods. As such planning has been described as a ‘magpie profession’ (Sandercock 2000), which mobilises theoretical frameworks and techniques from across all of these fields, as well as some ‘home-grown’ ones. Equally important is that planning tends to be oriented to normative purposes – that is, our aims often go beyond description and explanation, to explicit consideration of the new knowledge’s ultimate application to shaping the future of places and societies. Planning research therefore needs to connect with urban and regional policy, and to build foundations for action. This means, too, that planning research raises specific ethical issues, including for instance: the need to consider explicitly the practical implications of its ‘end use’ (rather than only its conduct) on the populations (human and non-human) that are studied; potential conflicts between academic, professional and institutional ethical codes; and various personal issues surrounding planners’ professional status vis a vis their subjects.

The scope of this book is ‘wide’ rather than ‘deep’ – as an introductory text, it constitutes a point of departure for understanding and addressing a broad suite of conceptual and operational concerns that first-time researchers often encounter when they start to grapple with the challenge of making an original contribution to knowledge (as they say). As such, we do not enter into comprehensive discussions of theoretical debates, nor do we go into very fine detail about methodological protocols, particularly in relation to the analytical stages of research. Rather, we focus especially on why you might choose particular approaches and methods over others, and outline some basic, concrete things to do once those choices are made. This allows us to cover a good sample of the most common methods that – in our experience – have been helpful to planning students and practitioners undertaking research projects within limited timeframes.

Our approach is to combine these basic methodological ‘how-to’ descriptions with the presentation of many and varied examples of real live research – including not only published scholarship, but also successful student projects and research applications in practice. The intent is not only to present a wide range of ideas and approaches, but also to make the abstract real and the real instructive – to cater for both theoretical and experiential learning styles. While students can read about other people’s research in articles and reports, the research methods section of many such publications is cursory, as authors tend to emphasise their findings, and learners (as well as more experienced readers) often struggle to see just how the research was conducted – where the ideas came from, what decisions were made and why, what steps were taken to generate and analyse data, and so on. Our live examples emphasise the process – from idea (question, problem, hypothesis etc.) through literature review to research design and its execution – in order to reinforce the stages of the research process as well as to illustrate the particular skills and techniques associated with each method.

We do this because we have found that students often find it difficult to make the connections –they might be excited about a particular research approach but struggle to develop a researchable question, or they have a general research question but cannot place it in a manageable context or work out what information would help them to answer the question. We hope that showing how other planning students, consultants and academics have managed these challenges will inspire you develop your own ideas about research and how to go about it. Planning is a rich and rewarding profession, drawing on knowledge of an exceptionally wide range of issues and phenomena to bring coherence to human and spatial development. Whatever your passion, it is likely to be relevant! But to produce trustworthy knowledge takes more than passion; it takes discipline and skill – as well as some imagination and creativity. Helping you to develop that discipline and skill is the purpose of this book.

What to Expect in this Book

Conventions

As explained above, this book makes extensive use of live examples to illustrate both concrete methods and abstract methodological issues. We have drawn freely on our own work for these examples, as well as that of our students and of colleagues from both academia and professional practice. This means that many – though by no means all – of the examples are grounded in Australia, where the three of us have mostly worked. Whenever this is particularly relevant to the principles being illustrated, we explain this.

Where this book describes examples from research undertaken by one or more of its authors – MacCallum, Babb and/or Curtis, with or without other co-researchers – these examples have been written by the author of the original research, and first person pronouns (‘I’ or ‘we’) are used in recounting the research processes, decisions and actions. Alternative forms of expression, such as referring to ourselves in the third person, seemed both unwieldy and unnatural. You should therefore understand the ‘we’ of this book to be contextually defined – sometimes (as in this introduction) it refers to the three authors, sometimes to a broader community of planners or planning researchers, and sometimes to a distinct group of researchers engaged in particular projects. We trust that context makes the specific referent clear.

Wherever we draw upon work that has been published (as a scholarly paper, a book or a professional report), we formally cite the publications. However, where we are using unpublished student work or policy research, we have usually anonymised both the authorship and the case, unless the author has given explicit permission to name them. We recognise the risk that this may make some of the examples seem slightly less ‘real’; however we are also bound by the same ethical obligations as our students in this matter, and trust that the point of the examples will still be evident.

Content and Structure

The book is organised in three parts. In the first part, we summarily explain and encourage you to think about a number of broad methodological issues which, in our view, it is useful to understand before embarking on a research project, especially as a student or in an academic context. It includes four short chapters:

• Chapter 2 explains the distinction between ‘methods’ and ‘methodology’ – terms which often cause some confusion. It also flags the relevance of philosophical and theoretical positions to your methodological choices, issues to be further taken up in the remainder of Part 1.

• Chapter 3 more fully addresses the role that theory plays in your research. In spite of the word’s association with ‘ivory tower’ academia, theory is important to practical research for many reasons. It is fundamental to shaping your research questions and methods, and to ensuring that your research fits within a wider body of knowledge. This chapter teases out these matters and provides some advice about ‘finding the right theory’ for your project.

• Chapter 4 describes the main characteristics of, and differences between, quantitative and qualitative methods, including issues of sampling, representativeness, data collection and analysis. It discusses the types of planning research questions that each might be applied to, and raises some questions about the helpfulness, or otherwise, of the distinction.

• Chapter 5 concludes Part 1 by introducing ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Praise
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Conceptualising Research
• Part 2 Methods
• Part 2.1 Understanding Places
• Part 2.2 Working with People
• Part 2.3 Interrogating Practice
• Part 3 Putting it into Practice
• Index