The Routledge Handbook of Planning Research Methods

Elisabete A. Silva, Patsy Healey, Neil Harris, Pieter Van den Broeck, Elisabete A. Silva, Patsy Healey, Neil Harris, Pieter Van den Broeck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317917021
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The Routledge Handbook of Planning Research Methods is an expansive look at the traditions, methods, and challenges of research design and research projects in contemporary urban planning. Through case studies, an international group of researchers, planning practitioners, and planning academics and educators, all recognized authorities in the field, provide accounts of designing and implementing research projects from different approaches and venues. This book shows how to apply quantitative and qualitative methods to projects, and how to take your research from the classroom to the real world. The book is structured into sections focusing on

Beginning planning research

Research design and development

Rediscovering qualitative methods

New advances in quantitative methods

Turning research into action

With chapters written by leading scholars in spatial planning, The Routledge Handbook of Planning Research Methods is the most authoritative and comprehensive handbook on the topic, providing both established and ground breaking coverage of spatial planning research methods. The book is an invaluable resource for undergraduate and graduate level students, young professionals and practitioners in urban, regional, and spatial planning.

PART 1 Personal reflections on research careers

1.1 Introduction

Patsy Healey

DOI: 10.4324/9781315851884-2

Doing good research is not just a question of following appropriate technical procedures. It takes complex judgements, imaginative insight and intense critical exploration of the topic in hand. Research requires professional skill, just as doing good planning work does. And as with the development of planning skills, it takes education, experience and time to mature. How can we build these skills in the planning field? To introduce this question and the book as a whole, we begin the discussion of research methods with biographical profiles of planning researchers, to illuminate the diverse personal journeys people have taken in developing their research focus and expertise. These profiles are not just career descriptions. They are also reflections on many of the conceptual, methodological and institutional issues raised in the rest of this book.

The profiles are by some of the editors, and a few others, to reflect a range of research careers and academic/practice environments. Finally, we were very pleased when John Forester agreed to add his paper, which had been circulating for some years informally, on how he learned the art of academic writing. So we have contributions from myself and John, now in or near semi-retirement; Mee Kam Ng and Heather Campbell, in senior professorial positions; with Neil Harris and Elisabete A. Silva, at mid-career stage. Our research training and experience range from the UK, Portugal, Hong Kong and the US. We all acquired doctorates, the younger ones in the context of well-structured programmes. Some of us, in addition to doctorates, acquired children as well! All of us have been challenged by the demands of combining research activity with practical work, social activism, academic teaching and our non-academic commitments. And we have all stumbled along through pitfalls and uncertainties, which somehow are always present, however experienced you are. So we hope these personal reflections will give some reassurance to those starting out on a doctoral programme or an academic career in the planning field about how to get through what lies ahead!

All of us are different, and so each reflection is different in style and content. But several themes emerge across the contributions. One is how we got into the planning field and then discovered that we were absorbed by research inquiry. As with life trajectories in general, our stories show a mixture of accident, personal background, inspirational teachers and work experiences, encouraging supervisors, a book or paper which showed us how to go on, and growing self-awareness about what we really wanted to do. Several of us did not expect to become researchers, and found out only through doing it that undertaking research inquiry driven by the problems and dilemmas of the practical world was such an absorbing and rewarding activity. All of us, however, have been stimulated by the complex relation between research and practical activity.

Another theme is the variable experience of an academic environment in the planning field. Heather and John have some harsh words to say about how academics behave! Heather sought to change her academic environment through creating a different departmental culture. John provides advice about how to make constructive use of the criticism we receive, however motivated. All of us have had to combine the varied demands of working in an academic context in a field which also values practical engagement, and have found that such engagement has often inspired our academic work. Neil and I have undertaken consultancy contracts from an academic position. Mee Kam has linked her teaching and research work with active community involvement. Elisabete focuses on skill development in spatial analysis, drawing on practice involvements. Heather has used her experience in academic organization to learn about practical engagement, while John has focused his research on how practitioners go about their work. But it is never easy to manage the competing demands of practical engagement, academic teaching and the administration that goes with it, along with a substantial portfolio of research activity, as Neil discovers. Different emphases may be needed at different times and in different contexts. Yet, as John stresses, teaching is not a distraction from research work, but can help to consolidate and contextualise research activity.

Our collective experiences also illustrate that research work in the planning field is done in many different social contexts. Sometimes we work in an individual way, in control of our own project from start to finish – rather like a standard PhD but without the supervisor. But often we work in teams, and we have to pay attention to research funders or practice-based clients. This book has examples of research activity in all kinds of institutional positions, and these personal reflections give an introduction to the challenges of different situations. And there are always tensions between the demands of a situation – to get a contract completed, to stick within a budget, to get the PhD written up and examined – and the time it takes for our ideas, insights and understanding to mature, to get ‘cooked’, as John explains. One of the advantages of an academic career is that a research interest can build through the years, allowing us to explore different avenues and make mistakes as we go along. John and I can confirm that we do not always agree with the written work of our younger selves. It is not only our ideas and interpretations which develop, grow, shift and change with time. It also takes time to build an academic research career. Elisabete gives good advice on how to go about this, having moved in her trajectory from Portugal, to the US and then to the UK. She emphasises the importance not just of doing research but also of getting published so that our work is recognised and shared. John takes us into the spills and setbacks of the writing experience. Heather warns against trying to mimic the established disciplines too closely. Instead, she argues, we should aim to combine good scholarship with the special insights which come from our engagement with planning practices.

So these biographical reflections will take readers into the messy business of becoming a researcher in the planning field and doing research through an academic lifetime. It takes time and struggle to build skills, experience and confidence, and a good dose of determination as well. But we all acknowledge the great good fortune we have had in finding ourselves contributing to, and continuing to learn from, a rich and stimulating vein of academic scholarship and practical endeavour.

1.2 Learning the Craft of Research

A continuing process

Patsy Healey

DOI: 10.4324/9781315851884-3

Embarking on a doctorate

I have often told the story of how I came into the planning field. After a few years working in the planning department of a London borough in the 1960s, during which I got my professional planning qualifications by studying part-time, I still felt I knew little about the planning activity I was involved in. I did, however, come from an academic family, so I thought that by doing a PhD I might get a better idea of the nature of the planning endeavour. This led me to get accepted for doctoral studies at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1969. I was lucky at the time because a new master’s and doctoral programme in urban and regional planning had just been established, and my interest and professional background seemed to fit the profile of the students they were looking for.

As with so many doctoral students, I came to the LSE with a vague idea that I wanted to investigate how far planning – as an idea and activity – could contribute to transforming societal conditions. ‘Planning and change’ became the overarching theme of my inquiries, and the eventual title of my dissertation. My supervisor suggested I should look at the experience of new and expanded towns in the UK, but at the time I had the opportunity of going to Latin America, where urbanisation was proceeding apace. This seemed much more interesting, and after a few months, the UK experience was quietly dropped. But that still left me with an enormously broad canvas, and I spent months in the LSE Library exploring what the social sciences had to say about the trajectories of countries experiencing development and about the relation between societal development and urban development. These journeys into different disciplinary fields were adventures into the thought-worlds of diverse epistemic communities.¹ Grasping the complex relation between concepts, research questions, research methods and interpretive analyses was a challenge. Each field, with its own multiple strands and debates, was so different. ‘How do they come to think like this?’ I often wondered. Debates on urbanisation and development in sociology, anthropology, geography and political science had different foci of attention and different ways of framing issues, investigating them and justifying findings. But the explorations proved excellent training in how to enter into and draw ideas from different disciplinary fields, as well as developing my sensitivity to interpretive approaches.²

However, back then, there was little mention of interpretive approaches, as the social sciences which I encountered were dominated by a mixture of positivist science and empiricist method. And in those days in the UK, there was little tradition of training doctoral students in research methods. I drew, in an unreflective and unstructured way, on what I had learned in undergraduate days in geography (descriptive ways of identifying and mapping phenomena) and social anthropology (ethnographic ways of immersing the researcher in the life / thought-worlds of others). Supervisors left us mostly to our own devices, and to our discussions with each other and in seminars. I used to prepare papers for my supervisor, and only occasionally got feedback. However, I discovered that an imagined supervisor could be valuable. I used to think about how my actual supervisor might respond to what I had written, and in such reflections began to construct all the criticisms that I thought he might make. In this way, I lodged the critic inside my head. Through supervising others, I have since come to think that a key role of a PhD experience in an academic career is to develop this auto-critical capacity. Good scholarship demands a difficult combination of confidence to drive forward with new explorations and insights, and humility in the face of the difficulty of grasping, even in a small focused study, how the world goes on.

So my doctoral experience was a messy, ‘do-it-yourself’ kind of training experience, through which I learned a tremendous amount, including about the tradition of ideas in the planning field and about how such ideas came to life in practices – in my case, in Venezuela and Colombia. In retrospect, I wish I had had more exposure to discussions of research methods. It would also have been helpful to have had some opportunity to discuss the different epistemological traditions through which systematic knowledge could be produced. Such philosophical reflection was lacking in the intellectual climate of British geography and planning at that time, until David Harvey came along.³ But on completing the thesis, I found enlightenment in phenomenology, to which I was introduced by Joe Bailey, who was then teaching sociology to planners at Kingston Polytechnic, where I had a lecturing post for a few years. Joe introduced Marxist analysis and phenomenological ideas (Bailey 1975), a combination which was later brilliantly articulated by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984). Through David Silverman’s work in particular, a sociologist then interested in organizational dynamics, I came to know of all kinds of ways of doing qualitative research investigation.⁴

My first funded research project

By this time, although I was by then at the Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) and involved in the design of planning programmes, it had become clear to me (and others) that I was fuelled by curiosity about how planning ideas came to interact with the practical world. This was in effect a more modest reformulation of my earlier interest in planning and change. In my Latin American work, I had found different ideas about planning coexisting and sometimes clashing in the development of urban governance practices. Remembering my planning experiences in London a few years before, I wondered what ideas were influencing planning practices in the thirty-three London boroughs.⁵ This led to the design of a research project, Planners’ Use of Theory in Practice, funded by the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES).⁶ Brian McLoughlin was a senior researcher there at the time, and proved very supportive to an unknown and inexperienced researcher.⁷ Such people are very helpful to early-stage researchers, and I was lucky to find him.

This new study was much more methodologically aware than my PhD. It combined participant-observation with interview survey to investigate planners’ use of theory in practice. Jacky Underwood, who had also worked as a planner in a London borough, became the research associate who spent six months in one of the boroughs.⁸ We both did the interviews with planners at different levels in each borough planning department, using semi-structured questionnaires and the careful writing up of each interview. We also followed Silverman’s advice, and discussed our draft research reports with those who had been the subjects of our research. This proved both challenging and enriching, as we had to make sense of the reactions and comments they made. Where possible, I have used this procedure in subsequent research. However, such a practice takes time and demands careful attention to ethical concerns.

It was on the basis of this research that I created my first map of the planning theories in circulation in practice.⁹ But we concluded also that the dominant ideas and practices (we might now call these ‘communities of practice’, after Wenger 1998) in each London borough were influenced by the configuration of local politics and the development challenges faced in each place. This led on to research which focused directly on the way that development plan-making work was shaped by its context. In these investigations, I got used to working in teams, and also with clients. Funding from national government for studies on how the planning system was working had the benefit of both providing significant financial support for research activity and facilitating good access to the working practices of local authorities.¹⁰ But there were also significant tensions. I have described elsewhere the pressures a client can put on a research team to change their findings.¹¹ We also had to keep in mind a double audience for our work. On the one hand, we had to produce research reports which conveyed our findings in a format that would reach our client’s audiences. On the other, we needed to report our investigations to a more scientifically minded academic community. This double reporting was a time-consuming and demanding process, but very productive of new insights.

Changing locations

In the late 1980s, I moved to the University of Newcastle (United Kingdom). There I was challenged to understand a very different context to that in affluent southern England. With colleagues, we explored a variety of policy initiatives aimed at the physical and social regeneration of the Newcastle area, sometimes as participants, sometimes shadowing key actors as they went about their work, sometimes working with community groups to give voice to their perceptions of an initiative as it evolved. In t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction: the craft of ‘doing research’ in spatial and regional planning
• PART 1 Personal reflections on research careers
• 1.1 Introduction
• 1.2 Learning the Craft of Research A continuing process
• 1.3 Shifting between Academia and Practice Reflections on doing planning research in a university environment
• 1.4 Research Methodology and My Life Some personal reflections
• 1.5 It Takes more than just Looking to Make a Difference The challenge for planning research
• 1.6 The Life-Changing Transitions of an Academic Research Career
• 1.7 Learning the Craft of Academic Writing
• PART 2 The craft of research
• 2.1 Introduction
• 2.2 Research Design
• 2.3 Planning Research Ethics
• 2.4 What can We Learn from France? Some reflections on the methodologies of cross-national research
• 2.5 Towards Social Holism Social innovation, holistic research methodology and pragmatic collective action in spatial planning
• 2.6 Refutation and the Knowledge Base of Urban Planning
• 2.7 Inquiry and Design for Spatial Planning Three approaches to planning research in late modern cities
• PART 3 Working within a qualitative tradition
• 3.1 Rediscovering Qualitative Research
• 3.2 Analysing Qualitative Data
• 3.3 Researching Community Engagement in Post-1997 Hong Kong Collaborative or manipulative practice?
• 3.4 Planning for the Place Ethnographic research and planning practice
• 3.5 Researching Professional Perspectives in Practice A pedagogic-ethnographic approach
• 3.6 Analysing Cartographic Representations in Spatial Planning
• 3.7 Urban Morphology and Cultural Expressions Qualitative methods to understand the city's dynamic in a self-built area in Caracas, Venezuela
• 3.8 A Value-Oriented Approach to Discursive Analysis of Urban and Regional Planning
• 3.9 Imagination as a Method for Generating Knowledge about Possible Urban Futures
• 3.10 From Wicked Problems to Elusive Planning Exploring Dubai's development conundrum
• PART 4 Working within a quantitative tradition
• 4.1 Quantitative Methods' Expertise – A Diverse Landscape in Europe and Around the World
• 4.2 Thinking Spatially, Thinking Statistically
• 4.3 Indicators and Spatial Planning Methods and applications
• 4.4 Measuring Space A review of spatial metrics for urban growth and shrinkage
• 4.5 Regression Analysis in Planning Research
• 4.6 Spatial Econometrics in Practice
• 4.7 Planning Support Systems (PSS) as Research Instruments
• 4.8 Geoprocessing and Spatial Planning Some concepts and applications
• 4.9 Spatial Simulation and the Real World Digital methods and techniques in the context of strategic planning
• 4.10 Spatial Data Infrastructures for Spatial Planning Research
• 4.11 Urban Sprawl and Region Building
• PART 5 Methodology in action
• 5.1 Methodology in Action The relationship between research and practice
• 5.2 Research Impact Should the sky be the limit?
• 5.3 Enabling Transdisciplinary Research on Social Cohesion in the City The Social Polis experience
• 5.4 Researching for Policy Relevance Critical reflections on government-sponsored research
• 5.5 Using the Case Study Approach to Inform Planning Practice and Research in Africa
• 5.6 Urban Master Planning in China A case study of policy and practice in Hua County
• 5.7 Conceptual and Epistemic Uncertainty in Planning Research for the renewal of industrial areas in Sweden
• 5.8 Cost-Benefit Analysis in Participatory Planning A critical perspective
• 5.9 The Strategic Use of the Charrette Process for Applied Research
• 5.10 Engaging and Educating Young People in Sustainable Development Communicating research findings and planning practice in an active learning environment
• Index