Researching the City

A Guide for Students

Kevin Ward

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781529700978
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This practical guide for students focuses on the city and on the different ways to research it. The authors explain how urban studies research is done, from the original idea to design and implementation, through to writing up and representation. Substantive chapters explain each method in detail, from using archival methods, interviews, ethnography, questionnaires, discourse analysis and diaries, to using GIS and visual methods.

This second edition offers:

·A thorough introduction to the research process

·Revised and updated discussions of foundational methods

·A new chapter on sensory methods

·A new chapter on social media as an object or a method of studying the city.

With real world examples throughout and guided further reading for each chapter, it is an inspiring guide for students carrying out their own research in urban geography, urban planning, urban sociology and urban studies.

1 Introduction

Kevin Ward

Beginnings

It began in March 1990 and it ended in February 1991. From start to finish, eleven months of my life was spent on my undergraduate dissertation. Towards the end it felt like I had been working on it for years, not months. I could think of nothing else as the submission date neared. The dissertation had begun, as so many do I think, by my speaking to staff, reading in a rather ad hoc and unsystematic manner academic papers on the sorts of issues in which I thought I was interested, and generally thinking about what sort of dissertation I wanted to produce. There was so much choice! How was I ever going to find my way through the literature? How would I come up with a question or a topic? What methods would I use? How would I know if I had ‘enough’ data? How would I analyse the ‘data’? What counts as ‘data’? There were so many questions, these and many others as well, that many times it felt a little overwhelming.

Now almost thirty years later it is tempting to believe I knew from the start what I was doing: that I had a plan and simply followed it through. The academic that I have become would like to believe so. This would be disingenuous, however. I did not have much of a clue if I am honest. Like many of the undergraduate and graduate students I have advised over the past two decades at the University of Manchester, I really had very little idea either of what I wanted to do my dissertation on or of how I was going to do it. This was my point of departure in early 1990.

Over the course of the next year I struggled along, grappling with the various geographical theories that academics seemed to be writing to one another about. It appeared I was being drawn to producing a piece of work that lay at the intersection of economic and urban geography, although I am not sure I would have described it like that all those years ago! Debates about economic restructuring, about the successor of Fordism, about something called regulation theory, were all being played out in the journals that I was struggling to find time to read while at the same time meeting the deadlines for coursework submission. I met my adviser on a regular basis, although the support I received was far short of what we offer our students at Manchester. There were no weekly tutorials, no feedback on chapters prior to submission, but rather informal discussions and updates. The summer of 1990 was when I was supposed to do my fieldwork, but England’s progress to the semi-finals of the World Cup did not help my cause! A number of weeks were lost, and I was playing catch-up. The last few months of the year, and of writing up, were predictably stressful. At the time 15,000 words felt like a lot. Structuring the argument, outlining a theoretical perspective, justifying a methodological approach, marshalling the data, pulling through the key arguments and themes – these were all things that I knew constituted a good piece of work but were also all things on which I struggled. The dissertation I submitted received a mark in the mid-60s. At the time I thought it was worth more, but having just reread it I would say the examiners were generous!

The year 2020

Fast forward almost thirty years and I have subsequently researched and written two master’s dissertations and one doctoral dissertation. Many of the issues I faced in each were similar to those I faced in my undergraduate dissertation: from challenging questions of theory and methods to more mundane concerns over identifying interviewees, organizing fieldwork and checking references. Each dissertation has been longer than the last but has also been easier to research and to write. Over the years I have refined the art of writing a piece of independent research, which probably explains why I do what I do for a living! However, I have not forgotten how hard I found producing my undergraduate and graduate dissertations. I try to bear this in mind when I speak to students at Manchester who are experiencing the same concerns that I had all those years ago. For what I, and Geography at Manchester, expect from a dissertation, whether it be an undergraduate or a graduate piece of work, is not that different from what was expected of me. While there have been many changes in the UK higher education sector over the past three decades in the undergraduate and graduate curriculums – and in other education systems around the world – the dissertation, as a piece of independent and scholarly research, remains largely intact. By and large the substance, the structure and the style of a dissertation are today what they were when I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s/early 1990s and a graduate in the early to late 1990s. In many universities it still makes up a significant element of the overall mark; students still work on it for a year or so, as part of a three- or four-year undergraduate degree programme, or for a number of months for a one- or two-year master’s; and it is still something that prospective employers show an interest in at interviews. While it might not be exactly the same around the world, at least at the undergraduate level, many students are nevertheless required to produce a not-dissimilar document, in terms of both length and structure.

However, one aspect of producing a dissertation that has changed quite dramatically over the past thirty years or so is that, back then, there was very little academic literature to turn to for help. Most of the approaches or methods pieces I drew upon in my undergraduate and graduate dissertations were those written by academics for academics, and there were not many of them. Now there is a mass of books written specifically for those students who are required to produce dissertations for their degrees. Think of the books you know about, the ones you are assigned on methods and philosophies classes, or which are recommended to you to help you research and write your dissertation. Some are in geography, others in cognate disciplines, such as anthropology or sociology. Many, indeed, describe themselves as ‘social science’ textbooks, transcending individual disciplines such as geography. It is possible to organize them into four groups, although there are plenty of overlaps, as one might expect.

The first group contains those books that outline the various histories and geographies of the discipline in the context of the claim made by Heffernan (2003: 3) that ‘[t]here is no single history of “geography”, only a bewildering variety of different, often competing versions of the past.’ These explore the emergence of the discipline and its evolution over the years. They examine the ways in which new thinking emerged, such as that around the quantitative revolution in the 1960s or cultural studies in the 1990s, and what this meant for the discipline, from the methods that geographers began to use, to what counted as ‘data’ (Boyle et al. 2017; Dorling and Lee 2016; Johnston and Sidaway 2016). Some highlight the internal differences within the subject, most noticeably between human and physical geography. They provide some historical context to the production of your dissertation, hopefully making you aware of how the research that now gets done under the name of ‘geography’ has changed over the years.

The second set of books that will be useful to you in the process of producing a dissertation contains those that focus on the approaching and researching of geography (Aitken and Valentine 2006; Castree et al. 2005; Clifford et al. 2016; Cloke et al. 2004; Flowerdew and Martin 2005a; Hoggart et al. 2002; Kitchin and Tate 2000). In these the emphasis tends to be on the philosophies and theories that characterize the current discipline. From these collections and compendiums you get a real sense of the diversity of geography. For all students this is both an opportunity and a challenge. The relative breadth of the contemporary subject means that students have plenty of potential dissertation topics from which to choose. It also means that where geography starts and stops is not always clear. The same can be said about what constitutes the ‘right’ theories and the ‘right’ methods. For many students the uncertainty they sometimes feel in their courses is exacerbated in the production of their dissertations. Perhaps it is something you feel? As Flowerdew and Martin (2005b: 1) put it, ‘[y]ou may currently see your project as a large, and somewhat frightening, chore or you may welcome it as an opportunity to express originality and get out of the classroom.’

The third set of publications contains those on the key concepts and thinkers in the discipline (Clifford et al. 2009; Hubbard and Kitchen 2010). These tend to consist of a larger number of shorter individual contributions. They are useful reference points for those of you who are looking for a place to start; they will help you to find out more about the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• Table List
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Designing an Urban Research Project
• 3 Archival Research
• 4 Interviews
• 5 Urban Ethnographic Research
• 6 Using Questionnaires to Survey Hidden Populations
• 7 Discourse and Linguistic Analysis
• 8 Using Diaries to Study Urban Worlds
• 9 GIS: A Method and Practice
• 10 Worlds through Glass: Photography and Video as Geographic Method
• 11 Researching Urban Life through Social Media
• 12 Mapping the Urban Experience Digitally
• 13 Writing Up
• Index