Chapter 4 (Advanced): Urban Research and Methods

Today, I'd like to talk about the different kinds of research modalities there are, that will help
support inclusive, sustainable, urban development. Firstly, what are the general issues faced by
researchers in the field of city and regional planning? Secondly, we will look at the various
approaches and the various modalities that are used to conduct research, the different kinds of
measurements, their advantages and disadvantages, the different kinds of research designs,
how local knowledge and peer-to-peer exchange and best-practice information are helpful for
research and lastly, I'll make a plea for supporting multidisciplinary and multi-disciplinary
methods of research.

Today there are three global conversations that are pervading every thoughtful person's mind:
the first one is how to address issues of peace and conflict; the second one is what is Climate
Change going to do and how is this going to affect us; lastly, how can we address this growing
problem of inequality. Underlying all of these, is the theme and question of urbanization, i.e. with
urbanization how are these three conversations shaped? The central question that really
pervades these three global conversations and the fact that the cities are so important is this:
what are the key policies that we can employ to make sure we achieve inclusive, sustainable,
urban development?
What are the policies that can protect and underguard the trend to urban life, the trend to cities
creating the global GDP and the trend to making the biggest changes in Greenhouse Gas
emissions in urban areas?

There are many ways to approach these questions. Firstly, we can benchmark and measure
what's happening in places with regard to some of these things. Secondly, we can engage in
structured social science research that will help us understand what kinds of policies and efforts
work and don’t work. We can also turn to local knowledge to make sure that we're informing our
research designs and our decision-making with the kinds of information that people who are
living in cities and living in neighborhoods and living with the issues and problems that we're
studying can help inform and lastly, as research and information and knowledge develops over
time, best practices emerge. We can study and use these best practices, particularly identifying
the critical success factors to share how to move forward, to identify the drivers and the kinds of
policies will enable us to have sustainable and inclusive urban development.

There are many sources of this knowledge: multilateral organizations, government and bilateral
organizations, practitioners and professional, NGOs and advocacy groups, academia and
research institutes, the private sector, philanthropy, citizens. Research comes in handy in
helping articulate the goal, helping articulate the target and most importantly, in inventing and
understanding the set of indicators or measures that will see if we're moving towards a particular
policy framework. Housing, transport, open space, environment, heritage, planning and
resilience; these are things that can be measured if we have the data. Data is the big question,
particularly when engaged in any sort of urban research. Normally researchers turn to traditional
census data; United Nations for example, does collect and assemble composite data on
urbanization and tells the world, the rate of urbanization, level of urbanization, location of
urbanization but there are deep limits to this data.

The definitions really vary as to what urban is and even though the United Nations does its best
to reconcile the different definitions, we need to look and understand what these differences are
in order to understand what we are dealing with. We are not actually comparing apples to
apples here, when we are looking at that UN data; it has its limits.Management counts too,
when we are thinking about censuses and how data is collected. India has stringent definitions
for urban but has not updated that definition for 50 years, and there are other issues besides
that. There are delays and redrawing of municipal boundaries as areas expand and we know
there's a great deal of urban growth in India, at the moment and in the future. It is important to
understand what we are dealing with when you're dealing with the data that is coming to you
from census. We also have at our fingertips, all sorts of resources and what we'll call the Big
Data Area, we have the capacities of mobile phones and the information that they are giving us
and many other devices that will help us understand what's happening in the urban arena.

I'd like to turn now to some other ways of collecting information. We talked briefly about Big
Data but I think perhaps the most promising are the advances that are now being made in
spatial analysis.

Diagram 1: Illustration of Satellites

What you're seeing in front of you here is an illustration of the number of little satellites that are
going around the globe right now as we're watching, reading and talking. There are many of
them and they are taking images of different resolutions of land areas throughout the world. And
we started doing this globally in the 1950s when the Sputnik went up. By the 1970s we set the
first land satellite which particularly measured land development and improved through 2013.
The improvement in the capacity of this measurement is illustrated by this slide as you see the
improvements in the imagery on the top and the bottom looking at Delhi and how much clearer it
is as the technology has advanced.

Diagram 2: Satellite Image of Delhi

Diagram 3: Recent Satellite Image of Delhi showing Improvement in Technology

There are two other spatial protocols that came into place in 2014 - the Global Urban Footprint
which was put forward by the German Aerospace Centre which provides nodes of definition
which you can see here on the right, and the Global Human Settlements Layer which is a new
satellite that has a much much higher resolution than any of the previous satellites and can get
you right down to the shape of a building in that resolution. So as we think about how we're
going to measure, we need to think about how we can link the census data, census
numbers-based data with the spatial data in order to measure the things that we think are
important when we're doing urban research.

Diagram 4: Nodes of Definition of Global Urban Footprint

Next I'd like to talk about structured social science studies and particularly the debates that often
go on between qualitative and quantitative studies. For purposes of this discussion we just want
to recognize that each one of these approaches when engaged in has particular strengths and
particular weaknesses and when you choose to use one or both because some researchers
blend quantitative and qualitative research with a mixed-method approach, you just need to
know what you're going to get once you engage in that research. And with the quantitative
statistically- based research, you'll get patterns that you could use to predict, with the qualitative
case, ethnographic study, you'll get in-depth understanding that might help you really
understand what is going on in a particular place but doesn't necessarily reflect what's
happening broadly. We also need to give importance and recognition to the ability of people
living in cities to reflect on and give information back about the conditions of their cities and also
to be the researchers themselves and lastly,talk about peer-to-peer knowledge exchanges.
Oftentimes, delegations of practitioners, of municipal leaders, of local advocates from local
advocacy organizations will convene to exchange their information, their local knowledge about
what's worked and been successful in their places, with others who are trying to do similar
things. And this allows for real-time, practice-based information to be exchanged. Lastly I'd like
to end with a plea for us to remember that there is no one single discipline that is going to
provide all the answers for places that are as complicated as cities.

Let's take a look at this issue of food security. We are not going to have prosperous cities if
people can't eat; we're not going to have cities that are socially inclusive if people are food
insecure and we are not going to have healthy cities if people are not eating the right kinds of
food and are ending up with food-related diseases.
So how do we need to solve this problem? We need to solve this problem starting with
developing the rural-urban linkages that understand the production of food, the distribution of
food, the marketing of food, we need to talk to the nutritionists, we need to talk to the land
conservationist, we need to talk to the marketers, business people; these are just a few of the
people that one needs to talk about when we're talking about food security which is so essential
to having sustainable city.

As we go forward I want you to remember that the key items that we are talking about in this
session : the great variety of sources of research, the great variety of approaches to research,
the fact that there is no one perfect kind of research because each one has its weaknesses,
each one has its strengths and the necessity of understanding what the capacities are of each
form of research and contributing it to the larger problem, the central question of how do we
create inclusive sustainable places.