Seeing the City

These observations and subsequent questions could be asked by urban researchers from a wide variety of fields. The field of urban studies is an interdisciplinary field by nature. Cities around the globe are dealing with complex challenges like rapid expansion, increasing crowdedness, intersecting forms of diversity, and staggering inequality between the rich and the poor. These processes take shape in the context of a climate emergency, biodiversity loss, globalization, and unprecedented urbanization. These multifaceted and complex challenges require researchers to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and approach urban problems and solutions via interdisciplinary approaches.

An interdisciplinary approach is uniquely positioned to inform urban governments who are up to the complex task of developing policies and designing interventions that are inclusive, multifaceted, intelligent, and sustainable, but also resilient and adaptable to unexpected change. Urban scholars can contribute to these tasks by unravelling complexity, revealing unequal power relations, or identifying
potential solutions using technological or social innovations. Such cooperation with governments and other societal stakeholders pushes the interdisciplinary nature of the field to a transdisciplinary approach that urges scientists to take responsibility for contributing to societally relevant questions, to step outside of academic boundaries and engage professionals and citizens in their research projects.

The persistent and urgent problems cities currently face demand both scholars and practitioners to make better sense of what is going on in the city. To do so, they need methodologies that help them to collect and analyze a diversity of urban data in a diversity of ways, and to integrate and combine these different analyses. This book offers a wide variety of quintessential urban methodologies developed, used,
and reflected on by Amsterdam-based researchers. As the editors of this volume, we curated a selection of methodological approaches that we believe will help urban researchers but also practitioners to better understand the multifaceted problems and opportunities of the urban environment.

source :
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/93298