Researching City Life


Book Description

Researching City Life: An Urban Field Methods Text-Reader examines the city from a street level perspective and provides readers with tools to conduct research on urbanism—the everyday experiences of people in cities. Contending that culture is central to understanding urbanism, editors Tyler Schafer and Michael Ian Borer address qualitative research in cities and how it provides insights unable to be captured via quantitative methods. Carefully selected and edited readings cover participant observation, interviewing, narrative analysis, visual and sensory methods, and methods for (re)presenting the city. Each section includes an introduction from the editors, a Reflection Essay from one of the authors, and exercises that prompt hands-on experience.




Studying Cities and City Life


Book Description

Studying Cities and City Life is a textbook designed to provide an introduction to the major methods of obtaining data for use when analysing cities and social life in cities. Major chapters focus upon best practices in: field studies (participant observation) natural experiments and quasi-experiments surveys employing probability and non-probability samples secondary analyses of previously published documents. A separate chapter examines a full range of questionnaires and interviews. Each chapter includes discussion of several case studies, and recently published research employing the method being discussed. This discussion highlights the issues and choices made by investigators in actual studies conducted in cities throughout the world. This unique book is designed for use in research methods courses that primarily enroll students majoring in Urban Sociology, Urban Studies, Urban Geography, Urban Planning, and related areas.




Everyday Life in the Segmented City


Book Description

The conference "Everyday Life in the Segmented City", held in July 2010, Florence, gathered a multiplicity of approaches and points of view dealing with issues of global urbanization. This title contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference.




City Water, City Life


Book Description

A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas that are a support for the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created the city. In City Water, City Life, celebrated historian Carl Smith explores this concept through an insightful examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s. By examining the place of water in the nineteenth-century consciousness, Smith illuminates how city dwellers perceived themselves during the great age of American urbanization. But City Water, City Life is more than a history of urbanization. It is also a refreshing meditation on water as a necessity, as a resource for commerce and industry, and as an essential—and central—part of how we define our civilization.




Researching the City


Book Description

‘Extends a warm welcome to students who have come face-to-face with the daunting task of producing a dissertation. Written in an accessible and engaging style, it deals with the nitty-gritty of researching the city... a must-have for the student!’ - Kim England, University of Washington ‘An invaluable guide to urban research design for undergraduate and graduate students alike. It provides the novice researcher with a wealth of practical advice on theory, methods, writing style, and everything else one needs to know to design and manage a successful urban research project. I wish this book had been available when I started my research career!′ - Byron Miller, University of Calgary ‘Replete with tremendously useful advice and guidance for students of all social-science disciplines undertaking significant research projects on urban issues... students writing undergraduate and master’s theses, or even doctoral dissertations, are likely to find it tremendously useful as well.’ - David L. Imbroscio, University of Louisville This practical guide for students focuses on the city and on the different ways to research it. The authors explains how 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. 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 studies and urban sociology courses.




City Lives and City Forms


Book Description

Focusing on a series of pivotal issues confronting Canadian cities and city-dwellers today, this volume address key themes in urban studies: the interaction between social relations and urban landscape, the status of the city in the new world economy, and the sociocultural complexity of urban populations. The fifteen essays presented here reflect the current preoccupations and perspectives of critically oriented urban researchers in Canada. The essays in Part 1, 'People, Places, Cultures, ' examine the nature of urban space and the links between this space and social relations, illustrating the fundamental principle that urban spaces are 'built values' and 'built politics' - physical expressions of social process. Part 2, 'The Economy of Cities, ' explores recent fundamental shifts in the economic character of Canadian cities, whose effect on the social and physical landscapes has been as dramatic as the explosive onset of industrialism was in the last century. Part 3, 'Urban Social Movements, ' focuses on the practices of social movements, including those oriented to gender, race, and the environment. Consisting largely of applied case studies, rather than broad thematic essays, City Lives and City Forms presents an overall argument for focused critical research in the urban field and suggests possible directions for the future.




The City


Book Description




Living for the City


Book Description

In this nuanced and groundbreaking history, Donna Murch argues that the Black Panther Party (BPP) started with a study group. Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African




Real Cities


Book Description

What is real about city life? Real Cities shows why it is necessary to take seriously the more imaginary, fantastic and emotional aspects of city life. Drawing inspiration from the work of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel, Pile explores the dream-like and ghost-like experiences of the city. Such experiences are, he argues, best described as phantasmagorias. The phantasmagorias of city life, though commonplace, are far from self-evident and little understood. This book is a path-breaking exploration of urban phantasmagorias, grounded empirically in a series of unusual and exciting case studies. In this study, four substantial phantasmagorias are identified: dreams, magic, vampires and ghosts. The investigation of each phantasmagoria is developed using a wide variety of clear examples. Thus, voodoo in New York and New Orleans shows how ideas about magic are forged within cities. Meanwhile vampires reveal how specific fears about sex and death are expressed within, and circulate between, cities such as London and Singapore. Taken together, such examples build a unique picture of the diverse roles of the imaginary, fantastic and the emotional in modern city life. What is "real" about the city has radical consequences for how we think about improving city life, for all too often these are over-looked in utopian schemes for the city. Real Cities forcefully argues that an appreciation of urban phantasmagorias must be central to what is considered real about city life.




City


Book Description

For the first time in the history of the planet, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - are now living in cities. Two hundred years ago only 3 per cent of the world's population were urbanites, a figure that had remained fairly stable (give or take the occasional plague) for about 1000 years. By 2030, 60 per cent of us will be urban dwellers. City is the ultimate handbook for the archetypal city and contains main sections on 'History', 'Customs and Language', 'Districts', 'Transport', 'Money', 'Work', 'Tourist Sites', 'Shops and markets', 'Nightlife', etc., and mini-essays on anything and everything from Babel, Tenochtitlán and Ellis Island to Beijing, Mumbai and New York, and from boulevards, suburbs, shanty towns and favelas, to skylines, urban legends and the sacred. Drawing on a wide range of examples from cities across the world and throughout history, it explores the reasons why people first built cities and why urban populations are growing larger every year. City is illustrated throughout with a range of photographs, maps and other illustrations.




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