Welcome!
Welcome to Urban Research. This course is a hands-on workshop in which we explore secondary data to analyze urban social and spatial inequalities. We'll choose from a menu of valuable techniques to document urban social patterns, processes, and policy questions. The precise questions will depend partly on your interests and the methodological prerequisites you've achieved. But for illustration, here's a sample of the projects I'm working on with graduate students, and topics explored by the last group of colleagues who took this course:
- Housing affordability and informality in the Vancouver metropolitan area.
- The links between residential location, urban structure, and travel-to-work patterns in Canadian metropolitan areas.
- Relations and tensions between inner-city gentrification and evolving geographies of religious affiliation and "secularization."
- The interrelations between immigration and racial/gender divisions in urban labor markets.
- Neighborhood geographies of the subprime mortgage boom that triggered the global financial crisis and the current wave of foreclosures and dispossessions.
- Depopulation, demolition, and selective redevelopment in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Prerequisites
The Calendar specifies that Geography 350, or permission of the instructor, is required before you can take this course. I don't enforce this requirement -- send me a note if you're interested -- but I do want you to be familiar with my expectations. First and foremost, I expect you to think carefully and seriously about methodology. This means that you need to mobilize and build on whatever methodological training you've had up to this point in your career. If you've taken a course on archival research, then that's your prerequisite for this course. Or maybe the prerequisites you completed were in discourse analysis, or legal or legislative research, or mathematics, statistics, GIS, or cartography.
I'll be posting various resources on this page to get you started on your inquiry, so keep an eye on the schedule. But please don't be deceived by a digital straightjacket: This course is not a package of information to be consumed, but rather an invitation to dive into the evolving ecosystem of secondary data on cities and social inequality. That's the prerequiste I bring to this course: a passion and patience to sift through all the data -- so much of it hiding in plain sight -- produced by an embattled, Fordist-modernist governance regime under siege from global neoliberalism. Every day, there's a flood of new data. Most of those who move quickly to analyze these data are greedy, or corrupted in other ways. But lots of people listen to these idiots because they can tell a good story around data, maps, and models. This breaks my heart, because I know the world will be a better place if you can tell your story, and use some data, maps or models to offer a convincing analysis.
If you have not already done so, please complete the survey, to introduce yourself to your colleagues.
Background
This course is designed as a workshop (in some parts of the university, this kind of approach is also called a studio). Many of the specific things we do depend on the mix of talents and skills that you bring to the course. This means that you are encouraged to apply what you have learned in other courses you've taken, and to collaborate with other students. Yes, grades must be assigned on an individual basis, but we will approach much of our work collectively in order to make use of different skills, talents, and preferences. Ideally, we'll have a very diverse mix of colleagues: some folks with experience in archival research, discourse analysis, and other qualitative techniques, other colleagues with one or more courses in Geographic Information Science (GIS), others with skills in cartography and graphic design. This is an opportunity for you to capitalize on what you know and like, and to use what you've learned in other courses to make your contribution to an understanding of urban issues. Play to your strengths. If you've taken GIS with Brian Klinkenberg, for instance, you will be able to help us organize and analyze spatial information on the changing contours of urban inequality, and you will help us to understand the profound implications of key methodological decisions. If you've taken research methods with Gerry Pratt, you'll be able to help us explore and explain the social and cultural assumptions built into many of the sources of information we use to describe cities and neighbourhoods. If you've explored the history and theory of geography with Derek Gregory, you'll be able to help us analyze the continuity and change in different kinds of urban processes -- and in the ways that different ways of thinking about city and society can have significant and wide-ranging effects on urban civilization. If you've taken cartography with Sally Hermanson, you will be able to help us to use the art, science, and language of maps to visualize and communicate our geographical insights. There are many other important insights too (perhaps you've taken a course with Daniyal Zuberi in Sociology? Nathan Lauster in Family Studies? Chris Freidrichs in History? Tom Hutton in the School of Community and Regional Planning? Abidin Kusno in the Institute of Asian Research? ... and there are many others). All of these different methodological traditions and disciplinary perspectives are important and valuable.
Workshop and studio courses challenge the standard, hierarchical assumptions of the lecture course. The lecture course presumes that 1) the professor knows more than the students, and 2) the primary goal of the course is for the students to get as much knowledge as possible from the professor. Those assumptions are entirely wrong in this course: you know just as much as I do, and in many areas you're well beyond me. Consider this: I have not had the good fortune to take a course with ... Sally Hermanson, Jamie Peck, Brian Klinkenberg, Derek Gregory, Gerry Pratt, Dan Heibert, David Ley, Trevor Barnes, or any of the other professors you've had. I envy you! I love my job, and I am very fortunate and privileged, but one of the sad things about my role is that professors don't have the time to take classes like you do. Many years ago, of course, I did have the opportunity to take courses with some very prominent and passionate scholars. But that was a long time ago, and many of my skills are rusty, or have been rendered obsolete by changing technologies. You would fall down laughing if I described the hardware and software in use when I first took classes in cartography and GIS. (And there was quite a lot of work that was still pre-digital. Have you ever heard of mylar? Koh-i-noor pens? Leroy lettering?)
There is one set of skills, however, that I bring to the table that seems a little bit unusual here -- quantitative methods. Don't worry -- I do not expect you to have any prerequisites in mathematics or statistics. If you can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, then you'll have no trouble at all. My contribution to our team effort will be to give you a low-key introduction to some approaches that turn out to be very important in the study of certain urban processes. This is particularly important in domains of public policy that shape the conditions of cities and urban life. Most of my research involves a menu of quantitative techniques that flowered in the age of geography's so-called Quantitative Revolution. The history of these methods, and the way they shaped how geographers thought and acted, is remarkable and fascinating. There's a wonderfully rich literature documenting this history. There's a lot of fancy polysyllabic vocabulary in this literature, with evocative etymologies (if you want a sample, read Peter Gould's "Geography 1957-1977: The Augean Period," and then look up the word "Augean"). But I prefer to define this approach in very simple terms: crunch numbers, draw maps, and tell stories. This simple approach has three major implications.
1. The numbers are never perfect: meaningless statistics increased by forty-nine point nine percent last year. But they often provide a unique way of exploring certain processes, and in any event there's a steady stream of numbers produced, analyzed, and disseminated by a vast web of institutions and individuals. Even if we have serious reservations about the quantification of social life in the information society -- and perhaps especially if we have reservations -- it is essential to have some familiarity with these research methods in order to participate in certain kinds of public debates.
2. Drawing maps has moved from an elite, specialized art, craft, and science to the popularized realm of geo-mashups and click-drag-poof-you've-got-a-map. Some people think this is great; some don't. I haven't yet made up my mind, and I respect both sides in this debate. But I will say this: the increasing ease of making maps has had the side effect of eliminating many of the costs of poor decisions. It's easier than ever before to make a map, but then this also means that it's easier than ever before to make a really bad map -- or many of them! One good map, done carefully and with solid research, is always better than dozens or hundreds of bad maps, cranked out by pressing buttons with the default settings on those automated systems.
3. Telling stories is the third and final element of our simple approach. It sounds the easiest, but in fact it can be quite difficult -- because the best stories are those that create a narrative that is accountable to specific evidence. There are, to be sure, many different kinds of evidence. But maps and simple quantitative findings are two important kinds of evidence that can help to support arguments and interpretations that would otherwise be nothing more than pure conjecture. There's certainly a place for conjecture and opinion. But everyone has an opinion, and nobody needs to take a course on the subject; that would risk imposing my opinions on you. That's the last thing I should do. My job is not to tell you what to think. My job is to give you some experience in methods that will teach you how to think -- and how to tell stories in particular ways to certain kinds of audiences.
So, that's a very short overview of some of the thinking behind the course. Interested in still more musings? Well, let's see, here are a few more thoughts ...
assumptions and starting points...
Our work in this seminar is premised on five key assumptions. First, the intensification of urban social inequality over the past two generations is deeply problematic, and demands a sustained commitment of theoretically-informed empirical research, activist commitment to organizing and social justice, and careful strategic engagement with existing structures of law and public policy. Second, human geographers should be part of the interdisciplinary effort to document, understand, and challenge urban inequality. Third, geographers will be excluded from large parts of this interdisciplinary effort if they are unable to engage with the array of methods and techniques recognized across many of the social sciences. Over the past generation, many geographers have been taught to avoid these techniques (especially quantitative or statistical approaches), because of the ascendance of multiple, influential, and competing "post-positivist" epistemologies. Despite the foundational disagreements among post-positivist approaches, they do find common ground in a) a rejection of positivism as a fundamentally flawed epistemology, b) a presumption of the equivalence of quantitative and statistical methods with positivist epistemological claims, c) a suspicion of quantitative and statistical techniques as instruments of state surveillance, governmentality, and oppression, and d) a commitment to qualitative methods as epistemologically superior and politically progressive. Fourth, the shared assumptions of post-positivist approaches are historically and socially constructed; linkages between methodology and epistemology are negotiated and chosen, as are the presumed dichotomies between qualitative and quantitative inquiry. Fifth, these shared assumptions become facts -- quite literally, things that are done -- when they are widely performed and repeated. When talented, hardworking young scholars who see themselves as politically progressive, intellectually ambitious, and theoretically cutting-edge decide to avoid learning methods perceived as quantitative, statistical, or otherwise 'positivist,' the result is a powerful self-selection process. Each scholar who makes this decision helps to reduce the pool of quantitative skills amongst political progressives, while also relinquishing the opportunity to communicate with (or challenge) conservative quantitative scholars and policy analysts on their own terrain.
Things Done, Things That Could be Done
Not long ago, Robert W. Lake, Co-Editor of Urban Geography, offered a frank and sobering assessment of the state of much social science research under the simple, provocative title, "Just the Facts." Lake is anything but a hardcore just-the-facts positivist. But amidst the horrors of impending war and worsening social exclusion and structural inequality, he noted that "One would be hard pressed to discern the severity and pervasiveness of these matters in the pages of most academic journals." Lake suggested that we have lost the spirit of Herbert Gans, Michael Harrington, Gunnar Myrdal, and others who were "prompted by a moral repugnance of observable inequalities and an insistent, unquenchable optimism that society could and would do better if only the facts were placed in evidence." Lake's lament is of course one voice among many in the continuing scholarly debate on the purpose, meaning, and relevance of urban research. Yet his assessment is particularly valuable as a reminder of how much has changed in the last generation, as urban geographers have questioned the meaning, limits, and relevance of structural imperatives, observable inequalities, and the facts.
Can we recover any of this unquenchable optimism? What can be done to place the facts in evidence, and to mobilize them to challenge urban inequalities, observed and otherwise? Can society do better? In this course, we tackle these questions from initial premises that "critical engagement and scholarly rigor are understood as compatible properties" and that for better or worse the links between scientific means (epistemology, methodology, technique) and ends (politics, morality, ethics) are contingent and contextual, not necessary and immutable. Our goal is to marshal a diverse set of theoretical, methodological, and empirical traditions to forge a 'hybrid' geography that can serve as an instrument of strategic and tactical maneuvers for social justice and new emancipatory geographies. The choices involved in fusing divergent traditions are never free of tightly woven networks, structures, and constructions of socio-cultural meaning and power; yet any decision to abandon methodologies on the basis of their historical abuses is a risky move of unilateral disarmament. As Adorno put it: "Genuine refutation must penetrate the power of the opponent and meet him on the ground of his strength; the case is not won by attacking him somewhere else and defeating him where he is not." Insurgent quantitative practices, and a strategic positivism chastened by our witness to the reactionary appropriation of the legitimacy claims of objectivity and metaphysical realism, can help the urban geographer committed to social justice to penetrate the power of her opponent and meet him on his own territory, to create new and emancipatory urban systems. Accordingly, we will examine a series of research initiatives that fuse quasi-positivist empirical analysis of urban inequality with critical social theory, in a pluralist recognition of what Jennifer Wolch describes as "the rich tapestry of the field as it has been woven throughout its recent history, nourished by the quantitative revolution, the rise of Marxism and humanistic geographies, and the effervescence of feminist, postmodern, and post-Colonial thought."
Notes from Former Students
I suffer from a visceral distaste for advertising and self-promotion, and I'm not very good at it. But circumstances sometimes do require promotion of a sort. Moreover, I am enthusiatic when it comes to promoting the insights and achievements of students. Below are some comments from students who have taken this course -- or courses very similar to this one -- in previous years. The heart symbols replace the @ in an attempt to foil the email-address harvesting bots that scour the web for spam scams.
Ren Thomas, Ph.D. (School of Community and Regional Planning) (2011)
"Quantitative and qualitative methods are really not that different. It is possible to look at an issue using several different methods: for example, we could study the relationship between public transit use and income using regression analysis (quantitative) or we could do interviews or focus groups to find out whether income was a significant factor in transportation choice (qualitative). However, we can only choose among several methods if we learn how to use them and which method(s) might be appropriate for each research question. Using simple statistics and mapping techniques helps people understand issues in a variety of ways: it is one thing to know that Vancouver residents take transit, but quite another to see the concentration of transit riders on a map. In my PhD work, I am using interviews and principal components analysis (PCA) to explain housing and transportation choice. I first learned how to do a PCA in GEOG 450 using STATA, and it was quite intimidating at first. But the combination of these methods has proven to be quite powerful: the PCA shows me the relationship between quite a few Census variables, and the interviews provide further in-depth data. Each method provides its own insights, and the combination gives me richer research results than either method could have produced on its own." -- November, 2010.
[rae.thomas ♥ gmail.com]
Nicole Foth, BA (Political Science) (2009)
"Doing quantitative work in Dr. Wyly's class showed me how to tell a story with numbers and provide proof for my arguments. It may not come natural to an Arts student, but it is a very practical skill to learn. It's something that one will use either in further education or in many types of careers. You will likely encounter quantitative data at some point in your career, even if you're not the one coming up with the data: it's important to know how to read numbers and understand the story behind them. I would recommend trying out a class that incorporates quantitative data into a research paper." -- November, 2010.
[nicolemfoth ♥ gmail.com]
See the revised version of Nicole's seminar paper, which was accepted and published in The Geographical Bulletin:
Nicole Foth (2010). "Long-Term Change Around SkyTrain Stations in Vancouver, Canada: A Demographic Shift-Share Analysis." The Geographical Bulletin 51:37-52.
Abstract: This study examines the long-term demographic implications of the SkyTrain, a light-rail rapid transit system, on surrounding neighborhoods in Vancouver, Canada. Using demographic Census data from 1981 and 2006, shift-share analysis shows the residents characteristics change over time. Results demonstrate that SkyTrain neighborhoods near stations have become physically denser, wealthier and more educated compared to vancouver as a whole. From these results, the article explores the contextual reasons why denser development occurred around the SkyTrain stations and the effect on residential demographics in the area.
Tommy Thomson, MA (Geography) (2010)
"When trying to make the case that a social injustice has occurred, quantitative evidence can be very powerful because it is very often the language of decision-makers who are in a position to effect change. Being able to use and understand statistics can also give us the confidence necessary to put forward our arguments for social change and to take to task the arguments of others. If you’re feeling uneasy about statistics, you probably stand to benefit the most from this course, which presents statistics in a digestible way and in a supportive environment." -- November, 2010.
[tmt1 ♥ interchange.ubc.ca]
Nicholas R. Gallant, BA (Geography) (2008), MSc., Planning, in progress, University of Toronto.
"If you're not uncomfortable, you're not learning" - Margo Fryer, UBC Learning Exchange
Bearing Margo's quote in mind, I carried a healthy degree of discomfort into Elvin's seminar, Critical Measures of Urban Inequalities. My studies typically gravitated toward courses taught from a theoretical/qualitative perspective because they made me feel comfortable. The problem with my approach was that it created cognitive dissonance between wanting to acquire quantitative understanding and wanting to feel comfort... I knew I was missing out on so much, but felt too intimidated by most quantitatively oriented courses to address the issue...
Elvin succeeded in creating a non-oppressive learning environment where folks like me could approach quantitative ideas in their own way. Through Elvin, my seminar colleagues and individual study I was empowered to access a level of inquiry far more sophisticated than if I had only studied subjects which made me comfortable. This privileged viewpoint came primarily through my term paper, which dealt with the essentialization of racial categories on the 2000 US census; tying the socio-quantitative implications of those decisions together with Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty.
The lessons I gained from dealing with my subject through the lens I chose has served me well as a political aide in Ontario government minister's offices, as a learner in the M.Sc.Pl program at the University of Toronto and as a commentator on recent Conservative government decisions regarding the census.
As someone who's been there I would advise that you do not pass up the opportunity to learn alongside one of the few researchers in the world who can forge eloquent socio-political arguments from quantitative methods." -- November, 2010.
[gallant.nicholas ♥ gmail.com]
Menora Tse, BA (Geography) 2007
"Numbers are evil.
The reason? Numbers take complex processes and all that is interesting, and flatten them into a dry, lifeless statistic.
At least that's what one might think at first...
Fortunately, cities are so much more fascinating than that, and going beyond the simple statistic is where the excitement can be found. The essence of studying urban geography is not just obtaining a statistic to back up an assertion -- important as that may sometimes be. Rather, the essence involves finding points of interest and inter-relations, and comparing these patterns to theories and expectations. Statistics and data are important in this search for organization and pattern. They make it possible to measure processes in ways that can be understood and compared widely across different contexts, and they provide the discipline with scientific legitimacy.
Cities may be in a constant state of change, but key features -- the simplest features, like geographical location -- remain constant amidst the turbulent changes in political boundaries, regional and continental geopolitical shifts, and even the names of cities themselves. In this context, cities can indeed be understood as numbers -- as numerically-coded locations that stay in the same 'place' while being redefined by all that's changing in the world beyond. Cities' locations in this shifting global context can be measured, compared, visualized, and interpreted. Putting a 'face' on the numbers makes it easier to understand urban networks, hierarchies, and patterns of growth and decline.
This realization allowed me to work around my initial anxieties about numbers, in Wyly's Mapping Global Firms and World Cities project. I approached the configuration of global-cities hierarchies as created, at least in part, by the decisions made by powerful global firms involved in high-level producer services. These firms' decisions, in turn, were driven by executives' perceptions of the mixture of benefits and costs associated with each city's geographical location in an evolving global economy. Studying corporate histories, therefore, and the changing roster of cities with locations deemed to be strategically important to corporate strategies, allows us to measure and visualize the urban worlds perceived and created by corporate capital." -- November, 2010.
[menora_tse ♥ hotmail.ca]
"As a geographer who uses mathematical methods in order to critique neoclassical economic geography and develop a Marxian political economic alternative, who has supported the growth of feminist, anti-essentialist and post-structuralist human geographies, and who works with marginal communities struggling to use GIS to better understand and improve their environments, I have long been convinced that progressive human geography can take advantage of quantitative practices." Eric Sheppard (2001). "Quantitative Geography: Representations, Practices, and Possibilities." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, 535-554, quote from pp. 535-536.
In Urban Geography, "One can find articles on urban transformations around the world, feminist urban geography and queer theory, homelessness and welfare reform, urban identity and citizenship, racial segregation and environmental justice, patterns of e-commerce as well as traditional manufacturing, transportation and land use, urban governance regimes, implications of globalization and transnational immigration flows. The list goes on and on, speaking to the rich tapestry of the field as it has been woven throughout its recent history, nourished by the quantitative revolution, the rise of Marxian and humanistic geographies, and the effervescence of feminist, postmodern, and post-Colonial thought." Jennifer R. Wolch (2003). "Radical Openness as Method in Urban Geography." Urban Geography 24(8), 645-646, quote from p. 645.
"The process of reducing real-world phenomena to published work involves two phases: the representation of the real world by essentially descriptive quantitative and qualitative data, and the analysis of these data. Both phases are important components of the replication standard. Future scholars, with only your publication and other information you provide, ought to be able to start from the real world and arrive at the same substantive conclusions. In many types of research this is not possible, but it should always be attempted. ....Gary King (1995). "Replication, Replication." PS: Political Science and Politics 28(3), 444-452, quote from pp. 445-446.
"The linkages between methodology and epistemology are negotiated and chosen, as are the presumed dichotomies between qualitative and quantitative inquiry. These shared assumptions become facts -- things that are done -- when they are widely performed and repeated. ... Fortunately, a new generation of geographers is moving beyond the old dichotomies that trapped those of us plagued with the vivid but blinding memories of old fights and grand ambitions ... Many in this new generation are predisposed to the kind of spirit that Wolch (2003, 645) describes as radical openness...." Elvin Wyly (2009). "Strategic Positivism." The Professional Geographer.
"Good studies and bad studies are not 'mutually canceling.' Regardless of what some advocates may claim, there are some objective facts and, hence, some objective truths. Whether public policy reflects that reality is not a choice left to those in the academy, but producing and protecting the research itself is our choice and our moral obligation." Elizabeth Warren (2002). "The Market for Data: The Changing Role of Social Sciences in Shaping the Law." Wisconsin Law Review 2002, 1-34, quote from p. 17.
For updates on Elizabeth Warren, see these:
World cities in the space of producer-services history and evolution. Each city is plotted in a space defined by the number of times prominent global firms mention the city in their official histories of incorporation, growth, and mergers and acquisition.
"This is more than merely a reassertion of the Conservative belief that they are the natural party of government; it is a claim that 'science' is firmly on their side. The terrain won by the left and by critical scholarship ... is now once more to be fought over. Within the framework of a world capitalism wracked by economic, political, and energy crises ... the battles of the immediate future are likely to be fierce. In this context there is a need not only to respond to specific ideological challenges but to stay on the offensive and produce more and better socialist scholarship which will serve the struggle for human liberation. Radical science will have its part to play within this." Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (1979). "Radical Science and its Enemies." Socialist Register 1979, 317-335, quote from p. 333.
Journals
For reference, here's a small sample of some of the best places to find the latest peer-reviewed scholarship on urban-analytical themes. Let me know if you'd recommend that I add other journals to this list. Please note that you may need to be working on a computer at UBC, or working through a proxy server or Virtual Private Network, for these links to give you full access to the articles.
Radical Science
A Small Sample of Journals in Positivist Geography and Social Science
Journals focusing on Cities and Urban Life
CopyLeft 2012 Elvin K. Wyly
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Newark, New Jersey, January 2008 (Elvin Wyly)