Geography 450: Urban Research

Welcome to the Urban Research Studio.

This course is a studio/workshop in which we explore publicly available secondary data to analyze urban social and spatial inequalities. We'll choose from a menu of statistical and spatial-analytical 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. For one example of collaborative work resulting from this course in previous years, see:

Elvin Wyly, C.S. Ponder, Pierson Nettling, Bosco Ho, Sophie Ellen Fung, Zachary Liebowitz, and Dan Hammel (2012). "New Racial Meanings of Housing in America." American Quarterly 64(3), 571-604.

Student evaluations of last year's course are here. A detailed schedule from last year's studio, with methodological lecture notes and other resources, is here.

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"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.

"Like many other feminists, I do not see science and feminism as incompatible. Since those days in the late 1960s, I have come increasingly to appreciate, in the context of both science and feminism, complexity rather than simplicity, the concrete and specific in addition to the abstract, ambiguity over elegance, variety rather than uniformity in lived experience, and theories peopled by situated, not universal subjects."

Susan Hanson (1993). "Never Question the Assumptions, and Other Scenes from the Revolution." Urban Geography 14(6), 552-556, quote from p. 556.

"..quantitative approaches to economic geography can and should be liberated from their needless association with mainstream economics and its own vision of science, truth, and evidence, and made part of an emancipatory economic geography. They can be marshalled to effectively critique mainstream economics on its own terms, to incorporate the insights of economic thinking that lie outside the mainstream, to develop understandings of the spatial dynamics of capitalism at the micro- and macro-scales, to conceptualize other possible worlds, and to create space for views of what constitutes a valid argument and the nature of empirical validation that depart substantially from a logical positivist worldview."

Paul Plummer and Eric Sheppard (2001). "Must Emancipatory Economic Geography be Qualitative?" Antipode 33(2), 194-199, quote from p. 198.

"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.