Urban Mess and the Relational City

Visit the Realities website (link below) for a recording (audio plus images) of this presentation, given at Methods in Dialogue: Researching Place. This presentation draws on recent scholarship in human geography, urban planning, architecture and the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies to describe an emerging methodological approach that interprets cities as sociotechnical ensembles.

This approach embraces the messiness of cities by focusing on the fluid interactions between humans, nature, and technology that ultimately produce the urban environments we experience on a daily basis. Studying the interwined character of social and material elements through a sociotechnical lens presents significant methodological challenges to qualitative researchers but also has the potential to reveal the vitality and realness of the contemporary urban condition and to imagine different future conditions.