Epilogue: re-qualifying the city

The city is a complex entity and comprehending that complexity has long challenged and extended the methodological repertoire of social scientists, artists, and other commentators. The complexity and scale of urban life, and the managerial interventions that this demands in terms of planning and maintenance logistics, has meant that urban scholarship has had a strong, and at times dominant, tradition of quantitative research. Within this methodological hegemony, qualitative methods were a tolerable adjunct, subsidizing (often by way of the exceptionally-framed ‘case study’) the more real and relevant knowledge generated by large-scale quantitative surveys and data sets. This bifurcated rendition of quantitative and qualitative approaches is difficult to by-pass and has, in my view, a range of unfortunate effects. Not least it implies that one type of approach and one style of knowledge is more important and relevant than the other. But of course whether a particular style of urban knowledge is better or more relevant than another depends always on the destination of that knowledge. Is it, for example, acquired to account for the presence of cities through explanatory frameworks of urbanization (why cities)? Or is it to render more accurately the complexity of life, processes, and systems that are in the urban context (how cities)? The importance of these different explanatory styles (and the methodological approaches that attend them) is inevitably contingent rather than absolute. In this essay I want to chart (in a very partial way) aspects of that contingency and revisit the shifting fortunes of qualitative approaches to the city.