John Harrison and Michael Hoyler’s edited volume Doing Global Urban Research asks how empirical research can be done on subjects that are both urban and global. The emphasis is on the “global”—how do the methods and practices of empirical urban research change once the subject takes on a global dimension? Over the past 20 years, ‘the prefix “global” has been attached to all manner of different urban ideas, concepts and processes’ (p.1). However, many researchers’ theoretical frameworks have explicitly engaged the global dimensions of their subject matter, but their methods have not explicitly done so. For many forms of primary research, expending effort across a global scale is impractical, but this impracticality just makes even greater the need for improved methods. On that score, they note that ‘the challenge is that new theories and concepts for framing the global urban have developed at a far faster rate than the empirical tools and techniques necessary to provide the evidence’ (p.3).
This is the first paragraph of an academic book review originally published as Datu (2019), ‘Doing Global Urban Research, John Harrison and Michael Hoyler (eds), SAGE Publications, 2018, 264 pp, ISBN 978 1 526 41678 0’, Geographical Research 57(1), 126–128. Click on the following link to read the entire review (academic paywall).