CCRSO

As argued throughout this chapter, the literature on cities, urban informality and informal cultural practices has often been caught in unhelpful dualisms – between the global North and the global South, between the formal and the informal, between the overvalued economic and the undervalued non-economic urban dimensions – which have led to urban facets such as informality or culture being obscured from the analysis, or subjected to a simplistic and normative analysis. Therefore, in order attain my research aim of an in-depth understanding of informal cultural practices in the urban context, I need to

Overall research aim:

To provide an in-depth, grounded understanding of informal cultural practices in contemporary cities.

Main research questions:

i. What are the different roles and purposes that informal cultural practices take on in contemporary cities?

ii. How are informal cultural practices defined and delimited by urban actors?

iii. How is informality deployed by urban cultural actors to fulfil the different purposes of their practices?

Subsidiary research question:

iv. How and why do urban policy-makers engage with, and respond to, informal cultural practices?

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reformulate and revisit the theoretical object of informal culture. The three main

‘building blocks’ that have emerged from more recent literature on urban informality in the global South will provide useful analytical tools, or ‘sensitising concepts’ to guide my enquiry. However, in order to genuinely revisit the theoretical object of informal culture I need to develop the knowledge from the ground (the actual informal cultural practices) up. As I discuss in more detail in section 3.2.1, this calls for a grounded theory approach. However, before I will review the methodological approaches that are predominantly used in urban research and discuss whether or not they will enable me to achieve my research aim and answer the research questions set out above.

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3 R ESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND PROCESS

In the previous chapter I have begun to set out the broad conceptual framework through which I will interrogate informal cultural practices in contemporary cities.

I have reviewed important theoretical positions across a number of research disciplines, and assessed the strengths and weaknesses of these theoretical positions. I have argued that the existing approaches are conceptually and geographically restricted and do not provide an adequate conceptual framework to analyse issues of informality and culture in the urban context. Thus, it will not be sufficient to ‘pick and choose’ from the different theoretical approaches, but rather, I need to revisit the theoretical object of informal culture. The previous chapter has identified a number of theoretical ideas, that have emerged from more recent literature on urban informality in the global South, which I will use as ‘sensitising concepts’ to guide my enquiry.

In this chapter, I now shift my focus to research methodologies. In the first section 3.1, I discuss the research methodologies used in the existing literature to interrogate cities and issues of informality. I argue that the approaches used in the existing literature are not only conceptually, but also methodologically inadequate to provide an in-depth understanding of informal cultural practices in the urban context. Based on this discussion, in section 3.2, I then outline the overall research approach that I propose to use in this study. The lack of ‘readily available’ conceptual and methodological frameworks, and the need to genuinely revisit the empirical object of informal cultural practices from the

‘ground up’, call for the use of a grounded theory approach that interrogates a number of case studies of informal cultural practices in two cities – one in the

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global North and one in the global South. Moving then on to the actual research methods and processes that I employed in this study, in section 3.3, I outline how I selected the sites of my case studies, the actual case study activities, and my interviewees. I describe my rationales for choosing them and give a more detailed introduction to each case study, as well as explaining how the case study fits the selection criteria. In section 3.4, I then explain step-by-step how I gathered my data. This also includes a critical reflection on the practical and ethical challenges of conducting research on the ‘informal’ – issues that I argue are inherent to my research topic. Finally, in section 3.5, I describe my analytical approach and the detailed process of conducting my analysis. Section 3.6 concludes the chapter.

As becomes apparent throughout this chapter, the discussion of my research methods – which are exploratory and developmental themselves – is an integral part of this thesis. This is because it reflects many of the issues that my thesis is dealing with regarding the nature and multiplicity of the informal. In particular, I highlight that “flexibility, creativity and daring in creating and seizing opportunities” (Cohen & Arieli, 2011: 433) were not only supporting the research, but were a basic condition that enabled me to carry out any research at all on my research topic of the informal. However, it is important to note that such a flexible approach is not only consistent with the object of my study, but also with the methodological approach I set out in section 3.2. Indeed, implicit to a grounded theory approach is a reflexivity that stipulates that my research

‘listens’ to my respondents, and responds flexibly to the requirements of the research subjects and the emerging theory.