Effective Methodologies to Study Affects: New Tools for Engaging With Socio-Spatial Relations

Abstract

Present day cities are highly diverse and include ongoing socio-spatial transformations. Attending to recent calls made within urban planning literature to draw on relational, nonrepresentational approaches to better attend to current cities dynamics, this paper suggests three adapted qualitative methods to the study of socio-spatial relations. The paper draws on three empirical case studies of diverse urban settings (the international airport and high-rise residential complexes) in which traditional qualitative methods were adjusted to attune to ‘affects’ in socio-spatial research: sense-oriented observations; experiential walking tours; and in-depth in situ interviews. The paper discusses the benefits and disadvantages of each of these methods and reconsiders the knowledge that can be derived from socio-spatial studies in urban planning for better urban futures. The paper advances the development of a solid nonrepresentational framework in urban planning to derive nuanced understandings of diverse urban experiences in rapidly changing cities, and planning which is more attentive to multiplicities, transformations, and complexities. For nonrepresentational scholars, the paper contributes to the search of affective methodologies empirical examples utilizing qualitative methods which were adjusted to include affective experiences in diverse urban settings.