Managing the Marketplace: Reinventing Shopping Centres in Post-War History

Abstract

tal collaboration will help make cities more “resilient, sustainable, and just” (p. 13). However, many of the technologies and methods, such as the use of data from geo-tagging and geospatial technologies or social media, tell an incomplete story. How people move around in a city or represent themselves online, for instance, are entangled with all sorts of other social factors – gender, ability, age, income, and so on. Even the ways in which one might respond in an interview, a method used by some of the researchers to compare against big data results, is imbued with methodological issues of representation, positionality, and power, which all go unexamined. While we can identify patterns from large pools of data, made possible by big data and digital technologies, using quantitative methods in this way only tells us the outcome (i.e. the most common routes people take) but not the why. Granted, Yadav et al. combine interviews and geo-spatial simulation modelling, in Chapter 21, to construct a “perceptive design” (p. 407) of homelessness in Brisbane, Australia. In the same vein, Osaragi, Yamada, and Kaneko (Chapter 12) compare their simulation of pedestrian behaviour with observations of a university campus and found the results from the twomethods in fact matched. In Chapter 16, Rout and Willet also conduct semi-structured interviews and participatory design sessions with architects (but as a way to understand how their proprietary software technology might benefit practitioners). These papers were the only articles that included qualitative methods as part of the findings, and even so, they were administered to “check” or complement the quantitative data. Further research on these topics should incorporate qualitative methods, beyond using it to confirm quantitative findings, but to produce conflicting and nuanced research. With only a few out of the thirty chapters in the book that implement some sort of qualitative method, the book clearly favours quantitative research. Big data alone can be highly impersonal and generalising; and failing to capture and understand the complexity of human behaviours can have detrimental impact on planning outcomes, financially, politically, and socially. Urban scholars also need to reconsider the role of academia. The researchers in this book believe that universities, governments, and private enterprises should collaborate on the delivery of urban informatics. However, academia must not be a place for governments and businesses to seek out, to gain evidence that reinforce certain agendas. Instead, academics must play the role of arbiter and question these relationships to ensure the research is in favour of people, the environment, and the future, and not just for governments and business elites. A healthy sense of caution is necessary toward research that claims using data on human subjects will help governments and businesses succeed, even if it insinuates that broader society advances as well. We must remind ourselves who benefits from “urban informatics” and how it might impact the public in different ways.