Advancing global urban research

Urban research is increasingly global in its outlook, therefore as urban researchers we must intuitively know what global urban research is, when we are doing it, why we are doing it and how we are doing it. We began this book by critically addressing this basic proposition, because to our mind this is often not the case (Harrison and Hoyler, Chapter 1). Despite the emergence of a growing body of critical work aimed at theorizing the global urban, our chief concern is that there remains a notable silence surrounding the practice of doing global urban research. The contribution of this book has been to open up this particular black box by presenting insights into the opportunities and challenges, techniques and tools, theories and case studies which enable the doing of global urban research. But, as with any such endeavour, the end point is never a resolution; rather it presents us with a series of reflections and further questions. In this concluding chapter we offer some of our thoughts – you will no doubt have your own too – about how we can go about doing global urban research.