Researching Local Development Cultures: Using the Qualitative Interview as an Interpretive Lens

Abstract

This paper directs critical reflection on the use and treatment of qualitative interviews in researching building and development actors, processes and outcomes. Using the case study of New Urbanism in Toronto, it argues that norms of self-presentation and impression management consciously or unconsciously enacted by development professionals (developers, builders, designers, planners) within the research interview constitute key data that are often overlooked in planning and urban development-related research. More often than not, such study is geared towards typifying development processes, identifying and prescribing industry ‘best practices’ and evaluating the relative success of outcomes on the ground. It is argued here that a finer grained coding of interviews with key project-based actors directs attention to the hybrid and contingent nature of social roles in development networks and processes. This challenges researchers to examine more rigorously the identities, strategies, constraints and rationalities of development professionals to gain a deeper understanding of their agency in the (re)production of urban form and the definition of local development cultures.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Field is here used following Bourdieu (2005) as a ‘site of actions and reactions performed by social agents endowed with permanent dispositions, partly acquired in their experience of these social fields’ (p. 30).

2. Notable exceptions are Pryke and Du Gay (2002) in their culturalist account of how commercial property actors repaired markets following the 1990 crash, and Henneberry and Parris’ (2013) argument for a project ecologies framework to analyse local property development networks.