LOCALOGRAPHY

Jane Clossick, Birgit Hausleitner and Agustina Martire

There are many ways to absorb knowledge from an everyday street – some overt, some tacit – but it is important to understand that some street knowledge is specific to particular people and groups. The third section of this book addresses the issue of how to conduct research into everyday streets, asking the following question: What methodologies are best suited to unravelling the multiplicity and complexity of everyday streets? In this introduction, we discuss drawings, on-site engagement and action research, the various temporalities that our authors have encountered, and the value of participant observation. The approaches in this section offer an alternative to the simplistic definition of people on everyday streets as ‘users’, which deprives groups and individuals of their distinct identities in an attempt to quantify that which is inherently unquantifiable. In contrast, the authors here – in the streets of the US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Germany – dive deep into the relationships  between people and the streetspace they occupy using a range of approaches that can collectively be referred to as ‘localography’.