CITB03H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Urban Sprawl
Document Summary
Studying ciies is a vast and never-ending enterprise. There istoo much material for any one individual to master and always more to learn. Disciplines havethe advantage that they are based on more or less agreed-upon methods for acquiring knowledge and a more or less agreed-upon body of knowledge shared by the discipline. All history professors, for example, in order to get their history phd degree must study methods of historical research that historians use. A disadvantage of disciplines is that they encourage rigid thinking within the fourcorners othe discipline itself. There is a danger that professors who are rigorously trained in economics, forexample, will see only economic factors as important when they study or teach about an issue like urban sprawl. Because they have been trained in the importance of economics they may neglect poliical, social, and spaial aspects of sprawl. Scholars who study ciies use both quanitaive and qualitaive research methods.
