Urban Studies
The Urban Studies group investigates people-place relationships at different spatial scales, from neighbourhoods to cities and regions. The research is focused on a better understanding of how neighbourhoods, cities and regions develop, and how different spatial configurations and structures emerge (within and between cities), and how these configurations affect socio-economic outcomes for people across spatial scales. The multi-level interaction between people and places is central. They investigate how the urban context affects individuals and their lives, and how people influence the socio-spatial structures around them. A better understanding of these people-place interactions is crucial for the design and planning of cities and regions, and for the design of spatial policies that contribute to the quality of places.
![](https://filelist.tudelft.nl/BK/Onderzoek/Onderzoekslijnen/Urban%20studies_RR%20London.jpg)
The group contributes to important challenges related to contemporary urbanisation. These include increasingly complex connections and networks of cities and regions, both nationally and internationally; growing levels of inequality and the spatial footprint of inequality; and changing structures of urban governance and citizen engagement in urban policy. The research in Urban Studies is multi-disciplinary and empirical in nature, using both qualitative and quantitative research methods, with a strong emphasis on the use of very large longitudinal register data sets and advanced statistical techniques. Increasingly, computational social science methods are used for a theory driven analysis of novel digital data resources (‘big data’).