Collaborative Workshop on Participatory Research Methods

Informal Cities is a research project based at the University of Oxford, part of the PEAK
Urban programme on Urban Futures (peak-urban.org) that adopts a multi-disciplinary lens to study a sample of diverse cities in India Africa and Latin America. Informal Cities investigate the types of data available, their timeliness, comprehensiveness and depth for each city. With a focus on informal systems, the project will collect and harmonize existing data sources, including administrative data, regional surveys, geospatial data, satellite imagery and mobile data. The project draws on expertise in anthropology, geography, mathematics and epidemiology to find new ways to study informal neighbourhoods, economies, healthcare and transport in cities. The goal of the project is to search for both scalable and specific solutions to delivery of SDGs in informal city systems.

PRIA (Participatory Research in Asia) is a global centre for participatory research and training based in New Delhi. PRIA’s professional expertise and practical insights are utilised by other civil society groups, NGOs, governments, donors, trade unions, private business and academic institutions around the world. They specialise in participatory development methodologies, citizen monitoring and social accountability of services, participatory governance in panchayati raj institutions and urban local bodies, municipal reforms and participatory planning.

The purpose of the Collaborative Methods Workshop was to generate more embedded
methodologies to grasp informality in Delhi.  Both teams shared methodological frameworks of the organisations/projects. This prompted a longer discussion about "informality” as an empirically complex reality.

• Discussion on the merits and limitations of various approaches 
• How might different research approaches generate different kinds of ‘evidence’ about
how the city works? How can ‘evidence’ be used to influence policy makers in the city?
• Discussion and development of an approach or a set of approaches to understand
informality in Delhi.
• How to refine analytical frameworks of climate change by developing a more grounded
understanding of informality, and situate the informal city as a mode of habitation as well as mode of urban belonging with its difficult tradeoffs and tensions. 

This engagement with the informal city will contribute to advance the field by showing the interaction of formality and informality and it shapes life at the margins. Through this conversation we discovered our overlapping practices in how we study and strive to better understand 'informality', and we agreed that a more grounded understanding of 'informality' is fundamental to developing urban policy and research.