How to Study a City?

It can be strange to study a city, even stranger to write about it. As a term, many disciplines have contested it. Is it a space, a place, a legal category, a geographical unit, or is it a phenomenon? [1] For me, the most useful way to look at a city for research purposes is to think of it as a unit of analysis. As a territory around a mass of people, where there is a certain level and quality of economic development, a type of occupational diversity (most often, lower agricultural share); and this mass of people or threshold population size can change the nature of the city. For example, a mega city (like Delhi or Mumbai) is a city with a population of or more than ten million people.

But this is academic analysis. It’s boring.

It is useless even to the researcher (me), who must eventually use these terms to place her city in the landscape of academese [2]. Instead, I am beginning to think that it is more useful (and interesting) to start by “just knowing”. The best way to study a city (for research or for writing) is by stalking it. Memorise the city’s numbers (zones, wards, sea level, population size, and so on). Learn its colours (is it very brown on the map?), big water bodies, its weather, the way the wind blows, when it gets rain, when it gets snow (if). What mountains climb over the city? How does it fulfil its needs? Does it get thirsty? Is it very green (tree census is a thing)? What is its most road-killed animal? What are its train lines? How much waste does it produce? What kills most of its people? How are its people governed?

The aim isn’t to be exhaustive–– one can’t be–– but to know a city like you would a crush and be willing to be corrected. To operate from curiosity and not the fear of being too narrow, too bougie, too collapsed under our highly self-indulgent psychogeography. This is step one.

The next step is to walk the city.

By walking I mean feeling it psychologically and physically. Place yourself in the city, take the bus, the train, an auto, a car; walk it in the heat and the rain. It may not be possible to do it all, but it’s good to accept that what you see with your eyes closed is most likely all that you know about a city. What you will know by memory, details that will make the city come alive on paper, requires laboured knowledge of the land. Not just the emotional, intangible things, but even the key points— like a river, a big train station, a landfill, or the corporation building— may feel invisible to your mind without this exercise.

I struggle to research and write cities. I have no sense of space. After a year of studying Chennai, I continue to struggle to imagine its water. Its three rivers and the sea. As per Yuvan Aves, this means I don’t know Chennai at all (true) [3]. At first, I thought, this is because I haven’t read enough about these rivers and the sea. But I have. (Oh, I so have.) But despite the many papers and books, I feel shy, inaccurate, almost cranky to write about water in Chennai. It’s because I don’t remember it. I haven’t seen the sea since 2013 (or so). I barely remember the other bodies. My stories of the city are more about the personal moments I’ve shared with it. The times I’ve cried. My first kiss. The beginnings of my depression. A red maruti.

Old memories can only take you so far. Make new ones. Wear your shoes and count the trees. Smell the sea.

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[1] I do think cities are in many ways an ambition for a kind of living conditions, which promise a better, more equal world; and it is useful to locate one’s data or findings or story against this plan. But this is for after, once we have some details to compare. The “real, sighted city” versus the imagined, “the vision”.

[2] Some argue that studying cities is necessarily a comparative project, as a city is always within a world of cities. I am not sure what to think of this. I suppose, it depends on why you’re studying a city.

[3] He says this in the prologue to Intertidal, pg. xxxiv.