But our point is that while the chapters need not be read in order, we certainly hope that individual chapters will be read in order. He claims “the authors advised their readers to go through the text without necessarily following the book’s sequence” and he seems to have taken it to mean that we endorse random skimming of the book.
Professor Tzonis also seems to have misunderstood our advice about how to read the book. We’d be thrilled if social scientists can help with more objective tests and studies in the future. In short, our aim is most certainly not to produce “fiction (almost dreamlike”) in fact, we use those words (on page 17) to describe Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, not our own method! We make use of both quantitative and qualitative methods, although we relied more on the latter because there is not much quantitative data available that sheds light on our research question. Finally, we made use of the strolling method: random strolls and chats with strangers can shape and refine hypotheses about the ethos of a city, especially cities we know less from personal experience.
We scheduled interviews with people of different classes, ethnic groups, and genders in different cities: we tried to find out if they argue about similar things (e.g., religion in Jerusalem, language in Montreal, national-level politics in Beijing) and what they say about those things.
Personal experience matters: if I have lived in a city for twenty years, I am likely to have a good sense of its dominant ethos, or “habits of the heart”. And we suggest other ways of doing more scientific research, such as comparing the distribution of resources in city budgets.īut we also make a case for more qualitative methods of research. Several chapters also draw on accounts of city planners who explain what values motivated what they did. The problem is that most surveys compare countries, not cities (hence, there is more data on Singapore, the only city-state in the book). In the introduction, we explicitly say: “In principle, we should do our best to use ‘hard’ science to write about values and cities.” We do make use of public opinion polls and values survey data. Mutual learning can only take place on a foundation of mutual understanding.Īs a matter of methodology, we do not “vehemently reject the “positivist” academic ways of political science and papers.” We ourselves write academic papers and we think it’s a perfectly legitimate way of doing things. But first, let me clarify what we actually say in the book. Upon further reflection, however I realize that I can learn something from his review. My first reaction was that Professor Tzonis didn’t understand the book, perhaps because he didn’t read it closely. So I was disappointed when I first read Professor Tzonis’s review of Spirit of Cities. In the same vein, we should read books and articles with the aim of learning something new. The point is that we should make a life-time commitment to self-improvement, and we should always be open to the possibility of learning new things from other people.
Confucius famously said: “In strolling in the company of just two other people, I am bound to find a teacher” ( The Analects, 7.22).