Urban areas are centres of gravity for economic, social, political and cultural life in the 21st century. Consequentially, the processes driven by our living and working in cities drive the environmental and sustainability challenges of our time. In this PhD I explore a field of research dedicated to understanding the processes and patterns unique to urban environments through the methods and epistemologies of the natural sciences. Though more than a century in the making, efforts to advance a quantitative urbanism, sometimes referred to as a ‘Science of Cities’, has rapidly developed over the last two decades through the introduction of new datasets, new methodological approaches and more advanced computational power.
To understand the contribution of this field to urban knowledge and practice in the context of the climate emergency and a wider set of urban environmental challenges, I apply a reflexive approach that applies the methods and epistemologies that characterise contemporary urban environmental quantitative literature. To consider the value of larger and more available urban data, I develop a case study that uses Google Maps data to assess transport interventions in a rapidly growing city in India. To interrogate the way new methodologies and empirical approaches can embed political and normative positions, I explore the effect of data on scaling on climate action priorities in the UK. Finally, to explore the extent to which normative decisions can drive the results of empirical analyses I explore the co-benefits of climate action in urban regions of the UK.
The empirical chapters of this thesis reveal fundamental challenges facing quantitative urban environmental analysis. The first chapter demonstrates how data collection and processing can systematically exclude certain urban realities and experiences. The second shows how methodological choices shape our understanding of policy priorities and their distributional implications. The third reveals how embedded normative assumptions influence the way we value and understand urban interventions, even within seemingly objective analytical frameworks.
Collectively, these chapters highlight the need for a more epistemically diverse quantitative urbanism to contribute meaningfully to urban environmental challenges. The way we achieve a more interdisciplinary urbanism is as important, I argue, as the realisation of a quantitative urbanism characterised by a greater diversity of methods, methodological approaches, and epistemological underpinings. I conclude by proposing an approach to advancing interdisciplinary environmental urbanism based on three principles: contextual sensitivity, active and engaged transparency, and the cultivation of productive epistemological conflicts.
