Hesam Kamalipour – författare

As an evolving and contested field, urban design has been made, unmade, and remade at the intersections of multiple disciplines and professions. It is now a decisive moment for urban design to reflect on its rigour and relevance. This handbook is an attempt to seize this moment for urban design to further develop its theoretical and methodological knowledge base and engage with the question of "what urban design can be" with a primary focus on its research.

This handbook includes contributions from both established and emerging scholars across the global North and global South to provide a more field-specific entry point by introducing a range of topics and lines of inquiry and discussing how they can be explored with a focus on the related research designs and methods. The specific aim, scope, and structure of this handbook are appealing to a range of audiences interested and/or involved in shaping places and public spaces.

What makes this book quite distinctive from conventional handbooks on research methods is the way it has been structured in relation to some key research topics and questions in the field of urban design regarding the issues of agency, affordance, place, informality, and performance. In addition to the introduction chapter, this handbook includes 80 contributors and 52 chapters organised into five parts. The commissioned chapters showcase a wide range of topics, research designs, and methods with references to relevant scholarly works on the related topics and methods.

As an evolving and contested field, urban design has been made, unmade, and remade at the intersections of multiple disciplines and professions. It is now a decisive moment for urban design to reflect on its rigour and relevance. This handbook is an attempt to seize this moment for urban design to further develop its theoretical and methodological knowledge base and engage with the question of "what urban design can be" with a primary focus on its research.

This handbook includes contributions from both established and emerging scholars across the global North and global South to provide a more field-specific entry point by introducing a range of topics and lines of inquiry and discussing how they can be explored with a focus on the related research designs and methods. The specific aim, scope, and structure of this handbook are appealing to a range of audiences interested and/or involved in shaping places and public spaces.

What makes this book quite distinctive from conventional handbooks on research methods is the way it has been structured in relation to some key research topics and questions in the field of urban design regarding the issues of agency, affordance, place, informality, and performance. In addition to the introduction chapter, this handbook includes 80 contributors and 52 chapters organised into five parts. The commissioned chapters showcase a wide range of topics, research designs, and methods with references to relevant scholarly works on the related topics and methods.

This book reframes street vending beyond depictions of marginality or disorder, exploring how informal street vending works as a situated, negotiated, diverse, relational, and gendered practice within contested public spaces. Bringing together a critical review of scholarship with an assemblage‑informed methodological framework, it positions informality as relational and spatially embedded, emerging through interactions among mobility, public space edges, pedestrian flows, governance, street life, and everyday survival.

Focusing on Tehran as a critical case, this book presents two detailed case studies. Through field observation, photographic survey, urban mapping, and archival research, it investigates how different types of street vending unfold in relation to mixed‑use corridors and transit nodes. A typology grounded in mobility and proximity to public/private interfaces shows how certain forms of street vending enable economic resilience while contributing to street‑level sociability and urban intensity.

The concluding discussion situates these findings within broader governance, political economy, and gender dynamics, addressing selective enforcement, institutional opacity, and women’s uneven access to public space and the informal economy. This book will appeal to scholars and practitioners in urban design, planning, geography, and Middle Eastern studies seeking empirically grounded, critically reflexive insights into informality, public space, and the everyday politics of the city.