For our project on urban green spaces in Portland, it was a struggle to define exactly what focus question we would be testing and the best possible methodologies for research. Despite being advised to not let “the tail wag the dog” and let our methodologies define our research, it was hard not to. We have a lot of tools at our disposal now, but we still felt limited by what we had to work with and the requirements of the project. We were also limited by our lack of time and resources to conduct as thorough research as was needed to answer some of our questions. It was definitely a struggle to find a focus question that was both interesting and answerable. We eventually came to (yet it still could be changed): What is the relationship between population growth and development and the distribution of green vs. grey spaces in Portland neighborhoods?
This question gives us a unique historical perspective that helps to distinguish our research from the research that has already been done in relation to Portland. It is also something that we can look into without too much difficulty since the census data since 1970 is easily accessible in GIS mapping form. For the GIS portion of our project, this was then set. We would look at various demographic shifts in Portland over time in relation to new urban green spaces and the upkeep of old urban green spaces. We hope to see some relationship between between implemented green spaces and urban sprawl demonstrated with GIS.
For our qualitative research, it was much harder to find something that we thought could easily relate. We thought about interviewing Portland citizens about how urban green spaces play a role in their lives and if they determined their housing situation. However, this didn’t seem like a very useful supplement to our GIS research and we didn’t know the best way to find people who have lived in Portland a long time. However, after reading several journals and seeing all of the current research being done, we decided it would really interesting to see document where and what kinds of research was being done in relation to urban green spaces. We wondered if research was being done in places where green spaces were a big deal or in places where people wanted to implement green spaces. Also, in what parts of the world did people care about urban green spaces and what kind of research was being done where? We thought this was much more relevant to our project by providing background to our research in Portland. Through this, we could maybe better understand why Portland has its interesting relationship with urban green spaces and gentrification.
For our inferential statistics, we could either find correlations between various variables we map with GIS or analyze correlations between the cities we find being discussed in the journals we code. This still needs to be determined and will likely be determined by which ever provides the most interesting results. We have a lot of work left to do for our project, but at least we know where we are heading.