Methods
Different questions demand different methods. This page has two families. Part A helps you know the region: framing, fieldwork and analysis. Part B helps you make the strategy with others, following the steps of the TU Delft Strategic Planning Cycle. Writing guides, cards and games complete the toolkit.
Knowing is not yet deciding
Methods that produce knowledge about the place: what is there, how it works, who lives there and what they think. Site visits, interviews, mapping, policy and discourse analysis. The result is evidence.
Methods that produce choices, agreements and actions among people with different interests and power: stakeholder analysis, SWOT, visioning, scenarios, strategy making, evaluation. The result is a strategy that others can carry.
Some methods belong to both families. A stakeholder analysis tells you who is involved, and it is also the first move in deciding who will shape the strategy. A SWOT summarises your analysis, and it is also the hinge between analysis and strategy. These methods appear in Part A, with their sheets, and again in Part B, where we show the role they play in making the strategy.
Frame the question, go into the field, analyse what you find. Twenty Methods Sheets, sorted by the stage of your research.
Framing
Find the problem, position it in the literature and design the steps from question to answer.
Every academic endeavour starts with a question, and every question comes from a problem. How to state the problem your project addresses.
Building on the shoulders of giants: an overview of previously published work that places your research in an ongoing conversation.
A visual brainstorm in which concepts branch out from a central idea, so a group can unpack its ideas and see how they relate.
Not a method but the design of the steps that take a project from its question to its answer, within a theoretical framework.
Urbanism as a meeting of disciplines, and what it takes to combine their questions, knowledge and methods.
Fieldwork
Gather evidence on site and from the people who use, own, manage and govern it.
Getting a grip on the complexity of a site through systematic observation of its spaces, uses, fragmentations and injustices.
A voluntary, structured conversation that gathers the perceptions, preferences and behaviour of users, clients and other groups.
Analysis
Interpret what you found: actors, policies, discourses and the preferences of users.
A schematic overview of the actors affected by an intervention: who is influential, who is important and who is left out.
Reading the plans of governments and other stakeholders critically, to link your project to their stated ambitions.
Analysing the whole communicative act: context, speaker, audience and the wider socio-political environment.
Confronting strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to move from analysis to design strategies.
A quantitative method that models users’ stated preferences between design alternatives.
Strategic spatial planning is a collective process: people with different interests, knowledge and power decide together what a region should become and how to get there. The methods below support that process. They are arranged along the ten steps of the TU Delft Strategic Planning Cycle (Rocco, Gonçalves & Lopez, 2024). The booklet defines the steps; the pairing of methods with steps is this course’s suggestion.
The cycle is not a recipe. Steps overlap, repeat and run in parallel. In your Q3 strategy you will work most on steps 1 to 5, and propose how steps 6 to 10 could follow.
Open the booklet →Summarise what you know and ask whose strengths and threats they are. The Whose SWOT? page shows a collaborative version.
Turn needs into a clear problem that others can recognise and discuss.
Map needs and also what a community already has: skills, places, networks.
Who is involved, what do they want, and how much power do they have? The sheet in Part A.
Sort stakeholders by power and interest, and give the high-interest, low-power quadrant a task: empower.
Civil society, public and private sectors: who holds power, and who are the silent stakeholders?
Session 05: governance, metagovernance and how planners organise attention.
A desirable and plausible long-term spatial future, based on explicit values, that convinces and engages the actors involved.
“What if we imagine that…?” Putting possible futures into words and images, so that a desirable one can be chosen.
Start from a desirable future and work backwards to the steps needed to reach it, instead of extrapolating present trends.
An intensive, collaborative design workshop in which designers, residents and experts draw futures together in a few days.
From the vision back to the present: key projects, spatial policies, a timeline and the actors who bring change about.
Confront strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to find strategies, and ask who gains, who loses and who acts.
Make uncertainty explicit: about the environment, about values and about related decisions, and decide step by step.
Sequences of actions that can be switched when conditions change, so a strategy stays robust under deep uncertainty.
Comparing and evaluating design alternatives before they are built: a check before implementation begins.
Model users’ stated preferences between alternatives. The sheet by Arie Romein in Part A.
25 questions on partners, people affected, data, distribution, time and integrity.
Spatial justice, capabilities, the doughnut and other frameworks to judge impact.
Read the plans and policies of governments and other stakeholders critically, to link your strategy to their ambitions. The sheet in Part A.
Zoning, land policy and public investment as instruments that create, distribute or capture value.
Rules, rights and institutions through which people govern shared resources together.
Temporary, low-cost interventions that test an idea in real space before committing to it.
Test a strategy against the interests of others before reality does. The Great Planning Game and the Shark House dilemma.
Condon, P. M. (2008). Design charrettes for sustainable communities. Island Press. · Friend, J., & Hickling, A. (2005). Planning under pressure: The strategic choice approach (3rd ed.). Elsevier. · Haasnoot, M., Kwakkel, J. H., Walker, W. E., & ter Maat, J. (2013). Dynamic adaptive policy pathways: A method for crafting robust decisions for a deeply uncertain world. Global Environmental Change, 23(2), 485–498. · Lydon, M., & Garcia, A. (2015). Tactical urbanism: Short-term action for long-term change. Island Press. · Robinson, J. B. (1982). Energy backcasting: A proposed method of policy analysis. Energy Policy, 10(4), 337–344. · Rocco, R., Gonçalves, J., & Lopez, H. (Eds.). (2024). The TU Delft strategic planning cycle. TU Delft OPEN Publishing.
Writing
Communicate your research, credit your sources and reflect on what you learned.
A short text that summarises objectives, questions, methods and results, and tells the reader why the research matters.
How to credit the knowledge you build on, with APA 7th edition in-text citations and reference lists.
Making sense of an experience to learn from it: reflection on action, in action and for action.
The tone and style that lift a reflection from description to academic reflection.
One method per card, with its definition and application. Use them to match research questions to the methods that can answer them.
18 cards: site visits · surveys & questionnaires · interviews · participatory workshops · observational studies · mapping and spatial analysis · document review & archival research · photography and video documentation · environmental assessments · stakeholder mapping & engagement · SWOT analysis · scenario planning · cost-benefit analysis · Delphi method · multi-criteria decision analysis · public participation GIS · discourse analysis · social network analysis
Methods for what you can do on site, so your research is grounded in the actual conditions of the place and in the experience of its stakeholders.
14 cards: site visits · behavioural mapping · environmental quality assessments · detailed site analysis · observational studies · social interaction observations · asset mapping · photography and video documentation · participatory mapping sessions · stakeholder interviews · SWOT analysis · photovoice projects · land use and zoning analysis · historical and cultural research
Games & exercises
Played in class, in groups. Each one puts a planning conflict, a value or a concept on the table and asks you to take a position.
One photograph by David Goldblatt (Boksburg, 1980), three commentaries and three testimonies. A reporter, a feminist scholar, an art critic, a contestant, a shopper and an organiser each see a different event. What you know depends on the question you ask, and on where you stand.
Based on Stainton Rogers (2006). Pair it with the TU Delft Urbanism Triangle and its reading, which set out the five logics of inquiry in urbanism.
A close reading of the introduction to On the Origin of Species (1872 edition). What Darwin teaches about a scientific attitude: observation, inference, and the systematic recording and referencing of evidence, and about clear academic writing in English.
How do civil society, the public sector and the private sector interact to produce urban space, through formal rules and informal institutions? Draw the triangle for your country: is it balanced, who holds power, and who are the silent stakeholders?
Then map the actors of your site on the power/interest matrix: whom to engage, keep satisfied, inform or empower.
Six cards, six typical planners working in network governance. Choose a role, take on a planning task and defend your position, your knowledge and your tools. Based on Sehested’s (2009) typology of planners as network managers and metagovernors.
A step-by-step model of democratic, participatory strategic planning, rooted in the Dutch tradition of visioning. Use it to place your vision, strategy and stakeholder engagement in one sequence. Rocco, Gonçalves & Lopez (2024), TU Delft OPEN, CC BY 4.0.
In 1986 a fibreglass shark crashed through a roof in Headington, Oxford. The council tried to remove it; today it protects it as heritage. Fifteen stakeholder personas, from the chief planner to the landowner and the residents of the council flats, negotiate one decision: should the shark stay or go?
About 85 minutes: speed dating, alliances and a tribunal. Individual rights against the rights of the community, public art as a public good, and where power sits in planning decisions. A game by Roberto Rocco.
Writing guides & glossary
For citation, start with the Citing & Referencing sheet above.
Rocco & Gonçalves (2025). The authoritative guide for the report.
The official website of the APA 7th edition, with examples for every type of reference.
A clear guide to APA formatting, in-text citations and reference lists.
Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR), 2020. A shared vocabulary from accessibility to sufficiency.