Adaptive Reuse of Commercial to Community Spaces: Methodology

RCPL 5113 995: Urban Planning Research Methods 1 Name: Emily Fitzsimmons Research question: How can empty commercial buildings be adapted and reused to meet other community needs?

Methodology During my search for literature about the adaptive reuse of empty commercial buildings into places for community services, I found about fifteen informative articles. Upon exploring these further, I found that they could not answer my research question in its entirety; the gaps and limitations in the literature gave an incomplete view of the topic. Therefore, to answer the question – how can empty commercial buildings be adapted and reused to meet other community needs? – fully, I will conduct qualitative research largely based on case study methodology.

As this topic heavily involves community needs and services, preparing a truly holistic report must include knowledge and opinions from communities. Such information from communities involved in projects that converted old commercial buildings to spaces for community services is particularly valuable because the users are the best experts of these ventures’ outcomes. Their knowledge will help improve future projects, including the physical designs as well as local engagement processes. Accordingly, I will collect information from primary sources, the people involved in various cases of commercial to community adaptive reuse. My methods will consist of surveys and interviews with the development firms, planning departments, and users of these spaces. The surveys will be sent to people associated with a selection of twenty-five different commercial to community adaptive reuse projects around the United States. Each project will provide survey results from at least one employee from the development firm or company in charge of the project, one person from the local planning department, as well as fifty users of that space.

RCPL 5113 995: Urban Planning Research Methods 2 Because I will be using the case study methodology, I will gather general information from the surveys and the current literature, but I will compare five different projects from around the country that exemplify commercial to community adaptive reuse. Surveying many projects will help increase generalizability and the knowledge base; however, I will delve deeper into those five projects in order to provide more details of the necessary processes and means for similar undertakings. The five case studies will involve interviewing the individuals from the development firms and the planning departments as well as five of the users from each case, which will be chosen randomly from those who completed the surveys. I would recruit people for the surveys and interviews by contacting the firms and the local governments associated with the projects’ development as well as the current managers of the spaces to get into contact with the users; the larger sample would be a voluntary sample (Lee, 2020a). I designed this to reach those knowledgeable of each project’s past and present, specifically those in the community who utilize its services. Notably, this sample excludes those in the community who do not use these spaces or services, those who directly renovated the buildings, and those who have actively opposed the projects. For secondary sources, I will collect more information from newspaper articles, academic literature, and government records in addition to ones already found. Because of the digitization of older articles and government records, I will be able to obtain most of my sources from databases on the internet.

The goal of this research is to answer the question in a report that applies to the general United States. As a result, I will be gathering the surveys and literature from projects around the country. Specifically, however, for the five, in-depth case studies, I will select one project from each of the five common regions of the United States: the West, the Southwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, and the Northeast. The existing literature on the topic already discusses a wide variety

RCPL 5113 995: Urban Planning Research Methods 3 of locations, so this factor will not add anything new to the literature. However, this step actively bolsters the desired generalizability of my research. Because my research question is broad, there are many places that will be left out, but performing five case studies is already more than usual and could cost the report depth (Lee, 2020b). In particular, rural areas will likely be excluded because such projects are more common and more documented in urban areas.

After collecting the information from the surveys, interviews, legal records, and literature, I will organize and analyze the data through coding. Prescribing to the deductive coding method, I will determine major themes and codes beforehand that I should look for during my research (Lee, 2020c). During the data collection, I will analyze the materials for predicted and unanticipated themes between the projects. I will then compile a dictionary of parent and child codes based on what I have learned from the various sources; some codes would include “healthcare,” “education,” “food,” “housing,” “business,” “childcare,” and others.

Because I will be analyzing large amounts of information from a variety of sources, I will utilize a coding software. This is appropriate for my research because a software program will allow me to catalogue the extensive body of data much more efficiently and accurately than coding manually (Lee, 2020c).

Notably, this methodology is not without limitations or threats to credibility. First, this research’s geographical boundaries are restricted to the United States, so it cannot be applied to other countries. Additionally, despite best efforts, expanding beyond the typical number of case studies will likely reduce the depth and detail of each case. Likewise, the case study methodology can demand considerable resources, effort, and time to complete; as this particular research project calls for five case study examinations as well as nationwide surveys, interviews, and coding, it would require even more resources than usual.

RCPL 5113 995: Urban Planning Research Methods 4 Regarding the credibility of the research, the goal of this report is to provide a piece of holistic literature about commercial to community adaptive reuse that has strong generalizability, so other parties have a comprehensive illustration of their options. Even so, this research’s generalizability has its own limits. Every region, every city, every neighborhood is unique, so the reader must be able to glean from the report the information that pertains to their situation. There is no one size fits all in community development. Lastly, as the only researcher, there would be a threat to the validity and reliability of the coding of data; however, this challenge could be addressed by forming a team to co-manage and execute the project (Lee, 2020c).

RCPL 5113 995: Urban Planning Research Methods 5 References Lee, C. A. (2020, September 23). More on interviews, ethnography [PowerPoint Slides]. Canvas. https://canvas.ou.edu/courses/219890/files/28866930?module_item_id=2932775.

Lee, C. A. (2020, September 30). Ethnography, field observations [PDF]. Canvas. https://canvas.ou.edu/courses/219890/files/28866934?module_item_id=2932780.

Lee, C. A. (2020, October 7). Qualitative coding and data analysis [PowerPoint Slides]. Canvas. https://canvas.ou.edu/courses/219890/files/28869737?module_item_id=2933245.