Urbanalys is a way to explore anything under the sun. The core issues are cities and urban issues. However, as the cities and urban areas are entangled in many and highly complex ways with other places, what is and what is not an urban issue seems a moot point.
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What Urbanalys does
Urbanalys has a tool-box from social anthropology and human geography. The main competence is in constructive research in and about urban contexts, particularly the built environment's planning, geography, politics, and energy and resource economy. In other words: research on processes of change for all kinds of actors in the city. This kind of work can be handled in two different ways: as knowledge feedback and as basic data.
Knowledge feedback
A key question for many actors is why projects seldom turn out quite as expected. By research on planning, policy, and sustainable technologies implementation in the urban context, I have trained myself in and developed methods to understand innovative projects often surprising turns. Innovative projects comes with a relatively high degree of unpredictability and open outcomes: their developments are hard to calculate and predict in advance. Because of this, project-owners and interested parties needs and asks for knowledge feedback either to reflect on what measures to take during a project's run or to learn from a project once it is finished.
Basic data
Urbanalys also specialises in investigating and mapping social topographies in and between cities. This means to define and gather knowledge on an urban context's, a group of actors', or a network's shape and dynamic: relations criss-crossing between what is commonly known as sectorial or essential categories (for instance, ethnicity, identity, nation, economy, ecology, society, culture, history, nature, human, object, thing, etc.). Such general categories are not necessarily wrong, but are often to coarse and misleading in order to understand many urban phenomena. This speciality also include lecturing, teaching, and to organise or help out on excursions.
Commissioners
Urbanalys sees itself as a mediator between the commissioner and its object of interest: a neighbourhood, a community, energy issues in the city, public spaces, project development concerning the built environment, eco-tech, etc..
Commissioners are:
Formal public institutions and authorities such as planning agencies.
Business actors who wants to broaden their knowledge base generally or for a particular project.
Academic institutions, where research on the built environment is carried out, such as architecture and planning departments at universities.