Urban fabric: which questions for which data?

Resumen

This article is the result of the seminar organized for the Project USP-COFECUB between universities of Lyon and São Paulo, entitled “Dynamic planning and spatial representations: heuristic data and context”. It highlights the methods and sources used by three doctoral students that deal with the production of the city on different field researches in Brazil, in Italy and in France. Each research is oriented by its particularities, the state of science in its own place, but mainly by the level of analysis of the city production, used by the researcher: the actor, the means and the territory. These levels are forcing to ask specific questions, to use different data to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the global phenomenon of the production of the city.