In order to research the city, geographers need to be sensitive to a range of qualitative techniques. These are reading the city, ethnographic takes on the city and thinking, which allow geographers to do urban research. It has allowed geographers to draw upon peoples' everyday experiences to theorise the city and re-think the way the city is undergoing a series of alterations. Recently, urban geography has turned to multiple explanations of the urban process. New means of studying the city have occurred thorough the emergence of post-modernism and post-structuralism theories. Geographers have now begun to view the city as a landscape that can be 'read'. Attention has been drawn to the importance of language in structuring the urban environment. The dominance of 'white, western, and usually male urban sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, or city planners' (King, 1996: 2) has been challenged. Geographers are now sensitive to the making of geography. That is, how geographers produce geography. Most cities have an assortment of geographies. Separate layers of geography interact with one another. The complex nature of the city works against the idea of a single geography being dominant.

The aim of the New York trip was to study and look further into the major themes covered in the lectures previous to the trip: