Licence L3

This course offers a concise, structured roadmap for conducting rigorous urban planning research, treating it as an intellectual process that generates new theoretical and empirical knowledge to inform urban policy. It guides students from the initial clarification of a broad theme into a feasible topic through problem identification and careful delimitation of scope.

The second phase develops a solid problem statement by reviewing existing literature to reveal knowledge gaps, formulating a clear research question and SMART objectives, and translating key concepts into testable hypotheses, variables, and indicators. Finally, the course explains how to construct a coherent methodology by aligning research philosophy, reasoning approach, and quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods strategies with the time horizon appropriate to the question under study.