Saffron's research focuses on anthropological approaches to understanding lived experiences of prosperity and inequality in urban neighbourhoods. Her work examines how 'communities of place' are imagined and actioned in urban policy and place-making practice, and how relationships between urban social life, urban form and prosperity are theorised. Saffron's research questions the social and political implications of reimagining prosperity as situated and diverse, and the theoretical and methodological challenges this presents to developing new forms of evidence and policy directions.

Saffron works collaboratively with citizen scientists, community organisations, government policymakers and business decision-makers to bring local understandings of prosperity into planning and decision-making processes that produce place-based strategies.   She focuses on developing citizen 'social' science as a method for co-producing policy-relevant knowledge about pathways to prosperity, translating lived experience into new prosperity metrics, and developing new forms of partnership and collaboration for action on place-based prosperity. 

Saffron’s published work explores the value of place-based approaches to research and policy development, and citizen-led models and metrics of shared prosperity. Her work draws on several years of ethnographic research in east London, and mixed methods research in urban neighbourhoods around the UK and in Malmö, Seoul City and south Chicago, and in informal settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.