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This short paper introduces a special section exploring how human geographers use research notebooks. It outlines why a fuller exchange about how exactly we do ethnographic note‐taking in human geography is worthwhile, and describes a series of conference sessions in which a group of human geographers took the relatively bold step of showing each other examples of what could be found inside their notebooks. It also provides an overview of how the papers in the special section might help us all to consider the variety of options available to us when we choose to work in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the collection of nine short articles that make up the inaugural special section of the journal on 'thinking with methods'. It begins by outlining why a fuller conversation about different ways of handling talk in human geography might be worthwhile. Then it describes a series of conference sessions in which a small group of researchers in this field came together to consider some of the most intriguing excerpts of talk generated by their studies. It ends with an overview of how the following articles that came out of these sessions might productively shake up some of our current working conventions. This paper introduces the collection of nine short articles that make up the first special section of the journal on 'thinking with methods'. It begins by outlining why a fuller conversation about different ways of handling talk in human geography might be worthwhile. Then it describes a series of conference sessions in which a small group of researchers in this field came together to consider some of the most intriguing excerpts of talk generated by their studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disagreement is a fundamental dimension of social life. In many situations, however, people are reticent to explicitly criticise the actions of others. It follows that if social researchers wish to study differences in people's common sense judgements of other's actions in an interview setting they need to carefully design how discussion of these differences are structured. This paper examines a research project that used context‐specific video clips to structure interviews with users of a communal infrastructural resource. In digging into the practical detail of an interview encounter, the paper contributes to human geography's ongoing conversation about the practicalities of doing interview‐based research. This paper examines a research project that used context specific video clips to structure interviews with users of a communal infrastructural resource. In digging into the practical detail of an interview encounter the paper contributes to human geography's on‐going conversation about the practicalities of doing interview based research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the public routines through which migrant domestic workers inhabit a global city such as Hong Kong. Using 'public outings' as a conceptual entry point to understanding migrants' mobile geographies of dwelling, it seeks to present such migrants as ordinary urban actors who inhabit, share and shape the city landscape every day just like many others. Whilst disciplined by their employers in all sorts of ways, domestic workers nonetheless use the public and quasi-public spaces within their neighbourhoods – spaces integral to their work routines – as sites for forging a precarious autonomy. Drawing on a short ethnography – using participant diaries, interviews, and participant observation – of live-in migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, the paper describes how migrants use a range of neighbourhood spaces to create an improvised infrastructure of care that helps creates a sense of domesticity and home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two previous reviews, we examined how human geographers currently report on projects involving their preferred qualitative methods – interviews and ethnographic observation. This final review steps back from specific techniques to evaluate some of the broader presentational conventions that typify this work. What can be inferred from where these geographers discuss data collection in their papers? Why do they develop new methods and what do they say about fieldwork failures? How often do they reflect on the provisional status of their findings? And what are the implications of how they define their purpose in working with qualitative material? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human geography has become deeply interested in a range of research methods that focus on researchers' corporeal engagement with their research sites. This interest has opened up an exciting set of research horizons, energising the discipline in a whole range of ways. Welcoming this engagement, this paper presents a series of meditations on the process of using the researcher's corporeal learning as a research tool. Exploring two research projects, as well as the work of the photographer Nikki S Lee, it examines how the process of becoming corporeally capable might productively be framed as sets of ongoing experiments. Framing such engagements as experiments is a useful heuristic through which to think rigorously about what such research can claim as knowledge. More controversially, the paper argues that the heuristic of the experiment helps us to attend to the varying durations of becoming in ways that much existing work has discounted. Developing corporeal capacities – gaining a skill, becoming capable of doing a particular activity – involves becoming attuned to a range of thresholds, the crossing of which open up novel and frequently unexpected perspectives. Attunement to these thresholds does not arise simply through the process of mixing in and participating in a research site. It requires careful attention to the parameters of transformation involved in being able to participate. The paper explores how such parameters might be decided upon and calibrated as part of an ongoing engagement with a research site or event. Our aim is not to artificially restrict or constrain how human geographers approach their research design. Rather it is to encourage human geographers to show more courage in their use of corporeal based research methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cycling has the potential to play a key role in developing environmentally and socially sustainable cities and neighbourhoods in New Zealand. Realising this potential requires understanding how different groups within New Zealand society relate to existing patterns of cycling, and how they might respond to the introduction of a range of new cycling oriented infrastructures. Commenting on articles from the special issue "New research on cycling in New Zealand," this article argues that human geographers and other social scientists have much to offer policy makers and planners in understanding how a transition to more people oriented, sustainable, urban mobility systems might be fostered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review examines how ethnographic methods currently feature in the work of human geographers. The ethnographic approach continues to be a popular choice amongst those hoping to learn from how social life unfolds in particular places and settings. But what visions of ethnography do geographers draw on to attain authorial authority? What are the implications of how they present their field experiences? How, linking back to our last review, is their ethnographic work connected to the interview? And what are some of the downsides to how the term is deployed in the discipline? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing the concept of kinaesthetics, this article undertakes a critical re-description of amateur sports and fitness to explore the topographies, materials, innovation, and socialities that make up urban environments. Extending work on affect and urban materiality within geography and elsewhere, we argue that amateur sport and fitness animates many cities in ways that are frequently overlooked. The paper aims to 1) broaden understandings of amateur sport and fitness practices; 2) reframe perspectives on the kinds of environments cities are; 3) develop a prospective politics of provision involving the design and maintenance of a social infrastructure of amateur sport and fitness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first in a series of three reviews that scrutinise the conventions of doing and describing qualitative research that currently predominate in human geography. Since we find that interviews are the most widely used method in this field, we begin with an examination of how they feature in the work of today's human geographers. How many people do geographers speak with and what do they say about their interviewing procedures? What do they imagine their interviews to be in terms of the social occasion? And how do they present the empirical material that is thereby generated? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities, published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in—depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine—grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking about urban transportation radically different from that used by mainstream transport planners and geographers. Geographical Research asked six researchers—Tim Edensor, Michele Lobo, Debbie Hopkins, Helen Fitt, Juliana Mansvelt, and Donald McNeill—to reflect on what kind of research vistas might be opened up bring the tools of cultural geography and mobility research to the world of commuting. Here are their responses, rounded out by a reply by David Bissell, Transit Life's author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

artists and geographers frequently work together. the following essay explores one such on-going collaboration. centering on a festival organized by an artist and a geographer, it explores the productive antagonisms that working through and along disciplinary borders produces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The health benefits of physical activity are many and well known. Those hoping to promote public health are therefore understandably keen on encouraging physical exercise. This commentary considers the role of qualitative research in this undertaking, given a context in which medical researchers have more commonly taken a quantitative approach to the motivations that are thought to underpin exercise. Our core argument is that studies concerned with how particular environments are inhabited by particular groups of exercisers could play a more central part in public health promotion. In making this case, and by way of an introduction to this Health and Place special issue, we present a series of statements that we think could usefully guide the further development of this work. Specifically, we argue for further attention to: the ways in which different material settings play into the exercise experience; how many of the exercise practices that we may hope to understand sit rather uneasily with the idea of sport; the subtleties of how sociality features in contemporary exercise practices; the physical pleasures that come from exercise; and how exercise practices are both acquired by individuals and evolve as a whole. In so doing, the aim is to encourage relevant researchers to engage more directly in conversation with health promoters instead of either being indifferent to, or critical of, them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recreational running is increasingly widespread and could therefore be seen as the obvious target for those hoping to encourage greater public health through exercise. Existing qualitative research on this topic has, however, tended to focus on groups of highly committed runners. It is accordingly unclear whether their findings can be extrapolated to the much larger population of comparatively casual runners. This existing work has also tended to emphasise the social nature of the activity in particular ways. Whilst much recreational running happens alone, most commonly these studies have centred on the establishment of shared identities and group subcultures. Drawing on a study involving accompanied runs and interviews with recreational runners who do not belong to running clubs in London, this paper presents an alternative account. These respondents were relatively uninterested in the idea of proper running technique, ambivalent about the presence of others when running, and reticent about being pulled into a more committed collective practice. In view of how these more casual runners may be of particular interest to public health promoters, this finding suggests future campaigns might do well not to focus too greatly on the potential enjoyments of running community membership and start instead with a different set of social dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting with a series of perspectives on why and where humans run, this paper considers how running comes to happen in some environments instead of others and how it is experienced thereafter. More specifically, we are interested in the processes by which contemporary recreational running has come to take place either indoors on treadmills or outside on pavements and paths. Running has been recently positioned as an obvious target for those hoping to encourage public health among increasingly time-pressured populations and running outdoors can often lead to additional benefits. Yet how it is that runners and environments come to coalesce has yet to be examined in any great detail. This paper responds by drawing on theories of how embodied practices spread through society to further an emergent geographical interest in the speech patterns of everyday life. With reference to a project involving accompanied runs and interviews with groups of both indoor and outdoor recreational runners in London, we ask what the subtleties of their running talk tells us about how exercisers become attached to the environments they currently occupy and how they might feasibly be encouraged elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative research focused on how people experience the social and material environments in which they exercise has the potential to inform public health agendas in all sorts of ways. This commentary takes up the claim made by Stephanie Coen that such research should begin with an 'equity lens' and place a greater emphasis on 'critique' than we did in the 'Exercise and Environment' special issue to which she responds. At its best qualitative research reveals new ways of thinking about the social and material contexts at hand. As such, it has the potential to highlight important dimensions of the lived experience of popular fitness practices that may have hitherto been relatively overlooked. Always starting with the overt aim of applying an 'equity lens' truncates the possibility of discovering such dimensions. Furthermore, being too wedded to an overtly critical stance may end up hindering, rather than encouraging, the most positive dialogue between those studying the cotemporary exercise experience and those involved in public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together comics studies and geography to consider how space operates both on and off the comics page. We integrate discussion of comics' formal properties with a sitespecific comics installation (Dave McKean's The Rut) to show the intertwining of these spaces. Our argument is articulated through juxtaposition of the literature on space-time in comics with our case study. This montage speaks to graphic narratives' formal properties, especially its alchemic, emergent nature. Our argument begins by introducing The Rut as an example of how space and narrative can be intertwined. Our argument tacks back to the literature, discussing the pluralization of time-space(s) throughout recent writing within human geography and how this can help us think with The Rut. We then briefly describe the way The Rut is physically laid out. Returning once again to the literature, we argue that the topological figuration of comics is mediated by readers' practices of relation-building and narrative construction, which are in turn impacted by the irreversible nature of time. This is demonstrated for The Rut through experience of the art as well as participant observation. Finally, we highlight how actual spaces are overlaid with virtual spaces that help shape the actualized version; we illustrate this by showing how the embodied experience of The Rut's materiality was productive of a multiplicity of experiential spaces, both actual and virtual. We close by drawing three conclusions: the first about the implications of graphic narrative's relational ontology for how social scientists narrate socio-spatial processes; the second, a call for more empirical work examining the emergence, evolution, and dissipation of topological spaces; and the third about the political possibility of initiating new practices of 'reading' spaces and times to produce and access new ways of being in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary cities are thick with infrastructure. In recognition of this fact a great deal of recent work within urban studies and urban geography has focused on transformations in the governance and ownership of infrastructural elements within cities. Less attention has been paid to the practices through which urban infrastructures are inhabited by urban dwellers. Yet in all sorts of ways infrastructures are realised through their use and inhabitation. This paper argues for the importance of attending to the ways that infrastructures are reinterpreted through use. Focusing on a case study of commuter cyclists in London, it explores the ways in which cyclists accommodate themselves to (and are in turn accommodated by) the infrastructural orderings of London's streets. Confronted by the obduracy of a road infrastructure designed primarily for motorised traffic, cyclists show a diverse range of approaches to negotiating movement through the city on bikes. The paper describes how this negotiation can be understood in terms of the more or less skilful processes of navigation, rule following, rule making, and rule bending. This involves a polymorphous mix of practices, some common to driving, others to walking, and yet others unique to cycling. In conclusion, the paper suggests that transformations of infrastructures found within cities need to be understood as much through emergent changes between their elements, and that close attention to how infrastructures come to be inhabited offers productive avenues for thinking about ways to improve them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an account of the emergence of jogging as mass physical fitness practice in America in the 1960s. It explores how jogging was configured as a physical fitness activity suitable for sedentary middle-aged men and women. Jogging developed as a counter to the ill-effects of habits entrained by the increasingly sedentary lifestyles of modern industrialized urban and suburban dwellers. The paper traces the development of jogging as a defined exercise routine at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. Focusing on the moment when jogging is ‘invented’ as a recognizable fitness practice tells a great deal about the origin of contemporary regimes of physical fitness for the middle-aged population and how they have evolved. It also points to the significance of understanding how the shaping of corporeal habits play into the making of (1) individual bodies, (2) common practices of corporeal care and activity, and (3) environments of physical activity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Qualitative research in human geography is dominated by interviews and ethnography - although an argument might also be made for adding discourse analysis to that short list. Papers that question how human geographers analyse qualitative research material. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores the concept of domestication as a way of attending to urban public spaces and the ways in which they come to be inhabited. It argues against the tendency in urban scholarship to use the term pejoratively and interchangeably with words like pacification or taming to express concerns relating to the corrosion of public life. Rather, the aim here is to develop domestication as a concept attentive to the processes by which people go about making a home in the city. Given the tremendous investment, enthusiasm and amount of policy directed towards urban development and regeneration over the past decade, it is argued that it is vital that urban scholarship continues to develop tools and concepts for offering fine-grained attention to the spaces that get produced by these interventions and to the social dynamics within them. These arguments are developed through a case study of the Prince of Wales Junction in London. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Thinking about and with images has long been central to the practice of geographical fieldwork. This paper considers how the participation of images in urban-based fieldwork might be understood in the wake of non-representational theories. Drawing upon our experience of co-teaching an urban-based field course in Berlin, we discuss three ways in which such theories allow us to make more of the participation of images in the thinking-spaces of urban fieldwork. Specifically, we consider how images afford opportunities for attending to everyday ecologies of materials and things; for thinking through the rhythms of urban environments; and for producing affective archives. In concluding we suggest that thinking with images in urban fieldwork can be understood as part of the elaboration of ecologies of non-representational ethico-aesthetic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to research on the lived dimensions of transnational mobility through an engagement with recent work on affect. Drawing on interviews with New Zealand skilled migrants, we argue that the attractions and experience of relocation to London are significantly connected to the affective possibilities it offers. As a diverse and enlivening set of ecologies of place, London appears to facilitate a certain feeling of being in the heart of things, an embodied state that is both valued and closely linked to New Zealand's former status as a British colony. We argue that considering the affective possibilities of cities - and the diverse ways in which transnational migrants perceive and appropriate these possibilities - offers valuable insights into the dynamics of subjectivity in a mobile world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the use of digital photography in urban-based human geography fieldwork. It draws on the authors' experience of introducing digital photography into the teaching and assessment of a level 3 undergraduate field course in Berlin. To begin they outline how they sought to use simple digital technologies in order to facilitate student engagement within Berlin and to widen the range of assessment avenues available to students. They concentrate in particular on how it provided the opportunity to develop Web-based assessments. In the second half of the paper they reflect on student experience of the use of digital cameras and Web-based assessment. While acknowledging some of the problems with using technology in this way, they conclude by arguing that digital photography not only enhances the quality of student engagement with urban environments but also provides a way of more effectively integrating the field-, class- and Web-based components of urban field courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the recent interest in Berlin in the English-language urban studies journals over the past decade. It argues that welcome though this interest may be, the narrowness of its focus says much about the limitations of current Anglophone urban and regional studies. Following on from the recent set of Euro-commentaries in this journal, and using recent writing on Berlin as a case-study, it suggests Anglophone urban studies has much to gain from: (a) placing greater value on the plurality of Europe's urban tradition; and (b) paying greater attention to the plurality of urban narratives that lie outside the existing analytic consensus within Anglophone urban and regional studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider whether London functions as an ‘escalator region’ for international migrants in the same way that has been suggested for domestic migrants. Our case study focuses on New Zealand tertiary educated migrants who move to London for a period of work and travel. We propose a four-fold typology of these movers, seeking to tease out the different motivations and aspirations behind their global mobility, and the different ways in which they make use of London's opportunities. Our findings have broader ramifications for studies of skilled migrants between global cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue on transnational urbanism, we are interested in accounts of transnational mobility that are attentive to everyday practices and geographical emplacement. Eschewing narratives of trouble-free movement by disembedded actors, consideration is thus given to the mundane and situated efforts by which people make their lives across international borders. We also wish to amplify the social scientific register of transnational migrants by considering groups whose mobility has thus far been little examined. In this introductory paper we elaborate these arguments, while also summarising the content of the substantive papers which follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a contribution to the growing literature on contemporary forms of global mobility, we consider young New Zealanders who move to the UK for a period of work and travel, typically basing themselves in London. Beyond consideration of career opportunities, we find formulations of the self as creative project to be remarkably central to the mobility of these New Zealanders. Their time in London is often understood as a period of exploration, travel and new experiences. We note also the distinctive role that friendship networks play in sustaining and shaping this movement, in both practical and less tangible ways. Significantly, we find that these friendship networks are themselves mobile, in some cases undergoing almost complete temporary relocation from New Zealand to the UK. This raises questions about how we think about contemporary international mobility, and the significance of friendship as opposed to kin or neighbourhood relations within it. We conclude with a series of schematic statements regarding what is needed to more fully come to terms with the distinctive forms of mobility that these New Zealanders—and the Australians, South Africans and Canadians with whom they have much in common—embody as a way of lift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we offer a discussion of the 'materiality' of the urban. This discussion is offered in the context of recent calls in various areas of the discipline for the necessity of 'rematerializing' human geography. While we agree with the spirit of these calls, if human geography (and, within that, urban geography) is going to return to the material, let alone articulate some kind of rapprochement between the 'material' and 'immaterial', it needs to be clear about the terms it is employing. Therefore, and drawing on a range of work from contemporary cultural theory, sociology, urban studies, urban history, architectural theory and urban geography, we sketch out more precisely what a 'rematerialized' urban geography might involve. Crucially, we argue that, rather than 'grounding' urban geography in more 'concrete' realities, paying increased attention to the material actually requires a more expansive engagement with the immaterial. In developing this argument we outline some important conceptual vehicles with which to work up an understanding of the material as processually emergent, before offering two pathways along which the materialities of the urban might be usefully apprehended, pathways that avoid simple oppositions between the 'material' and 'nonmaterial' while also restating the importance of understanding the complex spatialities of the urban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has seen a remarkable turn towards the cultural in human geography. This shift has been marked by a strange gap between theory and empirical practice. Radical though the turn to the cultural has been in reconstituting the ways that human geography thinks of itself as a discipline, its impact on ways that geographers actually do empirical research has been in certain respects relatively limited. Indeed, while the cultural turn has become strongly associated with a valorisation of qualitative methodologies, the actual range of methods used has been relatively narrow. Drawing on the work of Nigel Thrift and a range of other human geographers who are exploring the metaphor of performance to understand this realm of practical action, I argue that not only can social action be viewed as performance, so too is it productive to reframe the research process itself as a kind of performance. This reframing allows for a more experimental and more flexible attitude towards both the production and interpretation of research evidence. It also makes it easier to think of new ways of engaging with how individuals and groups inhabit their worlds through practical action. Drawing on my own experimentation with written and photographic research diaries, I explore a number of ways through which the performative ethos can inform and invigorate the human geographic imagination. I conclude by arguing that human geography needs to be more imaginative, pluralistic, and pragmatic in its attitude towards both (a) methodology and (b) the kinds of final research accounts it produces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial. Introduces articles in the November 2003 issue of the journal "Environment and Planning". Culture in human geography; Practices of voluntary welfare in the city; Spatial textures; Industrial clusters.

Contemporary urban theory is marked by a division. Urban policy practitioners, planners, architects and town hall administrators have over the past two decades rediscovered an enthusiasm and belief in urban life—as indeed have significant numbers of ordinary citizens. It might have been expected that urban critics from the left would be enthusiastic about this rediscovered urbanity. In fact, the much-vaunted urban renaissance has been robustly criticised by academic urbanists, particularly by those working from within a political economy framework, as little more than élite propaganda. Rather than being defined by a renaissance, the contemporary urban landscape is almost uniquely riven by social divisions. In many ways, the critique offered by academic urbanists is powerful and convincing. But this paper argues that the academic—or urban political economy—critique of the contemporary urban condition comes at too high a price, Recognising the pervasiveness of many of the more destructive trends highlighted by the urban political economists, there is also a need to engage more positively with the broader contemporary enthusiasm for the city. Through a case study of a site in Auckland, New Zealand, the paper seeks to demonstrate how thinking carefully about both the context and the emergence of particular kinds of spaces and types of social practices associated with specific instances of urban change, can help us engage more productively with the current resurgence of interest in urban culture and cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assesses heritage planning in Auckland, New Zealand. Presentation of conflicts and issues that confront planners formulating urban preservation strategies; Evolution of an heritage/urban design strategy for prominent inner-city suburban road; Formulation of a policy of tools for managing heritage of the suburban built environment.

Establishes a phenomenology of perceptions based on Walter Benjamin's analysis of urban experience under modernity. Connection of Benjamin's perceptions with an economy of self-defense; Auratic similarities of Benjamin's analysis; Intersubjectivity between humans and the nonhuman; Emergence of a code of ethics of encounter within the contemporary city.

This essay is a brief reply to Cochrane (2006b). It reiterates the ways in which the existing Anglo-American consensus within urban studies allows only a narrow reading of the possible futures of European cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With growing concerns about air pollution and congestion, getting more people to move around cities by bicycle is gaining more attention than at any point over the past 50 years. At the same time, the spread of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is being positioned by some as a solution to these same problems. This raises interesting questions about the possible trajectories AVs could take when they become part of the traffic landscape of a street. Will they entrench existing hierarchies of use? Or will they help facilitate the expansion of cycling and other non-motorised forms of mobility? To begin to think about this question, the paper considers what a street is and how different users within a street environment share and cooperate. It then moves on to explore the technologies involved in the development of AVs and the challenges involved in their use on environmentally complex urban streets. With rules being central to how AVs operate, the fact that rules can mean different things to different people, and that they are both formal and informal, matters. To show why this matters, examples from an ethnography of infrastructure involving 81 adult road users are used to illustrate the ambiguities involved in making sense of the appropriate way to make a right-hand turn when cycling in a country that travels on the left. How AVs are programmed to deal with such ambiguities will have profound effects on the kind of infrastructural settlements that come to dominate how people share the street. These are judgements that will have important consequences for the development of cycling in the many places with car-dominated transport environments. • Streets are amalgams of materials, regulations, people and normative patterns of use. • AVs could entrench existing inequalities, or facilitate new ways of using streets. • Rules can mean different things to different people, they can be formal and informal. • Moral judgements shape the infrastructural settlement of streets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Libraries, laundrettes, and lidos. Pizzerias, plazas, and playgrounds. Sidewalks, swimming pools, and schools. These are just some of the kinds of spaces and facilities that contribute to the public life of cities. Drawing on the arguments of the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, this article develops the concept of "social infrastructure" as a way to research and value these kinds of spaces. Social infrastructure helps in recognising the public dimensions of often overlooked and undervalued spaces. It draws attention to the breadth, depth, and textures of sociality that can be afforded by different urban environments. In developing the concept of social infrastructure, this article pulls together four related strands of social scientific inquiry: work on infrastructure; publicness and public space; sociality and encounter; and the politics of provision. An infrastructural approach to the topic of public space presents geographers with some productive tools for understanding the public life of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been remarkable enthusiasm for redesigning and reanimating urban public spaces in recent years. Yet geographical and urban research has tended to interpret these changes through a relatively limited set of concerns related to exclusion, encroachment and claim-making. This paper seeks to extend engagement with the concept of public space. It does so by arguing for the need to attend more closely to the generative capacities of public spaces and to the material and practical affordances they can offer. Following a project of intervention in a public space in West London - where a troubled crime hotspot underwent a programme of transformation - we suggest that there is much to be gained from broadening attention to the ways in which everyday spaces of public life are assembled: to different ways of inhabiting public space, to atmospheres that are produced, and to the ways in which material interventions enable and constrain the potentialities of spaces and their publicness. Our aim in doing so is to foster attention to, and develop an understanding of, the many instances where cities might become more inclusive, more convivial and generally better for the people that inhabit them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduces a Classics Revisited collection within which a range of invited authors have used Louise Bracken and Emma Mawdsley's paper, '"Muddy glee": Rounding out the picture of women and physical geography fieldwork', as inspiration for reflection and to broaden the debate around geography fieldwork. Published in 2004, 'Muddy glee' sought to engage with feminist critiques of the masculinist endeavour of fieldwork, whilst trying to reclaim some of the more nuanced, positive aspects of women in fieldwork. This editorial introduces the classic paper, reflects on fieldwork access today and the role of the RGS‐IBG in helping to shape good practice and briefly introduces the collection of papers that together form the special section. This is an introductory editorial to the Classics Revisited special collection, 'Muddy Glee'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]