Search

An emerging theme within the mega-events literature is the ways they affect the provision, regulation and design of urban public spaces. Parks, streets and squares host competition venues, and are also used for supplementary occasions and facilities associated with hosting mega-events. Using examples from the London 2012 Olympic Games and Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games, this paper examines the long-term significance of mega-events for urban public spaces. The paper contends that these events can be used as 'Trojan Horses', allowing new systems to be introduced under the cover of an event. It also emphasizes how temporary mega-events transform public spaces into venues for subsequent commercial events. Finally, the paper acknowledges more positive legacies, showing how mega-events can change how public space is imagined by users and by those responsible for managing it. Both cases highlight how events influence the ways spaces are used, designed and managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the state of affordable housing in England, with a focus on regional variations in space standards and standardized dwelling layouts widely used by volume housebuilders. Space standards are not statutory and therefore adopted inconsistently across development types or building typologies in England. The study draws on data obtained from planning applications, analysing 153 housing developments and 9876 newly constructed affordable housing units from different regions in England that were completed and marketed in 2021. Based on this, the study compares space standards and their effectiveness as well as the use of standardized unit types. The analysis reveals that apart from London, the most recent Nationally Described Space Standard (2015) is not yet widely used. Instead, Housing Quality Indicators that preceded the new national standards continue to be the norm for houses built outside of London. The findings demonstrate that there is a high level of standardization in affordable housing in terms of dwelling size and layout, with widely used standard house types often determining the design and size of dwellings more than space standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities have long been subject to urban containment policies against urban sprawl. Climate change concerns have recently added to the imperative to densify urban space. Urban compaction is often pursued through the creation of 'exemplar' urban developments that superficially implement 'best practice' ideas from elsewhere. In this paper, we abandon the notion of 'best practice' in favour of context-sensitive 'good practices'. Taking London's King's Cross redevelopment as a case study, this paper draws on qualitative methods to examine the contribution of context and path-dependency, as a product of local and non-local forces, to the emergence of King´s Cross as 'good practice'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an account of post-war London from the building site paintings of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. It approaches these paintings as a visceral and embodied source of data regarding the post-World War Two landscape of bomb damaged London. It contrasts this form of knowledge with the narratives of memorialization, and order and control, which I argue characterize post-war reconstruction. In this context the paintings are read as an ontological statement about the complexity and ambiguity of the urban landscape, one which contrasts with historical and contemporary narratives of the urban built environment. The paper posits that knowledges which preserve the complexities and materialities of urban space have the potential to provide political interventions into both historical and contemporary narratives of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the negotiated everyday experiences of Jewish Litvish people in London and Jerusalem, exploring ideas of transcendence and immanence in these spaces. By uncovering the relations between religious identity and boundary-making in urban settings, the paper exposes the latent social, organizational, and spatial mechanisms that determine communal demarcation lines in the everyday life of city spaces. We argue that to examine such processes, one must refer to the social system that drives local processes and the values that communities draw their strength from. Empirically, we compare the mechanisms the Haredi (strictly orthodox Jews) -Litvish communities in Jerusalem and London use to delineate areas between immanence and transcendence in city life. The findings point to planners' need to better understand how individuals cooperate and how community leaders are involved in developing urban structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an ethnography of an investigation of an under-explored sociolinguistic phenomenon, namely handwritten signs in public spaces, against a context of urban regeneration and socio-cultural transformation. These signs are a subset of urban communicates that involve handwriting, lettering or the painting of letters and text using different materials and serving different functions. We focus primarily on handwritten signs on paper or cards. The data were collected in Stratford, a ward in the ethnically and linguistically diverse London Borough of Newham and home of the 2012 Olympics. Our analytical focus is on the indexicalities of the handwritten signs. We engaged ordinary residents in Stratford, customers and visitors of the two main shopping centres, precinct management, and local council staff who interacted with such signs as part of their everyday work and life, as well as non-participant commentators in interpreting and analysing the meanings of the signs. We also analyse the disappearance of the signs vis-à-vis urban development policies, and the emergence of refashioned painted signs with handwritten style lettering in the global-facing commercial spaces. The study highlights the significance of handwritten signs and invite the reader to engage in making sense of their meaning potentials and symbolic values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing understanding of the role of the built environment on children's neighbourhood mobility and play and the importance of this for children's development. This has led to concerns over children's declining neighbourhood mobility and calls to see an increase in children's use of public space. This paper draws on findings from a research study working with 9 and 10 year olds living in inner London, England. The children participated in go-along interviews and a range of other qualitative methods, which explored how they used their neighbourhoods for getting around and play. Findings from the study demonstrate the importance of threshold spaces for children in supporting both their neighbourhood play and their wider neighbourhood travel and mobility. Threshold spaces are defined as a semi-public space that straddle the gap between the private space of the home and the wider public realm. Children's use of threshold spaces was influenced by a reduced movement function in these spaces, restricting vehicles and people passing through, and the presence of signals that it was ok to play, with girls being more sensitive to these features than boys. Threshold spaces were important as a start point for children's wider explorations of their neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, a bourgeoning body of literature has explored the influence of financial actors, techniques and motives in the urban development of North American and European cities. Less has been said about the influence of finance on the temporalities of urban production and urban life. Yet finance is, at its most basic, the management of debt; and debt is, simply put, the deferral of payment; thus, by its very nature, financialization introduces new temporal dynamics into whatever object of investment it engages with. This paper examines these temporal dynamics in the financialized production of a large-scale urban infrastructure project, the Thames Tideway Tunnel (TTT), a 25-km 'super-sewer' beneath the River Thames where it runs through the center of London. From analyzing how financial actors, motives, and instruments influence the planning and implementation of this massive sewer expansion, it traces the ways in which the temporal characteristics of finance have repercussions in the urban space that privilege financial interests. This analysis contributes both conceptual and empirical insights. Firstly, it provides a theoretical conceptualization of the ways in which the temporalities of financialization shape the material production of the city. Secondly and more empirically, our case analysis allows us to schematize the different ways in which the financialization of the TTT project shapes the temporalities of its production, with wide-ranging political, economic and environmental implications. In summary, the paper closes a crucial gap in understanding how different temporalities of finance intersect in the making of contemporary cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fast food seems unequivocally at odds with any moves towards more sustainable food consumption. It is identified as a major contributor to obesity, health inequalities, and to environmental impacts through its production and distribution. However, this problematisation of fast food ignores its contribution to understandings of "living well", particularly for young people. This paper draws on data from an international project which explores how young people understand what makes for living well in cities. We focus on research with young people in Lambeth, London, exploring the role of food – specifically fast food practices – in their constructions of living well. Drawing on focus group interviews and photo diaries with young people aged 12–24, we highlight the enthusiasm inherent in discussions of fast food whereby it is constructed as easily accessible, inexpensive and attractive, whilst affording young people a degree of autonomy and agency. Fast food outlets are regarded as friendly, convenient, and safe social spaces, in a context where austerity cuts have reduced access to spaces specifically for young people. Further, consumption of fast food facilitates and legitimises young people's use of local streets and green spaces. Thus practices of fast food consumption might be understood to contribute to the ability to "live well" from the perspective of young residents. Making fast food less accessible to young people may be part of obesity and sustainable food strategies, but a broader wellbeing strategy is needed which is informed by understanding the valued social practices fast food currently affords young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on ethnographic research on the experience of Slovak au pairs living and working in the London area. It attempts to connect three areas: theories related to visibility and social recognition, debates on cities as public places enabling political action, and paid domestic work. Focusing on a specific group of migrant domestic workers, I analyze how various aspects of being visible or invisible relate to the empowerment, disempowerment, and resistance of paid domestic workers. I demonstrate that host families invisibilize au pairs and their work in order to both diminish their role in children's lives and secure the myth of the exclusivity of the nuclear family. Au pairs counter this process of invisibilization by making themselves visible in their rooms and in the city. I interpret au pairs' usage of visibility and invisibility as enabling au pairs subtle gestures of resistance without openly challenging the inequalities of the au pair scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposals for greater community involvement in local governance run through much 'New Labour' policy. Studies suggest that often the performance criteria tied to participatory mechanisms act to discipline citizen voices. This paper considers the ways in which this political space might simultaneously enable citizens to appropriate governmental power to their own ends. It draws on empirical evidence, gathered during qualitative research in south-east London, to focus on contestations surrounding the way in which 'voices' are expressed. The paper highlights the role of practitioners as allies in struggles to counter policy-makers' expectations for citizens to speak the 'language' of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emerges from an ethnography of the economic and cultural life of Rye Lane, an intensely multi-ethnic street in Peckham, South London. The effects of accelerated migration into London are explored through the reshaping and diversification of its interior, street and city spaces. A ‘trans-ethnography’ is pursued across the compendium of micro-, meso- and macro-urban spaces, without reifying one above the other. The ethnographic stretch across intimate, collective and symbolic city spaces serves to connect how the restrictions and circuits of urban migration have different impacts and expressions in these distinctive but interrelated urban localities. The paper argues for a trans-ethnography that engages within and across a compendium of urban localities, to understand how accelerated migration and urban ‘super-diversity’ transform the contemporary global city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The availability of vast amounts of location-based data from social media platforms such as Twitter has enabled us to look deeply into the dynamics of human movement. The aim of this paper is to leverage a large collection of geo-tagged tweets and the street networks of two major metropolitan areas—London and Tokyo—to explore the underlying mechanism that determines the heterogeneity of human mobility patterns. For the two target cities, hundreds of thousands of tweet locations and road segments were processed to generate city hotspots and natural streets. User movement trajectories and city hotspots were then used to build a hotspot network capable of quantitatively characterizing the heterogeneous movement patterns of people within the cities. To emulate observed movement patterns, the study conducts a two-level agent-based simulation that includes random walks through the hotspot networks and movements in the street networks using each of three distance types—metric, angular and combined. Comparisons of the simulated and observed movement flows at the segment and street levels show that the heterogeneity of human urban movements at the collective level is mainly shaped by the scaling structure of the urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the idea of ‘superdiversity’ at the city level through two churches with different approaches to architectural visibility: the hypervisible Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the invisible Igbo Catholic Church, both in North London, guide our exploration of invisible Nigerian London. Although Nigerians have lived in London for over 200 years, they live beneath the radar of policy and public recognition rather than as a vital and visible element of superdiversity. This paper argues that we can trace the journeys composing Nigerian London in the deep textures of the city thus making it visible, but this involves re-mapping space and ethnicity. It argues that visibility is vital in generating more open forms of urban encounter and, ultimately, citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds on contemporary memoirs of homelessness from cities across the United States to develop a more nuanced understanding of the use value of urban parks and green spaces. Based on analysis of over seventy memoirs, we synthesize the writings of nine memoirists who examine their relationship to green spaces in cities. Instead of framing nature as something pristine and distinct from society—or something dangerous and untamed—these writings portray urban green spaces as sites of belonging and everyday life. In the US today, cities often either value parks as playgrounds for middle-class leisure or devalue them as targets of racialized anti-homeless policing. In both instances, parks are framed in relation to their impact on the exchange value of surrounding urban areas. In contrast, the memoirs of homelessness we examine portray parks and other green spaces as enabling privacy, survival, and emotional solace in an urban landscape often marked by surveillance, deprivation, and violence. These crucial values reveal a new conceptualization of urban parks as profoundly useful to those who are subject to the exclusions of capitalist property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In recent years, there has been a favourable shift in UK urban policy towards the use of sport as a tool for regenerating declining areas. Sporting infrastructure has been constructed in various British cities with a view to addressing the dual aims of sporting need and urban regeneration. However, evidence to support the notion that sport can underpin regeneration goals is highly variable. This paper will explore the growth of sport-related regeneration in the UK and examine the evidence base for this. In particular, it will focus on the economic literature and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of emerging evidence. It will suggest that with investment in sport likely to increase as a consequence of the London 2012 Olympic Games, there is a need to develop a greater understanding of the role of sport in the regeneration process, to maximize the potential benefits and to justify public expenditure on sport in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Although young women have an equal right to public space, socio-cultural influences both manifested in and sustained by the built environment contribute to their exclusion. Using mixed qualitative methodologies, this research explores the spatial and non-spatial causes of this injustice, and examines solutions presented by Key Independent Organizations addressing the issue in London. The analysis problematizes how inequitable social conditions may constrain young women's design preferences, potentially leading to solutions that perpetuate gendered behaviours with detrimental outcomes. This study provides a point of reference for future initiatives addressing the problem and adds to the growing discourse surrounding inequality in public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food markets were a vital element in the economic life of Britain over many centuries, and the arrival of railways into urban spaces during the nineteenth century provided unprecedented opportunities for them to expand the range and volume of good that they sold. This article examines the impact of railways on these markets during the decades following the arrival of trains into London through a case study of Borough Market. This important London fruit and vegetable market is examined through the prism of its financial records. Detailed analysis of the Market's income produces a timeline for growth, while the records for the goods ported through the Market help to explain the change. The case study also highlights developments in trading techniques at Borough Market that enabled it to prosper during the second half of the nineteenth century, despite limitations placed on its expansion created by the impact of railways on the urban physical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food hawkers filled the streets of early modern London and Naples but had an ambiguous relationship with urban governors. By comparing how hawkers were regulated in the two capitals between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this article extends our knowledge of irregular work to two of the period's largest cities and argues that historians should consider informality as a social process, rather than a fixed economic category. It examines, in turn, how food hawkers were hard to distinguish from other rule-breaking retailers, how governors issued food-selling licences, and how hawker regulation also involved managing public space and related to gender and social status. Instead of clamping down completely, London aldermen and Neapolitan eletti gave licence to food hawking when it was useful and stayed within standards of behaviour. Deciding who was allowed to sell food and how were finely balanced questions of governance in the expanding early modern metropolis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English word 'mountebank', borrowed from the Italian montimbanco to describe a performing quack doctor, crucially defines its subject in terms of motion in space: the motion of ascending a stage. In fact, the early modern mountebank in London was a player known for many kinds of motion—geographical itinerancy, rhetorical circumlocution, and even appropriative journeys from bank to theatre to print. This article articulates the mountebank's license to roam physically and representationally across London as a kind of theatrical vagrancy, one that begs the question not only of where theatre can exist in urban space, but how—how a physically and rhetorically unfixed performance can still be recognised by an audience as a performance. Playing with and across space, as this article argues, is perhaps one of the most crucial of the mountebank's many 'impossible' feats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the replication of familial, communal patterns from the home country is shaping public space. Combining the synergetic aspects of subjective experience with the objective measurements of the space, we study Whitechapel Market in the East End of London. We shed new light on the term public sphere, revealing two socio-spatial mechanisms: the first is an adaptation of the spatial structure—a way of the local community to create separation between females and males in the heterogeneous western public space. The second is the "invisible hands" of the females: the unobservable force that contributes to the community's wealth and cohesion. Our findings show the capacity of a given urban form for adaptation—it creates a new public sphere, partly democratized, but still segregated. A sphere, that from one hand provides traditional gendered roles, and from another a fertile environment for social and economic prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Fredric Jameson's theory of the ideologeme to trace representations of working- and white working-class characters through a selection of contemporary literary texts, this article shows how the construction of (white) working-class identity in literature has been influenced by, and fed back into, mainstream representations of the (white) working class in politics and media, thus contributing to cycles of socio-cultural, financial and political exclusion. This article continues by arguing that there is a lack of rounded and developed white working-class characters in British fiction, specifically in London and the South-East, and that contemporary authors continue to rely on typified representations rather than interrogate them, therefore remaining complicit in feedback loops that work to marginalise the (white) working class. To conclude, an argument is put forward in support of opening up space in the public arena for both imagined and real individual voices from marginalised groups to be heard, providing more direct access to channels of representation and an interrogation of the blame narratives that are used to maintain these groups' socio-economic and political exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces a battle over grass mowing and scrub clearance between local campaigners and land managers on London's Hampstead Heath during the late 1970s. I discuss one of the key arguments in favour of maintaining long grass: its look of 'naturalness', which effaced centuries of grazing by sheep and cattle, as well as the extensive land management that went into maintaining this 'wild' aesthetic. The 1978 conflict over scrub clearance resulted in a widely reported claim that 20 dead bodies were dumped on the Heath annually. Here, I consider the reality of the claim and the ways in which frictions between local actors point towards a fluid and constantly changing understanding of what is properly 'wild' and 'natural' on Hampstead Heath. The debate highlights the degree to which both management and historical narratives of public open spaces are the product of complex negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Property crime was a major concern in Georgian London and previous studies have noted that this spurred on the development of locks, security regimes and policing. Until now, however, the role played by dogs in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century crime prevention has been overlooked. When thinking about Georgian canines, historians have tended to focus on nuisance strays or spoilt lapdogs. By contrast, this article reveals that domestic dogs of all shapes and sizes made a significant contribution to the London economy by protecting valuable property, both commercial and domestic, from thieves. In doing so, it challenges the assumption that access to private space, a key battleground in Georgian power relations, was controlled solely by people. Moreover, it argues that the presence and behaviour of dogs shaped human behaviour and social relations in the city, as well as debates about crime, taxation, social order and the rights of citizens. As such, this article calls for dogs and other non-human animals to be integrated into social and urban history, and to be accorded agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore Buddhism’s often-overlooked presence on London’s urban landscape, showing how its quietness and subtlety of approach has allowed the faith to grow largely beneath the radar. It argues that Buddhism makes claims to urban space in much the same way as it produces its faith, being as much about the practices performed and the spaces where they are enacted as it is about faith or beliefs. The research across a number of Buddhist sites in London reveals that number of people declaring themselves as Buddhists has indeed risen in recent years, following the rise of other non-traditional religions in the UK; however, this research suggests that Buddhism differs from these in several ways. Drawing on Baumann’s (2002) distinction between traditionalist and modernist approaches to Buddhism, our research reveals a growth in each of these. Nevertheless, Buddhism remains largely invisible in the urban and suburban landscape of London, adapting buildings that are already in place, with little material impact on the built environment, and has thus been less subject to contestation than other religious movements and traditions. This research contributes to a growing literature which foregrounds the importance of religion in making contemporary urban and social worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the unrelenting wake of the global recession has intensified pressure on the public realm to mediate between different actors vying to assert political rights, economic claims and social expression. Multi-disciplinary frameworks for reading economic systems as integral to the design and lived experience of the public realm have shaped our conceptualisation of the financial crisis as a city design problem. The following images and narrative offer a socio-spatial and political analysis of the City of London as a ‘business as usual’ city in which private interests trump public good. Through a design-based proposal for policy intervention and physical restructuring that radically alters the City's socio-spatial realities, we re-imagine the City of London as a true public city for the 21st century, where ‘productivity’ stems from the residential diversity, urban intensity and inclusive public spaces produced by significantly increasing the number of people living in the City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focussing on performative displays at Tamil Hindu annual festivals in London, UK, this article examines the use of sound and ritual movement, in territorialising and organising space and in celebrating Tamil identity. Notions of ‘dwelling and crossing’, taken from Tweed's work (2006) on the analysis of religion, as well as theoretical material from spatial and human geography shed light on the tensions between such diasporic groups' migratory movement and their emplacement in city life. An analysis of the soundscape of such moving processions reveals how sonic elements can be a powerful force in marking out processional space, in ritualising and assisting in the sacralising of the space through sonorous, loud and auspicious music that speaks directly to the deities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the NEOutopia, a project showing the challenges and contradictions of urban space with specific reference to urban regeneration and notions of utopia. It says that the project was mainly inspired by Henri Lefebvre's writings which started in early 2011. Moreover, it's a fictional archive which is a collection of photographic images and documents referring to an ersatz development plan for Elephant and Castle area in London, England.

This article examines how the traditional English folk form of Punch and Judy is deployed in two very different contemporary public settings in the UK: the beach and the shopping mall. It explores how the nature of public settings alters profoundly the meaning of this highly specific cultural object and how its commodification as part of the spaces of everyday consumption transforms its original value and connection to its audience. Other examples of street performance in British urban contexts are also considered. The article derives from recent ethnographic research into the contemporary significance of Punch and Judy, combined with theoretical accounts of spectacle in urban space. Its authors are from two quite different academic and research fields - puppetry and street performance, and urban design. The research demonstrates how these approaches and styles of conceptualizing public space can be creatively synthesized to yield fresh insights into the nature of spaces of performance - and on the notion of 'tradition' as it is experienced in the contemporary public realm. The analysis and examples of Punch and Judy performances derive from an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded PhD ethnographic study in collaboration with Royal Holloway, London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In literature about queer men, London's parks, squares, streets and 'public conveniences' have figured more significantly even than bars and clubs, let alone bedrooms. What matters more than where men eventually make love has been where they meet. Some do so in great national spaces and thoroughfares - Piccadilly Circus principal among them - others in more obscure corners. The queer presence in them emerges, often in the weighty moment of cruising's backward glance, as an 'open secret'. Notwithstanding the changing pressures of wars and laws, the queer subculture is represented as continuously occupying the same public social spaces as the culture that abhors and attacks it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]