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This paper contributes to work on the social life of time. It focuses on how time is doubled; produced by, and productive of, the relations and processes it operates through. In particular, it explores the methodological implications of this conception of time for how social scientists may study the doubledness of time. It draws on an allied move within the social sciences to see methods as themselves doubled, as both emerging from and constitutive of the social worlds that they seek to understand. We detail our own very different methodological experiments with studying the social life of time in London, engaging interactive documentary to elucidate nonlinear imaginaries of space-time in London's pop-up culture (Ella Harris) and encountering time on a series of walks along a particular stretch of road in south east London (Beckie Coleman). While clearly different projects in terms of their content, ambition and scope, in bringing these projects together, we show the ability of our methods to grasp and perform from multiple angles and scales what Sharma (2014) calls 'temporal architectures'. Temporal architectures, composed of elements including the built environment, commodities, services, technologies and labour, are infrastructures that enable social rhythms and temporal logics and that can entail a politicized valuing of the time of certain groups over others. We aim to contribute to an expanded and enriched conceptualisation of methods for exploring time, considering what our studies might offer to work on the doubled social life of time and methods, and highlighting in particular their implications for an engagement with a politics of time and temporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that it is generative to link struggles around access to, control over, and the transformation of urban energy systems to the imaginary of the right to the city; and we explore the conceptual, empirical and political contributions of this connection. Our paper starts with two main questions: (1) what do we learn from reading attempts to reclaim urban energy systems from a right to the city perspective? (2) What can this analysis add to debates around the right to the city? We make two main arguments from our empirical engagements with initiatives seeking to remunicipalise urban energy systems in Berlin and London, each of which is premised upon calls for more just, democratic and ecologically sustainable forms of energy supply. First, we argue that these struggles need to transcend concerns around energy infrastructure to raise broader questions around the democratisation of urban space. Second, we contend that appropriating long-lasting urban infrastructure requires the creation of new and durable forms of democratic institutions, providing insights into the notion of self-management (autogestion) beyond more spontaneous and fleeting forms of protest and uprising addressed in much of right to the city literature. Overall, the paper hopes to put the question of autogestion and related strategies at the centre of conversations around right to the city moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to existing research on the relational work of real estate developers to demonstrate how internal corporate complexities create opaqueness in governance settings and limit potential community engagement. This work is particularly pertinent at a time when there is renewed interest in the private sector, yet very little analysis that begins from the perspective of the developer. Drawing on the example of London's Silvertown, this paper shows how the strategies of development organizations evident in existing research, including their work with the public sector, communities and experts, require multiple levels of internal coordination. I argue that because of these sub-centres of power, developers are able to maintain a more deeply entrenched centrality in urban governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London's water sector professionals seek to secure public funds for blue and green infrastructure projects while also engaging with local advocates for river improvement. This paper argues that current project appraisal practice forms a barrier to aligning public investment with local demand because justifying investment requires the enactment of a utilitarian public good that is at odds with the non-instrumental values motivating local advocacy. Drawing on qualitative evidence and performativity theory, we show how the appraisal practices of water sector professionals and the environmental advocacy of London residents both enact publics in different arenas of water management: appraisal enacts a general public to secure funding, while advocacy enacts a particular public that serves to articulate local demand for environmental improvement. Whereas the performativity of a general public works through demonstrating nature's economic value to people, the performativity of local publics is animated by people's responsibility towards nature. We find that the general public that is enacted through cost-benefit analysis legitimizes public expenditure on readily demonstrable economic benefits, such as flood risk mitigation, while withholding funds from the water quality improvement valued by local publics. Comparing the performativities of general and local publics, we discuss the conditions under which appraisal and advocacy practices enact their respective underlying values. We conclude that the current appraisal practice frustrates the delivery of blue and green infrastructure projects that would respond to local demand for improving rivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on the mobility outcomes of violence focuses on Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs) or refugees displaced in response to armed conflict. The influence of everyday urban violence on population movements has been largely invisible, especially transnationally. This paper addresses these issues in relation to transnational migration and displacement among Colombians in the United Kingdom. Cities in the global South have porous violence boundaries in terms of rural–urban linkages but also with regard to the more neglected dimension of transnational migration, a crucial response to everyday urban violence and less directly influenced by armed conflict. The paper also highlights transnational linkages between countries, forged and maintained especially through remittances that fund security infrastructure back home as well as further migration. The notion of displacement also encapsulates how fear and security in cities in the South are often transformed into anxiety and the experience of discrimination among those with no legal papers in cities such as London. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper focuses on transnational wealth elites buying residential properties in New York and London as an investment rather than as a primary residence. The transnational wealth elite is a group of people that have their origin in one locality, but invest their wealth transnationally since they entertain transnational jobs, assets and social networks. New York and London real estate has the unique quality that it is perceived to be highly liquid, i.e. easily resold to other investors. Together with the safe haven and socio-cultural characteristics of both cities and the way the real estate market and its professionals are organised, global city residential real estate functions as a ‘safe deposit box’. The paper brings together different geographies: of the wealth elite, of offshore financial centres through which most real estate purchases are organised, and of real estate investment locations. It also maps the consequences of the safe deposit box function of real estate, in terms of not only house prices increases, but also of economic, social and cultural changes and how elite decision-making impacted this comprehensive set of changes in the fabric of the city. In doing this, the paper substantiates work on the financialisation of real estate by focusing attention on the agency of the wealth elite and their investment and legal networks rather than on property developers, housing associations or institutional investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Stuart Cunningham's thought leadership in 'creative' spaces since the turn of the millennium. It presents the author's personal glimpses of Cunningham's contributions to scholarship and advocacy, ranging from Cunningham and Hartley's exposé on the recently-titled creative industries at the National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit (Canberra, 2001), through the establishment of QUT's Centre of Excellence (Brisbane, 2005) and its European node (London, 2008), to Cunningham's more recent work with creative economies and their opportunities, including his influence upon Australia's Cultural and Creative Economy: A 21st-Century Guide (Canberra, 2020). The paper concludes with some comments about continuing resistance to substantial investment in Australia's creative industries, and Cunningham's call for a more united voice in their advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses 'Build to Rent' (BTR), a new form of tenure in London's housing market. We examine the ways in which private and public sector actors have shaped the context of BTR's emergence, and developed a model for delivery in London. We argue they relied on and constructed narratives of negativity about the private rental sector, which were juxtaposed with their product to position BTR as a solution to part of London's housing crisis. Building on this, and leveraging an emerging but supportive institutional context, real estate professionals have adapted a US model to the UK. We argue that both the narrative-generating activities and the model development reveal tensions, which help theorise the ways new models of financing housing emerge. [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 paper analyses the implementation of Compstat-like processes in two large European police organizations: the Metropolitan Police Service in London and the Préfecture de police in Paris. Compstat-like processes are characterized by processes framed by performance indicators and targets, performance assessment sessions, units dedicated to the collection and analysis of performance data, and information processing requiring the use of crime data. Such processes raise two broad sets of questions. First, do these innovations lead to tighter or more encompassing crime control strategies? Second, does the old command-and-control organizational model of police departments emerge reinforced, or does innovation foster the emergence of a new, more deliberative, problem-solving style of management? The paper analyses the mix of common features (limited geographical decentralization, increasing internal accountability based on the centrality of quantitative data, the prioritizing of crime reduction, and the influence of new technologies on how data is used) and differences (the range of indicators used, broader in London, and the management styles, more in line with a neo-managerial impetus in London). Interpreting these contrasts requires an analytical framework combining both the administrative, political and cultural traditions in the two police forces and the intentional projects carried out by political and professional actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines recent migration from three little-studied European Union (EU) countries, the Baltic states, focusing on early-career graduates who move to London. It looks at how these young migrants explain the reasons for their move, their work and living experiences in London, and their plans for the future, based on 78 interviews with individual migrants. A key objective of this paper is to rejuvenate the core–periphery structural framework through the theoretical lens of London as an ‘escalator’ region for career development. We add a necessary nuance on how the time dimension is crucial in understanding how an escalator region functions – both in terms of macro-events such as EU enlargement or economic crisis, and for life-course events such as career advancement or family formation. Our findings indicate that these educated young adults from the EU’s north-eastern periphery migrate for a combination of economic, career, lifestyle and personal-development reasons. They are ambivalent about their futures and when, and whether, they will return-migrate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores gender relations in the City of London advertising industry. It argues that the gender imbalance in the highest ranking positions and the stifled career progression of women in the industry are a result of social, structural and institutional factors rather than individual choice, lack of ‘talent’ or the absence of mentors or appropriate role models. We discuss the organisation and spatiality of the advertising industry in London, significance of social networking within and beyond the firm, and problematise the notion that female childbearing and caring are the primary determinants of women’s truncated career trajectories in advertising. The research reveals that whilst age, gender and domestic divisions of labour combine to reinforce occupational sexual divisions of labour in the advertising industry in London, these inequality regimes are amplified by the industry’s precariousness, informality and requirements for flexibility. Attempting to explain away gendered divisions of labour solely on the basis of women’s role in social reproduction deflects attention away from other key determinants of inequality, most notably the pace of advertising work and the geographical concentration of the industry within London. These are further accentuated by deep-rooted forms of homophily and homosociality – those unspeakable inequalities that call into question the dominant post-feminist rhetoric that ‘all the battles have been won’. We analyse the ways in which homosociality has been crucial in maintaining insidious sexism which has made it very difficult for female creatives to obtain the most prestigious roles at work. Taken together, the organisation and geography of the sector, the rhetoric of buzz and egalitarianism, the ‘motherhood myth’ and the homophilic practices at work within advertising combine to create deep and enduring gendered inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For 30 years, planning has been attacked both rhetorically and materially in England as governments have sought to promote economic deregulation over landuse planning. Our paper examines two new moments of planning deregulation. These are the loosening of regulation around short-term letting in London and the new permitted development rights, which allow for office to residential conversion without the need for planning permission. Whilst these may be viewed as rather innocuous reforms on the surface, they directly and profoundly illustrate how planners are often trapped between their legal duty to promote public values as dictated by national planning policy and the government’s desire to deregulate. We argue that viewing these changes through a value-based approach to economy and regulation illuminates how multiple and complex local values and understandings of value shape planners’ strategies and actions and thus vary national policies in practice. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how planners have, at least, the opportunity to develop a critical voice and to advocate for policy interpretations that can help to create better outcomes for local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engendering interest and support among young people was a key strategy for the organisers of the London 2012 Olympic Games. Part of the approach entailed promoting the event as a context and inspirational catalyst to propel young people’s proclivities toward, and enduring participation in, sport and physical activity. Although a variety of participatory platforms were entertained, the discipline of physical education remained a favoured space in which enduring Olympic imperatives could be amalgamated with government policy objectives. In this paper data are presented taken from the initial three years of a longitudinal study on young people’s engagement with the London 2012 Olympic Games, sport, physical activity and physical education within the UK’s West Midlands region. Memory scholarship is brought together with Olympic critiques, legacy debates, youth work and discussions about physical education to conceptualise participants’ anticipations and recollections of the London 2012 Olympic Games as a triptych of narrative fragments: each provides insights regarding youth experiences and the remnants of Olympic ether in the country’s hinterland. The paper offers a means subsequently to think differently about how we might play with the qualitative sociological/historiographical moments (experiences, voices, accounts, stories, etc.) that we capture in and through our work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As cities around the world are tunnelled and hollowed to new depths, geographers are giving increasing attention to infrastructure in the context of verticality, often framed through urban planning or geopolitics. This paper responds to calls from geography and the wider geohumanities for ethnographic and aesthetic consideration of vertical infrastructures by reflecting on London’s sewer system as a site of embodied engagement and creative imagination. Once venerated by the press and public as engineering, medical and aesthetic triumphs, London’s sewers are thought to have morphed into sites of ubiquitous obscurity. This paper counters this understanding by considering bodies, technologies and activities through time that have shaped imaginations of London’s main drainage, including the work of contemporary urban explorers. I argue that although the current aestheticization of infrastructural spaces in London is connected to particular technologies, politics and geographical concerns of the present, it also echoes body-space interventions and affects across a 150-year span. This aesthetic legacy is a crucial pillar in our understandings of urban verticality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although migrants dominate employment in many major cities, the reasons for this, and the mechanisms by which they are recruited, are surprisingly under-researched. Focusing on the numerically dominant small hotel sub-sector in a global city, London, the paper first questions whether labour costs or competences are the main drivers of migrant employment, emphasising the difficulties of disentangling the relationships between these. Secondly, it analyses how migrant workers are recruited, and finds less evidence to support the concepts of ethnic queuing and co-ethnic recruitment as opposed to diversified migrant recruitment in the context of the super-diversity of migrant populations in a global city. Finally, it demonstrates that although there are compelling reasons for migrant employment in London’s small hotels, and that this is supported by a number of recruitment practices, they are unevenly distributed across establishments, reflecting the complex nature of migrant employment in a highly diverse sub-sector. The research utilises mixed methods, drawing on a survey of 155 hotel managers and 51 in-depth interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European democracies are moulded by a 'transnational cleavage' between green-alternative-libertarian and traditionalist-authoritarian-nationalist parties and attitudes. The territorial reverberations of this new cleavage are still scarcely analysed. Therefore, this article aims to explore how the transnational cleavage relates to political opinions and choices at the local level, by uncovering connections between such cleavage and the characteristics of metropolitan places. What are the implications of living in different metropolitan contexts on citizens' positions on the transnational cleavage? I answer this question by investigating how metropolitan contextual factors shape transnationalism attitudes and support for green-alternative-libertarian and traditionalist-authoritarian-nationalist parties within London. Findings highlight that transnationalism attitudes and support for green-alternative-libertarian/traditionalist-authoritarian-nationalist parties are statistically significantly related to contextual factors; among the latter, the boroughs' housing conditions and ethnic structures are the best predictors of transnationalism attitudes and party choices; residents of disadvantaged metropolitan contexts exhibit lower support for transnationalism and green-alternative-libertarian parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial centres are central to contemporary capitalism, but research on their development has been impeded by methodological challenges related to data availability. This paper offers a new typology of financial centre activity. Based on the nationality of parent companies of financial service providers operating in a centre, and the nationalities of their customers, we distinguish between domestic, export, import and platform activities. Second, we compile a unique dataset of investment banking deals worldwide, which allows us to apply the new typology and introduce the first ever ranking of top financial centres based on the actual investment banking activity conducted in these centres. Our findings confirm the dominance of New York and London as global financial centres, with New York focused on domestic activities, and London on export and platform activities. Our data also show that, overall, investment banking activity has fallen dramatically since 2007, with 60% of the decline concentrated in New York, and a further 30% in Zurich, London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Edinburgh combined. As a result, the dominance of investment banking by New York and London has diminished, contributing to a trend that predates the crisis, explainable by the increasing shares of Asian centres, with Tokyo and Chinese cities in the lead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Baldwin Buckstone took over the management at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 1853, assuming control from Benjamin Webster who had been manager since 1837. They had both served in the company of David Edward Morris, the proprietor who had overseen the building of the new Haymarket Theatre in 1821. When Morris died, his estate passed into a trust on behalf of his widow, Maria Sarah. A lease dating from 1871 (now in the Library at the Garrick Club) describes the agreement between Buckstone and Maria Sarah. Not only does the lease detail the arrangement between the two parties, it also includes an extensive 214-page room-by-room inventory of the Haymarket Theatre, revealing hundreds of items accumulated throughout half a century of constant use. This article outlines the peculiarities of the lease and pays special attention to the music and dance holdings which feature prominently in the inventory. The lease is remarkable not only for the diversity, breadth, and specificity of its contents, but also because it serves as a rare document of theatre business and tells us more about the day-to-day life of one of London's most important theatres in the mid-nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the spatial imprint and social impacts of the emerging geographies of concentrated overseas investment into London’s high-end real estate market, particularly the boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea. Framed by literatures on the 1% and the super-rich, and based on a mixed methodological approach of qualitative interviews with intermediaries and a quantitative mapping of overseas investors using 2011 census data, the results speak to the pervasive nature of “safe-haven” seeking in London real estate and its attendant transnational provenance set within a laissez-faire regulatory framework. In so doing, it makes an important contribution to the geographies of the super-rich, the class geographies of London, and the broader sense that overseas investors are producing what we call “pied-à-terre” urbanism which builds on a conventional gentrification framework (exclusionary displacement and a more affluent incoming group) but also exceeds it in several ways, leading to an increasingly socially attenuated landscape. This exceeding relates to: a different kind of rent gap, in that it is not speculative but safe-haven seeking, a guaranteed return on investment, and occurs without previous disinvestment; the agents are not traditional gentrifiers; the transnational nature of the process, with no attachment to particular places like in the traditional gentrification model; and a process focused on super-prime areas and completely independent of the existing gentrification process in London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the influence of the burgeoning global 'super-rich' on contemporary sociospatialization processes in London in the light of a contemporary re-reading of Pahl's classic volume, Whose City? It explores if a turn to 'big data' - in the form of commercial geodemographic classifications - can offer any additional insights to a sociological approach to the study of the 'super-rich' that extends the 'spatialization of class' thesis further 'up' the class structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the temporality of urban planning in contemporary London, especially with regard to the 2012 Olympic Games. I argue that planners and officials deployed a rhetoric of permanence to validate not only the Games themselves, but also the costly development and infrastructural changes in the city as well as human displacements. Specifically, a decentralized network of planners, officials, consultants, and administrators used temporal concepts such as ‘legacy’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘regeneration’ in describing the benefits of hosting the Games, all of which purposely ignored the temporary and unsustainable nature of the two-week sporting event. I further argue that this rhetoric could be sustained only through an implication that the Olympic site—and East London as a whole—was in a state of ruin, a state which could be ameliorated through the production of this sporting ‘mega-event’. Above all, the Olympics attempt to rhetorically mitigate their own temporary, ‘pop-up’ quality for the sake of an urban settler colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Mother went in to work tonight, how I hate her on Sunday work!," wrote fourteen years old Kathleen Biddlecombe in her diary, on Sunday, January 13, 1918. Kathleen and her family lived on 6 Cobbett Road, London, in Well Hall Garden Suburb—mostly known today as Progress Estate. Built between January and December 1915, in the first year of the First World War, the estate provided some 1,086 houses and 212 flats for the munition workers of the nearby Royal Arsenal factory in Woolwich. This article examines the First World War history of this housing project, by focusing on the diary of young Kathleen. Using the works of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certueau, the article probes the tensions between the ways this space was planned and built—in accordance with the agenda of the Garden City Movement—and the ways it was produced and used by its inhabitants during the war. It uncovers the production of space by the people whose houses were built along the Well Hall Road, where Route 44 of the Tram stopped to take them to and from the munition factory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capture of value from public land has emerged as a central concern in recent scholarship on urban financialization. Drawing on the case of local authority housing companies in London, this paper explores why and how the local state is engaging in an increasingly speculative mode of land development, and with what effects. By conceptualizing state-led value capture as a political technology of risk management that operates across scales, I develop two key arguments. First, I argue that struggles over the allocation of the risks and costs of public debt have shaped local authorities’ speculative engagement with land. Unlike the case of US municipalities that are structurally reliant on private bond markets, I show how local authorities’ growth politics have been underwritten by the central state and accelerated by budgetary austerity. Second, I argue that this translocation of risk at the scale of the local gives rise to a form of state power organized around the allocation, production, and constant monitoring of financial and political risks. The politics of risk that underpin municipal experiments in state-led value capture combine an embrace of uncertainty and value expansion, with the principles of austerity budgeting, downscaling, and retrenchment. Ultimately, the effects of this form of state intervention are a heightening of uneven development, an exacerbation of local fiscal crisis, and a weakening of democratic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on conceptual research exploring how evolving geographies of finance inform urban and regional change, we examine the size and functional scope of the presence of leading global banks across functional urban areas in Europe. Based on data for 100 major global banks, we find that their overall presence is proportional to (the square root of) the national gross domestic product. London and Luxembourg host far more banks than can be explained by their national gross domestic product, which can be traced back to their export of banking services. We also analyze the geographies of specialized banking services per city. Corporate and investment banking are mainly explained by national gross domestic product, with London emerging as the most prominent center. Private banking and securities services, in turn, are largely independent of national gross domestic product and rely on the importance of small and specialized economies such as Luxembourg and St Helier (Jersey). The stability of Europe's banking centers is underpinned by their role as the national banking center and/or their specialization in international banking services, as well as manifested in specialized subnetworks of financial centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The slum concept originated as a descriptor for trans-class, or urban majority, environments in and around which people of different social levels lived in close proximity to each other. This article reappraises the concept's emergence in physically aging neighborhoods of London between the City of London and Westminster from the 1820s to the 1850s, within which a stage of rediscovery and reapplication of the word after the late 1830s has so far been overlooked. It focuses on a discursive shift in which a word borrowed from low-life slang became part of the accepted vocabulary for urban areas judged undesirable. Early identifications of sites labeled as slums in the St Giles district of London were by writers and visual artists who themselves lived and worked nearby. Several alternative words including rookery, court, and Alsatia were used in the effort to label a place zone previously unrecognized. The article traces these lexical changes with their consequences for how urban semantics became fixed through case studies from journalistic and political rhetoric, and from the imaginative fiction of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray which in the 1840s and 1850s viewed the area of the word's coinage with a degree of nostalgia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We respond to the special issue's call for a multiscalar, historicised approach to state capitalism through an exploration of Sovereign Wealth Fund investment into London real estate. We point to how the UK's ostensibly market-led recovery since the 2008 financial crisis has relied in part on attracting 'patient' state capitalist investments. In this, we contextualise the relational regulation of real estate markets as the outcome of intersecting state projects by considering the investment motivations of the single largest owner of London real estate, the Qatari Investment Authority, and the utilisation of their investment by UK governance actors. Focusing on Qatari Investment Authority's involvement in London's Olympic Village, we highlight how this strategic coupling in the real estate market realised domestic and geopolitical aims for the Qataris while facilitating the UK government's strategy to ameliorate London's housing shortage by fostering a 'build to rent' asset class. In doing so, we contribute to readings of state capitalism as an 'uneven and combined' process beyond the traditional state/market binary by placing sovereign wealth fund investment into the context of city governance, the geopolitics of real estate and resultant relational forms of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Patient capital' is presented by many policymakers as a panacea to address domestic (and sometimes city-level) gaps in financing urban development, particularly housing, that emerged in the post-2008 credit crunch. In this article, we analyse the complexities of patient investors' entry into residential markets in London and their response to the first major, and unexpected, crisis of demand: the COVID-19 pandemic and immediate falls in market demand. We focus on how patient capital and the firms invested in the professionalised rental market, build to rent (BTR), have responded. We highlight three main responses: (1) advancing their lobbying efforts to secure a more supportive political environment; (2) protecting their income streams by offering new payment plans and adaptability to prevent void rates; (3) turning to a 'reserve army' of renters backed by the state – so-called Key Workers (KWs). We argue these demonstrate a continual and co-evolutionary dimension to policy promoting patient capital and the need for patient planning to govern patient investment in housing systems. Our findings are in 'real-time' and highlight the importance of structural uncertainties and the breakdown of long-term assumptions in shaping investment decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines mainstream news media framings of North Korea and the inter-Korean relationship in the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games, focusing on the role that the media played in privileging particular understandings of nationalism, conflict and reconciliation. Print news articles from South Korea and English-speaking western nations were collected and analyzed. The results illustrate notable differences between South Korean and western media coverage of North Korea’s involvement and the inter-Korean relationship. Western representations of North Korea featured discussions of controversies pertaining to the North Korean government, and often deemphasized or dismissed athletes’ efforts. South Korean coverage included few reflections on socio-political problems related to North Korea, but highlighted athletic accomplishments. Emphasis on division was also found more often in western coverage of the inter-Korean relationship as compared to South Korean coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a focus on gardens in England, Germany, and France, the author asks three basic questions: (1) How did allotment gardens function as a form of relief to the poor? Allotment gardens, London, pollution, trees, green space Keywords: allotment gardens; green space; London; pollution; trees EN allotment gardens green space London pollution trees 1187 1193 7 08/10/22 20220901 NES 220901 Nilsen, Micheline (2014). Peter Thorsheim's chapter on green space emphasizes the class tension imbricated in the spread of parks, allotment gardens, and other open spaces, with particular emphasis on London's Green Belt. [Extracted from the article]

Portugal exiled its Jews in 1497. In 1536, the Portuguese Inquisition began to persecute Jews who continued to practice their religion in secret. It became difficult for the secret Jews to leave Portugal, but small communities of emigres grew up around Europe, especially in London, Amsterdam and Salonica (Thessaloniki), and beyond. As the Portuguese Inquisition became more active in the early decades of the eighteenth-century, Jews, who had been accustomed to practising their religion in secret, while outwardly conforming to Catholicism, were again sought out for persecution. Philip De la Cour's parents escaped from Portugal and arrived in London around 1707 and his eventful life in London and Bath illustrates many of the aspects of eighteenth-century Jewish medical life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London has unexpectedly low overall rates of self-harm in public health data and contains highly deprived areas with these paradoxically low rates. Qualitative data were collected via interviews and focus groups with 26 individuals living and working in one such area. Using the Stress Process Model, we explore why this ethnically diverse community, which is exposed to multiple, chronic stressors, might nonetheless appear to have low rates of self-harm. Participants described significant impacts of stressors on the mental health of people locally. These were partly buffered by social resources related to community solidarity and a culture of self-reliance. However, identifying oneself as mentally ill through being known to have self-harmed was seen as highly risky, diminishing a person's social status and exposing them to additional stressors from the community and services. Consequently, people tended to hide distress, respond with behaviors less linked to mental illness, and avoid mental health services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background A prospective bed utilisation census of acute London hospitals using an established Day of Care Survey (DoCS), which quantified adult patients not meeting criteria for in-hospital care. Methods Twenty-three hospitals were surveyed over two weeks in October/ November 2017 using supervised trained hospital staff. Pairs of staff visited wards, reviewed all patients and identified those not meeting inpatient care criteria, recording reasons for delay. Patient demographics, length of stay (LOS), ward specialty and delay reasons were collected. Results Overall – In total, 8,656 in-patients were studied (overall occupancy 96%, range 82- 117%): 800 definite discharges were excluded, leaving 7,856 patients for analysis; seven hospitals had ≥100% occupancy; 1,919/7,856 patients (24%, range 12–43%) did not meet criteria; 56% of patients were over 70 years; five hospitals had higher number of patients <70yo. 56% patients had LOS 0≤7days. Delayed patients – Number of delayed patients increased with age, but three hospitals had more patients <70yo; 53% had LOS≤14 days and 47% LOS>14 days; 13 hospitals had greater/equal number of patients in ≤14 days LOS. For delayed patients in ≤14 days group, most were within seven days of admission (627 ≤7days, 393 8-14 days). In total 34% (range 11-54%) of delays were related to acute hospital reasons (AHR) and 61% (range 46-83%) to wider system reasons (WSR). Eight common themes accounted for 67% of recorded reasons and were equally split between AHR and WSR. Conclusion Data showed high occupancy levels with insufficient discharges. This study suggests policies selecting age and/or LOS alone as cut offs to tackle delays in care may miss a large proportion of patients requiring more timely interventions. Adopting a proactive thematic approach to improvement using the top eight delay reasons provides an obvious opportunity to reduce delays while noting the inter site variation. All metrics analysed emphasized the need for informed local data to help support local change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on material from an ethnographic study in the gentrifying/gentrified London neighbourhood of Brixton to analyse the relationship between practices of LGBTQ territorialisation and the politics of neighbourhood change. It proceeds with two interrelated aims: to think critically about the ways in which LGBTQ claims to place-based belonging interact with racialised and classed ideologies of displacement and disciplining, and to explore memory's significance in framing the relationship between LGBTQ people and place. 'LGBTQ situated memory' is thus introduced here as a concept that draws attention to the complex, contradictory and dynamic role that site-specific evocations of the past play in contemporary LGBTQ urban politics. By exploring three memory tropes that emerge in Brixton, I show that LGBTQ situated memory can be used to claim spatialised belonging, negotiate culpability for gentrification and disturb progress narratives. Ultimately this article both calls for, and works towards, an approach to sexual geography that foregrounds multiplicity: a multiplicity of LGBTQ situated histories and – as is reflected in the memories explored – a multiplicity of relationships between LGBTQ people and neighbourhood development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic fieldwork around commemorative events in London and analysis of textual materials used during commemorations, this article explores how long-distance nationalists are involved in Bangladeshi state building practices. I demonstrate how long-distance nationalists, people who identify with Bangladesh and its government as their ancestral homeland, and who seek to influence the state, draw on family histories to narrate national pasts and justify dynastic political hierarchies that characterise Bangladeshi politics. Further, by paying attention to the uses of the idioms of kinship in transnational state practices, the article deconstructs thinking about states as natural entities that can only be studied as part of larger abstract political frameworks removed from peoples' experiences. Narrating shared pasts are central in creating shared sentiments and form a justification for undertaking Bangladeshi state practices from London. Taken together, the materials presented in this article illustrate the need to take the use of kinship idioms in state apparatuses seriously, because they provide key insights into the ways these apparatuses work within and beyond the borders of the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Billy Waters (c. 1780–1823), the 'King of the Beggars', was a London street-performer and a well-known figure in early nineteenth-century popular culture, yet despite this he has received no sustained critical or cultural attention. Close attention to depictions of Waters offers the potential for developing a new model of 1820s and 1830s popular culture that shows – in more detail than the critical models currently available – how popular theatre connects with print and visual media. The use and reuse of Waters' image allows us to see how Regency popular culture had a specific kind of matrix in which characters, scenes, and images were used and reused across media: with Waters as a case study we can track the ways in which representations of theatricality as a mode of urban life spread across popular culture in a series of networked illustrations. This article analyses visual and textual representations of Billy Waters to suggest a new approach to ascertaining the relationship between ideological agency and popular cultural forms. Building on Robert Darnton's more linear 'communication circuit' it proposes the model of the 'communication network' to give new insight into the ways in which theatre and its visual culture function across Regency popular forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neo-artisanal production is a growing milieu of contemporary urban cultural economy. This article positions one area of this neo-artisanship – 'craft' beer brewing – as pivotal to this urban milieu. It draws on 25 qualitative interviews with craft brewers and brewery owners in London and critically unpacks how the 'crafting' of beer involves entanglements with and alterations of social and material space. The article offers accounts of London craft brewery owners' creative and commercial dispositions and the spatial and aesthetic patterns emerging out of London's craft beer boom and troubles the weaving of craft brewing by policymakers and real estate developers into restructuring and place-making agendas. The article suggests that the 'authentication' of livelihoods, tastes and places through the tactile promise of 'craft' cannot be decoupled from patterns of socio-spatial stratification and growing precarity and casts doubt upon any 'creative' urban economy shifting in this direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Kingdom now boasts the largest Brazilian population in Europe, but so far the processes behind this relatively new migration stream remain undertheorized. An examination of Brazilian migration to London suggests that, although increased access to economic capital certainly plays a role in it, what migrants do with this capital may vary significantly and, further, that these differences are related to social class and ideology. The likelihood that they will settle or return is also linked to the degree to which they identify with the dominant ideology of the destination society. O Reino Unido agora possui a maior população brasileira da Europa, mas até agora os processos por trás desse fluxo de migração relativamente novo permanecem pouco teorizados. Uma examinação da migração brasileira para Londres sugere que, embora o maior acesso ao capital econômico certamente desempenhe um papel importante, o que os migrantes fazem com esse capital pode variar significativamente e, além disso, essas diferenças estão relacionadas à classe social e à ideologia. A probabilidade de eles se estabelecerem ou retornarem também está ligado ao grau no qual se identificam com a ideologia dominante da sociedade de destino. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is the development of neighborhood planning in England, in particular its guiding principle of local people as rational actors. The article looks at neighborhood planning in its own terms; that is, it looks at the rationality of engagement in a new system that seeks to tip the balance of rationality in favor of communities following the UK government's aims of overcoming local resistance to the development of new housing. While there is evidence that neighborhood planning is enjoying some success, this is a delicate settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syphilis rates have been increasing in men who have sex with men (MSM) in London. To describe risk behaviour and refine public health interventions, we conducted prospective enhanced surveillance of new syphilis cases in MSM attending selected London sexual health clinics (SHCs) between October 2016 and January 2017. Sexual health advisors (SHAs) completed 107 questionnaires. Eighteen per cent of respondents reported always using condoms, with lower use in HIV-positive (8%, 4/53) than HIV-negative men (33%, 14/52). Almost half of respondents reported condomless sero-discordant sex (46%, 33/72). The most frequent means of meeting new partners reported were venues (80%, 76/95), particularly bars or clubs (34%, 32/95), and apps or websites (79%, 75/95). Nearly a third of respondents reported engaging in group sex (32%, 30/95). Almost half reported drug use during sex (47%, 46/98), with HIV-positive men more likely to report use of the three main 'chemsex' drugs. The majority of respondents preferred health promotion information from SHAs (63%, 58/92) compared to other sources such as Google/Wikipedia and apps. Prevention activity should continue to focus on condomless sex, serosorting, multiple and overlapping partners, and chemsex. SHCs, particularly those serving HIV-positive men, are important sources for sexual health promotion advice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on 'the convivial, everyday turn' by approaching the workings of complex urban spaces of multiculture as entangled with processes of urban change that are infused with judgements and contestations about what is of value. The article explores the competing value claims made for a leisure space, a London bowling alley, used by a diverse group of people (in terms of dis/ability, ethnicity, gender, class and age) that has been threatened with demolition. It examines how arguments about diversity and inclusivity are deployed in these debates and how official discourses are resisted through the mobilisation of other articulations of social value. The article argues that the combination of the hollowing out of the concept of diversity and the political and economic context results in a paradox whereby multiculturalism is celebrated as an atmosphere and generator of capital while existing physical spaces of everyday urban multiculture are at best unprotected and at worst not recognised, devalued and demolished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media are fundamental to the way communities make sense of conflicts. This also holds true for diaspora communities, who are involved in and affected by distant/homeland conflicts. Shifting away from the dominant focus on ‘radicalization’ through media in this context, this study looks at the role media play in making sense of such conflict among young Kurds in London. Data consist of focus groups with Kurdish youth, participant observations in community centres and ethnographic conversations. While media are generally perceived as the central forces through which diaspora youth experience and engage with the Kurdish conflict in Turkey, ethnic media, in particular Kurdish broadcasting, play a very limited role. The distance vis-à-vis ethnic media is analysed and explained through respondents’ discourses on diasporic cosmopolitanism. The results show that their shift away from ethnic media facilitates more solid ethnic identities and more enhanced engagements with the Kurdish conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local governments often see parking as an essential amenity to maintain competitiveness. Restrictive parking policy, therefore, could potentially deter investment and local development. This study examines the effect of residential parking restraints on multifamily housing supply in London, United Kingdom. We find that the effect varies with car ownership and usage levels. Restrictive parking maximums are associated with fewer multifamily housing developments in outer London but more developments in inner London, most of the latter being car-free developments. These results suggest that parking maximums may help restore the attractiveness of inner cities and promote smart growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the degree to which spatial inequalities reinforce other forms of social inequality in cultural labor markets. It does so using the example of London, an acknowledged hub for the creative and cultural industries. Using pooled data from 2013 to 2015 quarters of the United Kingdom’s. Labour Force Survey, we consider the social makeup of London’s cultural labor force, and reveal the extent to which, rather than acting as an “engine room” of social mobility, London’s dominance in fact reenforces social class disparities in cultural employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians portray London's "Magnificent Seven" suburban cemeteries as the first fruits of the urban health reforms inspired by Edwin Chadwick and George Walker. But all seven cemeteries opened before Chadwick and Walker's work began. What's more, the city's new cemeteries were met with a chorus of protests. Why was this? I remove London's cemeteries from the narrative of health reforms in which they have been anachronistically placed and study them in their own time. It turns out that financial designs prompted their construction, designs that involved a number of previously unexplored, deleterious consequences. These consequences, which historians have overlooked, were recognized immediately by Londoners of the time. Church revenues waned, public parks were enclosed and developed, and the socio-spatial division between the rich west and the poor east widened. Londoners fought hard against the very same cemeteries that recent historians have anointed as the solution to the city's health problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon a survey of more than three thousand respondents and forty in-depth interviews, the aim of this article is to examine the impact of migration on sexual resocialisation. In particular, we show how living in London influenced the attitudes of Central and East European migrants towards pre-marital sex and homosexuality. While the general acceptability of pre-marital sex was not affected by time spent in London, differences were noted in the meaning attached to sex outside marriage in the United Kingdom compared with Central and Eastern Europe. Particularly significant changes were observed in our respondents' attitudes towards homosexuality, with a greater liberalisation the result of extrication from mechanisms of social control, re-socialisation into new social norms regarding sex and sexuality, greater visibility of sexual difference in London and, in particular, inter-personal contacts with gays and lesbians. Limitations to the general liberalisation of attitudes were also noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Incidence and prevalence rates of multiple sclerosis (MS) are generally higher in White populations than in other ethnic groups. Relevant studies in the United Kingdom were conducted over 30 years ago. Objectives: To provide updated ethnicity-specific MS prevalence rates in the United Kingdom. Methods: Electronic records from general practices (GPs) in four east London boroughs were queried for the number of people diagnosed with MS, grouped by ethnicity, into 5-year age bands. Compared against total registered GP patients in the area (c. 900,000), the age-standardised MS prevalence was calculated by ethnic group. Results: The overall age-standardised prevalence of MS was 111 per 100,000 (152 for women and 70 for men), and 180, 74 and 29 for the White, Black and South Asian populations, respectively. The sex ratios (female:male) were 2.2:1, 2.1:1 and 2.8:1, respectively. Conclusion: MS prevalence was considerably lower among Black and South Asian populations, compared to the White population, by 59% and 84%, respectively. However, compared to available data in Africa and South Asia, MS is several times more prevalent among Black people and South Asians living in the United Kingdom than their territorial ancestry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do the wealthiest inhabitants in one of the world’s wealthiest cities engage with public settings? Certainly, public concern about social and spatial divisions resulting from gross inequalities has not been matched by empirical research into the flows and social repertoires of the very wealthy. This article presents research examining the place and impact of the super-rich on London and considers how this group relates to its others, how they traverse urban spaces and their feelings about the value and relative dangers of the city. The impression derived from this investigation is of a group able to use residential locational choices and choreographed mobilities as strategies to avoid negative aspects of daily life in the city (visible poverty, potential danger, spaces of social and ethnic difference). Yet despite these strategies of selective engagement, it is also possible to identify a celebration of London as a safe and cosmopolitan urban field in which cultural institutions and commercial districts allow what is nevertheless a socially delimited range of interactions. The city allows the very wealthy to experience London as a democratic and welcoming space underwritten by high levels of domestic security, spatial divisions/buffers and public–private security apparatuses that facilitate their relative invisibility and safety. The wealthy take on a cloaked co-presence that prevents the need for disagreeable encounters with poverty, facilitated by the built structures and networks of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affective dimensions of ordinary urban way-finding. There were three persistent motifs that ran through these diverse works: a basic fascination with the destruction of the atlas, the foregrounding of a stoic or heroic pedestrian figure, and the attachment of the atlas to a projected network of mobile individuals that connected on the streets at random times and places. An interrogation of these tropes reveals how the A-Z became a means to explore the terms of an expanded pedestrian experience, as well as a possible configuration of metropolitan movement and contact. Furthermore, the popularity of these texts points to an excess of affect that might have become embedded within acts of A-Z way-finding. Using, owning or being seen with the atlas briefly became a potential mechanism for imagining one’s contribution to a mobile metropolitan community. Hence, this essay is both a focussed exploration of street-atlas poetics and an attempt to think more deeply about the cultural dynamics of everyday urban navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the experience and outcome of a collaboration between a photographer, a geographer and six senior citizens from six different faith communities in West London. In 2012 this group collaborated to produce an exhibition 'Faith in Suburbia: a shared photographic journey' which was exhibited at a local history museum, at University College London and at the participating places of worship. Drawing on the photographic approach developed by Liz Hingley for her work 'Under gods: stories for Soho Road', the participants sought to capture the everyday life and meaning of each other's places of worship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]