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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

This article investigates the issue of migration success achieved by Poles settling in Berlin and London between the 1980s and 2018. We focus on the migration wave that took place after Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004. We show different ways in which migrants understand their new situation in the light of their integration, daily life, and well-being or satisfaction in the context of migration success. We analyse the similarities and differences of approaches to the new life in London and Berlin explicated by Polish migrants. In doing so, we pay attention to several important characteristics and processes related to the integration of Polish migrants into the metropolitan environments of Western Europe. [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]

"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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]