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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]

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]

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 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 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]