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The fire at Grenfell Tower, a block of public housing flats in The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, in June 2017 has come to epitomize the growing divide between Britain's rich and poor in the last decade. Yet, the proximity of Kensington Palace, home of many senior British royals, has been almost entirely ignored in scholarship and commentary on the Grenfell Tower atrocity. This is especially remarkable given the philanthropic 'work' the monarchy has undertaken since the fire's aftermath. This paper explores Together: Our Community Cookbook (The Hubb Community Kitchen. 2018. Together: Our community cookbook. London: Ebury Press), a cookbook released by Meghan Markle as part of her royal charitable 'duties', to raise money for The Hubb Community Kitchen – a group of women displaced in the fire, who prepared meals for survivors in the aftermath. The cookbook repeatedly emphasizes unity, collectivity and togetherness: the importance of a local community response to rehabilitate Grenfell survivors. By analysing the cultural politics of Together through radical contextualization, this paper argues that in releasing the cookbook, the British monarchy itself is incorporated into this narrative of community and recovery, which erases the classed and racialised inequalities between the monarchy and Grenfell survivors (and, indeed, those in similar socioeconomic positions). Fundamentally, the cookbook obscures the ongoing culpability of 'the elites' for the sociopolitical and socioeconomic inequalities experienced by citizens in Britain. Together evidences how inequalities in contemporary Britain are normalized and legitimized in the public imaginary through media representations, obscuring the structural inequalities that underpinned the conditions at Grenfell, and instead individualizing the survivors as 'responsiblised' neoliberal subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complexities of conviviality in a London neighbourhood by using primary qualitative data to analyse the implications of the (in)visibility of difference for superdiverse social relations. It develops the concept of power‐geometries to examine the implications of how social differences are produced, imagined, and experienced in the neighbourhood's public spaces. Drawing on three situated examples from a visual ethnographic research project, it explores the affective intensities of how gender, sexuality, class, and race intersect with ethnicity, religion, and migrant status to shape urban conviviality. The paper argues the way different positions and identities are layered and intersect can shape the development of ‘cosmopolitan outlooks’ and intercultural relations. In doing so, the analysis refines understandings of superdiversity conceived narrowly within the remit of majority/minority relations. It promotes instead more critically ethnographic explorations of the complex and varied ways difference has meaning in everyday lives in superdiverse places and shapes everyday forms of recognition and equality. The paper contributes to debates on geographies of difference, encounter, and public space by analysing how power relations affect conviviality. It demonstrates how conviviality is an ambivalent process that is punctuated by both prejudices and solidarities and is shaped by structural inequalities and wider political discourses. The paper concludes by highlighting the role of agency and space for dialogue for residents negotiating differences among urban change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends recent examinations of neoliberalism’s affective impact through a close reading of Kae Tempest’s 2016 piece Let Them Eat Chaos. Building upon the work of Rachel Greenwald Smith, I demonstrate how Tempest locates geopolitical discussions of neoliberal affect in London’s particular geo-historical contexts. The significance of this approach lies in the insights Tempest offers into the digital infrastructures that underpin neoliberalism’s affective atmosphere. These findings are expounded through a close reading of Tempest’s work in dialogue with the writings of Paul Gilroy, Byung-Chul Han, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Mark Fisher. Through such a framework, I foreground how gentrification is a key driver in establishing, and maintaining, neoliberalism’s digitally enervating affects. The paper concludes via the work of Hans Blumenberg – whose meditations on maritime disaster help unpack the emancipatory humanism Tempest seeks to salvage from London’s ruin. Offering no grand political alternatives, Tempest’s critique of neoliberal technology aims, instead, at redrawing the parameters of political solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a conspicuous growth in the height and extent of luxury urban development in the 21st century. This has been accompanied by important critical analyses exploring how this upward construction has created new vertical social divides and landscapes of power. This article argues, however, that there are spatial and methodological limitations to the way luxury urban skies have tended to be framed and pursued. Through a focus on the decisions taken in producing the 2017 meditative film Vertical Horizons by Tom Wolseley, the paper offers an expanded agenda for engagements with elite vertical development. This film juxtaposes views of London and Western Europe's tallest skyscraper, the Shard, from different vantage points, with contrasting narratives about the building. Vertical Horizons seeks to use its focus on the Shard to open up more imaginative experiments with high-rise landscapes, and better recognition of the potential complicities in responses to the gleaming façades of contemporary urbanisation. The paper posits that more multi-sited, creative and reflective approaches, such as those pursued in Vertical Horizons, are required in efforts at levelling with the social and symbolic power of urban vertical luxification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the construction of London's West India Docks in 1802, I argue that this project established a feedback loop with conditions of production in the Caribbean. Through an analysis of committee minutes, letters, parliamentary papers and visual art, I move beyond economic accounts of slavery's impact to demonstrate how geographies of security and surveillance—first developed on the sugar plantation—were imported into the design and function of London's port. As such, I argue that London's docks produced a geography of segregation which offers a unique insight into the workings of racial capitalism and its exploitation of group‐differentiated vulnerabilities. Positioning my discussion alongside London's contemporary landscape, I excavate Britain's repressed memories of slavery to illustrate how they still scar the urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban chicken‐keeping is on the rise in London, in private gardens, community gardens, allotments, schools, and urban farm projects. In welcoming chickens into the city, urban spaces are being transformed: coops are being built, runs constructed, chicken‐friendly flora introduced, and space landscaped to accommodate both chickens and humans. Underneath the design of these multispecies urban spaces, there is a desire to bring the good life into the city, through a return to nature. Chicken‐keeping is being lauded by urban keepers and commentators alike as a response to urban crises over food provenance and quality, environmental ethics, and a growing unease with industrial agriculture. However, after chickens arrive in these urban spaces, it becomes quickly apparent that the design of the urban barnyard imposed by the human is rarely practical for, or enjoyed by, chickens: perfectly laid lawns are torn up, plants are demolished, and vegetable patches are gorged on, and chickens are at the mercy of local foxes. When chickens enter these urban barnyards, they demand humans pay attention to their desires, behaviours, and territoriality by overflowing and expanding their assigned space. As such, designing the urban barnyard is an ongoing spatio‐temporal iterative process between chickens, humans, and other non‐human actors in the more‐than‐human city. In this paper, using the case of the urban chicken, I argue that more‐than‐human (urban) geographies can find generative collaborations with design thinking in theorising human–environmental relationalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to social protection in old age is crucial and yet contingent upon negotiations between the social structures of the welfare states and the personal networks within which individuals are embedded. International migration, changing family dynamics, and the transformation of care and other welfare policies in the global North make it challenging for older migrants to negotiate social protection. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with first-generation older Turkish migrants in London and 13 semi-structured interviews with professional service providers for the community, the paper aims to investigate the assemblages of formal and informal social protection in the lives of older migrants. Findings indicate the complexity in accessing informal social protection and the navigation of formal care support in the UK for first generation older Turkish migrants and the contingency of access to formal care services on informal support networks for participants. It has been demonstrated that built infrastructure and policies aimed at older adults have great influence on assemblages of care, highlighting the need for more age-friendly and integrated policies to facilitate access to social protection for diverse groups of older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike for other forms of qualitative data, examples of how fieldnotes are analysed are rarely provided in the literature. Using fieldnotes from my ethnographic study of the production of public space on London's South Bank as a starting point, this paper considers why this might be the case. In particular, the paper argues that for fieldnote‐based research, analysis is a feature of note‐taking, rather than a discrete phase of activity conducted using our fieldnotes once they have been collected. In this vein, the paper encourages researchers to be aware of the analytical in their fieldnotes, and to be open to the ways that analysis inside the notebook can help us identify salient objects of enquiry in our work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the practice of counting physical activity in a large urban park as a social research method. Using a page of tabulated numbers from inside my notebook as a launching off point, it discusses how this quantitative method aided my qualitative inquiry. It discusses some of the strengths and weaknesses of the method as well as offering a reflection on how geographers and urban scholars might use counting as a regular part of their research practice. By opening up my notebook I reflect on how I went about assembling evidence as a researcher in my investigation of a busy urban space, and how it helped me to understand the social life of a well‐used park in situ as I developed an argument about conceptualising parks as social infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short paper explores the practice of putting Polaroid photographs into field notebooks. It draws on the ethnographic research and collaborative photography associated with my PhD on the everyday lives of young Black people in West London. I begin by describing how and why I put Polaroids into my A6 sized field notebooks in an attempt to think harder about how these lives might be represented. Then, looking to encourage other geographers to consider using Polaroids in this way, I discuss how traditional approaches to field notetaking can be replaced by something more collaborative. Doing so, I contend, can help you to engage productively with those involved in your studies as you take and talk about photos together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the relationship between struggles for housing justice and alternative housing models is riddled with epistemological and methodological challenges. A posteriori definitions of specific housing typologies – for example, “co-operative housing” – fail to account for the often informal and fluid practices that constitute the emergence of housing commoning through collective organizing. This paper offers an empirically grounded theoretical analysis of the development of short-life co-operative housing in London, UK, since the 1970s. Taking a longitudinal view, it explores how performative power surges by squatters and other precariously housed people were sustained by federative organizing and aligned with central and municipal institutional experimentation, giving rise to significant, if precarious, shifts in housing policy and practice. The concept of “precarious institutionalization” names this state of contingency and furthers a political analysis of the maintenance of housing commoning against multiple enclosures, with wider implications for scholarship on contemporary movements for decommodified self-managed housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the situated production of opinions in human geography research. Drawing on an online focus group project in which university students were asked to discuss smartphone use in urban greenspace, I'm interested in how our methods can make opinions as much as collect those that are already assumed to exist. Why were these students inclined to speak of having and sharing opinions? How important should opinions be to us if they are not actively influencing the everyday lives of those who we hope to understand in our studies? And what does this all say about staging effective group discussion in the discipline? This paper considers how opinions feature in human geography research and how focus groups are organised most effectively. It does this by drawing on a study in which university students were asked to discuss smartphone use in urban greenspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the generative capacity of activist movements defending their community assets from commodification or closure to produce new forms of social infrastructure. We explore this through the case study of activism along the Westway, a motorway in West London. The area has a strong tradition of community activism, particularly in the 1960s and the 2010s. Through a Participatory Action Research approach, we elaborate a historical account of the formation of social infrastructure under the Westway and surrounding spaces. In doing so, we develop a framework—processes, alliances, and capacities—to understand how communities and activist groups contesting the loss of community spaces can generate new forms of social infrastructure—both physical spaces such as play spaces or cultural venues, and social and caring relationships such as friendships or support networks. These informal spaces and alliances can shed light on how to build alternative, bottom‐up forms of social infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractSquatting has long been a crucial form of direct action in housing struggles across the globe, in which women have always played an important part. However, despite recent calls to inflect housing studies with feminist, decolonial, and queer praxis, scholarship on women’s role in London’s squatting story remains significantly underdeveloped. Their absence becomes even more apparent when we consider that squatting’s second wave occurred simultaneously with that of feminism, during which time the home was articulated as a key site of feminist struggle. This paper therefore draws from materials authored by and about women during this period to trace broad contours of their involvement in London’s squatting history, focusing in particular on two avenues which call for further critical inquiry, namely: (1) the mobilisation of the ‘mother’ figure in press and public narratives, contrasted against the demonisation of young, single women for whom squatting defied popular understandings of how femininity should be performed; and (2) the world-building capacities of squatted domestic violence refuges, which provided safe spaces for women escaping violent partners and shared with squatting an autonomous, self-help ethos. At stake here is an understanding of what it meant for women to take (up) and remake space in late twentieth century London, and how similar feminist actions continue to enrich contemporary understandings of squatting as a radical, intersectional, and vital practice in ongoing struggles for urban housing justice worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The replanning of London following the Second World War is, in many ways, a familiar story. However it has often been told in fragments, usually prioritizing the best-known plans and the involvement of Professor Patrick Abercrombie. This paper positions the replanning more widely, considering a hierarchy from region to specific locales, and the problems of fragmented planning within such a structure. It explores issues of agents, agency and authority. The sanitized and orderly vision of a new London is set against a more complex and disordered reality of reconstruction-plan production. The urgency, scale and complexity of the task, and questions of why should 'author' plans, are significant issues. The realities of postwar London have been shaped by a messy and misunderstood process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the institutional and theoretical silences within debates on infrastructural violence with reference to migrant women survivors of gendered violence. Drawing from feminist thinking around structural and symbolic oppression, it develops the notion of gendered infrastructural violence to help understand how migrant women survivors navigate statutory and non-statutory institutions when seeking support. Empirically, the paper elucidates how diverse Brazilian migrant women in London negotiate multiple forms of passive and active infrastructural violence played out in terms of xenophobia, discrimination and a hostile immigration environment. Such experiences can dissuade them from reporting due to actual and perceived fear of further violence being perpetrated against them. While infrastructural violence perpetrated by an oppressive racial state can exacerbate Brazilian migrant women's suffering of direct gendered abuse, migrant and/or feminist organisations provide invaluable support and an essential protective bulwark. Yet these experiences are mediated differently depending on women's social locations in terms of intersecting race, class, occupational and immigration status and language competencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since austerity policies in the UK began in 2010, homelessness has risen rapidly. Drawing from feminist geographical theories and methodologies, this paper examines experiences of homelessness under austerity in Haringey, London through photo‐elicitation research with one participant, Tessa. This paper argues that home(un)making—the constantly shifting balance of homemaking and unmaking—is central to everyday experiences of, and resistance to, austerity. The paper first demonstrates how Tessa resists austerity through practices of homemaking that enable her to cope with the difficulties of homelessness at a time of austerity. Next, it explores how Tessa's relationships with other actors in the homeless shelter—other residents and government officials—contributed to processes of home‐unmaking, exacerbating the hardships she experiences. By developing the concept of home(un)making, therefore, this paper aims to show the dynamism of home for homeless people under austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper historicizes the riotous geographies of British Blackness by focusing on three socalled "riots" in London's post-World War II development, the 1958 Notting Hill uprisings, the 1981 Brixton uprisings and the 2011 pan-London uprisings. Mobilizing debates in Black (British) Geographies, I challenge state narrations of these events as illegitimate expressions of Black Britons' political discontent. Based on archival research, I expose such framings as ongoing attempts of whiteness to render Black British geographies "ungeographic" within a supposed white British geography. Employing fugitivity as method, I show how these riotous events constituted possibilities for escaping racialized spatio-political categories of British state geographies. I consider British Blackness as political category and as a historically contingent discursive construction that mobilizes people from the African diaspora in specific ways but also stretches beyond them. Thus, I ask: How does Blackness continue to escape attempts of capturing it in and through British state geographies and in what ways does this escape constitute a transfiguration of Black British (un)geographies? The three historical cases I examine exemplify the struggles between the state's efforts to enclose and exclude Black Britons and their efforts to forge an underground of British Blackness in the wake of Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent debates have widely acknowledged gentrification's varied manifestations, success in enumerating and disentangling the process and its defining features from other forms of neighbourhood change at‐scale and across entire cities, has remained largely elusive. This paper addresses this gap and employs a novel, open and reproducible urban analytics approach to systematically examine the past and future trajectories of neighbourhood change using London, England, as a case‐study example. Using suites of datasets relating to population, house prices, and built environment development, the nature of gentrification's mutations and its spatial patterns are extracted through a multi‐stage data dimensionality reduction and classification methodology. Machine learning is subsequently adopted to model gentrification's observed trends and predict its future frontiers with interactive visualisation methods offering new insights into gentrification's projected dynamics and geographies. This paper employs a novel, open, and reproducible urban analytics approach to systematically examine the past and future trajectories of neighbourhood change using London, England, as a case‐study example. Using suites of datasets relating to population, house prices, and built environment development, the nature of gentrification's mutations and its spatial patterns are extracted through a multi‐stage data dimensionality reduction and classification methodology. Machine learning is subsequently adopted to model gentrification's observed trends and predict its future frontiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As academic geographers continue to investigate popular geographical knowledges and imaginations beyond the bounds of academic publications, less attention has been given to moments when popular geographies reverse the gaze, expressly lifting the curtain on the production of knowledge by those of us who call ourselves professional geographers. What could turning to popular culture tell professional geographers about perceptions of our discipline, its history of complicity with imperialism, and its practices of knowledge production? This paper offers some partial answers by turning to an English popular cultural metaseries that is remarkably explicit and dynamic in its depiction of geography: Michael Bond's Paddington Bear franchise, or as Bond ironically referred to it, the "Paddington Empire." From the very first Paddington story published in 1958 to the 2014 feature film, the Paddington franchise scrutinises geography and stages the work of professional geographical institutions, from the Royal Geographical Society to the imaginary "Geographers' Guild of Great Britain." Drawing on archival work in Bond's collected papers, interviews, contextualising scholarship, journalism, and careful readings of the Paddington texts, I argue that the Paddington Empire iteratively reprises colonial encounters, at times in troubling ways, but also offers insightful critiques of extractive forms of geographical knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a new politics of knowledge and skills, which is being used effectively by campaigning groups over planning, housing, and land, challenging the very basis of conventional property development. The new politics, articulated by Hilary Wainwright in a recent book, is grass roots local action which challenges top–down conventional knowledge and expertise. Using examples from campaigns for social and affordable housing in London, in which the author has been involved, this practitioner paper highlights how grass roots knowledge and organisation can challenge conventional power in land and property markets, and the language and expertise on which they rest. In these campaigns, the knowledge of local residents about their communities is combined with the skills of committed professionals in planning and land economics. Conventional property market expertise is extraordinarily powerful in UK social, economic, and environmental policy, yet it can and must be challenged at a fundamental level if alternative community‐led models of urban development are to be taken seriously. Examples of "People's Plans" and successful community challenges to the abuse of financial viability analysis by developers demonstrate that new knowledge and skills combined with grass roots organisation can create a new politics of opposition to conventional urban development. This practitioner paper highlights how grass roots knowledge and organisation can challenge conventional power in land and property markets, and the language and expertise on which they rest. Examples of "People's Plans" and successful community challenges to the abuse of financial viability analysis by developers demonstrate that new knowledge and skills combined with grass roots organisation can create a new politics of opposition to conventional urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legacy and future of the 'ethnographic film' has been the subject of much scrutiny and refinement in recent decades, mirroring the reinvention of ethnography itself. A number of innovative strands such as observational film, direct cinema, and sensory ethnographic film have attempted to reframe the 'ethnographic film' beyond its narrative expository documentary origins. In reinventing the 'ethnographic film', filmmakers have addressed important questions regarding representation, the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject, and the need for a more open-ended interpretation and contextualisation to involve the audience. Concomitantly, an ever-increasing number of films direct their focus towards the contested nature of housing and urban redevelopment in cities. Despite this, the use of film in housing and urban studies remains under-examined and in need of urgent critical engagement. In this paper, we discuss the representation of two contested housing and urban redevelopment projects in London, the Robin Hood Gardens public housing estate, and the Seven Sisters Indoor Market. We analyse a relatively large number of films made on these projects and compare their treatment of representation and audience to assess the significance of the 'ethnographic' approach, consequently arguing that filmmakers and researchers probing contested cities can benefit from a closer engagement with productive debates with it. We argue that the dialectical engagement between 'ethnographicness' and 'filmicness' can help realise the immense generative potentials presented by the filmmaking medium, allowing a reality to emerge from the film, rather than reduce the film to a representation of textually reproduced reality. In doing so, we consider the importance of the contested nature of housing and the urban as cinematic subjects. As a conclusion to the paper, we present some reflections on the need for moving towards filmmaking that dwells on the liminal experiences of communities inhabiting contested housing and urban redevelopment projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that squatting provides a concrete and theoretical location for dismantling binaries between successful and failed resistance. Focusing on the development of a political and affective consciousness and the inherent antagonism within squatting above the temporality of an individual squat or occupation helps to recentre the 'urban political' and understand the value and power of the urban commons. I combine radical democracy and affect theory to argue for the centrality of squatting in challenging urban capitalist hegemony. Not only does squatting transform consciousness, but the physically and emotionally supportive practices that it engenders helps to return the emotive as well as the political to the urban environment. I support this claim with reference to the successful 2015 Aylesbury occupation in London, which the occupiers approached with affective solidarity and a desire to reclaim space through antagonistic urban insurrection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents 'shared projects' and the 'symbiotic' relations they engender to capture accounts of state and society actors collaborating to turn individual constraints into collective opportunities for pursuing urban experiments which are institutionally-shaped but also institution-shaping. The concepts are developed through a sequential and recursive comparison – that is, a 'comparative conversation'– between a case of urban village upgrading in Shenzhen and Community Land Trust Development in London. The paper uses a pragmatist approach to capitalist transformation as a starting point for comparison between these supposedly 'incomparable' cases. I build both heterogeneous and generalisable accounts of the pathways and progressive potential of collaborations on shared projects by recursively composing analytical proximities across the cases and their contexts of state entrepreneurialism and austerity localism. Theoretically, this paper contributes to scholarship which focuses on the contingency and complexity inherent in urban transformation. State and society actors are seen as potential collaborators working pragmatically to solve systemic problems without necessarily targeting wholesale systemic change. Methodologically, it contributes to ongoing attempts to demonstrate the positive relationship between experimental comparisons and conceptual innovation through staging a 'comparative conversation'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most housing forms and living arrangements in contemporary cities are designed for settled populations, and housing markets poorly address the needs of mobile population groups. This paper explores the housing forms and living arrangements which emerge from the conditions of temporality and mobility and are practised by the middle-income group of high-skilled transnational professionals. The study is based on 65 semi-structured interviews with migrants from Western countries in Moscow and London. Three inter-related factors of highly mobile living are found to shape the particular housing demands of this migrant group. Firstly, the need for economic flexibility determines the preference for sharing options rather than for individual renting. Secondly, the travelling pattern of their jobs imposes time-related housing limitations, and their life-course stage may require flexibility. Thirdly, this migrant group expresses requirements for physical and functional comfort of housing, as well as access to amenities and a sense of community, despite their detached lifestyles. However, although most of these housing needs are known in the literature, they have not yet been examined in relation to the mobile living of transnational professionals, and this paper illuminates this research gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses methodological approaches to comparative urban geography and the consequences of such approaches. It demonstrates three ways by which an imaginative comparison can be constructed and employed: letting the sites speak to one another, repeated instance analysis, and tracing. Successfully employing these methods requires adopting comparison as both an implicit ethos and explicit approach during data collection and analysis, answering "why is it different here?" Reflecting on the impact of utilising comparative approaches, I argue that comparative urbanism helps balance the unique and ubiquitous conclusions from research, and forces researchers to question the norms or assumptions they hold from doing singular case study research, which in turn foregrounds the situational nature of urban governance in analysis. In the specifics of this paper, it also helps uncover assumptions around the power of state and reveals (some) global elite urban networks. This paper addresses methodological approaches to comparative urban geography and the consequences of such approaches. It demonstrates three ways by which an imaginative comparison can be constructed and employed: letting the sites speak to one another, repeated instance analysis, and tracing. Successfully employing these methods requires adopting comparison as both an implicit ethos and explicit approach during data collection and analysis, answering "why is it different here?" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how deportation became a solution to rough sleeping in pre-Brexit England. It identifies relationships between the social regulation of vulnerable and marginalised adults, contemporary governance arrangements and bordering practices characteristic of Britain's 'hostile environment'. Drawing on media reports and grey organisational literature, the focus of discussion is events across 2015–2018 in which three London-based charities were criticised for working with the Home Office to deport homeless migrants under its European Economic Area Administrative Removal policy. The overall tenor of criticism was that collaboration with the government compromised the organisations' independence and charitable missions and aims. This diminished their capacity to both advocate for vulnerable adults and effectively challenge oppressive state practices. The paper observes how state and nonprofit relations structure institutional and socio-legal responses to marginalised and 'othered' adults through commissioning and contracting mechanisms. It demonstrates that the social and legal control of homeless migrants may be differently constituted by institutions delivering services in relation to citizenship, vulnerability and marginalisation. This analysis incorporates a broader appraisal of institutional motivations, values and beliefs in social welfare delivery, including the historic role of charitable agencies in the criminalisation of social welfare users. Taken together, the paper offers an interdisciplinary critique of the relationships between border control, neoliberal governance and the sociocultural and historic construction of homeless migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European cities have responded differently to the growing number of short‐term rentals (such as Airbnb) and proposed a variety of regulations, although little is known about their efficiency. This paper contributes to filling the gap by analyzing both policy documents and spatial distributions of Airbnb listings between 2015 and 2020 using Amsterdam, Berlin, and London as case studies. We also compare the results with those of nine other European capitals. Our results show that cities follow highly individualized approaches. According to the strictness of each regulation, we see different intensities in the growth (and drop) of Airbnb listings, the share of multi‐hosts, and the share of apartments withdrawn from the regular housing market. There is also a spatial dispersion of listings from the center to the periphery. Our numbers insinuate that dynamically changing regulations force hosts to adapt continuously–which tames an uncontrolled proliferation, but more research is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the employment experience of workers at the Eastern Palace Cinema in East London, in 1934. In August 1934, a member of staff murdered the cinema's manager. The witness statements taken in the subsequent criminal investigation give a unique insight into the operations of 1930s cinemas and the working conditions of the people who were employed in them. The statements give voice to a group of service staff that had limited means of relating their lived experience. The article contrasts these statements with contemporary advice on cinema operations from guidebooks and trade papers to explore how trade advice translated into reality. It also draws on archival sources to excavate the backgrounds of cinema staff across roles. This adds to our understanding of the experience of staff employed in the most popular leisure industry of interwar Britain, an area that has not yet been extensively researched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper poses a parallel analysis of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark, two novels set in London around the First World War that complement one another with regard to representation of women in the city. In focus are Woolf's and Rhys's heroines who belong different social classes. With a view to producing a fuller picture of the London strata of the time, the paper concentrates on a dual front: it examines the position the protagonists enjoy in respect to their gender as well as in respect to their social status. While Rhys's Anna is a young woman from a distant colony, that is an outsider with no permanent residence in London, Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, however seemingly privileged, is greatly disadvantaged by her restricted experience of the metropolis. The paper argues that in these two novels London is a source of double marginalisation - a city unjust to the colonial subjects but unjust to women of all strata. As a theoretical background, the paper uses the concept of gendered geographies of power, which are supposed to help us reveal how different power structures affect the cityscape on both macro and micro level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes features of secular buildings, mostly houses, shops, and warehouses, standing in the City of London in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; buildings in some cases constructed after the Great Fire of September 1666, and in other cases buildings from before the fire which stood in the zone outside it until the nineteenth century. Some prevalent types of smaller house in the rebuilt city are described; and, to compare with them, some houses in the area outside the fire which are known from historic plans and antiquarian drawings. Briefly some archaeological aspects are outlined: prospects for reconstructing the interiors of houses, London's incipient involvement in slavery, and the houses of some prominent seventeenth-century citizens who financed slavery. Other matters raised are criticism of scholars who have habitually described the city after the fire as totally rebuilt in brick, which it was not; and the statement, also often made, that after the fire London became a modern city. This is questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The longstanding housing crisis in the UK, and London in particular, has been exacerbated in recent years by an increased understanding of the flammability of buildings and the arrival of what activists term 'The Cladding Scandal'. In this paper, I show how in response to the health and financial risks of The Cladding Scandal, disparate groups come together to challenge the dominant politics of expertise through the enrolment of traditionally 'expert' forms of knowledge within community groups. I analyse community building practices, especially the lines of communication, to show a means by which the social reproduction of the city is sustained, to argue that such practices constitute an important but under-recognised form of expertise. Drawing together geographies of emotion and social reproduction theory, I demonstrate the productive possibilities of thinking through the social reproduction of the city and its politics of expertise by questioning the role, types and circulation of particular emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is one of the first attempts to reconstruct the story of Afia Begum, wife --and later widow-- of Abdul Hamid (a Bangladeshi immigrant in Thatcherite London), whose entry was cleared by the British Home Office in 1982, months before her husband died tragically in a fire in East London. Upon her arrival in the United Kingdom, Afia was told that her grant to stay in the country was no longer valid owing to the death of her husband; that she was now an illegal immigrant in Britain. In the process of the reconstruction, I also revisit the untold story of the Sari Squad, a group of Asian women who fought valiantly, though peacefully, to stop Afia's deportation. Although Afia was deported on May 8, 1984, her case was heard in the European Court of Human Rights and debated in the European Parliament; in both forums, the highhandedness of the British Home Office was fiercely critiqued. By way of conclusion, I lay out a hermeneutic in which to read Afia's story, in a literary sense, offering a skeptical stance to reading it in binary terms of success-defeat/victimization-survival of a female foreigner battling a racist state. In doing so, I draw upon Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "connection between nationalism and reproductive heteronormativity", to argue that the case of Afia's deportation suggests that her nationality can only be --tragically-- established by determining the citizenship of her husband; this ends up doubly othering and transcendentalizing her nationality, reducing her to her sociobiological reproductive heteronormativity, impregnated with the cryptic trace of her husband's ghost which practically became the summum bonum of her deprived statehood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, reductions in the price of photovoltaic panels and batteries have made them profitable. However, the achievement of grid parity, i.e. whether these systems are cheaper than the national grid for residential users, is still being debated. This paper quantifies the proportion of demand that could be covered assuming that solar-battery adoption is decided based on the maximum profit, the maximum autarky with no extra cost or the maximum autarky with limited extra-cost. A simulation model is developed which performs a half-hourly analysis for one year, considering the solar radiation, the consumption pattern and characteristics of equipment. London is examined using a database gathering consumption from 5567 households. In particular, the techno-economic performance of the systems is studied according to different reward schemes (from a non-subsidized to a high compensation one). Results are discussed according to the optimisation strategy: maximising profit, for users seeking economic performance; and maximum autarky, for users willing independence from the grid. Complementarily, the correlation between characteristics of consumption profiles and autarky is analysed. Results show that installations are profitable for a reward of 0.03 £/kWh, under profit maximisation, and can attain 90% autarky. The injection reward is still essential to make batteries profitable. • Quantification of residential users for whom solar panels are economically viable. • Development of a simulation model to perform an hourly analysis of a typical year. • Examination of a public database with date from 5567 households in London. • 0.03 £/kWh reward makes facilities profitable and 90% autarky can be reached. • Injection reward for fed electricity is essential to make batteries profitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of this paper refers to both the personality and work of the Spaniards who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had to abandon their homeland fleeing from the absolutism of King Ferdinand VII (1784–1833), and the inhabitants of the Spanish colonies in the New World, the forerunners of the struggles for independence in their respective countries. Both ended up settling in London, a city that served not only as a refuge but also as a place from which to disseminate their slogans in favour of freedom. Three areas are discussed: the publications of liberal Spanish exiles in London in the early nineteenth century, the interaction between Spanish and (Latin) American exiles and the role of women in this endeavour and in the cause of liberalism in general. The London press shaped this exile journalism and the subsequent liberal journalism in Spain when the extreme censorship from which these exiled journalists had fled was finally lifted. We believe that this global approach offers an original perspective from which to highlight the role of women, with a view to filling the traditional historiographical lacuna in this regard. To this end, we have employed recent relevant literature and primary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an effort to understand Hogarth's unique position in early eighteenth century London, so as to grasp the rich complexity of his work. It begins by tracing two rival competing positions in the sociology of art, derived from Becker and Bourdieu, before taking a closer look at how Hogarth's work conjures up a new vision of the world, providing shape and meaning to the nation's changing understandings of morality, society, and the city. A fundamental transformation in the field of representation appears halfway through the eighteenth century and the interweaving of art theory, national identity, and systems of patronage are at the centre of this dynamic period. It is no accident that in Hogarth's world the main targets are those who seek to transgress their stations in life and cross class barriers. By combining two different sociological approaches to art the study builds a more nuanced picture of the artist and his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses water security and wellbeing within a public health perspective and focuses on urban areas with high population density. It analyses access to safe water and the multiple challenges to water security in two megacities: São Paulo and London, comparing differences and similarities. It illustrates how water security and health are related to Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6): universal and equitable access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene, and SDG3: healthy lives and well-being for all, focusing on the problem exacerbated by the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, during 2020. [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]

Neighbourhoods are fundamental spatial units to present social phenomena in urban studies. Many studies use administrative boundaries such as census tracts as representations of neighbourhoods, but such boundaries may poorly represent the underlying social structures and physical attributes which might help define more vernacular conceptions and dialectical evolution of these zones. In this paper, using the goal of creating a new set of 'Strategic Neighbourhoods' for Transport for London (TfL) as vehicle for analysis, we evaluate two contrasting spatially and socially focused methodologies of neighbourhood generation. In comparing the outputs of a tertiary-communities (T-Communities) method and a combined Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) cluster analysis method with an earlier iteration of Strategic Neighbourhoods defined by TfL, indices including neighbourhood size, intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC), and the number of community centres are calculated to evaluate their relative performance which demonstrate that both methods create neighbourhood boundaries that can better capture intra-group social homogeneity and are more suitable for analysis than the original SNA boundaries. These results are discussed in the context of the dialectic relationship between neighbourhood outcomes, spatial structures, and social characteristics, leading to more widely relevant conclusions that neighbourhood boundary delineation should combine spatial structure, social attributes, and experimental knowledge to effectively sub-divide urban activity. • We apply two methods to derive new neighbourhood systems of London from the spatial and social perspectives. • We find that the new spatial neighbourhood system has increased internal social homogeneity and external heterogeneity. • We find that the new social neighbourhood system is more homogenous in size and better spatially contiguous. • We discuss the dialectic relationship between space, society, and neighbourhood formation. • We prove that the social variation of the neighbourhood can be deduced through its spatial structure, and vice versa. [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]

The incremental housing development is rarely discussed in the context of the North. While perceived as a niche modality, its analysis provides a valid opportunity to question the perceptions of local housing markets as fully formal and document the spatial and morphological outcomes of more inconspicuous, long term and decentralised housing processes. This paper fills this gap by analysing obscure yet prevalent processes of backyard extensions in London, United Kingdom. The morphological analysis presented documents this phenomenon's scale and main characteristics through tracing changes in built form using remote sensing imagery between 2003 and 2021. It focuses on changes in the backyards of four residential blocks in four case study areas with varying income levels across the London metropolis. By discussing these transformations in the context of legal ambiguities, densification, and deregulation, we point to the informal/formal hybridity of the local housing market. This nascent study documents that incremental development happens at a rapid pace and scale and occurs across all income levels. In theoretical terms, the paper questions the dichotomic categorisation of informality and formality in a context of a Northern city and points out the benefits of engaging with experiences of incremental development across geographic boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted ethnic minorities in the global north, evidenced by higher rates of transmission, morbidity, and mortality relative to population sizes. Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in London had extremely high SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence rates, reflecting patterns in Israel and the US. The aim of this paper is to examine how responsibilities over health protection are conveyed, and to what extent responsibility is sought by, and shared between, state services, and 'community' stakeholders or representative groups, and families in public health emergencies. The study investigates how public health and statutory services stakeholders, Orthodox Jewish communal custodians and households sought to enact health protection in London during the first year of the pandemic (March 2020–March 2021). Twenty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted across these cohorts. Findings demonstrate that institutional relations – both their formation and at times fragmentation – were directly shaped by issues surrounding COVID-19 control measures. Exchanges around protective interventions (whether control measures, contact tracing technologies, or vaccines) reveal diverse and diverging attributions of responsibility and authority. The paper develops a framework of public health relations to understand negotiations between statutory services and minority groups over responsiveness and accountability in health protection. Disaggregating public health relations can help social scientists to critique who and what characterises institutional relationships with minority groups, and what ideas of responsibility and responsiveness are projected by differently-positioned stakeholders in health protection. • COVID-19 produced diverse responses and relations around health protection in London. •Pandemic preparedness can be enhanced by mapping possible partners in localities. •Establishing public health partnerships requires adequate resources. •Public health services cannot defer responsibility entirely to local partners. •Households are key constituents of public health relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

References 1 Howie J. Portraits from memory 17 - Sir Walter Russell brain, FRS, PRCP (later Lord Brain). Keywords: Russell brain; Neurology; London EN Russell brain Neurology London 3387 3388 2 05/23/22 20220601 NES 220601 Walter Russell Brain DM FRCP FRS (Fig. 1:STN:280:DyaL2szgtVGqsw%3D%3D. 10.1136/bmj.295.6590.108 2 Royal college of physicians archives: Walter Russell Brain (1895-1966), 1st Baron Brain of Eynsham: personal and professional papers 1907-1966 MSS, pp 3133-3296 3 Pickering GW. [Extracted from the article]

Employing an institutionalist approach to governance, and engaging with recent scholarship on organisational resilience and scalar politics, this paper focuses upon institutional reactions to terrorism in London between 1990 and 2020 and explores the mechanisms through which responses to disruption occurred. Empirically, this applied paper tracks specific emergency processes, governance assemblages and policy mechanisms that have been enacted in London in response to terrorism. More specifically, it tracks changes in the institutional dynamics involved in the reorganisation of traditional governance apparatus, the mobilisation of adaptive capacity, and the generation of multi-stakeholder visions for futureproofing against terrorist attack. Such institutional changes are explored through three vignettes of responses to terrorist incidents: against financial targets in the 1990s; in relation the risk of attack after 9/11 and in preparation for securing the 2012 Olympics; and in response to recent attacks against crowded places since 2012. This paper illuminates how institutional responses to terrorism have evolved from a focus upon small specialist networks that dealt just with terrorism, to much larger multi-institutional, multi-scalar and multihazard responses to, and preparations for, complex emergencies that cut across numerous administrative jurisdictions. The paper concludes by posing wider questions about optimal institutional form(s) required for responding to future shocks. • London's institutional responses to terrorism are analysed over a 30-year period. • London's preparedness for acts of terrorism is still a work in progress. • Through strategic policies London has increasingly institutionalised resilience across municipal authorities and emergency stakeholders. • London is increasingly active in promoting learning and knowledge exchange for global counter-terrorism. • Through partnership approaches to governance, cities can become more resilient to terrorism and others disruptive shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Interfaces between railway-based infrastructure need to be comprehended. • Railway asset management requires multi-disciplinary evidence-based data. • Multi-disciplinary data gathering assists effective asset management. • The AIR processes provide standardised approaches to data collection and sharing. • The AIR processes contribute to Building Information Modelling processes. As urban environments densify and cities across the world employ urban underground metros for the effective rapid movement of millions of people a day, there is an essential need to ensure the safe continued presence and operation of those metros. To achieve this, the authors argue there is a need for a more detailed qualitative analysis of how urban underground metro infrastructure and its environment interface. Failure to do so could potentially lead to the development of inaccurate asset management data. This would subsequently lead to the implementation of flawed Building Information Modelling processes for 2, 3, and 4D modelling and mapping, of existing and proposed infrastructure. Following a review of existing asset management approaches which confirms the need for qualitative approaches to the analyses of the interfaces, this paper presents findings from a detailed case study, in the Bayswater area of the City of Westminster in West London, UK. The processes employed for the detailed case study form part of proposed (ultimately) standardised approaches to the gathering, analysis, and sharing, of multi-disciplinary evidence-based data, developed by the authors. Such data is essential to enable effective asset and urban management processes, now and for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of 'crisis' plays an important role in academic and policy imaginations (Heslop and Ormerod, 2020), particularly since the global financial crisis. Across major western cities, at the same time as policy-makers have had to respond to ' the (economic) crisis', many have also experienced intense 'housing crises' and the acute divergence of average incomes and house prices. In response, cities such as London have become central sites in debates around housing acquisition by the ultra-wealthy, land value extraction and growing levels of unaffordability. However, much critical geography research on housing crises is state-centred or focused on civil society impacts, with relatively little reflection on the real estate sector and the work that crisis does as a narrative in shaping institutionalised and actor-centred practices. In this paper, we draw on in-depth research with developers, investors, and advisors in London to argue that crisis-driven policy responses have created political risk which is differentially experienced by actors across the sector, with large housebuilders and advisors benefitting whilst smaller niche developers move out. Moreover, we show how consultants, investors and developers have used the crisis situation to create new geographies, products and investor types in the housing market. These, in turn, require regulatory support and demonstrate the inherently political nature of crisis narratives' use. We use the London case to broaden understandings of the impact that conceptualisations of 'crisis' have on urban and regional planning practices, and how these influence and shape processes of contemporary urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]