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This paper explores the politics of diversity planning in one of Europe’s most socially and economically divided and globally oriented cities: London. The analysis draws on Latour’s writings on modes of politicisation to examine the processes and practices that shape contemporary urban governance. It uses the example of diversity planning to examine the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of urban politics. It shows that on the one hand diversity is represented in pragmatic, consensual and celebratory terms. Under prevailing conditions of contemporary global capitalism, the ‘what’ of diversity has been politicised into an agenda for labour market-building and the attraction of ‘talented’ individuals and foreign investment. However, at the same time this celebratory rhetoric represents part of a wider effort to deflect political attention away from the socially and economically divisive impacts of global models of economic growth and physical development. There is little discussion of the ways in which planning frameworks, the ‘how’ of diversity policy, are helping to generate new separations in and beyond the city. Moreover, despite claiming that policy is pragmatic and non-ideological, the paper shows how diversity narratives have become an integral part of broader political projects to orientate the city’s economy towards the needs of a relatively small cluster of powerful economic sectors. The paper concludes with reflections on the recent impacts of the vote for Brexit and the election of an openly Muslim London Mayor. It also assesses the broader relevance of a Latourian framework for the analysis of contemporary urban politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a project exploring the friendships of children and adults in ‘super-diverse’ (Vertovec, 2007) localities in London, England, examining whether and how friendships are made and maintained across ethnic and social class differences. The aim is to identify what friendships reveal about the nature and extent of ethnic and social divisions in contemporary multicultural society. Drawing on interviews with children and their parents, this paper analyses affective parental responses to their children’s friendships, identifying instances where parents seek to manage these friendships. We identify the importance of the ‘ease of similarity’ for many parents concerning their children’s friendships, and the relative lack of concrete practices amongst parents to support their children’s friendships across difference. However, we also note parental support for living in super-diverse localities and children attending schools therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the lead-up to the peak of the financial bubble (and before the onset of the global financial crisis), property was regularly promoted as a ready-made alternative to private pensions. This paper explores the importance of owner-occupied housing for the retirement savings strategies of defined contribution (DC) pension plan members. Based upon a unique survey of over 2300 participants in the DC pension scheme of a London-based international bank, an assessment is made of the statistical significance of respondents’ socioeconomic status and risk preference in predicting the significance or otherwise of their home for retirement saving. Relatively few respondents indicated that they were likely to rely on their home. Those that indicated reliance were relatively older, higher-paid and married employees. The paper concludes with implications for understanding the connection between savings behaviour and housing before and after the global financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the processes by which middle-class belonging is generated, through the exploration of social and spatial trajectories in narratives of residential choice and mobility. It is based on an understanding of residential choice as indicative and constitutive of social mobilities. In particular the paper builds on the discussion of the match between habitus and field that lies at the root of the notions of middle-class belonging and place attachments to draw attention not only to the conditions under which ‘fit’ is possible, but also acknowledge that belonging is a dynamic process, generated and maintained through residence that feeds back into understandings of classed identities. This paper argues that residential space is not just appropriated to reflect pre-existing tastes and lifestyles, but may also contribute in the transformation of habitus to fit to particular neighbourhoods and ways of living. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past decade, a growing body of research has examined the role of cities in addressing climate change and the institutional and political challenges which they encounter. For the most part, in these accounts, the infrastructure networks, their material fabric, everyday practices and political economies, have remained unexamined. In this paper, it is argued that this is a critical omission and an approach is developed for understanding how urban responses to climate change both configure and are configured by infrastructure networks. Central to any such analysis is the conception of how and why (urban) infrastructure networks undergo change. Focusing on urban energy networks and on the case of London, the paper argues for an analysis of the ‘urban infrastructure regimes’ and ‘experiments’ through which climate change is governed. It is found that climate change experiments serve as a means through which dominant actors articulate and test new ‘low-carbon’ logics for urban infrastructure development. It is argued that experiments work by establishing new circuits, configuring actors in new sets of relations and through these means realising the potential for addressing climate change in the city. At the same time, experiments become sites of conflict, a means through which new forms of urban circulation can be confined and marginalised, leaving dominant energy regimes (relatively) intact. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues for an increased emphasis on the institutions of risk governance and management in understanding urban resilience. This moves analysis of vulnerability away from a focus on individuals to also consider risk management regimes as co-productive of vulnerability and resilience in the City. This is illustrated through the application of an Adaptive Capacity Index to unpack the role played by formal governance institutions in mediating resilience to extreme heat events in the empirical case of London. Analysis shows that the configuration of risk at the institutional level directs heat wave risk management through the health services, and operationalises it during the emergency phase of hazard onset. This misses an important opportunity for integrating individual and regime level risk management initiatives, which we proposed can be worked out through greater collaboration with social services and interaction with those caring for the vulnerable, has yet to be fully integrated into planning and practice in London and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will examine the views and experiences of Black youths living in socially deprived areas of London in order to examine the way in which they recognise the term ‘Black neighbourhood’ as a resource for ethnic identity formation and collective mobilisation. Despite the apparent problems that are typically associated with ‘Black neighbourhoods’ for many Black youths, these neighbourhoods also represent urban spaces through which a range of bonding social capital resources are generated including ties of reciprocal trust, solidarity and civic participation. These spaces hold intrinsic value for these young people providing them with a sense of wellbeing and belonging. However, the analysis will also show that the young people’s experiences of the neighbourhood are not always positive ones, and such spaces create negative outcomes for Black youths residing there. In particular, the data will highlight the restrictive capacity of ‘Black neighbourhoods’ and the various ways in which they limit Black youths’ opportunities to ‘get on’ in terms of social mobility and their ability to move beyond neighbourhood boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Britain has seen a significant increase in the size of its ethnic minority population over the past 20 years. Because of the relatively youthful age structure of the ethnic minority population, the percentage of ethnic minorities in the school age-groups is much higher than its share of the overall population. Given the very uneven geographical distribution of ethnic minorities, this has raised concerns over the extent of school ethnic segregation. This paper examines the changing distribution of ethnic minority secondary school pupils in England over the period 1999–2009. It shows that, while there have been big increases in the percentage of ethnic minorities in those local authorities with existing concentrations, with ethnic minorities comprising over 50 per cent of pupils in 24 urban authorities in 2009, the dominant trend has been one of an increase in the percentage of ethnic minority pupils across the board combined with the increasing diffusion of ethnic minorities across all local authorities, rather than increasing concentration in a small number of authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the long-run convergence of district-level house prices in Greater London using the recently developed pairwise approach. This methodology allows for unit root tests to be conducted on all N(N-1)/2 possible pairs of house price differentials across the N boroughs of London, thus avoiding the need to choose a base borough of reference or the regional average as the benchmark. It also permits the estimation, consistently, of the proportion of the pairs that are stationary and convergent. Using HM Land Registry house price data for 33 Inner and Outer London boroughs over the period 1996q1–2009q2, no overall multidistrict long-run convergence is found. Some evidence of district-level segmentation of house prices in Greater London is found, with the sub-group of the boroughs contiguous to the ‘City of London’ district and the wider ‘central’ sub-market emerging as the clubs with the highest rate of convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The English government’s 10-year flagship Decent Homes programme ended in 2010. The purpose of this article is to examine the asset management strategies that a sample of London housing associations took to meet the Decent Homes Standard. Drawing on the concept of institutional logics, the article outlines the social housing sector’s conflicting regulatory context, whereby organisations were statutorily obliged to improve housing standards, without being able to raise rents as a way to fund improvements. Depending on whether the housing association adopts a market-orientated or traditional, task-orientated approach to asset management, the associations sampled have either disposed of non-decent stock to generate cash flows or else retained the stock, undertaking minimal repairs to meet the government’s target deadline. The article concludes that not only has this national performance target triggered different organisational responses, it has also led to longer-term unintended consequences for existing and future tenants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on research conducted with men arriving from eastern Europe in London after the expansion of the EU in 2004, this article examines how migrants’ narratives of the city construct a counter-discourse to a ‘global’ London. It is argued that the use of ‘visual narratives’– a combination of participant-directed photography and semi-structured interviews as a methodology—allows for the exploration of embodied and material aspects of everyday lives in the city, which destabilise traditional urban pictorial approaches to the city. Such narratives of participants’ embodied movements through London relocate the observer as the everyday mobile-subject; they highlight the connections between urban and transnational mobilities; and they present participants’ constructions of different kinds of affective spaces in the city where they begin to negotiate home, belonging and return. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social mix and social mixing are topics of increasing significance to both the policy and academic communities in the UK, and have particular salience in urban multi-ethnic and socially diverse contexts. Enshrined in the comprehensive school ideal, and implicated in the now legal duty to promote 'community cohesion,' (urban) schools play a pivotal role in agendas for social mixing but little is empirically known about how this is lived and experienced by the young people in those schools. This paper begins to develop a theoretical understanding of social mixing drawing on qualitative data on the patterns, discourses, and experiences of associations and friendships collected in a London comprehensive school. We find that while the social mix of the school is celebrated, in official discourse as congenial and 'convivial', by staff and students alike, the extent of actual mixing - of associations and friendships forming between those of different social and ethnic backgrounds - is both constrained and complex. We point to the social and cultural factors which produce this sense of conviviality, and the opportunities for cultural learning it supports. At the same time, we argue that there are limitations. Schools are sites of differentiation, and friendships as exemplars of social mixing, both (re)produce and are (re)produced by existing social hierarchies and inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We build on both our theoretical and empirical work on modelling the demand for paid sex (Della Giusta et al., 2009a, 2009b) and examine the demand for paid sex, considering the effects of risky behaviours and attitudes to relationships and to women on demand. We find that those who declare to have purchased sex have both different socio-demographics (older, with fewer children, more educated but with lower professional status), and different sexual and risky behaviours as well as attitudes to relationships. As expected in the light of findings in the literature (well summarised in a 2004 Urban Studies special issue and in more recent literature) a clear city effect in the sample, mostly driven by London, which goes beyond the attitudes captured in the survey and thus combines a mixture of factors related to the supply of paid sex and unobserved characteristics of city-dwelling respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a joint effort by the union Unite and the community organisation London Citizens to unionise two migrant-rich hotels in London. The author explores the effectiveness of union and community strategies in the field of migrant organising drawing from the literature on union strategy and workers’ activism and focusing on workers’ own experiences of mobilisation. Gender, contractual and migration-related barriers to workers’ engagement in the campaign appeared determinant of the failure of the unionisation effort while the leaders eventually favoured a politics of incentive towards employers, ‘contracting out’ the protest to institutional actors in the community. The central argument is that neither workplace-based nor community unionism alone appears effective in terms of sustaining union activism among highly fragmented, migrant and precarious workforces. The renewal of industrial unionism in the UK rather requires unions to tackle the intersecting discriminations experienced by migrants across their communities and workplaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011, Hounslow public health opened a dialogue with probation, asking what the obstacles were, in terms of access to healthcare. The first issue raised was a difficulty in clients registering with a GP practice. This formed the start of a robust partnership between probation, public health, the forensic mental health practitioner, GPs and community health services. The health and well-being initiatives have included GP registration, with 10 dedicated practices for probation and Drug Intervention Programme clients, in-house stop smoking support, and the start of a health trainer scheme. This work will help to reduce health inequalities in a marginalized and underserved group and also meet the goals for both public health and criminal justice agencies [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article documents the significant successes and major setbacks of a campaign led by Latin American cleaners for union recognition and better pay and conditions at the University of London. It shows how they overcame fear, resignation, intimidation, racism, poverty and cultural and linguistic alienation to find their political agency. However, their collective empowerment was met by dismissals and deportations. The article argues that there are a number of important lessons for the trade union movement to learn; namely, the need to have specific legal and campaigning strategies in place to defend its migrant activists as well as calling for the regularisation of ‘irregular’ workers. In sum, the struggle for immigrant rights is at the cutting edge of the global working-class fightback.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The context of support for a range of minor parties in the United Kingdom is identified using ward-level aggregate data from the 2004 European elections in London. Four parties in particular, namely Respect, Green, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the British National Party (BNP), which collectively obtained 3 in 10 of all European votes cast in London and performed well at the subsequent general election in 2005, are considered. Bivariate and multivariate analyses, employing socio-economic and political variables, show that for each of the four parties there is an identifiable and reasonably well-defined ward-level context of support. Regression models help to explain around three-quarters of variance in vote support. Strong similarities are found in the context of support for the anti-European Union UKIP and the far-right, anti-immigrant BNP. Close study of the geography of support shows that while the spread of votes for minor parties is fairly homogeneous across some boroughs, in others there is a fair degree of heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the changes and sequence of events in the British newspaper industry. It mentions that the escape from Fleet Street in London, England changes the newspaper industry in Great Britain, wherein its major impact lies on the labor-management and economic relationships. It discusses the change of technology on the newspaper industry from 1988, which changes the national newspaper's new judgments and newsrooms. Furthermore, it says that from the opinion of the reporters and editors, the changes in the press are due to the impact of management class versus working class.