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In this article, the authors contend that contemporary urban streets are over-regulated, preoccupied with surveillance, commercial requirements and rapid transit, aesthetically homogeneous and sensually sterile. As an exemplary site of contrast, the article focuses on the recently redesigned Blackpool Promenade. First, it argues that this redesign honours the resort’s popular traditions, its potent heritage and the importance of innovation. Second, it explores how the promenade fosters playful interactions, conviviality and lingering. Third, the article focuses on sensory attributes that enhance the experience of promenaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the street art tours industry in London, and its function in constructing the geographic, economic and symbolic value of street art. The street art world of the capital has reached a substantial level of institutional endorsement as a proper urban creative practice, through backing such as by local councils and private developers, art galleries and book publishers. This article examines the role of walking tours in holding up street art as a cultural product of the creative city. It argues that London’s street art scene is constructed and legitimated by these tours through the strategic deployment of an authoritative discourse. Street art tours’ routes and locations are then integrated into a longer lineage of endorsements for the cultural field of street art, and interpreted as branding strategies for the creative city. In the conclusion, the role of walking tours in gentrification and urban change is discussed, with a focus on how street art works and murals contribute to performing Shoreditch as a hub of vibrancy and urban creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weaving together observations and insights from ethnographic research gathered over two years, this article considers how design and everyday life intertwine to create convivial places, but also pauses to take in the moments when tensions rise and conviviality fails. To illustrate, the article takes as an example the redevelopment of a small urban square in London, designed by landscape architects Gustafson Porter and completed in 2011. Gustafson Porter’s practice is deeply informed by inclusive design, and they strive to design barrier-free environments that ‘promote choice, flexibility of use and enable everyone to participate equally’. Taking in both the material design of the square and the social encounters that happen there, the article considers how inclusion and exclusion operate in a public space like General Gordon Square, and reflects on the challenges of making and maintaining conviviality. It suggests that inclusive design might be imagined as a vision of convivial culture in which we live together with difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban regeneration strategies since the 1980s have been framed around a recovery and extension of the urban realm by focusing on the redevelopment of streets as loci for public life and social interaction. Research has tended to analyse these changes through an exclusive focus on the effect spatial transformations have in reshaping social life. This article seeks to extend engagement with the concept of the regenerated street by examining its temporal dimensions. Bringing together Lefebvre’s trialectic of the conceived, the perceived and the lived with Adam’s notion of timescapes, the article argues that we need to attend more closely to the multiple temporalities that underpin interventions of urban change. In particular, this article explores how temporalities of planning, the environment and everyday life interact to create unique timescapes of urban change. By drawing on a longitudinal study of the regeneration of the Rambla del Raval in Barcelona, the article explores the multiple, at times interdependent, at times divergent temporalities that are tangled up in the making and experiencing of this street. The article suggests to approach urban regeneration as a long-term process and place making as a temporal practice where a diversity of temporal modalities interact to produce a diverse and dynamic sense of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes to task a common assumption within Anglophone scholarship that conceives the street as a preeminent site of urban life, arguing that this sociological truism has worked to obscure the role of other spaces, terms and experiences across different historical, geographical and linguistic contexts. In response, and building on recent reappraisals in sociology of the work of Raymond Williams, the aim of this article is to analyse the street as a particular keyword and reflect on how a cultural materialist approach to lexical change can be incorporated into the practices of urban ethnography and translation. To develop its methodological argument, the article draws on the author’s research on Italian cities, where rather than the strada (street), the piazza and the vicolo (alleyway) have typically commanded a more prominent place in ideas about the public realm. At the same time, the disparate meanings of these two spatial forms attest to the uneven and disputed positions of different Italian cities within national urban culture. In conclusion, the article argues for greater attention to be paid to variations in language use vis-a-vis urban spatial forms as the prerequisite for a more incisive sociology of the street. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The street has long been a key laboratory for studies of social life, from the roots of urban sociology in the ethnographies of the Chicago School to the diverse range of contemporary studies which consider the performative, affective and non-representational nature of street etiquette and encounter. For all this, the street remains only loosely defined in many studies, and sometimes disappears from view entirely, with social action often privileged over material and environmental context. This Special Issue is intended as a spur to take the street more seriously in contemporary sociology, and explores the importance of the street as a site, scale and field for sociological research. Recognising that the street is both contradictory and complex, the Introduction to this Issue draws out emerging themes in the shifting sociologies of the street by highlighting the specific contribution interdisciplinary work can make to our understanding of streets as distinctive but contested social spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The streetlife of discrimination emerges in the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation. Focusing on livelihoods forged by migrants on four peripheral streets in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester and Manchester, this article draws on face-to-face surveys with over 350 self-employed proprietors. Despite significant variables amongst proprietors, these individuals had all become traders on streets in marginalised parts of UK cities, and the article addresses whether ‘race’ matters more than class for how certain groups become emplaced in the city. Narratives of inequality and racism feature prominently in the proprietors’ accounts of where they settled in the city and what limited forms of work are available in the urban margins. Yet as significant to proprietors’ experiences of trade are repertoires of entrepreneurial agility and cross-cultural exchange. Through the concept of the ‘migrant margins’ the article explores the overlap of human capacities and structural discrimination that spans global and urban space. It combines urban sociological understandings of ‘race’ and inequality with fluid understandings of makeshift city-making that have emerged in post-colonial urban studies. Such combinations encourage connections between the histories and geographies of how people and places become bordered, together with city-making practices that are both marginal and transgressive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 20 years we have witnessed an increasing prevalence of ethnographic studies concerned explicitly with the social and cultural life, and production, of space and specifically of the urban public realm. In line with a wider trend, many of these studies seek to analyse urban public life through the prism of the ‘everyday’, using accounts of the ordinary to explore the ways that city streets are used and experienced. In this article the author seeks to interrogate this multifarious deployment of ‘everydayness’ in ethnographic work on urban ‘streetlife.’ This interrogation is both theoretical, exploring how the everyday became the privileged approach for studies of the street, and methodological, asking what is it about our methodological choices that lends itself to conceptualising public life as everyday, and what might we do differently? At the same time, the article draws on ethnographic work on London’s South Bank to open up a space to consider the exceptional in sociological studies of streetlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes the case that street life is characterized by its flow online and offline. Such change requires a new way of doing street ethnography that holds great promise for urban and digital scholars alike. I walk through a set of empirical cases drawn from years of participant observation on the ground and in the network with the same set of teenagers in Harlem. The fieldwork modeled also shifts concepts of public space, reworking Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street through digital study and grounding the concept of networked publics in urban ethnography. This article bridges urban and digital approaches to ethnography to keep pace with the social life of the street. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his ceaseless subdivisions and detours, Henry Mayhew invites a reading of London Labour and the London Poor that argues against its own purported taxonomical endeavor. Supposing a non-taxonomical Mayhew, then, this essay argues that the generic categories that most accurately record the collaborative effort of Mayhew and his subjects are portraiture and the performances of the depicted figures. I delineate the principles of what I call Victorian visual ethics to ask questions about the relationship between perception and judgment when confronting physically aberrant subjects. Looking at one exemplary figure in Mayhew, "The Street-Seller of Nutmeggraters," I demonstrate how such subjects--utilizing the conventions of performance and portraiture--engage in acts of strategic self-fashioning in order to shape the terms of the visual encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]