Author: Louise

Cities Group Book Launch

Panelists
Rob Imrie (KCL)

Loretta Lees (KCL)

Mike Raco (KCL)

Book launch for Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

The Right to the City: A Radical Agenda for the Global South?

Speaker

Sue Parnell (Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town)

Discussant(s)
Julio Davila (Bartlett, Development Planning Unit, UCL)

Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930

Speaker
Richard Dennis (Geography, UCL)

Discussant(s)
Jenny Robinson (Geography, The Open University)

In Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930, historical geographer Dr Richard Dennis (UCL Geography) explores what made cities “modern” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Drawing his evidence principally from London, New York and Toronto – London often studied as much as an imperial as a modern city, New York a more obviously modern city in this period, and Toronto a comparative baby in population terms but striving for metropolitan status and intriguingly positioned politically and imaginatively “between” Britain and America – Dr Dennis focuses on the relationship between, on the one hand, processes of modernisation in government, technology and economy, but especially innovations in the built environment and changes in the spatial structure of cities and, on the other, modernity as a social and cultural experience.

The first half of the book discusses new ways of seeing cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, looking at cities in contemporary political and religious discourse, at the growth of social survey and city mapping, and at the representation of cities in art and literature. Later chapters look at changes to and on city streets, at new forms of residential environment – middle-class and working-class suburbs, apartments and tenements in North American cities, flats and model dwellings in London – and at new kinds of retail and business spaces.

One of Dr Dennis’s aims is to build bridges and make connections between humanities and social science ways of looking at cities, and between culture and economy – the book begins by discussing some real bridges – Brooklyn Bridge, Tower Bridge and the lesser known Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto – and ends by analysing new networks of connection in intra-urban communications and infrastructure, including sewers in London and the elevated railway in New York. 

Integral to the book are illustrations reproducing contemporary postcards and advertisements, highlighting the tension between modernity, tradition and the picturesque, or aligning a modern environment with style and cosmopolitanism, a variety of specialised maps, from the “glove map” intended for ladies visiting the Great Exhibition, to fire insurance maps which cartographically embody the connections between modernity and risk, and an 1880s sewer map which plotted the time taken for sewage to flow across London.

Dr Dennis also discusses and reproduces numerous works of art and draws on his extensive research into the representation of urban space in literature. 

Newly drawn maps and plans, prepared by Miles Irving and Cath D’Alton (UCL Geography Drawing Office), chart the distribution and spread of offices and department stores, the impact of Tower Bridge and Victoria Street on their environs, and the functioning of space within new apartment buildings.

The book closes with a brief discussion of Harmsworth’s Magazine’s 1902 article, ‘If London Were Like New York’, speculating on the effects of an American invasion. There are elevated trains on Tower Bridge, Holborn-Oxford Street has become Broadway, and Mansion House is Tammany Hall.’Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930′ is published by Cambridge University Press in hardback and paperback.

To find out more click here

Illegal Geographies of the City: Everyday places of water and sanitation in a New Delhi squatter settlement

Speaker

Ayona Datta (Sociology / Cities Programme, LSE)

Discussant(s)

Abdou Maliq Simone (Sociology, Goldsmiths)

Place attachment and mobile place making: Cases from Santiago de Chile and Mexico City

Speaker
Paola Jiron and Iliana Ortega (LSE)

In light of the current globalisation process, some believe that spaces lose their distinctiveness and become subdued and unified, making place lose its significance and its characteristics are emptied and abstracted; others insist that place persists as a constituent element of social life and historical change (Gieryn 2000; Cresswell 2001; Sheller and Urry 2006). According to Savage et al (2005), place-making is still relevant today, however, the process of place making in contemporary cities is complex. Massey has argued that if social organisation of space is changing and disrupting the existing ideas about place, then the concept of place should be rethought altogether (Massey 1994; Massey 1995) and move towards understanding it as the location of particular sets of intersecting social relations and intersecting activity spaces (Massey 1995) in time. This presentation attempts to move further in this re-conceptualisation.

First, Paola Jiron will introduce the idea of mobile place making within the practices of urban daily mobility by using ethnographic work in Santiago de Chile. It explains how those spaces encountered in mobility like buses, metros or cars become mobile places; and those spaces people signify while moving about, along or through like street markets or a mall become transient places. Both types of places involve the appropriation of space for reflection, contemplation, socialisation, friendship, intimacy, independence, distraction or evasion or recreation, but only momentarily, making them events of places.

Secondly, grounded on ethnographic research in the consolidated periphery of Mexico City, Iliana Ortega-Alcazar will examine an example of contemporary place-making in relation to a fixed place. She will show how, in the context of popular urbanisation, attachment to place does not result from long term family association with place nor from choosing a place for aesthetic/ moral reasons as the existing literature suggests. Instead, place attachment results from the production of place as a symbolic resource and from people’s active and productive engagement with space.

Comparative migrations

Speaker
Tim Bunnell (National University of Singapore)

Giulia Sinatti (Goldsmiths)

Discussant(s)
Jennifer Robinson, UCL

Chair
Hyun Bang Shin, LSE

Post-maritime transnationalization: Malay seafarers in Liverpool

Home is where the heart abides: Migration, return and housing investment in Dakar, Senegal

The London Debate

Speakers
Loretta Lees (King’s College)

Peter Hall (UCL Bartlett)

Ian Gordon (LSE)

Michael Keith (Goldsmiths)

Some of the issues addressed in this debate will be:

What kinds of issues will face the new mayor?

What does the ‘future’ of London look like?

Which social/political/spatial trends will be of relevance for the new mayor?

How is the London political system functioning and how is it likely to be influencing processes on the ground into the next political term?

Migration and the ‘Post-Cosmopolitan’ City: The emergence of ‘tolerance’ in Bukhara and Odessa

Speakers
Vera Skvirskaja (Cambridge Anthropology)

Caroline Humphrey (Cambridge Anthropology)

Discussant(s)
Ger Duijzings (SSEES, UCL)

Liquid City

Speaker
Matthew Gandy (UCL Urban Laboratory)

Liquid city (30 minutes; English, Hindi and Marathi with English subtitles)

The tortuous flow of water through Mumbai presents one of the most striking indicators of persistent social inequalities within the globalizing metropolis.  The documentary film Liquid City explores the complexity of water politics in Mumbai ranging from the engineering challenge of transferring nearly 3,000 million litres of water a day to the city from the jungles, lakes and mountains of the state of Maharashtra to debates over flooding, privatization and social conflict.  The film is based on a unique collaboration between academics and film makers based in London and Mumbai and combines in-depth interviews with activists, engineers, local residents and other voices to paint a unique picture of this vibrant and fast changing city.


       Director/Producer       Matthew Gandy
       Assistant director        Savitri Medhatul
       Camera                     Krystallia Kamvasinou
       Editors                       Savitri Medhatul
                                        Krystallia Kamvasinou

       Production coordinator Andrew Harris
       Sound designer          Amala Popuri
       Research                   Andrew Harris

The film was developed in collaboration with PUKAR and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Global Barcelona: Cultural territories and the limits of consumption

Speaker
Mari Paz Balibrea (Birbeck College, London)

Discussant(s)
Patria Roman-Velazquez, City University

This paper will attempt to recontextualize dominant images of the city of Barcelona by discussing the terms in which this is a global city, but based on Kees Christiaanse’s reflections on the closed city rather than on Saskia Sassen’s well known definition. I will explore the concept of cultural territory (Fessler and Berenstein) as a demarcated space in the city defined by the presence of what is understood as a cultural manifestation, in order to make sense of the conditions of visibility in the city of Barcelona. The final section of the paper will be devoted to the analysis of the documentary film by José Luis Guerín, En construcción [Under construction] (2002), by focusing on its politics of space and reappropriation of the notion of cultural territory.