‘Tales from other people’s houses’: home and dis/connection in an East London neighbourhood

This paper explores what it means to live together in the city through a focus on home and urban public space in East London. It develops a conceptual framework for understanding home as a site of dis/connection – both connected to and disconnected from – the wider estate, street, neighbourhood and city. Drawing on a series of home-city biographies with residents living on different housing estates, we explore what makes a city ‘liveable’ for its diverse residents within and across domestic and public spaces; how home-city dis/connections shape ideas and experiences of living together; and the importance of sensory, material and social contexts of home in shaping residents’ dis/connections with neighbours and the wider neighbourhood. By taking seriously the practices, experiences and imaginings of home as a site of urban dis/connection, we argue that urban scholars can gain a fuller picture of what it means to live together in the city, and understand and challenge inequalities, exclusions and prejudices that shape urban lives

Walking with light and the discontinuous experience of urban change

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2020 The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers). This paper is concerned with the affective power of light, darkness, and illumination and their role in exposing and obscuring processes of rapid urban change. Little academic attention has focused on how lighting informs multiple, overlapping, and intersecting urban temporalities and mediates our experience of an ever-changing city. This paper foregrounds a walk through the illuminated city at night as an epistemic opportunity to develop an embodied account of material and temporal change in ways that disrupt the aesthetic organisation of the sensible world at night. By detailing the discontinuous experience of walking through differently lit spaces, the paper develops novel ways of conceptualising the experience of urban change that unsettle common understandings of subjectivity, temporality, and the city. The paper draws on a single night's walk from Canning Town to Canary Wharf in east London – an area that has recently undergone rapid change, including the erection of enclaves of high-rise development. By accentuating the shared experiences of walking with light, we reveal the affective capacities of light and dark to conceal and expose wider material, embodied, and temporal urban changes but also how we might challenge the organisation of the nocturnal field of the sensible