Visualising London's Suburbs

2 - 4 April 200

Do the suburbs exist? Discovering complexity and specificity in suburban built form

In human geography cities are routinely acknowledged as complex and dynamic built environments. This description is rarely extended to the suburbs, which are generally regarded as epiphenomena of the urbs and therefore of little intrinsic theoretical interest in themselves. This article presents a detailed critique of this widely held assumption by showing how the idea of 'the suburban' as an essentially non-problematic domain has been perpetuated from a range of contrasting disciplinary perspectives, including those that directly address suburban subject matter. The result has been that attempts to articulate the complex social possibilities of suburban space are easily caught between theories of urbanisation that are insensitive to suburban specificity and competing representations of the suburb that rarely move beyond the culturally specific to consider their generic significance. This article proposes that the development of a distinctively suburban theory would help to undermine one-dimensional approaches to the built environment by focusing on the relationship between social organisation and the dynamics of emergent built form

A multi-disciplinary perspective on the built environment: Space Syntax and cartography – the communication challenge

8-11 June 2009

Phase Structure of 2-Flavor Quark Matter: Heterogeneous Superconductors

We analyze the free energy of charge and color neutral 2-flavor quark matter within the BCS approximation. We consider both the homogeneous gapless superconducting phase and the heterogeneous mixed phase where normal and BCS superconducting phases coexist. We calculate the surface tension between normal and superconducting phases and use it to compare the free energies of the gapless and mixed phases. Our calculation, which retains only the leading order gradient contribution to the free energy, indicates that the mixed phase is energetically favored over an interesting range of densities of relevance to 2 flavor quark matter in neutron stars.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. Major Revisions. Includes a detailed discussion of the kinetic terms of the effective theory, instabilities of the gapless phase and the charge neutral phase diagra

Surface spin-flop phases and bulk discommensurations in antiferromagnets

Phase diagrams as a function of anisotropy D and magnetic field H are obtained for discommensurations and surface states for a model antiferromagnet in which $H$ is parallel to the easy axis. The surface spin-flop phase exists for all $D$. We show that there is a region where the penetration length of the surface spin-flop phase diverges. Introducing a discommensuration of even length then becomes preferable to reconstructing the surface. The results are used to clarify and correct previous studies in which discommensurations have been confused with genuine surface spin-flop states.Comment: 4 pages, RevTeX, 2 Postscript figure

Living graphs as a methodological tool: representing landmarks in the professional development of teacher educators

This article relates to the use of an innovative visual research method, living graphs, to capture and represent the life experiences of teacher educators in two universities in the UK. Six mid-career teacher educators from each university were asked to map their personal biographies, career landmarks, academic and research highs and lows, using a graphic format. This was then used as a basis for discussion and exploration in the interviews. Narrative analysis was used to examine the teacher educators’ accounts and themes were identified which related to professional and academic development. Living graphs were found to be a rich data source to identify and explore career landmarks: enhanced verbal input resulted from using graphics to represent highs and lows of experience, including the visual representation of emotion. This is a useful research tool but needs further clarification and guidelines for use

The Spatial Morphology of Community in Chipping Barnet c.1800–2015: An Historical Dialogue of Tangible and Intangible Heritages

This article presents a case study of the London suburb of Chipping Barnet to show how a spatial-morphological approach to tangible heritage challenges its archetypal image as an affluent commuter suburb by highlighting its resilience as a generative patterning of social space that has weathered successive phases of social change. We argue that the enduring spatial-morphological definition of Barnet as a local centre explains how it has been possible to preserve something less tangible—namely its identity as a suburban community. We show how Barnet’s street network constitutes community heritage through a combination of local- and wider-scale affiliations that have sustained diverse localised socio-economic activity over an extended period of time. Noting how local histories often go further than sociological studies in emphasising the importance of the built environment for indexing the effects of social change on everyday life, we draw on a range of archive sources including the analysis of historical maps using space syntax techniques, to reveal Barnet’s street network as a dialogue of both tangible and intangible heritages that are formative of a suburban community