Density and the compact city

The ‘compact city’ agenda has become commonplace and is often presented as an urban ‘good’ in mainstream urban research, policy, and practice. Haarstad et al.'s intervention aims to bring critical geographical research to this debate, and is a very welcome one. In this response, I reflect on the debates on the compact city, consider its links to research on high density urbanisms, and present some questions for taking this critical urban debate forward

Repopulating density: Covid-19 and the politics of urban value

How might concepts of ‘value’ and ‘population’ illuminate the present and future of urban density? The Covid-19 pandemic prompted a public debate on density in the city. While some initially blamed density for the spread of the virus, others rightly cautioned against those claims. As the pandemic progressed, an imaginary of density-as-pathology gave way to a more nuanced geographical understanding of the urban dimensions of the crisis, focussed on connections, spatial conditions, domestic ‘overcrowding,’ and poverty. Throughout, an interrogation and reflection on urban density and its future unfolded, throwing into question the historical relationship between ‘value’ and ‘population’ in understandings of density. I argue for a new politics of value based on shifts in three inter-connected domains - governance, form, and knowledge - and identify implications for research on density in urban studies

Travelling knowledges: urban poverty and slum/shack dwellers international

The relationship between knowledge and development is of growing importance in development theory and practice. Despite the growth in interest, there are significant issues that have not been explored in detail. I will focus on some of these issues, including: the ways in which knowledge and learning are conceived and created in development; the ways in which knowledge travels; the opportunities for learning between 'North' and 'South'; and the political spaces that are created through different kinds of knowledge. To explore these issues, I examine a network of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community-based organisations (CBOs) called Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI). This network seeks to reconfigure the governance of urban poverty reduction strategies and encourage poor' people to re-think their own capacities and potentials. In particular, I draw on interview-based fieldwork conducted on one key member of this group, the Indian Alliance based in Mumbai. I critically examine some of the possibilities and challenges of various forms of 'travelling knowledges'. These are strategies that have travelled through exchanges, wherein groups of poor people travel from one settlement to another to share stories and experiences with other poor people in what amounts to an informal 'training' process. By examining exchanges between SDI and groups in the UK, I critically discuss the broader potential in development to move beyond barriers of North and South that limit learning. I adopt a broadly post-rationalist approach to the concerns in the thesis. Through this, I argue the importance of considering knowledge and learning as produced through relations of near and far, social and material, and as driven by routines and practices. A post-rationalist approach helps us to understand and appreciate the importance of geography for knowledge and learning in the SDI network. This approach draws attention to power. It encourages a critical consciousness that is alert to the kinds of knowledge conceived for development, and that recognizes the various ways in which different knowledges help create different types of politics. A post-rationalist approach also cautions against conceptions of knowledge and learning that risk marginalizing geography and power in development more generally. The thesis demonstrates the need to give further consideration of how knowledge is conceived as a development strategy, and what the potential possibilities and pitfalls of travelling knowledges are

The Crowd and Citylife: Materiality, Negotiation, and Inclusivity at Tokyo’s Train Stations

In the history of urban thought, density has been closely indexed to the idea of citylife. Drawing on commuters’ experiences and perception of crowds in and around Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, this article offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between urban crowds and life in the city. We advance understandings of the relations between the crowd and citylife through three categories of ‘crowd relations’ – materiality, negotiation, and inclusivity – to argue that the multiplicity of meanings which accrue to people’s encounters with crowds refuses any a priori definitions of optimum levels of urban density. Rather, the crowd relations gathered here are evocations of citylife that take us beyond the tendency to represent the crowd as a particular kind of problem, be it alienation, exhaustion, or a threshold for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ densities. The portraits of commuter crowds presented capture the various entanglements between human and non-human, embodiment and mobility, and multiculture and the civic, through which citylife emerges as a mode of being with oneself and others

ImpacT2 project: preliminary study 1: establishing the relationship between networked technology and attainment

This report explored teaching practices, beliefs and teaching styles and their influences on ICT use and implementation by pupils. Additional factors explored included the value of school and LEA policies and teacher competence in the use of ICT in classroom settings. ImpaCT2 was a major longitudinal study (1999-2002) involving 60 schools in England, its aims were to: identify the impact of networked technologies on the school and out-of-school environment; determine whether or not this impact affected the educational attainment of pupils aged 816 years (at Key Stages 2, 3, and 4); and provide information that would assist in the formation of national, local and school policies on the deployment of IC

ImpaCT2: pupils' and teachers' perceptions of ICT in the home, school and community

The Strand 2 report of the ImpaCT 2 research describes the results of applying a range of research methods to explore, how pupils use ICT, in particular out of school and what had been gained from this use. ImpaCT2 was a major longitudinal study (1999-2002) involving 60 schools in England, its aims were to: identify the impact of networked technologies on the school and out-of-school environment; determine whether or not this impact affected the educational attainment of pupils aged 8 - 16 years (at Key Stages 2, 3, and 4); and provide information that would assist in the formation of national, local and school policies on the deployment of ICT

Introduction: rethinking urban density

In this piece, we introduce a special issue on “Rethinking Urban Density” which asks: what are the meanings and implications of density in cities today? How might we understand and research it? This collection offers a set of reflections on urban density in different parts of the world. Ranging from the urban forms, lived experiences, and perceptions, to the policy trends and politics of urban density, authors in this collection explore together the dynamics and implications of urban densities in cities of the global South, East, and North. Emerging from the 2019 Rethinking Density workshop in the Department of Geography at Durham University, this evolving dialogue on urban density identifies some key debates and critical reflections on wider urban processes and futures