City government and urban inequalities

What potential do city governments have to prevent and mitigate worsening urban inequalities? Focusing on different urban scales of government, this discussion goes beyond the core tasks of urban service provision to consider strategies of: (i) distribution and deliberation (e.g. revenue measures, living wages or participatory budgeting); (ii) housing and planning (e.g. equity planning, inclusionary zoning, anti-displacement measures, social housing programmes); (iii) environment and infrastructure (e.g. water and waste services, mass transit and non-motorised transport alternatives); and (iv) urban citizenship (e.g. freedom of information, association and movement; public realm and open space strategies)

The undergraduate dissertation

LSE Sociologists, it is final year- that means dissertation! This blog is to provide some reassurance, and hopefully answer any questions you may have about the sociological dissertation. This is for you to refer back to as you progress throughout your dissertation course. Course convenor Fran Tonkiss provided an interview and some advice about the sociological dissertation project. To find out more about Fran’s work, click here

Austerity urbanism and the makeshift city

This paper engages with a recent set of critical arguments concerning the 'post-crisis city' and the political economy of 'austerity urbanism'. The focus of the discussion is on practical interventions in the vacant and disused spaces of recessionary cities, and in particular on temporary designs and provisional uses. In this way, it opens a further line of argument about urbanism under conditions of austerity, alongside analyses of the formal politics of austerity or the possibilities of urban activism in these settings. Its concern is with forms of urban intervention that re-work orthodoxies of urban development as usual: in particular the timescales that inform conventional development models; the understandings of use around which sites are planned and designed; and the ways in which value is realized through the production of urban spaces. The argument centres on European contexts of austerity urbanism, drawing on critical examples of urban design and occupation in the region's largest economies. Such urban strategies are concerned with a politics and a practice of small incursions in material spaces that seek to create a kind of 'durability through the temporary'

SocSocialising design? From consumption to productionialising design? From consumption to production

The notion that design should be socially engaged has become an article of architectural faith, but it is not always clear what we want from design in social terms, or want the social to do or to be within design processes. In the discussion that follows, I consider some of the core ways in which ideas of the social inform the field of spatial design. Debates over social architecture are frequently concerned with alternative and activist approaches to the practice of design, and the papers in this collection take up in critical mode a range of right-thinking and left-leaning interventions which are committed to social ends, processes and values. There is a strong orientation in this field to low-income urbanism as the crucible for socialised design—in contexts where the ‘social’ may be the chief or only resource in conditions of state under-capacity and capital indifference. My focus, however, is less on avowedly engaged practices of spatial design than on the social dimensions of more orthodox—and generally more powerful—designs on space. The initial aim is to call out the versions of the social implicated in mainstream design and development in rich-world settings. Such an account begins with the social sites in which design projects take place, and the social uses to which the latter are geared. The larger aim of the discussion, however, is to go beyond a concept of the social as the context or the object of design to think more critically about the social relations of production which shape design as a process and produce space as a design outcome

The Metropolis and Evangelical Life: Coherence and Fragmentation in the ‘Lost City of London’

This article examines the interplay of different processes of cultural and subjective fragmentation experienced by conservative evangelical Anglicans, based on an ethnographic study of a congregation in central London. The author focuses on the evangelistic speaking practices of members of this church to explore how individuals negotiate contradictory norms of interaction as they move through different city spaces, and considers their response to tensions created by the demands of their workplace and their religious lives. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, the author argues that their faith provides a sense of coherence and unity that responds to experiences of cultural fragmentation characteristic of everyday life in the city, while simultaneously leading to a specific consciousness of moral fragmentation that is inherent to conservative evangelicalism

Whiteness and loss in outer East London: tracing the collective memories of diaspora space

This paper explores collective memory in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting. Newham's formation through migration – its ‘great time’ – has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people's and youth workers' memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced over, and how this tracing reveals ambivalence and porosity, at the same time as it highlights the continued allure of race. It explores how whiteness and class loss are appropriated across ethnic boundaries and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place

Book review: the Olympic Games and the architecture of extreme capitalism: remaining sceptical about the ‘urban renaissance’

The privatisation of our cities has gone too far, argues Anna Minton in this passionate and convincing tale of the brutal links between regeneration, capitalism and unhappiness. Fran Tonkiss finds Minton’s analysis of the real legacy of the Olympic Games compelling, with important warnings on inequality and police states. Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city. Anna Minton. Penguin. January 2012. 288 pages