Alan Latham

University College London | UCL · Department of Geography

This paper introduces the collection of nine short articles that make up the inaugural special section of the journal on ‘thinking with methods’. It begins by outlining why a fuller conversation about different ways of handling talk in human geography might be worthwhile. Then it describes a series of conference sessions in which a small group of r...

Disagreement is a fundamental dimension of social life. In many situations, however, people are reticent to explicitly criticise the actions of others. It follows, that if social researchers wish to study differences in people's common sense judgements of other's actions in an interview setting they need to carefully design how discussion of these...

This editorial introduces a Classics Revisited collection within which a range of invited authors have used Louise Bracken and Emma Mawdsley’s paper, ‘“Muddy glee”: Rounding out the picture of women and physical geography fieldwork’, as inspiration for reflection and to broaden the debate around geography fieldwork. Published in 2004, ‘Muddy glee’...

Social infrastructure is an emerging research frontier in urban geography and urban studies. This editorial introduction provides a concise introduction to the term. It briefly sets out the intellectual provenance of the concept of social infrastructure, examining the different ways social infrastructure is being used across urban geography.

This paper examines the public routines through which migrant domestic workers inhabit a global city such as Hong Kong. Using ‘public outings’ as a conceptual entry point to understanding migrants’ mobile geographies of dwelling, it seeks to present such migrants as ordinary urban actors who inhabit, share and shape the city landscape every day jus...

Cities need social infrastructure, places that support social connection in neighborhoods and across communities. In the face of austerity in many places, the provision of such infrastructures are under threat. To protect such infrastructures, it is important to have robust arguments for their provision, maintenance, and protection. Through a case...

Cycling has the potential to play a key role in developing environmentally and socially sustainable cities and neighbourhoods in New Zealand. Realising this potential requires understanding how different groups within New Zealand society relate to existing patterns of cycling, and how they might respond to the introduction of a range of new cycling...

Human geography has become deeply interested in a range of research methods that focus on researchers’ corporeal engagement with their research sites. This interest has opened up an exciting set of research horizons, energising the discipline in a whole range of ways. Welcoming this engagement, this paper presents a series of meditations on the pro...

Torsten Hägerstrand’s work was influential to the emergence of human geography as a theoretically sophisticated social science. Focusing on the materiality of everyday life, and the complex ecological webs through which human society is made, his writings offered an original set of tools to think about the how and where of communal life. Nonetheles...

In two previous reviews, we examined how human geographers currently report on projects involving their preferred qualitative methods – interviews and ethnographic observation. This final review steps back from specific techniques to evaluate some of the broader presentational conventions that typify this work. What can be inferred from where these...

This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities, published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in‐depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine‐grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking abo...

This review examines how ethnographic methods currently feature in the work of human geographers. The ethnographic approach continues to be a popular choice amongst those hoping to learn from how social life unfolds in particular places and settings. But what visions of ethnography do geographers draw on to attain authorial authority? What are the...

With growing concerns about air pollution and congestion, getting more people to move around cities by bicycle is gaining more attention than at any point over the past 50 years. At the same time, the spread of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is being positioned by some as a solution to these same problems. This raises interesting questions about the pos...

Cities are full of disputes about organizing public life. These disputes are important for deciding how spaces get used, and they are integral to how publics form and develop. In all sorts of ways they define the potentialities of urban public life. This article tells the story of the Southbank Centre's plans to redevelop their central London site,...

Developing the concept of kinaesthetics, this article undertakes a critical re-description of amateur sports and fitness to explore the topographies, materials, innovation, and socialities that make up urban environments. Extending work on affect and urban materiality within geography and elsewhere, we argue that amateur sport and fitness animates...

Libraries, laundrettes, and lidos. Pizzerias, plazas, and playgrounds. Sidewalks, swimming pools, and schools. These are just some of the kinds of spaces and facilities that contribute to the public life of cities. Drawing on the arguments of the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, this article develops the concept of “social infrastructure” as a way to r...

This is the first in a series of three reviews that scrutinise the conventions of doing and describing qualitative research that currently predominate in human geography. Since we find that interviews are the most widely used method in this field, we begin with an examination of how they feature in the work of today’s human geographers. How many pe...

There is a growing body of research that, under the banner of ‘green exercise’, considers the additional physical and psychological benefits that may be accrued by those who exercise in ‘natural’ environments. This essay considers the implications of how this research has been conducted to date and argues that it may be usefully enriched by a fulle...

https://www.urbanstudiesonline.com/resources/resource/book-review-symposium-key-thinkers-on-cities/

Qualitative research focused on how people experience the social and material environments in which they exercise has the potential to inform public health agendas in all sorts of ways. This commentary takes up the claim made by Stephanie Coen that such research should begin with an 'equity lens' and place a greater emphasis on 'critique' than we d...

The health benefits of physical activity are many and well known. Those hoping to promote public health are therefore understandably keen on encouraging physical exercise. This commentary considers the role of qualitative research in this undertaking, given a context in which medical researchers have more commonly taken a quantitative approach to t...

artists and geographers frequently work together. the article explores one such ongoing collaboration. centering on a festival, RUN! RUN! RUN! International Festival of Running #r3fest organized by an artist and a geographer, it explores the productive antagonisms that working through and along disciplinary borders produces. #r3fest was held at t...

his chapter considers the relation between exercise, sport, and fitness activities and urban life, with a particular emphasis on how these activities can be traced through the affective, kinaesthetic, and collective registers of urban space. The affective 'effect' of many kinaesthetic practices has become an integral part of popular discourses abou...

Recreational running is increasingly widespread and could therefore be seen as the obvious target for those hoping to encourage greater public health through exercise. Existing qualitative research on this topic has, however, tended to focus on groups of highly committed runners. It is accordingly unclear whether their findings can be extrapolated...

Starting with a series of perspectives on why and where humans run, this paper considers how running comes to happen in some environments instead of others and how it is experienced thereafter. More specifically, we are interested in the processes by which contemporary recreational running has come to take place either indoors on treadmills or outs...

Contemporary cities are thick with infrastructure. In recognition of this fact a great deal of recent work within urban studies and urban geography has focused on transformations in the governance and ownership of infrastructural elements within cities. Less attention has been paid to the practices through which urban infrastructures are inhabited...

This paper brings together comics studies and geography to consider how space operates both on and off the comics page. We integrate discussion of comics’ formal properties with a sitespecific comics installation (Dave McKean’s The Rut) to show the intertwining of these spaces. Our argument is articulated through juxtaposition of the literature on...

This article provides an account of the emergence of jogging as mass physical fitness practice in America in the 1960s. It explores how jogging was configured as a physical fitness activity suitable for sedentary middle-aged men and women. Jogging developed as a counter to the ill-effects of habits entrained by the increasingly sedentary lifestyles...

This paper explores the concept of domestication as a way of attending to urban public spaces and the ways in which they come to be inhabited. It argues against the tendency in urban scholarship to use the term pejoratively and interchangeably with words like pacification or taming to express concerns relating to the corrosion of public life. Rathe...

There has been remarkable enthusiasm for redesigning and reanimating urban public spaces in recent years. Yet geographical and urban research has tended to interpret these changes through a relatively limited set of concerns related to exclusion, encroachment and claim-making. This paper seeks to extend engagement with the concept of public space....

Over the past couple of decades, human geography has seen a proliferation in its empirical reach. This proliferation has been associated with a series of ongoing attempts to reconsider the kinds of time-spaces through which the world is made. Responding to Allen (2011), this article argues that thinking topologically about time-space does not simpl...

Thinking about and with images has long been central to the practice of geographical fieldwork. This paper considers how the participation of images in urban-based fieldwork might be understood in the wake of non-representational theories. Drawing upon our experience of co-teaching an urban-based field course in Berlin, we discuss three ways in whi...

Abstract

Book description: At a time when references to things 'global' have gained more currency than ever, this book explores the nexus of power and space behind the politics of geographical scale. * Explores the nexus of power and space behind the rescaling of contemporary social, economic and political life. * Organized into three sections on theorizin...

Key Concepts in Urban Geography is a new kind of textbook that forms part of an innovative set of companion texts for the human geography sub-disciplines. Organized around 20 short essays, Key Concepts in Urban Geography provides a cutting edge introduction to the central concepts that define contemporary research in urban geography.

This paper contributes to research on the lived dimensions of transnational mobility through an engagement with recent work on affect. Drawing on interviews with New Zealand skilled migrants, we argue that the attractions and experience of relocation to London are significantly connected to the affective possibilities it offers. As a diverse and en...

This paper reflects on the use of digital photography in urban-based human geography fieldwork. It draws on the authors' experience of introducing digital photography into the teaching and assessment of a level 3 undergraduate field course in Berlin. To begin they outline how they sought to use simple digital technologies in order to facilitate stu...

This essay is a brief reply to Cochrane (2006b). It reiterates the ways in which the existing Anglo-American consensus within urban studies allows only a narrow reading of the possible futures of European cities.

This paper examines the recent interest in Berlin in the English-language urban studies journals over the past decade. It argues that welcome though this interest may be, the narrowness of its focus says much about the limitations of current Anglophone urban and regional studies. Following on from the recent set of Euro-commentaries in this journal...

In this paper we consider whether London functions as an ‘escalator region’ for international migrants in the same way that has been suggested for domestic migrants. Our case study focuses on New Zealand tertiary educated migrants who move to London for a period of work and travel. We propose a four-fold typology of these movers, seeking to tease o...

Summary This paper explores the dynamics of engagement and disengagement within urban space. It argues that a certain capacity to encounter the world around the self in an active, creative way is central to the self's ability to recognize and care about the places it inhabits and the people encountered within those places. Drawing on the work of Do...

In this special issue on transnational urbanism, we are interested in accounts of transnational mobility that are attentive to everyday practices and geographical emplacement. Eschewing narratives of trouble-free movement by disembedded actors, consideration is thus given to the mundane and situated efforts by which people make their lives across i...

As a contribution to the growing literature on contemporary forms of global mobility, we consider young New Zealanders who move to the UK for a period of work and travel, typically basing themselves in London. Beyond consideration of career opportunities, we find formulations of the self as creative project to be remarkably central to the mobility...

In this paper we offer a discussion of the ‘materiality’ of the urban. This discussion is offered in the context of recent calls in various areas of the discipline for the necessity of ‘rematerializing’ human geography. While we agree with the spirit of these calls, if human geography (and, within that, urban geography) is going to return to the ma...

The past decade has seen a remarkable turn towards the cultural in human geography. This shift has been marked by a strange gap between theory and empirical practice. Radical though the turn to the cultural has been in reconstituting the ways that human geography thinks of itself as a discipline, its impact on ways that geographers actually do empi...

Contemporary urban theory is marked by a division. Urban policy practitioners, planners, architects and town hall administrators have over the past two decades rediscovered an enthusiasm and belief in urban life—as indeed have significant numbers of ordinary citizens. It might have been expected that urban critics from the left would be enthusiasti...

This paper seeks to broaden the debate around research ethics in New Zealand geography beyond the current discussions of 'ethics as mitigation'. We argue that geographers need to focus more attention on the 'ethics of negotiation' associated with each stage of the research process. We suggest that our geographical imaginations should be extended to...

In this article the aim is to chart the evolution of an heritage/urban design strategy for a prominent inner-city suburban road in Auckland, New Zealand's largest metropolitan centre. This is a story which is interesting not simply because it marks the increasing sophistication of urban planning practice in New Zealand. More universally, it provide...

Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, 264 pp., paper, ISBN 0–631–18693‐XLife in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 256 pp., paper, ISBN 0–631–19267–0Postmodernity and its Discontents, New York: New York University Press, 1997, 232 pp., paper, ISBN 0–814–71304–1

In this paper I seek to examine a set of tactile, habitually grounded, bodily modes of perception which lie at the centre of Walter Benjamin's analysis of urban experience under modernity. On first reading of Benjamin's later writings, particularly his various interpretations of Baudelaire, these tactile, distracted modes of perception appear to re...

As part of wider engagement with different ways of being mobile in the city, human geographers (like many others) have critically engaged with the possibilities and prospects of walking as a way of attending to the city. For human geographers, walking is particularly interesting because it has formed the basis for a range of historical and contempo...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Bristol, 1996.

Thesis (M.A.)--Massey University, 1992. Includes bibliography.