UCL Urban Laboratory

Current Urban Laboratory affiliated PhDs:

Killian Doherty (Bartlett School of Architecture) 

'Post-development' design practice(s); making and unmaking of communities within post-conflict Rwanda.

Building upon 5 years of Rwanda based architectural practice & research this proposal will: examine inherited concepts of ‘modernity’ that underpin urban policy in Rwanda; question these in light of current design trends of ‘modern’ architectural practice entrenched within development/NGO cultures; and posit alternatives to these by working with a marginalised, low-income community in Rwanda. The latter theme will be explored through a settlement-led design project.

Alexandra Parsons (English Literature)

Derek Jarman and Life-writing

My research focuses on the director, artist, writer and activist Derek Jarman. I explore the way he records his dissident uses of the city as the means by which to provide social commentary and ignite political activism. I engage with his use of city spaces as diverse as the abandoned industrial wastelands of Millenium Mills, heterotopias such as Hampstead Heath at night, the development of central urban areas like Soho, and how he reclaimed the streets via protests and political activism. I do this by exploring Jarman’s life-writing. Throughout these texts, Jarman repeatedly makes use not just of his own memories, but also examines the lives of queer figures from the past alongside those of his friends and other contemporaries.

Kristen Hartmann (SSEES)

Sarajevo’s Post-Conflict Urban Environment: Islamic Interventions in the Urban Landscape and Peace Building in a Plural Society.

The aim of my research is to investigate how interventions in post-conflict urban environments affect peace building in plural societies. I will analyze the impact of new sacred and secular Muslim building constructions on the plural social fabric of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). My research will examine ideas of trans-national identity formation and capital flows from countries in the Islamic world and the negotiations and contestations surrounding new architectural constructions. The urban environment plays a crucial role in the formation of identity, and within the current context of Bosnian and Herzegovinian society, uncovering how Sarajevans are reacting to new architectural projects will have implications for continued peace building in BiH.

Sigi Atteneder (Development Planning Unit)

The East Mediterranean – Insight and Outlook

My research is about the potential of the coming together of spaces - overlaps, folds - and related border issues as materialisation of power relations, especially in urban areas. On the theoretical side the work draws on Etienne Balibar´s notion of "borderland". For the empirical part I am focussing on the so called "Levant", and Amman and Tel Aviv-Jaffa in particular.

Pooya Ghoddousi (Geography)

Global Nomads or Temporary Citizens: transnational mobility of middling Iranians.

This research uses the concept of nomadism to go beyond socially or geographically bounded notions of diaspora, citizenship, or local communities that abound in urban and migration studies. An ethnographic study of everyday practices and routines in the lives of my interlocutors (snowballing from my Iranian networks in London) will map the micropolitics of how they build and maintain ties with their human-non-human environments as well as trace their mobile trajectories. The resulting ‘cartographies’ show the socio-material (dis)organisations of these transnational assemblages using insights from theories and historical examples of nomadism – especially the dynamic nomad/sedentary mixes found in ‘dimorphic societies’. In addition to an epistemic contribution to the study of these emerging modes-of-being-in-the-world, this study traces the lines of flight and novel becomings of these transnational assemblages with the phronetic hope of increasing the reflexive agency of  the nomadic subjects to navigate their unpredictable lives and negotiate their instances of marginality.

webpage; research diary

ThienVinh Nguyen (Geography)

Oil and the City: Urban development, governance, and the potential for poverty alleviation in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana.

Funded by a UCL Graduate Research Scholarship and a UCL Overseas Graduate Research Scholarship, supervised by Charlotte Lemanski and Jennifer Robinson

ThienVinh's research explores the themes of urban development, governance, and the potential for poverty alleviation in light of recent oil windfalls in the city of Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana.  The discovery of commercial quantities of oil in 2007 off the coast of the city has been marked by the galvanisation of civil society organisations, traditional authorities, different levels of Ghanaian government, and transnational corporations (and their respective governments, which include the UK, US, China, and Norway) wishing to benefit from the promise of oil. Because oil brings about societal upheaval, vis-à-vis heightened economic activity, altered perceptions of place and new opportunities for  socio-economic development, this research shall investigate ways in which different actors and groups contest and coordinate for their interests, as they shape the development of this city. Although cities are constantly moving, transforming, and constructing, such moments of profound change provide a rich and dynamic context for studying the reconfigurations of everyday life, politics, and the trajectories of development—giving further impetus for this research to uncover the potentialities of a city to come.

Sabina Andron (Bartlett School of Architecture)

The Site Specificity of City Surface Interventions.

A battle for visibility takes place every day on the surfaces of the city. Drawing strongly from the materiality of those surfaces, inscriptions of various kinds struggle to make their way into our field of vision, by employing different tactics of placement and form. Surfaces display their own inherent frames and contrasting materials, offering opportunities for the marking of visual territories. Whether they are done through size, legibility or crispness, the visual statements of surface inscriptions break the skin of the city into different spots, some blinder and others bolder.

The workings of visibility through city surface inscriptions are the focus of my doctoral research, which aims to record and understand the connections between the materiality of various surfaces and the types of inscriptions they will support.

Through a visual exploration of brick and metal, perspex and paper, Sabina looks for the structural frames of the city and the visual and textual marks that adorn them. Surfaces are territories in themselves and they define a new form of site specificity, which she explores through photographical practice and interpret through semiotic analysis.

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Nicola Antaki (School of Architecture and DPU)

A Learning Architecture: Designing environments for municipal primary school children from informal settlements in Mumbai.

Can we change the way we design learning spaces for children from informal settlements in Mumbai, if we approach them with a wider view of educational philosophies and pedagogy, whilst engaging with communities and governing powers and taking into consideration the effect of architecture on learning processes and outcomes? Driven by live practice-led experimental research, this thesis focuses on small-scale situated interventions using a local heritage of design languages, as a means of defining sustainable strategies of practice, using participatory methods within a community and a local culture. The invention and implementation of such strategies are then used to catalyse self-organising processes and activities that would evolve without the need for the architect ‘leader’, to strengthen a community’s engagement with its territory, empowering individuals to generate improvements in their environments.

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Mohammed Bakkali (Bartlett School of Graduate Studies)

Developing a climate-responsive urbatecture.

This research focuses on developing a climate-responsive design framework tailored to the early design stages. This will create tools for masterplanning as well as the design of individual buildings, making use of climate-responsive built form indicators and modelling tools. The framework will highlight key features of the urban environment that affect local urban climate by interlinking land use, street canyons and building forms and assessing them in a multi-scaled approach. 

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Katy Beinart (Bartlett School of Architecture)

Salt as a medium Connected to storytelling and migration through site-specific practice in Brixton.

Sites of 'Salted Earth', (a term first used to refer to District 6, an area of Cape Town demolished by the Apartheid Government), are places loaded with memory, contested by communities with different versions of history. This research seeks to redress the loss of migrant and diasporic histories in public spaces of contested history. This project explores architecture and spatial practices as instruments to reveal and memorialise the invisible, and how participatory approaches can renew these processes. At the intersection between art and architecture, this provides a basis to critique existing modes of memorialisation.

Using 'Salted Earth' as material and metaphor, a 'desalination' process is proposed revealing and making traces visible. Developing intuitive methodologies to work with emotionally contested sites, interventions will be created that draw out emotion. Strategies will be tested that interweave practices to 'heal' contested sites, and to uncover traces in specific places, creating an archive of material highlighting their hidden histories.

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John Bingham-Hall (Bartlett School of Graduate Studies)

Mobile communication and the social life of urban public spaces. Funded by an EPSRC Studentship.

Pei Sze Chow (Scandinavian Studies)

Architecture of transnational regions in film. Funded by a UCL Overseas Graduate Research Studentship (2011).

Pei-Sze is a PhD candidate supervised by Dr Claire Thomson in UCL's School of European Languages, Culture and Society. Her research focuses on contemporary cinematic representations of landmark architecture and space in transnational regions and cities, particularly the Øresund and Berlin. The project investigates the synthesis of cinema, architecture, and haptic viewing in order to examine a group of film documentaries/essays that capture the emerging relationships between transnational communities and their architectural environment. In her dissertation, she will consider films by documentarists and filmmakers such as Fredrik Gertten (Sweden) and Uli M. Schüppel (Germany). Her broader research interests include visual experimentation in film, cities, and identity and place-making.

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Jae-Sung Chon (Geography)

Modernization and co-evolution of man, machine and nature in three cities: Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai.

Jae-Sung Chon's PhD research discusses ‘urban gaps’, forged by postwar elevated urban roads, as latent sites for post-functional and post-carbon imaginations. Taking ‘infra-structures’ as forms of ‘sub-presence’ of others, the discussion expands the recent discourses around ‘informal urbanism’ and imagines spatial conditions for cohabitation and coproduction of human and non-human: a braid urbanism. 

Carole Enahoro (Geography/Anthropology)

The planned city, ridicule and the phenomenology of hope: contesting the material structure of power in Abuja, Nigeria.

Mohamad Hafeda (Bartlett School of Architecture)

Negotiating spaces: informal processes for claiming spaces in Beirut. Awarded funding from the Global Supplementary Grant Program, Open Society scholarship and from The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture.

This project based PhD research investigates the design, use and experience of contested boundaries in Beirut. The research investigates, in particular, the negotiation of spaces of sectarian-political conflict and the informal processes and strategies for claiming spaces by different site users and controllers such as residents, militia, and politicians. The study aims to examine the notions of division, connection and negotiation between and within two adjacent and contested sectarian communities of Tarik Al-Jdideh (Sunni majority) and Al-Mazraa (a Sunni and Shiite mixed area with Christian minority) in specific and consequently the ephemeral and concealed borderlines experienced in the city. The research aims to use participatory research methodology by employing design and ethnographic research tools to work with site users/residents on their everyday spatial practices through observation, documentation, analysis and intervention. The research method aims to test the ability of the creative processes to play an active role in sites of conflict by engaging in both; conceptual debates and practical situations inside and outside the geographic site of interest to understand how divisions (or borderlines) are constructed and confirmed in a country as both mental notions and material practices – spatialised and negotiated everyday by people.

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Sandra Jasper (Bartlett School of Architecture and Geography)

Cyborg Imaginations: nature, technology, and urban space in West Berlin (1961-1984)

Sandra Jasper's work to date has focused on how cities forge relationships between nature, technology and the human body. Her doctoral thesis, Cyborg Imaginations: nature, technology, and urban space in West Berlin (1961-1984), supervised by Professor Matthew Gandy and Dr Peg Rawes, traces urban change in Berlin in the post-war period. To investigate the shifting boundaries between the body and the city by Sandra draws on concepts from urban political ecology, acoustic ecology and on feminist perspectives on bio-political space. 

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Charlotte Jones (Geography)

The Revival of the Turkish bath in mid-Victorian Britain

Charlotte's thesis examines the revival of the Turkish bath in 1856 and its subsequent movement in relation to health, reform and the body. Her broader research areas fall into three distinct areas; nineteenth century heterodox medical practices (e.g. hydropathy) and how developments in 'cutaneous science' (dermatology) can be explored under the rubric of the body-space nexus and 'technologies of the self'; the role geopolitics played in the revival of the Turkish bath; and the history of the Turkish bath pre- 1856. 

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Karolina Kendall-Bush (Film Studies)

Moving city: the ambulatory urban experience in film, memory and walking tours.

'Walking Pictures' is about how tourists walk London. It studies two ways of walking the city: walking tours and film. The thesis seeks to demonstrate how each is implicated in the other’s practices. It does so by using three different types of research. First, an historical study of the development of tourist walking in the capital between 1880 and 1939 using the British and expatriate press; the brochures, newspapers, and magazines held by the Thomas Cook company archive; and guidebooks.  Second, cinematic textual analysis of actuality footage, travelogues and fiction films that move around the capital in this period. And third, an ethnographic study that follows London’s walking tours and interviews walking guides. Combining these disciplinarily diverse approaches, I ask: how can we understand the cinematic experience of London through the experiences of tourists walking its streets?

Diverse disciplinary approaches are brought together to try and understand how walkers interact with the spaces of the city. The thesis contributes to larger discourses in history, geography, and film studies that seek to understand people’s movement in the metropolis. More broadly, 'Walking Pictures' addresses how the representations of the city shape not only the way we perceive the spaces we live in, but how we move through them.

Regan Koch (Geography)

Eating in public: Re-imagining collective urban space

This project aims to extend geographical engagement with urban publicness by expanding both the concepts and registers through which everyday public life is apprehended. Central to this effort is an examination of ways in which collective culture is being re-imagined in contemporary U.S. cities through a range of innovative food-related trends. Research focuses on three multi-site case studies: the growth of 'pay-what-you-can restaurants' or ‘community kitchens’; street food vending and collective advocacy for vendors; and underground restaurants or supper clubs in private homes.

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Torsten Lange (Bartlett School of Architecture)

Critical thinking, complex design: the concept of Komplexe Umweltgestaltung and the problem of complexity and quality in the production of the built environment in 1970s and 1980s East Germany. Awarded funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

This thesis explores the issues of complexity and quality in the production of the built environment in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) through, on the one hand, an historic analysis of the theoretical concept of Komplexe Umweltgestaltung [complex design of the environment] as developed by East German architectural theorist Bruno Flierl, and, on the other, a study of construction projects in the capital East Berlin. The aim of the research is to elucidate relationships between architectural discourse within the GDR (and beyond) and building practice during the 1970s and 1980s.

The research is situated within a context of current international scholarship about post-World War II modernity and about new towns and large housing complexes as specific heritage. This international perspective raises questions concerning mutual exchange and observation between the eastern and western parts of divided Germany, and with other western countries such as France and Britain in the late phase of the Cold War.

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Lucrezia Lennert (Geography)

The City and the War Machines: Deleuze and Guattari and collective houses in Berlin.

This project looks at the organization of, and struggles around, collective living projects (“Hausprojekte”) in contemporary Berlin. Collective houses, the legalized spaces which remain of the German squatter movement of the 1980s and 1990s, are sites in which anarcho-autonomous modes of living, knowledges and practices are elaborated. Increasingly these houses are threatened by the gentrification processes transforming inner-city Berlin as well as by the political will of the city government to eradicate spaces of radical left politics. Through interviews and ethnography the project sets out to understand the non-hierarchical organization and everyday experience of collective living in Berlin, as well how these spaces function as sites of resistance. 

Leah Lovett (Slade School of Fine Art)

Playing space: performing the spatial politics of Augusto Boal's invisible theatre. Funded by an AHRC BGP Scholarship. 

Leah’s practice and thesis begin from an understanding of social structures as spatial and as performed. As an artist, she works collaboratively to make performances, videos, installations and workshops which explore how people negotiate each other and create space through conversation, story-telling and incidental actions. Under the provisional title Playing Space: Performing the Spatial Politics of Invisible Theatre, this practice-related thesis turns to Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal’s descriptions of invisible theatre as a starting point for considering the spatio-political potential of performance and performative writing. This project draws on the ideas and approaches of critical theorists from a variety of disciplines, including Lefebvre, de Certeau, Doreen Massey and Jane Rendell, and is supervised by Amna Malik, Ben Campkin and Jayne Parker. 

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Sam Merrill (Geography)

The Production of Social Memory in the Landscapes of London and Berlin’s Buried Transport Infrastructure. 

Sam Merrill's research investigates forms of ‘buried’ social memory across the physical, representational and experiential landscapes of the London Underground and Berlin UBahn with the intention to reveal how such memory is manifested and contested. 

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Aaron Mo (Bartlett School of Planning)

Artworks and networks: An ethnographic study of creatives and urban spaces in Manchester and Brno.

A majority of placemaking practitioners and urbanists who are interested in creative-led development have limited knowledge of the actual workings of creative actors, and how the creative industry operates globally. These voids of knowledge hinder our ability to develop effective creative-oriented development and economic policies. Aaron Mo's Planning Studies thesis and visual essay attempts to address the missing pieces of information by identifying the interactions that may catalyse or hinder different phases and activities of a creatives' practice, and dissimilates how it relates with space and place. The investigations are undertaken in Manchester, England, and Brno, Czech Republic, so to avoid the potentially narrow 'World City' findings cliché.

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Louis Moreno (Geography)

The Architecture of Financial Crisis: urban design and urban restructuring in the inner city of London and Leeds (1993 - 2008)

This thesis investigates the role capital investments in new buildings and public spaces in the UK played in the physical restructuring of UK cities, against the backdrop of the build up to the 2008 crash. It explores the new commercial landscape of the City of London and Leeds to try to understand the political and economic processes behind urban investment and architectural transformation. Examining the relationship between the development of commercial property investments in office, apartment and retail space and urban regeneration policies the thesis asks: Did the recent era of asset based growth produce a new approach to urban development and design? If so how were new buildings and spaces related to new capital investment and urban development strategies? What does the production of the built environment tell us about the role of contemporary architectural and urban design in urban economic development?  

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Braulio Morera (Geography)

The politics of sustainability: new environmental metaphors in Chinese urban development

Ana Maria Muñoz Boudet (Geography)

Power, agency and citizenship: public spaces of the city, Santiago de Chile.

Ana María is undertaking her research while working as a consultant with the Gender and Poverty Group of the World Bank’s Latin America and the Caribbean Operational Region. 

Giles Omezi (Geography)

The history of infrastructure provision in Lagos, Nigeria

Brent Pilkey (Bartlett School of Architecture)

Queering heteronormativity at home in London. Funded by a UCL Overseas Research Scholarship, and a UCL Global Excellence Scholarship (2009).

This thesis offers a London-based contemporary study of the everyday space of home in relation to minoritised sexual identity. Drawing from several disciplines, including architectural history, theorised feminism, queer theory and human geographies of sexuality, the project interrogates the stability of domesticity. Highlighting everyday homemaking practices of more than 40 non-heterosexual households in London, I seek to complicate one overarching regime of power that dominates our cultural value system, known in queer theory as heteronormativity – the idea that sees heterosexuality as the default and natural sexuality to which everyone must conform or declare themselves against.

The research project is a response to two decades of research across several disciplines that have looked at the spatialised ways in which minoritised sexual identity unfolds in, for the most part, ‘Western’ urban centres. This work shows the ways that sexual minorities stake claim to public and visible spaces of gay identity, the most common examples being commercial gay clusters and spaces where male-male public sex takes place. This body of literature focuses on extraordinary spaces removed from the everyday experience of the majority of society, and in so doing passes over one of the most commonplace spaces where identity is regularly performed: the domestic realm.

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Regner Ramos (Bartlett School of Architecture) 

The cyborg revival: embodiments, identities, and reconfigurations of urban spaces by mobile technologies.

This dissertation seeks to situate the current spatio-temporal condition of the modern-like cyborg-citizen within the built environment. Where theorists have addressed the role of the cyborg in science, politics, and performance, a fissure in the discourse is left to address the role of the cyborg within architecture. Through theories of performance, participation, embodiment, space, and technology, and innovative methodological solutions, the cyborg might find its home back in urban spaces with the aid of new dimensions in architecture and cyberspace.

From man’s dependency on technology, to the cyborg’s portrayal in sci-fi cinema; from gender differences, to notions of the abject, the cyborg has cunningly found its relevancy into this research and back into the twenty-first century. Through digital devices, and echoing theories of affection, how do people make sense of themselves, their environments, and interpersonal relationships?

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David Roberts (Bartlett School of Architecture)

Public housing and regeneration in London through site-writing. Funded by a UCL Graduate Research Scholarship and an AHRC Studentship in Architectural Design.

The history of housing the working population in Britain has a predictable circularity in architectural form; one generation’s panacea becomes the next generation’s problem, only to be reappraised with remorse after it has passed. This thesis is a practical and theoretical research project into this cycle. It follows the life of an inner-city housing estate in London to allow its inhabitants to reflect on the utopian promises of public housing in order to reclaim the principles of equality, dignity and security at its foundation.

The project focuses on the Haggerston West Estate built in the late 1930s by the London County Council Housing Department which is to be demolished in 2013 and replaced by a mixed tenure and mixed funded development typical of contemporary regeneration programmes. The retreat of social welfare under austerity measures has paved the way for a dismantling of public housing in ideal and form. This has catalysed a groundswell of renewed interest in housing estates from academics and practitioners seeking to mend their conceptual, built and social fabric. I draw from the work of Alison Ravetz, Andrea Phillips and Paul Watt and the practice of Jane Rendell, Peter Watkins and Mike Pearson to create a dialogue between debates in architectural history, critical theory and housing policy and self-reflexive, socially critical practices in writing, filmmaking and site-specific performance. 

Vicente Sandoval (Development Planning Unit)

The progression of vulnerability: A multi-scalar perspective

This study aims to investigate the social production of disaster risk and its relation with contemporary notions of geographical scales. Specifically, this research looks for linkages of the progression of vulnerability at different geographical scales; local, urban, regional, national and/or global. In so doing, this work seeks to contribute to the disciplinary debate on the social production of disaster risk by providing a critical understanding of the progression of vulnerability as a multi-scalar phenomenon. 

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Ophelie Véron (Geography)

Deconstructing the divided city: Identity, power and space in Skopje.

Astrid Wood (Geography)

Peripatetic planning: an exploration of South African policy mobilizers.

Policy actors, working within formal and informal policy networks have been instrumental in introducing and circulating international and domestic urban planning policy models between cities. The study investigates the role of policy mobilizers in moving information and strengthening municipal connections over the last century of South Africa policy circulation. The focus will be on contemporary policy mobilizers and the South African Cities Network as part of a century of progression towards formal municipal policy networks. In so doing, this research exposes the pivotal role of policy mobilizers in shaping both policies and relationships within cities. The study also draws attention to the resulting municipal collaborations as evidence of constant and continuous policy circulation.

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Saffron Woodcraft (Anthropology)

Another failed utopia? Examining social sustainability in new urban neighbourhoods. 

Why do some planned new communities flourish and others fail? How do new urban neighbourhoods represent political narratives about what a 21st century city should be? And how are competing ideas about urban development, sustainability, citizenship, community, family and home materialized in new communities? This research will address these questions by looking at how a new community in London is imagined, constructed and inhabited. Saffron is interested in how narratives about London's future, economic growth, housing need and sustainable development are interpreted by the planners, architects, developers and public agencies working on those neighbourhoods to create new visions of urban social life and new built forms. 

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Stamatis Zografos (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Architecture and fire: an archival approach to architectural conservation.

Recently completed PhDs

Johan Andersson (Planning) 

Consuming visibility: London’s new spaces of gay nightlife.

Melanie Brickman (Geography)

The resurgence of tuberculosis in London and New York.

David Gissen (Geography/Architecture)

Atmospheres of late modernity the urban production of indoor air in New York City, 1963 – 2003.

Sophie Handler (Bartlett School of Architecture)

A little bit of TLC, (Urban curating, ageing and regeneration in Newham, East London).

Clare Herrick (Geography)

Governing the ‘obesity epidemic’: putting preventative public health to work in London and Austin.

Joseph Hillier (Engineering)

Hydropolis: a history of water, engineering and power in London.

Leandro Minuchin (Geography)

Material imaginations: architecture, nature and politics in Buenos Aires, 1929-49.

Valerie Viehoff (Geography)

Engineering modernity: the provision of water for Tangier.

Tse-Hui Teh (Engineering)

Hydro-urbanism: reconfiguring the urban water-cycle.