People
Director
Co-Directors
Centre Manager
Steering Committee
Student Academic Representatives (StARs)
Student Academic Representatives (StARs) are elected to represent students’ views to UCL. At the beginning of each academic year, two postgraduate research students are appointed as the UCL Urban Laboratory StARs. They represent students’ views to our Steering Committee, which meets termly, to ensure we engage with the student body effectively in our decision making processes. StARs liase with UCLU and UCL staff to resolve issues.
StARs sit on various committees at a programme, faculty and University level, at which they act as the voice of students, ensuring that UCL takes into account the needs of students in its decision making processes. StARs achieve this through liaising with UCLU and UCL staff to resolve issues.
Current representatives are:
Vacancy x2
Artist in Residence
International Advisory Board
İpek Akpınar (Istanbul Technical University)
Karen Bakker (University of British Columbia)
Stephen Barber (Kingston University)
Neil Brenner (Harvard University)
Dominic Church (German Sustainable Building Council DGNB)
Mustafa Dikec (École d’urbanisme de Paris)
Michael Edwards (University College London)
Adrian Forty (University College London)
Susanne Frank (TU Dortmund University)
David Gissen (California College of the Arts)
Stephen Graham (Durham University)
Jane M. Jacobs (Yale-NUS College)
Gareth Jones (London School of Economics)
Roger Keil (York University, Toronto)
Jorge Francisco Liernur (Torcuato Di Tella University)
Patrick LeGales (Sciences Po Paris)
Julia Lossau (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Iain Low (University of Cape Town, African Centre for Cities)
Jeremy Melvin (Royal Academy)
Ayodeji Olukoju (Caleb University, Lagos)
Kate Orff (Columbia University)
Vyjayanthi Rao (Terreform Center for Advanced Urban Research)
Rebecca Ross (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design)
AbdouMaliq Simone (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
Erik Swyngedouw (Manchester University)
Karen Till (National University of Ireland Maynooth)
Visiting Researchers
Current researchers
Past visiting researchers
Dr Beatrice de Carli
Insurgent Regeneration. A critical review of notions and practices
Beatrice de Carli completed her architectural studies at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, including a PhD in Architecture & Urbanism developed in collaboration with the University of Leuven, Belgium (2011). She has previously held positions as Research and Teaching Assistant at Politecnico di Milano, and has worked in practice in Milan for several years. Since 2011, she has been teaching Urban Design and Urbanism at Politecnico di Milano and KU Leuven. She joined the Urban Lab in January 2014 under the Bartlett Visiting Research Fellows scheme, as part of the Cross-Disciplinary Research Programme and will be supervised by Dr Ben Campkin (UCL Urban Laboratory) and Dr Adriana Allen (Bartlett Development Planning Unit). During her tenure at UCL Beatrice will work on a project entitled ‘Insurgent regeneration. A critical review of notions and practices’. The project investigates the notion of ‘insurgent regeneration’ as a means to explore the capacity of occupant practices to inform and steer state-led discourses on ‘sustainable urban regeneration’ in inner city areas of the global South. As such, the project aims to address two distinct challenges: the cyclical decay and deterioration of cities and their sustainable resurgence and adaptation, and the housing crisis in the global South – particularly in its manifestation through the informal occupation of vacant and deteriorating buildings and site.
Her research focuses on issues of territorial regeneration, housing and participation in architecture and urban design, specifically in contexts of conflictive spatial change and/ or scarce resources. She is interested in developing creative research and teaching methodologies and alternative modes of spatial practice, including an on-going interest in activist practices in urban contexts. She is a member of Architecture Sans Frontieres Italy, an architectural NGO that works between architecture, community and international development. Recently she has been appointed as vice chair of ASF International.
Eduardo Canteros
Social Work Department, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago
Urban Values from a Grassroots Organisation In Urban Regeneration Process
Eduardo Canteros is a sociologist and social worker who has recently submitted his thesis in Architecture and Urban Studies. He has worked in community participation programmes in public and private organisations, and in academic positions in different social sciences schools in Chilean universities.
Eduardo has research interests in urban collective action, citizen participation, and community knowledge and expertise. Eduardo joined the Urban Lab in January 2014 under the Bartlett Visiting Research Fellows scheme, as part of the Cross-Disciplinary Research Programme. While at UCL Eduardo will be working on a project entitled 'Urban values from a grassroots organisation in urban regeneration', supervised by Dr Ben Campkin (UCL Urban Laboratory) and Dr Alexandre Apsan Frediani (Bartlett Development Planning Unit) using qualitative methods to examine the values around which communities organise when they critique and reject regeneration proposals. The project will build on research conducted in Chile and will involve a comparative dimension.
Dr Andy Merrifield
Neo-Haussmannization
Dr Andy Merrifield will be working on Neo-Haussmannization, mentored by Urban Laboratory Steering Committee members Michael Edwards (The Bartlett School of Planning) and Professor Murray Fraser (The Bartlett School of Architecture).
Andy Merrifield is a writer, social theorist and urban geographer with a PhD in Geography from the University of Oxford. He has taught at assorted universities in the UK and USA. Merrifield is co-editor (with Erik Swyngedouw), of The Urbanization of Injustice (1995) and author of eight books, including Metromarxism (2002), Dialectical Urbanism (2002), Guy Debord (2005), Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (2006), Magical Marxism (2011) (which was shortlisted for the 2012 Bread and Roses Prize), and most recently, The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization (2013).
His many essays and reviews have appeared in publications including Adbusters, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, New Left Review, Harvard Design Magazine, and The Times Magazine.
Andy's new book, The New Urban Question, will be published by Pluto Press in March 2014.
Andy will be leading a seminar series for postgraduate research students and advanced undergraduates during his time at UCL on 'Urban theory and protest: from collective consumption to predatory dispossession'. For more information please click here.
Professor Thea Brejzek
Zurich University of the Arts
The politics of performance
Professor Brejzek is director of the PhD on Scenography at Zurich University of the Arts, and currently Visiting Fellow at UTS Sydney. Professor Brejzek will be Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL from January to September 2013 as part of a larger research project she is working on, linking up over 10 institutions internationally to explore the politics of performance.
Dr Robin Kim
Department of Geography/Urban Laboratory
JHK Urban Research Lab, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Robin Kim’s project explores urban regeneration in London, with particular focus on the area between St Paul’s Cathedral and Tate Modern formed by the artery of the Millennium Bridge and Peter’s Hill. The proximity of Tate Modern to St Paul’s has helped shape this new axial pedestrian link and strengthened the relationship between the commercial centre of the City and the cultural hub of Southwark. At the same time, the narrative of urban intervention created by the new urban quarter has contributed to the transformation of that part of central London. The aim is to explore the form and role of this new urban axis and the way it has reshaped central London’s socio-spatial geography. Historical references and policy documents are used to analyse how planners, civic authorities and historians have considered integrating the north and south of the River Thames. For purposes of spatial and visual analysis, conventional survey maps, drawings, sketches, photographs, planning documents and development plans are employed. The research also involves site observation, visitor surveys and Millennium Bridge pedestrian counting data analysis to explore the usage pattern of the axial space and the improvement of pedestrian accessibility on both riversides. This project is supervised by Professor Matthew Gandy.
Anna Mayr
URBANgrad
Global cities discourse in urban transformations
Anna Mayr, a PhD candidate at the graduate school URBANgrad at the urban research center of TU Darmstadt, visited the Urban Laboratory in March 2012 and participated in the International Stadtkolloquium. Anna's research is on global cities discourse in urban transformations, taking a comparative view on Johannesburg and Delhi. Her doctoral research project compares local visions of becoming a world-class city in Delhi and Johannesburg.
Aditya Mohanty
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
The politics of governance amongst civil society organisations in Delhi
Aditya Mohanty, a PhD student from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, was awarded a Commonwealth Split-Site Doctoral Scholarship to spend a year (2011-12) at the UCL Urban Laboratory and Department of Geography under the supervision of Dr Pushpa Arabindoo. His research examines the politics of governance amongst civil society organisations in Delhi.
Professor Susan Parnell
University of Cape Town
Leverhulme Visiting Professor
Professor Susan Parnell from the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town joined the Urban Laboratory in January 2012 as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor. She worked with Professor Jenny Robinson in the context of the Urban Laboratory to support international urban teaching and research at UCL. Professor Parnell presented a Leverhulme public lecture in May entitled ‘The Crisis in Urban Studies: revolution, reform and reconstruction’. She also undertook teaching and other public lectures in the Geography Department and at the Development Planning Unit, including a Dialogues in Development seminar series at the DPU on African perspectives on urban development planning. She travelled to Manchester and Edinburgh to present further Leverhulme public lectures and build links between UCL, UCT and urban groupings in those Universities. Professor Parnell was also invited to contribute to a range of policy-related discussions, notably with the government Department for International Development.
Maider Uriarte Idiazabal
University of the Basque Country
Fringe landscapes
Maider Uriarte Idiazabal is a PhD candidate at the University of the Basque Country who visited the Urban Laboratory for 6 months, funded by the UPV-EHU. Her research on the urban fringe was supervised by Dr Ben Campkin and Professor Nick Gallent and was presented at Stadtkolloquium 2012.
Students
Current Urban Laboratory affiliated PhDs:
Claire Malaika Tunnacliffe (Bartlett School of Architecture)
Street Messages and Creative Place Making in West African Urbanism
This research explores the encounter with artistic interventions within rapidly changing urban spaces.
More specifically, I look at artistic movements, typically illegal but not always defined as such,
which challenge these spaces by creating a new raised awareness and understanding within
processes of urbanism by deconstructing street messages & creative place making in two west african cities:
Accra & Dakar.
Alexia Sawyer (Epidemiology & Public Health)
The interaction of the physical and social environment in the generation of physical activity
Both the physical environment and social environment are associated with physical activity levels in adults. Socioecological models of physical activity hypothesise that physical and social factors also have a synergistic effect, but there is a lack of research investigating this interactive influence. Given the recent interest in ‘active design’, this PhD investigates the role of the social environment in creating activity-promoting environments.
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.
Hiroaki Ohashi (Bartlett School of Planning)
Long after massive suburbanization in the rapid economic growth period, the suburban realm of Tokyo Prefecture has experienced new multifaceted suburban restructuring under the recent metropolitan transformation in both socio-demographic and economic terms. This suburban restructuring has caused different trajectories of suburban municipalities of Tokyo Prefecture depending on their geographical locations and past development paths, leading to spatial polarization and segregation within the suburban realm. The research will examine the suburban restructuring and clarify how urban policies should be formulated to achieve suburban sustainability and avert suburban decline or stagnation.
Alexandra Parsons (English)
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)
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)
Borderland Levant: Transformative urban geographies in Amman and Tel Aviv-Jaffa
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)
Being Iranian in London: nomad-sedentary micropolitics
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.
ThienVinh Nguyen (Geography)
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)
Skin Deep: The Material Site Specificity of Urban Surface Inscriptions
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.
Nicola Antaki (School of Architecture and DPU)
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.
Mohammed Bakkali (Institute of Environmental Design and Engineering)
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.
John Bingham-Hall (Space Syntax Laboratory)
The Blog and the Territory; a geography of place and hyperlocal media in three London neighborhoods
Funded by an EPSRC Studentship. This research looks into the cultural formation of cities and society, and addresses the critical contemporary debates around the internet, modern communication patterns and socio-urban form. The work asks: how is the geographical coverage of each hyperlocal channel derived from the physical and administrative boundaries present in the urban fabric? How, in turn, might the distribution of locally-specific information though a hyperlocal channel influence the way neihghbourhood boundaries are perceived and come to have a part in shaping the geography of urban places? What are the implications – when people living close by come to connect through mediated communications – for place-based social networks and individual access to localized social capital? As an outcome he aims to contribute both theoretically to the “smart cities” and society and technology studies debates, and also offer a resource for the growing practice of using the internet as part of community-building and placemaking.
Pei Sze Chow (Scandinavian Studies)
Representations of Urban Space and Architecture of the Øresund Region on Film and Television
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.
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)
Satire, Space, and Survival in Abuja, Nigeria
My thesis examines minor acts of dissent against city bureaucracy in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja. Its focus is on edicts articulated by city administration, translated on a capricious, unpredictable level by officialdom, and civil society’s response, in certain cases, through satiric attack. I study the way in which these encounters affect spatial control of the city. Finally, I observe how the city itself plays a role in this dynamic cluster, through the play, segregation, and structure of the built environment.
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.
Sandra Jasper (Bartlett School of Architecture and Geography)
Cyborg Imaginations: nature, technology, and urban space in West Berlin
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.
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.
Torsten Lange (Bartlett School of Architecture)
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.
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 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.
Sam Merrill (Geography)
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.
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.
Louis Moreno (Geography)
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?
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
Regner Ramos (Bartlett School of Architecture)
Revival of the Cyborg: Embodiment, Technology, and the Built Environment
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?
David Roberts (Bartlett School of Architecture)
Make Public: performing the pursuit of public housing
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: multi-scalar interpretation of disasters
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.
Myfanwy Taylor (Geography)
Nurturing London's diverse economies: re-thinking urban planning for diverse economies
Myfanwy's PhD is concerned with the role of planning in relation to economic development in London. Diversity is an important starting point for her work, in light of the tendency within urban theory, policy and practice to focus on a narrow sub-set of activities thought to be productive and generative of urban growth, in particular financial services, creative and high-tech industries. The role of economic diversity in fostering innovation and resilience in cities also means that it may become an increasingly important focus of urban policy and planning in times of economic crisis and austerity urbanism. Finely-grained, incremental approaches that work with existing economies may be needed in place of large-scale development schemes. One might also point to the increasing recognition of the importance of jobs and livelihoods, rather than GDP growth alone, at the same time as living costs rise and welfare support is withdrawn or reduced.
Ophelie Véron (Geography)
Deconstructing the Divided City: Ethnic, Social an Cultural Divisions in a Balkan Capital
Saffron Woodcraft (Anthropology)
Re-imagining the London Terrace: sustainability, community and the urban family in East London
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.
Recently completed PhDs
Katy Beinart (Bartlett School of Architecture)
Johan Andersson (Planning)
Consuming visibility: London’s new spaces of gay nightlife
Melanie Brickman Stynes (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
Karolina Kendall-Bush (Film Studies)
Moving city: the ambulatory urban experience in film, memory and walking tours
Regan Koch (Geography)
Eating in public: Re-imagining collective urban space
Leandro Minuchin (Geography)
Material imaginations: architecture, nature and politics in Buenos Aires, 1929-49
Brent Pilkey (Bartlett School of Architecture)
Queering heteronormativity at home in London
Valerie Viehoff (Geography)
Engineering modernity: the provision of water for Tangier
Tse-Hui Teh (Engineering)
Hydro-urbanism: reconfiguring the urban water-cycle
Astrid Wood (Geography)
Peripatetic planning: an exploration of South African policy mobilizers
Stamatis Zografos (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Architecture and fire: an archival approach to architectural conservation
