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Dr Clare Melhuish
Principal Research Fellow
UCL Urban Laboratory
Faculty of the Built Environment
- Joined UCL
- 1st Jul 2013
Research summary
My research focuses on the processes and impacts of large-scale urban developments in the UK and abroad, and conceptualisations of urban heritage within transformative processes of change in multicultural cities. I lead the Urban Laboratory's participation in the Curating the City research cluster in the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies at UCL (a partnership with the University of Gothenburg, Sweden). My background is transdisciplinary, in architectural history and criticism, anthropology, and human geography, drawing on ethnographic and visual research methods and writing to analyse architecture and the built environment as social and cultural setting. My particular areas of interest and expertise include Modern Movement and contemporary architecture, postcolonial urban aesthetics and heritage, and urban regeneration policy and practice, with specific area specialisations in the architecture and planning of the UK, France, Gulf and Caribbean.
Teaching summary
I offer PhD supervision in the anthropology of architecture, the built environment and urban processes; ethnography of architectural practice; urban and architectural visual and material culture; postcolonial urbanism; critical urban heritage; modern(ist) architecture and planning in London; French modern(ist) architecture and planning; Arab cities; Caribbean urbanism; universities and urban regeneration; education spaces and the city; participatory and community-led planning; anthropology of home and domestic space; ethnographic methodologies.
I am a co-convenor on the MSc Urban Studies programme in UCL Geography, and I also contribute dissertation supervision on that programme and on the MA in Architectural History and Theory in the Bartlett School of Architecture.
From 2019 I will co-convene a pair of new modules, Histories of Global London 1900 to the present 1 & 2, on the MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments course in the Bartlett School of Architecture, with Prof Ben Campkin. These two interlinked 15-credit modules assess urban heritage as a social, cultural and economic asset in complex multicultural/postcolonial cities. They position the capital’s global histories and population flows as central to a critical understanding of its urban heritage and futures.
I have taught for a number of years on the Ethnographic Ways of Knowing module in the MArch at University of Westminster, and prior to that have contributed to the PhD programme at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and offered a course on Architecture and Anthropology at the Architectural Association, London.
Education
- Brunel University
- Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy | 2008
- University College London
- Other higher degree, Master of Arts | 2001
- University of Cambridge
- First Degree, Bachelor of Arts | 1985