Russell Hitchings

Russell began his academic journey studying for his BA in Geography at Cambridge University from 1994 to 1997. He first joined the UCL Geography community as an MSc student before going on to achieve his doctorate in 2004. His academic appointments included:

• 2023 - 2024: University College London: Professor of Human Geography
• 2018 - 2023: University College London: Associate Professor of Human Geography
• 2013 - 2018: University College London: Senior Lecturer in Human Geography
• 2012 - 2013: Wollongong University: Senior Visiting Research Fellow
• 2007 - 2013: University College London: Lecturer in Human Geography
• 2005 - 2007: University of Hull: RCUK Academic Fellow in Human Geography
• 2004 - 2005: University College London: ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Geography

Professor Hitchings was a dedicated educator who taught various modules, including:

• Methods in Human Geography (GEOG0018)
• Overseas Field Class (coursework based) (GEOG0045)
• Independent Study (GEOG0042)
• Social Science Research: Methodologies and Methods (GEOG0155)

Investigating the changing relationships between people and plants in domestic gardens.

In his own words:

"These interests first took shape during my doctoral work on how people live with plants in the domestic gardens of London. Domestic gardens were, at the time, being repositioned in terms of their media portrayal and, given that these spaces cover over three per cent of our national land mass, I reasoned that any corresponding changes in physical practice would likely have significant impacts in terms of issues ranging from social wellbeing and wildlife preservation to water consumption. With this in mind, this project deployed conceptual ideas about material culture and nonhuman agency across a series of London sites (the garden centre, the garden design studio and different types of domestic garden) to understand how and whether these changes were actually taking place. Through interview and ethnographic work, the study particularly considered whether the ways in which people related to 'living' plants were changing and why this was so as a means of stimulating debate about the roles that domestic gardens were, at the time, coming to assume."

Examining how office workers in London interact with outdoor environments.

In his own words:

"Since then I have become interested in exploring the value of cultural studies of ambient experience through a further grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. People in the west now spend over ninety per cent of their time within buildings that are increasingly air conditioned and this trend is troubling in terms that range from resource consumption to social sustainability. With this in mind, this second project took a sample of professional office workers in the city of London, as those at the forefront of a wider movement towards sanitised indoor existences, and tracked their activities as they passed through the changing outdoor conditions presented by one calendar year. In the context of a need to understand the mundane adaptations entrained by global climate change and the means by which we might steer cities toward more sustainable futures, this study considered how a societal indifference to the seasons, the weather, and other aspects of immediate climatic change might be practically engineered and subjectively experienced."

Studying how older adults manage their winter warmth.

In his own words:

"There are many reasons to be interested in how older people organise their winter warmth within ageing societies such as ours. Winter mortality rates are highest amongst this group and several initiatives have been set up to alleviate the fuel poverty some older people are prone to experience. Yet many older people are also wealthier than ever and this leads to alternative environmental anxieties about how their home heating could exacerbate wider climatic changes. By straddling these two issues, this third project in collaboration with Rosie Day (Birmingham) began with the contention that existing studies of older person winter adaptation were relatively neglectful of evolving social conventions of keeping warm at home. We argued that it was only through close consideration of how these changes are lived out that we will fully understand the reasons why older people are inclined to organise their winter experience in some ways instead of others and what this means for positive intervention. By applying a novel approach to the evolution of personal practice to a stratified sample of older people in UK, this project aimed to address this issue and thereby uncover policy relevant and academically instructive insights about this increasingly important sector."

Understanding preferences and experiences of runners in different environments.

In his own words:

"This project, in collaboration with Alan Latham (UCL geography) and Courtney Kipps (UCL Surgery and Interventional Science), sought to understand how recreational runners come to find themselves running either indoors on treadmills or outside along streets or in parks. By spending time with those who generally ran in one or other of these two environments and talking with them about the physical experiences involved we sought to generate fresh suggestions about the effective promotion of public health through regular exercise."

Exploring cleanliness norms at music festivals and implications for sustainable water use.

In his own words

"This project in collaboration with Alison Browne (Manchester) and Tullia Jack (Lund) also focussed on physical experience. This time, however, the spotlight was on dirt at summer music festivals in the UK. More specifically, we were interested in whether and how festival goers develop new cleanliness norms and ways of relating to being ‘dirty’ when at these festivals and what that tells us about the wider establishment (and potential unsettling) of different ways of using water in everyday life. Framing the festival as a naturally occurring ‘practice disruption’, our ambition was to extract wider lessons about how more or less sustainable ways of living with dirt come about and about how this process may be influenced to positive effect."

Investigating changes in leisure mobility among retirees.

In his own words:

Most recently I have joined a team of academics across the UK and France aiming to develop an original line of research focussed on how energy demand can be usefully studied as an outcome of wider processes of social change. For more information on this see the ‘Demand Centre’ website. My role within the centre is to jointly lead a collaborative project seeking to understand how post-retirement leisure mobility may be changing in the UK. The core question we ask here is: how have certain policies and pressures led to the current situation and what does that tell us about the future of post-retirement mobility?"

Examining cultural aspects of thermal comfort in Qatar.

In his own words

"Together with academics from Australia and Singapore, this project developed my interest in how 'thermal comfort' and the energy demand associated with this idea can be examined through a cultural lens. Through a series of different research activities, and funded by the Qatari National Research Fund, we have been examining the link between ideas of social and cultural 'progress' and the provision of air-conditioning in Qatar. The broader aim is to see what such an exercise reveals about whether alternative, less energy consumptive, answers to the question of human comfort may yet be possible in this context. My own work has particularly sought to explore this by comparing how different social groups (older Qataris, younger Qataris, ex-pat residents) talk and think about air-conditioning in their everyday lives."

“"We ended the fieldwork for this project with a policy workshop hosted at UCL. This provided policymakers from across government departments (DECC, DEFRA), the energy sector (EDF and EON), and campaigning groups (Help the Aged, Attend Rights to Warmth) with the opportunity to discuss how they might work together to tackle the issues identified in our study (reluctance to respond to campaigns targeted at older people, the social stigma of particular energy-saving actions etc.). This also led to various further policymakers requesting the report we went on to write upon completion of our analysis. Indeed we used the feedback from this policy event to ensure our recommendations were practicable and sensitive to the wider policy context at that time. Since then I have been involved in various further knowledge exchange activities around the topic of ‘thermal comfort’, most notably a policy workshop hosted at UCL with colleagues at Lancaster University, and civil servants at DECC on the matter of ‘thermal comfort standards’, how they evolve, and how they may be encouraged to take more sustainable paths."

“"The end of this project was marked by a tailored policy report being distributed to identified stakeholders. I also wrote a short opinion piece for the journal ‘GreenSpaces’ which targets those working in city green space policy. As a result of this work, I was asked to give expert advice at a Corporation of London strategy meeting and a keynote speech at the annual conference of their ‘green spaces’ team. As a consequence, they have since piloted an innovative mobile phone text-based service that alerts city workers to the potential benefits of spending time outside at particular points in the year. One paper from this project has also since been selected by the European Commission’s environmental news service to be distributed to policymakers in all member countries."

• Antonia Hodgson - Weather experience and recreational running in London
• Yaqian Zhang - Community gardens as social infrastructure in Shanghai
• Hao Wu - Social media and gay life online in Chengdu
• Wanhao Zhang - Intergenerational negotiation around air-conditioning in Shenzhen
• Helene Shultze - Cultures and practices of seed sharing in London
• Xiaoxue Chen - Nature and technology in everyday life in China
• Yidan Cao - Square dancing in public space in Shanghai
• Catherine Willan, 2016-2019: Energy targets in the Construction Industry
• James Hudson, 2015-2019: Older collaborative housing communities in Berlin
• Michael Nattrass, 2015-2019: Cycling policy and cycling practice in the UK.
• Faye Wade, 2012-2016: An ethnographic approach to boiler installation in UK homes
• Anna Plyushteva, 2011-2016: City mega projects and new modes of commuting in Sofia
• Rebecca Collins, 2009-2013: Young people and sustainable consumption through divestment
• Regan Koch, 2009-2013: Eating in public and ways of making cities more hospitable