This book explores the relationship between architecture, government and fire. It posits that, through the question of fire-safety standardisation, building design comes to be both a problem for, and a tool of, government. Through a close study of fire-safety standards it demonstrates the shaping effect that architecture and the city have on the way we think about governing.Opening with an investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire and the political actors who sought to enrol it in...

In 1970, Richard Sennett published the groundbreaking The Uses of Disorder, arguing that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed. Fifty years later, Sennett returns to these still fertile ideas and, alongside campaigner and architect Pablo Sendra, sets out an agenda for the design and ethics of the Open City.The public spaces of our cities are under siege from planners, privatisation and increased surveillance. Our streets are becoming ever more lifeless and ord...

This book offers the first comprehensive overview of alternative approaches to architectural practice.At a time when many commentators are noting that alternative and richer approaches to architectural practice are required if the profession is to flourish, this book provides multiple examples from across the globe of how this has been achieved and how it might be achieved in the future.Particularly pertinent in the current economic climate, this book offers the reader new ...

First Published in 1998. The so-called 'cultural tum' in contemporary geography has brought new ways of thinking about geography and culture, taking cultural geography into exciting new terrain to produce new maps of space and place. Cultural Geography introduces culture from a geographical perspective, focusing on how cultures work in practice and looking at cultures embedded in real-life situations, as locatable, specific phenomena. Definitions of 'culture' are diverse and complex, and C...

Cultural geography is a major, vibrant subdiscipline of human geography. Cultural geographers have done some of the most important, exciting and thought-provokingly zesty work in human geography over the last half-century.This book exists to provide an introduction to the remarkably diverse, controversial, and sometimes-infuriating work of cultural geographers. The book outlines how cultural geography in its various forms provides a rich body of research about cultural practices an...

As buildings are responsible for fifty per cent of CO2 emissions, their design has become the focus of intense technical scrutiny. Knowing how to build more technically efficient, or ecologically responsible, buildings, and being able to assemble the social resources to do so, requires different forms of knowledge and practice. There is wide contestation over the optimal pathways to greener buildings design and great diversity in practices of sustainable architecture.This volume br...

Connects global migration with urban marginalization, exploring how “race” maps onto place across the globe, state, and streetIn this richly observed account of migrant shopkeepers in five cities in the United Kingdom, Suzanne Hall examines the brutal contradictions of sovereignty and capitalism in the formation of street livelihoods in the urban margins. Hall locates The Migrant’s Paradox on streets in the far-flung parts of de-industrialized peripheries,...

Non-Plan explores ways of involving people in the design of their environments - a goal which transgresses political categories of 'right' and 'left'. Attempts to circumvent planning bureaucracy and architectural inertia have ranged from free-market enterprise zones, to self-build housing, and from squatting to sophisticated technologies of prefabrication. Yet all have shared in a desire to let people shape the built environment they want to live and work in. How can buildings better refle...

This volume comprises a curated conversation between members of the Material Culture Section of University College London Anthropology. In laying out the state of play in the field, it challenges how the anthropology of material culture is being done and argues for new directions of enquiry and new methods of investigation. The contributors consider the ramifications of specific research methods and explore new methodological frameworks to address areas of human experience that require a n...

This book poses important philosophical questions about the aims, values and purposes of landscape architecture. The editors, highly regarded in their field, have drawn together a distinguished team of writers who provide unique individual perspectives on contemporary themes from a wide base of knowledge. Altogether, this key international study raises awareness of the landscape and encourages innovative ways of thinking about quality in design.

"This extraordinary collage of sophisticated essays on key terms in urban geography both provides a conventional basis to and recasts innovatively a burgeoning field in the discipline."- Roger Keil, co-Editor, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research"The city is an obvious but confounding object of geographical analysis; urban structure and life are shaped by an astounding array of social, economic, and political dynamics. This volume em...

City provides an accessible yet critical introduction to one of the key ideas in human geography. While most of the world’s population now lives in cities, the definition and theoretical specification of the city nonetheless remains elusive. In this extensively updated second edition, Phil Hubbard considers the different ways that the lived and messy realities of urban life have been approached by geographers, past and present. Situating these in the context of ongoing debates concerning g...