What can the twisted histories of one Sri Lankan canal tell us? Sujit Sivasundaram on how the coastal environment of Colombo has been colonised and marketised, but in turn creates its own paths, through winds, waves and waters as well as unstable earth.
“By excavating the archives of urban hydrology in Chennai, we can see how the unequal production, impact, and representation of floods is embedded in property making and belonging.” Aditya Ramesh argues that responses to flood must go beyond engineering and planning.
How did Black activist organisations fight racism in the London suburbs? Daniel Frost finds that they did so – in districts like Croydon and Thornton Heath – through association and alliance with the struggles of inner-city locales.
Who owns the street? Bob Pierik and Gamze Saygi investigate spatial segregation by mapping everyday mobility in eighteenth-century Amsterdam.
This opening article in the ‘Whose Streets?’ feature considers what it means to live through the jarring collapse of public life in the midst of a pandemic and how this moment might stimulate new radical histories of the urban commons.
Amidst the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic it seems that virtual conferences are here to stay. In the first half of this post, PhD student Ed DeVane reflects on the experience of ‘doing’ an online event. The second half of this blog serves as a report on the proceedings of the ‘Building Welfare States’ conference, hosted (online) by Warwick University, 23rd – 25th September 2020.
What are the origins of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) hangover? David Anderson drives onto the QE2 bridge to analyse the legacies and landscapes of PFI.
