Cities are now where more than half of humanity live and urban processes affect the whole globe. The pace of change and the complexity of urban lives is breathtaking. As such cities represent a crucial site to explore social and cultural change, and offer a powerful lens through which to explore questions which are central to the research agenda of CRESC. Cities concentrate difference, diversity and inequality where differences and divisions are manifest in material, social and symbolic ways. Urban politics and urban governance provide a window onto understanding wider national and international political and policy making processes. The uneven effects of capitalist processes are graphically visible in the sites and spaces of the city, while the unsustainability of growth poses testing questions to urban policy makers and political actors. 

At a different level cities offer a key site for exploring the part that social methods play in actively shaping the world and the relations that we seek to describe and understand, providing new challenges for our attempts to understand and explain socio-cultural change. How we think about, and understand cities has implications for the strategies we deploy and the interventions that are made to ‘solve’ the problem identified and perceived. This, in turn, relates to the different technological, economic and material solutions that are seen as relevant at particular historical moments and at particular sites and places.

Our new focus on Urban Experiments thus looks at the ways in which research across CRESC draws on the dynamics of urban change to address our key research questions.  The focus on cities as experimental spaces for research integrates work from across our various themes on (a) how social differences and inequalities are perceived, made public and re-ordered, and (b) the role of expert knowledges in mediating social change by attending to cultures, materialities, and mobilities/migration.

In the forthcoming year CRESC’s Urban Experiments will also seek to make strong links with the other Centres in the UK and internationally with a specific focus on cities. Our aim will be to develop our existing international networks and to direct attention to the ways in which urban experience and urban research are key sites for the articulation of contemporary social science research agendas.

Our three provisional research clusters

City Cultures 

Urban culture is commonly used to draw attention to those aspects of city life that give it its distinct flavor and sensibility, a specific sense of place, an atmosphere, which might define one city as different from another, or which define the city in ways which are not reducible to the local economy or even the social mix of the people who live there.  Urban cultures also refers to cultural practices performed in the  spaces of  the city- from music to art, theatre to film, as well as to those practices which relate to particular ethnic/cultural groups, be they religious or secular. Spaces and sites associated with urban cultural practices are enacted in both formal and informal ways, in spaces of the everyday or event spaces, visible in public spaces or hidden in marginal urban sites.  Finally, urban cultures are also connected to the economy and commerce through different forms of commodification and cultural industries. CRESC research on cities touches on many of these different aspects of urban cultures.

Illustrative Projects

• Dodsworth and Watson:  Religious Cultures in London’s East End
• Rees-Leahy:   Private Property and ‘National Heritage’: Art, Tax and the State
• Banks:  Craft Labour and the Creative Industries

City Materialities

Typically in urban research the materiality of the city, the buildings, the infrastructure, the plethora of objects to be found in the street, the drains and pipes and all the other things that together make up the city, are figured as inert. Particularly for the engineer, constructing the city out of steel and pipes, wires, and concrete, but also for the planner and urban designer, ‘man’, as it were, makes the city, according to ‘his’ will. For the planner or urban designer  the material city has been conceived as connected to the social through its potential to be manipulated, formed and reformed according to preconceived notions of the better good, meeting social needs and objectives as well as material ones. 

However if we think of the social as an aggregation of individuals, then perhaps the city is no more than an aggregation of things - buildings, pipes, roads, signs, statues, parks, and canals - and their relations with people and animals.  If so it is an aggregation that is always elusive for despite methods such as maps, surveys, photographs, and plans, 'it' cannot be visibly captured.  But/and if the small always holds the key to the big , then perhaps we can see the city through an ordinary, everyday material object such as the park bench, allotment garden or lamp post. Rather than simplification, here we might  find in such small entities a city richer in difference and complexity than the aggregate that we can only observe from far away.

Methodologically, what does it mean to know the city through its objects and what is the relation between this method and the city we seek to know?  Rather than seeing objects and materials as inert, our interest in CRESC Urban Experiments is to conceive of urban objects as active forces in social engineering projects, assembling human relations and materialising markets. We are interested in how city objects assemble, materialise and act back upon social, spatial and economic relations of the city, and in the transformative potential of different materials and technologies deployed in urban spaces.

Illustrative Projects 

• Carter, Dodsworth, Ruppert and Watson:  City Objects and Urban material forms: a different way of indexing urban cultures, publics and politics (working title).
• Evans : 2013 and Beyond: Materialising an Olympic Legacy in the East end of London
• Harvey and Knox: Roads to Development: Uneven Modernities and the Politics of Knowledge.  An Ethnography of Road Building in Peru.
• Knox: Digital models and their publics- research on the construction and use of digital models in projects of urban change. 

City Mobilities

The idea of cities as a site of mobility draws attention to the mobility of people, of  feelings and affect, of vehicles and capital, of commodities, of images and objects. It also figures the city as a space of bustle and stimulation across time and space and as a space of flows, networks and connections.  In an era of ever faster processes of globalization and global flows, the transnational migrations and movements of people constitute cities as spaces of multi -cultures and heterogeneity. People are connected in a multiplicity of ways with their place of origin and their place of residence, networked across time and space in changing and shifting patterns. CRESC Urban experiments explores city mobilities in several of its projects.

Illustrative Projects

• Ward:  Imagining urban futures: the mobilisation and circulation of urban policies in the twenty first century.
• Watson and Saha ( non CRESC): Everyday multicultures and spaces of suburban London.
• Gillespie: Tuning in: Diasporic Contact Zones at BBC World Service
• Kaika, Swyngedouw, Watson and Keith (COMPAS, Oxford):  eco-cities project exploring these as exemplary instances of contemporary public policy initiatives, with a focus on the diverse expertises and models of economic and social change that have emerged in Asia, Europe and the UK.
• Glick Schiller:  The relationship between the migrant and the city