Urbanisation, Planning and Development

Staff involved: Dr Deen Sharp

Domicide is a three part video project (links here to videos One, Two and Three) exploring the impact of the destruction of cities and towns, architecture and cultural heritage sites following conflict. The film follows accounts of violence and conflict across different regions and moments in history.

The project was undertaken by Dr Ammar Azzouz, an analyst at Arup and an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Oxford. The video includes a series of interviews with Dr Deen Shariff Sharp (LSE), Dr Dacia Viejo Rose (University of Cambridge), Dr Joanna Kusiak (University of Cambridge) and Dr Martin Coward (University of Manchester), Sary A. Najib (Danish Refugee Council) and also two UK-based Syrians whose lives have been impacted by the war.

This research was possible through support from Community Engagement and Global Research collaborations at Arup. Over the past three years at Arup, Ammar has explored different themes related to the destruction and reconstruction of contested cities and his research has taken him to different countries as he was invited to present in the US, Morocco, Germany and Lebanon. Read more about Ammar's work. Film directed by Sophie Bernberg.

Staff involved: Kath Scanlon, Fanny Blanc and Beth Crankshaw 

We are looking at how the coronavirus pandemic, in combination with selective licensing of private landlords, welfare reforms and increased taxation, is affecting the behaviour of individual private landlords, and rents and conditions for tenants, at the lower end of the private rental market.  We will collect evidence from local case studies of three small areas in Bexley (Thamesmead), Redbridge (Ilford) and Southwark (Walworth & Old Kent Road) with selective licensing. We hope our findings help boroughs to improve conditions for both longer-term tenants and homeless households in TA, and help regulators design policies to incentivise landlords to serve this market and provide a good product. Read more.

Staff involved: Prof Christine Whitehead, Fanny Blanc, Beth Crankshaw 

LSE London is conducting research to review evidence on older homeowners’ physical property conditions and the health and societal impacts of disrepair. In particular, the literature review and data sources will clarify the extent to which older households face poor housing conditions, the evidence available about the nature of these physical conditions and the impact that poor housing conditions have on the affected households. Then, the quantitative data analysis of statistical datasets will help identify spatial variations and how these relate to dwelling age, type and tenure.   

Staff involved: Kath Scanlon, Prof Christine Whitehead 

In one of its latest reports, LSE London set out potential solutions to address the problem of mortgage prisoners, who are home owners who borrowed from lenders that are no longer active. 

Staff involved: Dr Nancy Holman, Fanny Blanc, Beth Crankshaw, Martina Rotolo 

The LSE Regional and Urban Planning Studies programme teamed up with LSE London to organise the Progressing Planning series of events on housing, sustainability and advocacy and publish blogs on any relevant issue which refers to planning. Progressing Planning aims to bring back together alumni from the MSc programme and pair them up with academics from LSE. Progressing Planning also supports Planning for Justice, a coalition of students and academics committed to anti-racist planning efforts.

Staff involved: Prof Christine Whitehead, Dr Nancy Holman, Kath Scanlon, Fanny Blanc, Beth Crankshaw, Martina Rotolo 

LSE London estimated the possible impact on the private rented sector of Covid-19 and rising unemployment; looking at the scale of the current problem, the immediate and longer-term consequences for evictions and homelessness, focusing on the case of London and England overall. The goal was to examine possible approaches that the government might put in place after the end of the moratorium, providing some indication of relative costs and benefits.

Staff involved: Christine Whitehead, Kath Scanlon, Fanny Blanc 

LSE London has been selected to lead a team of academic and professional specialists to undertake a project which evaluates the value, incidence and impact of developer contributions in Scotland. The team includes Prof Tony Crook of Sheffield University, John Boyle of Rettie and Co, Stefano Smith Planning, as well as Kathleen Scanlon and Christine Whitehead from LSE London.

Staff involved: Kath Scanlon

As part of the government’s loneliness strategy, LSE London, the Universities of Bristol, Lancaster and Northumbria are investigating whether residents of community-led housing (CLH) experience less loneliness than people living in conventional housing. The ten-month project, which started in late 2019, features in-depth case studies of five CLH communities in England including cohousing, CLTs, co-ops and self-build. The findings will help guide decisions about government support for community-led housing. Since lockdown restrictions have forced the team to suspend field visits until September.

At the end of February LSE London launched a survey which then included questions on how Community Led Housing residents are dealing with the Covid-19 crisis. The survey closed on April 24 and collected about 350 responses. Read more. 

Staff involved: Dr Alan Mace, Pablo Navarrete, Jacob Karlsson, Davide Zorloni, Dr Nancy Holman 

The research examines the impact of design on the perception and acceptability of density  on suburban development in London.  We tested 75 design features that may reduce the perception of density development and increase its acceptability.  Our work indicates that few treatments made medium density more acceptable and almost no treatments made higher density developments acceptable.  We also found that attitudinal factors matter, for example, suburban residents who accept that London has a housing crisis are more tolerant of housing developments at all densities (independent of design treatments).  We conclude therefore, that seeking a panacea of perfect design treatment to increase the acceptability without considering and working with reticence to accepting density will do little to alter public perceptions.  

Staff involved: Alan Mace, Jacob Karlsson, Nancy Holman, Davide Zorloni 

The green belt is a strongly applied planning policy, intended to limit a city's outward growth. Very little green belt land is released for new housing. Our study examines residential attitudes in Bristol and Newcastle offering a choice between green belt land release for housing vs. the alternative of housing built in proximity to their own homes.

Staff involved: Dr Meredith Whitten

Funding: ESRC  

Urban green space has risen up the agenda, buoyed by heightened awareness of nature’s role in addressing the two most urgent crises of the 21^st century: climate change and public health. A focus on green infrastructure has further elevated urban green space, connecting it with critical urban systems and services, such as urban cooling and flood prevention. Yet, instead of being managed as “critical scaffolding” in a multifunctional, interconnected system of green infrastructure, green spaces are conceptualised as an ornamental amenity detached from the city around them and delivered through a siloed approach pervasive across local authorities.  

This research examines explores strategic green space planning, which is critical for addressing issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss, by exploring whether green space governance is becoming transcending the local level to become more strategic. In particular, the research examines whether two recently created organisations – the GLA’s London Green Spaces Commission and London National Park City Foundation, a grassroots charity – are having an impact on policy and planning approaches to green-space planning. The aim is to establish if these organisations represent a shift towards more integrated, strategic thinking regarding conceptualising, providing and managing London’s green space as an integrated system of green infrastructure.  

Staff involved: Hyun Bang Shin

This project funded by the British Academy draws on methods of comparative urbanism and multi-sited ethnography, aiming to uncover the differentiated models of urban production in the Global China era and to generate new insights for inclusive approaches to urban space, nature and modernity. This international collaborative project critically examines the dynamics of urban political economy and contemporary urban living in a rapidly shifting geopolitical setting. By focusing on the local, national and global mechanisms and impacts of Chinese urban spectres, the project aims to deepen our understandings of interrelated urban future issues. Research will be conducted in London, Iskandar Malaysia, Beijing and Foshan.

Staff involved: Hyun Bang Shin

This project aims to analyse and compare how Asian cities have risen to become reference points for the development of cities in the Global South. The project is to examine the experience of building new cities branded as smart cities in Kuwait and the Philippines. The Kuwait study is funded by the Kuwait programme Research Grant from the LSE Middle East Centre, while the Philippines study is supported by the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre.

Staff involved: Deen Sharp

What do Kuwaitis (both citizens and non-citizens) think about, and how do they experience, climate change? This is the central motivating question of this project. Kuwait is proportionally one of the highest producers and consumers of hydrocarbons, at the same time, it is at the forefront of many of the weather extremes that climate change will produce. What Kuwaitis think about the threat climate change poses and, if and how, they seek to address it matters. Our current carbon-led social age is unsustainable. To sustain Kuwait, and modern social life, in these unsustainable times neither advances in science, technology, and/or technocratic planning are sufficient. Political, social, and cultural change and engagement is required. To be able to change it, however, you must first understand it.

This project is dedicated to illuminating the global linkages and local specificities around the socio-economic and ecological challenge that Kuwait faces in relation to climate change. It will emphasize the specific urban challenges for Kuwaitis in relation to climate change and efforts–or lack thereof– toward sustainable urbanization. The project is aimed at listening to and illuminating Kuwaitis’ own perspective on the impact, urgency, and importance of climate change in their daily lives.

Staff involved: Deen Sharp

In 2019, large-scale non-sectarian protests across Lebanon unsettled the political system and challenged the very understanding of Lebanese history, space and identity. This protest movement has provided the opportunity for a new generation in Lebanon to rewrite, and potentially heal, the bitterly disputed histories of the country. This project builds on the openings and momentum that this movement has created.

Lebanon Unsettled will establish, through student workshops and collaborative research, a publicly accessible archive of the recent urban protests in Lebanon. It will place the 2019 uprisings in their larger historical and geographical context. Through utilizing several new and enlarged archival collections, at USEK and beyond, this project will reread Lebanese history through urban revolt from the Ottoman era to the present day. By engaging scholars at LSE and across the scholarly community, this project puts urban protest in Lebanon into dialogue with protests in the Arab region but also across the globe from Asia to Latin America. 

Staff involved: Nancy Holman, Jacob Karlsson, Alan Mace and Pablo Navarrete.

Progress to solve the London housing crisis means using the highly constrained land supply to accommodate the high demand for new housing, i.e. increasing density. One solution is to accommodate the required housing supply in higher density developments in traditionally low-density suburban areas. However,  this strategy is likely to meet resistance from existing residents slowing the delivery of required housing solutions.

 In this research, we are interested in understanding the contribution of building design to making higher-density housing developments more acceptable to suburban residents. Our hypothesis is that where higher-density development echoes traditional suburban elements it will be more acceptable. The research uses an innovative image-based randomised controlled trial technique to collect residents' views on simulated multiple density scenarios. In this experiment, participants will rate images containing diverse simulated suburban development allowing us to tests the significance of diverse design elements  (such as heights, roof-lines and the delineation of public and private space). As a result, we will build a set of building design policy recommendations to make new housing development more acceptable.

Staff involved: Nancy Holman, Alan Mace and Pablo Navarrete, Davide Zorloni

This research explores how people’s perception of safety in urban spaces relates to ethnicity. Urban safety has been increasingly tied to racialized dialogues about immigration. As the Italian state has shifted away from more collective views of society to one of individual responsibility, "danger" has been racialized in terms of protecting ‘good citizens’ from the ‘bad’ ones who are often portrayed as "disorderly" minorities and immigrants.

Using the case of Milan, we assess the relative impact of different ethnic compositions on declared perceptions of safety in a diversity of urban landscapes such as squares, alleys, high streets. Our hypothesis is that native-born white populations perceive safety through a racialized framing that interacts with urban spaces. To test this, we employ an image-based randomised controlled trial approach that uses photo simulation techniques to manipulate ethnicity composition in white-dominated urban spaces.  

Staff involved: Alan Mace, Associate Professor of Planning & Fanny Blanc Policy Officer

The project will draw together academic and practice views on the purpose of the Metropolitan Green Belt.  The project promotes constructive debate on the purpose and future form of the Metropolitan Green Belt in the context of contemporary housing need and urban development planning in the region. It also asks how, in an era of localism, collaboration can effectively be pursued between different scales and authorities when reviewing the Metropolitan Green Belt.

We are seeking to identify the possibility of a more flexible approach to the Metropolitan Green Belt that supports a clear purpose but which recognises the need for flexibility given the complex and changing needs of London and the wider South East.

Visit the project website. 

Staff involved: Nancy Holman, Director of Planning Studies; Alessandra Mossa, Oram Fellow; Erica Pani, Assistant Professor in Local Economic Development and Planning 

For 30 years planning has been attacked both rhetorically and materially in England as governments have sought to promote economic deregulation over land use planning. Our paper examines two new moments of planning deregulation. These are the loosening of regulation around short-term letting (STL) in London and the new permitted development rights (PDR), which allow for office to residential conversion without the need for planning permission. Whilst these may be viewed as rather innocuous reforms on the surface, they directly and profoundly illustrate how planners are often trapped between their legal duty to promote public values as dictated by national planning policy and the government’s desire to deregulate. We argue that viewing these changes through a value-based approach to economy and regulation illuminates how multiple and complex local values and understandings of value shape planners’ strategies and actions and thus vary national policies in practice. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how planners have, at least, the opportunity to develop a critical voice and to advocate for policy interpretations that can help to create better outcomes for local communities.

Visit the project website. 

Staff involved: Austin Zeiderman

This research examines the work performed by “race” and “nature” in the context of large-scale technopolitical interventions. The geographical focus is Colombia’s Magdalena River, which is the primary waterway connecting the country’s Andean interior and Caribbean coast. The river has played an important role in the global histories of “nature” and “race,” and it is now the site of a major development project whose objective is to boost economic growth by resuscitating fluvial transport. Ethnographic fieldwork in the port-city of Barranquilla, in riverside towns, and on cargo vessels will reveal how this megaproject, which seeks to harness nature through technology in pursuit of progress, both reproduces and reconfigures Colombia’s racial and environmental orders.

Forthcoming publication: “In the Wake of Logistics: Situated Afterlives of Race and Labor on the Magdalena River.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

Staff involved: Austin Zeiderman

The collaboration will explore the varied relationships that exist between two different understandings of the word traffic. The first is vehicles moving on a road and the second is the trading in something illegal. The aim is to engage themes such as security, mobility, and infrastructure in the Americas from a novel perspective.

The participating units include the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, the Latin American and Caribbean Centre at LSE, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin, and the Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre Desarrollo at the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia).

Visit the project website.

Centner, Ryan (2013) ‘Distinguishing the right kind of city: contentious urban middle classes in Argentina, Brazil and Turkey’, In  T. Samara, S. He, and G. Chen (eds) Locating the Right to the City in the Global South (London: Routledge) 

Chant, Sylvia (2016) ‘Women, girls and world poverty: empowerment, equality or essentialism?’ International Development Planning Review, 38:1, 1-24 

Holman, Nancy, Alessandra Mossa and Erica Pani (2018) ‘Planning, value(s) an the market: an analytic for ‘what comes next?’’ Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 50, 3, 608-626

Jones, Gareth and Dennis Rodgers (2016) ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants? Anthropology and the city’, Etnofoor, 28, 2, 13-32

Lees, Loretta; Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto Morales (2016) Planetary Gentrification (Cambridge: Polity Press)

Mace, Alan (2018) ‘The Metropolitan Green Belt ‐ changing an institution’, Progress in Planning, 121, 1-28

Mercer, Claire (2017) ‘Landscapes of extended ruralisation: postcolonial suburbs in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42, 1, 72-83

Sanyal, Romola (2018) ‘Managing through ad hoc measures: Syrian refugees and the politics of waiting in Lebanon’ Political Geography 66, 67-75

Zeiderman, Austin (2016) Endangered city: the politics of security and risk in Bogotá (Durham: Duke University Press)

Cowan, Tom (2018) ‘The urban village, agrarian transformation, and rentier capitalism in Gurgaon, India’ Antipode 50, 5, 1244-1266. 

Evans, Alice (2014) ‘“Women can do what men can do”: the causes and consequences of flexibility in gender divisions of labour in Kitwe, Zambia’, Journal of Southern African Studies 40:5, 991-998. 

Lazzarini, Alicia H. 2017. “Gendered Labour, Migratory Labour: Reforming Sugar Regimes in Xinavane, Mozambique.” Journal of Southern African Studies 43(3): 605-623. DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2016.1197695

Luger, Jason and Julie Ren (eds.) (2017) Art and the city: Worlding the discussion through a critical artscape (Oxon: Routledge). 

Paccoud, Antoine and Alan Mace (2017) ‘Tenure change in London’s suburbs: Spreading gentrification or suburban upscaling?’ Urban Studies, 55, 6, 1313-1328.

Ryburn, Megan (2018) Uncertain citizenship: everyday practices of Bolivian migrants in Chile (Oakland, University of California Press). 

Sharp, Deen (2019) ‘Difference as Practice: Diffracting Geography and the Area Studies Turn,’ Progress in Human Geography 43, 5, pp.835-852.

Sundaresan, Jayaraj (2019) ‘Urban planning in vernacular governance: land use planning and violations in Bangalore, India’ Progress in Planning.

Whitten, Meredith (2020) 'Contesting Longstanding Conceptualisations of Urban Green Space'. In: Dempsey N., Dobson J. (eds) Naturally Challenged: Contested Perceptions and Practices in Urban Green Spaces. Cities and Nature. Springer, Cham. Read here. 

Antona, Laura (forthcoming) ‘Making hidden spaces visible: using drawing as a method to illuminate new geographies’ Area.

Birkinshaw, Matt (2016) ‘Politics, information technology and informal infrastructures in urban governance’, Economic and Political Weekly, 5, 57-63.

Gibbons, Andrea (2018) City of Segregation: 100 years of struggle for housing in Los Angeles, Verso. 

Koh, Sin Yee (2017) Race, education and citizenship: mobile Malaysians, British colonial legacies, and a culture of migration, Palgrave Macmillan, New York.  

Materka, Edyta (2017) Dystopia's Provocateurs: Peasants, State, and Informality in the Polish-German Borderlands, Indiana University Press (winner of Heldt Prize). 

Mohan, Taneesha  (2010) ‘Interrogating temporal and spatial negotiations: home as a gendered site for working women in Delhi”, S. Raju and K. Lahiri -Dutt (eds) Doing gender, doing geography: emerging research in India, pp152- 173, New Delhi: Routledge. 

Navarette, Pablo and Nicolas Navarrete (2017) ‘Unleashing waste-pickers’ potential: supporting recycling cooperatives in Santiago de Chile’, World Development, 101, 293-310. 

Pettit, Harry (2018) ‘Hopeful city: meritocracy and affect in Global Cairo’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Ramalho, J. (2018) 'Empowerment in the era of resilience building: gendered participation in community-based (disaster) risk management in the Philippines', International Development Planning Review. 

Suckling, Chris (2016) ‘Chain work: the cultivation of hierarchy in Sierra Leone’s cannabis economy’ Review of African Political Economy, 43, 148, 206-226.

Uribe, Simon (2017) Frontier Road: Power, History, and the Everyday State in the Colombian Amazon, Wiley Blackwell.  

Zhao, Yimin (2017) ‘Space as method’, City, 21, 2, 190-206.