I am an interdisciplinary urban scholar and formerly practised as an architect in South Africa. My work engages with the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation. Through my ethnographic approach which spans globe, state and street, I highlight an interconnected political economy of displacement in which everyday bordering, urban dispossession, and casualisation overlap. From the grounded perspective of peripheral street economies, I’ve explored racialised frameworks of precarious citizenship and inequality and their contestations. I conceptualise the improvisational space of ‘edge territories’ where social sorting, cultural intermixtures and claims to difference are forged in my open-access book, The Migrant’s Paradox: Street Livelihoods and Marginal citizenship in Britain (Minnesota Press, 2021).
Over recent years I have engaged with feminist deconstructions of the economy to foreground a world of work in which cultural practices of exchange, coping and allegiance emerge. Key research projects include racial formations of colonisation and apartheid in Cape Town in the working life of refugee women; and the de-industrialisation of work from the vantage point of streets in urban peripheries in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester and Manchester. I’m compelled by thinking with differing geographies, including in collaborations with: Haneen Naamneh and Abaher El-Sakka on Covid, Care and the City in Palestine; and Huda Tayob and Thandi Loewenson on an open-access curriculum on ‘Race, Space and Architecture’. I have been part of the ‘Digital Makings of the City of Refuge’ project led by Myria Georgiou, and the ‘Beyond Banglatown’ project led by Claire Alexander. My work has been recognised by a Philip Leverhulme Prize, an ESRC Future Research Leaders award, and a Rome Scholarship in Architecture.
At the LSE I primarily teach in the Cities Programme on social and political formations of urban space, planning and design. I also convene an undergraduate module on ‘Racial Borderscapes’. I currently co-supervise PhD projects engaging with: the moral economy in Makka’s urban restructuring (Jawaher Al Sudairy); migrant solidarity in Istanbul (Helen MacKreath); Palestinian life and land in Jerusalem (Lucy Garbett); and reproductive injustice and racialised frictions (Babette May).
Selected Publications:
Books
2021 The Migrant’s Paradox: Street Livelihoods and Marginal Citizenship in Britain, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2017 Hall, S., and Burdett, R. (eds) The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City, London: Sage.
2012 City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary, London: Routledge.
Reviewed in: British Journal of Sociology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, Symbolic Interaction, Polis, LSE Review of Books (reprinted in the Digest of South African Architecture).
Edited volumes
2021 Guest Editor for ‘The Migrant’s Paradox Book Review Forum: Author to Author’, Society and Space, July.
2015 Editor, Special Issue on ‘Migration and Election 2015’, Discover Society, Issue 17, February.
2010 Hall, S., Dinardi, C. and Fernandez, M. (eds) Writing Cities, a graduate student publication, London: London School of Economics and Political Science (in collaboration with the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design and Harvard Law School).
Peer-reviewed journal articles
2022 Hall, S., Nyamnjoh, H. and L.R. Cirolia, ‘Apportioned City: Gendered delineations of asylum, work and violence in Cape Town’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 40(1) pp. 3-20.
2022 Nyamnjoh, H., Hall, S., and Cirolia, L. ‘Precarity, Permits and Prayers: Working practices of Congolese women in Cape Town’, Africa Spectrum, 57(1) pp. 30-49.
2022 Cirolia, L., Hall, S., and Nyamnjoh, H. ‘Remittance Micro-worlds and Migrant Infrastructure: Circulations, disruptions and the movement of money’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47(1) pp. 63-76.
2022 Georgiou, M., Hall, S. and Dajani, D. ‘Suspension: Disabling the City of Refuge?’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48(9) pp. 2206-2222.
2018 ‘Migrant Margins: The street life of discrimination’, The Sociological Review, 66(5), pp.968-983.
2017 ‘Mooring “Super-diversity” to a Brutal Migration Milieu’, commissioned for the 40th Anniversary Special Issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(9), pp. 1562-1573.
2017 Hall, S., King, J. and Finlay, R. ‘Migrant Infrastructure: Transaction economies in Birmingham and Leicester, UK’, Urban Studies, 54 (6), pp. 1311-1327. *Shortlisted for the Urban Studies Best Article Award.
2016 Hall, S. and Savage, M. ‘Animating the Urban Vortex: New sociological urgencies’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1) pp. 82-95.
2015 Hall, S., King, J. and Finlay, R. ‘Envisioning Migration: Drawing the infrastructure of Stapleton Road, Bristol’, New Diversities 17(2), pp. 59-72.
2015 ‘Migrant Urbanisms: Ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Sociology, 49(3), pp. 853-869.
2015 ‘Super-diverse Street: A ‘trans-ethnography’ across migrant localities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 22-37.
2013 ‘The Politics of Belonging’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol. 20, issue 1, Special Issue: Settling Differences in a Land of Strangers, pp. 46-53.
2011 High Street Adaptations: Ethnicity, independent retail practices and Localism in London’s urban margins Environment and Planning A, 43(11), pp. 2571-2588.
2010 Hall, S. and Datta, A. The Translocal Street: Shop signs and local multiculture along the Walworth Road, south London in R. Tavernor (guest editor), Theme Issue on ‘London 2000 – 2010’, in City, Culture and Society, 1(2), pp. 69-77.
2010 ‘Picturing Difference: Juxtaposition, collage and layering of a multi-ethnic street’, in Anthropology Matters, 12(1).
*Reprinted in Steven Vertovec (Editor) 2014, Migration and Diversity, Edward Elgar, London.
2009 ‘Being at Home: Space for belonging in a London caff’, in A. Datta (guest editor), Theme Issue on ‘Home, Migration and the City’, in Open House International, 34(3), pp. 81-87.
*Reprinted in Dick Hobbs (Editor) 2011, Ethnography in Context: The Urban Condition, vol. 1, London: SAGE.
2008 ‘Narrating the City: Diverse spaces of urban change’, in M. Mitchell (guest editor), Theme Issue on ‘The Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources’, in Open House International, 33(2), pp. 10-17.
Book chapters
2022 ‘Edge Syntax: Vocabularies for violent times’, in Ash Amin and Michele Lancione (eds), Grammars of the Urban Ground , Durham NC: Duke University Press, Chapter 11, pp. 221-239.
2018 Hall, S. ‘Interior City’, in Ricky Burdett and Philipp Rode (eds), Shaping Cities in an Urban Age, London: Phaidon, pp. 120-127.
2017 Hall, S., Finlay, R. and J. King, ‘The Migrant Street’, in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett (eds), The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City, SAGE, pp. 464-477.
2017 Hall, S and Burdett, R. ‘Urban Churn’, in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett (eds), The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City, SAGE, pp. 1-9.
2017 ‘The Street is not a Square: Urban politics from the margins’, in Yvonne Franz and Christiane Hintermann (eds), Unravelling Complexities: Understanding Public Spaces, ISR-Forschungsbericht, Vienna, pp. 33-42.
2015 ‘Designing Public Space in Austerity Britain’, in Juliet Odgers, Stephen Kite and Mhairi McVicar (eds), Economy and Architecture, Routledge, Oxon, pp. 226-236.
2014 Emotion, Location and Urban Regeneration: The resonance of marginalised cosmopolitanism in Emma Jackson and Hannah Jones (eds.), Emotion and Location: Stories of cosmopolitan belonging, Routledge, London, pp. 31-43.
2014 ‘Unrecognised Street: The social space of global change’, in Ryan Locke (ed.), Shifting from Objects to Places, Ax: Johnson Foundation, Stockholm, pp. 83-92.
Research Reports
2021 Alexander, C., Carey, S., Hall, S., and J. King, Revisiting Brick Lane: The Impact of COVID-19 on an Ethnically Diverse High Street, The Runnymede Trust.
2020 Alexander, C., Carrey, S., Lidher, S., Hall, S. and J. King, Beyond Banglatown: Continuity, Change and New Urban Economies in Brick Lane, The Runnymede Trust.
2018 King, J., and Hall, S., Roman-Velazquez, P, Fernandez, A., Mallins, J., Peluffo-Soneyra, S. and N. Perez (2018) ‘Socio-economic value at the Elephant & Castle’ London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Sociology, London, UK.
2017 High Streets for All, We Made That and LSE Cities, commissioned by the Mayor of London, Greater London Authority, September 2017.
2015 Hall, S., King, J. and R. Finlay (2015) City Street Data Profile on Ethnicity, Economy and Migration. Rookery Road, Birmingham, an ESRC report, LSE, December 2015.
- Stapleton Road, Bristol, an ESRC report, LSE, December 2015.
- Narborough Road, Leicester, an ESRC report, LSE, December 2015.
- Cheetham Hill, Manchester, an ESRC report, LSE, December 2015.
2014 London’s High Streets: The value of ethnically diverse micro-economies, submitted by invitation to Just Space, in response to the London Plan, March 2014.
2013 Future of London's Town Centres, submitted by invitation to the Planning Committee, London Assembly, 10 January 2013.
2012 London’s High Streets: Bringing empty shops back into use, submitted by invitation to the Economy Committee, London Assembly, 31 August 2012.
2010 Building Confidence: The emergence of the Bankside Urban Forest project, A Process Case Study, commissioned by the Council for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE).
Film and websites
2020 Tayob, H., Hall, S. and Loewenson, T. Race, Space and Architecture. An open-access website.
2015 Hall, S. and Yetton, S. Ordinary Streets. A film. LSE Cities.