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London’s Urban Landscape

Another Way of Telling

1st Edition

London’s Urban Landscape is the first major study of a global city to adopt a materialist perspective and stress the significance of place and the built environment to the urban landscape. Inspired by phenomenological thinking, the book presents fine-grained ethnographies of the practices of everyday life in London. In doing so, it offers a unique perspective on the city that integrates ethnographies of daily life with an analysis of material culture. The first part of the book considers the residential sphere of urban life, discussing in detailed case studies ordinary residential streets, housing estates, suburbs, and London’s mobile “linear village” of houseboats. The second part of the book analyzes the public sphere, including ethnographies of markets, a park, the social rhythms of a taxi rank, and graffiti and street art.

London’s Urban Landscape returns us to the everyday lives of people and the manner in which they understand their lives. The embodied experience of the city is invoked in the descriptions of entangled relationships between people and places and the paths of movement between them.
 

444 pages | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2019

Free digital open access editions are available to download from UCL Press.

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology


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Table of Contents

"Introduction:
Materializing the urban

Christopher Tilley


PART I: THE DOMESTIC AND RESIDENTIAL SPHERE
1.Continuity and change in a central London Street
Ilaria Pulini
2. Towards a phenomenology of the concrete megastructure: space and perception at the Brunswick Centre, London
Clare Melhuish
3. Isolation: A walk through a west London housing estate
Dave Yates
4. The making of a suburb
David Jeevendrampillai
5. The Linear Village: Experience of continuous cruising on the London waterways
Titika Malkogeorgou
PART II: THE PUBLIC SPHERE
6. “We’re all mad down here”: liminality and the carnivalesque in Smithfield meat market
Caroline Wilson
7. Observation and Selection: objects and meaning in the Bermondsey Antiques Market
Dave Yates
8. Rank and File on the Harrington Road: stories of place and the place of stories
Alex Young
9. Holland Park: An elite London Landscape
Christopher Tilley
10. From pollution to purity: the transformation of graffiti and street art in London (2005-2017)
Rafael Schacter"

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