Themes

COVID-19 and density

COVID-19 had an immediate impact on cities and urban life, but how have people experienced and perceived density and crowds as the pandemic unfolded? How have different city and national governments sought to manage the pandemic? And what might be lessons for the longer-term consequences for cities? The project is examining these questions in research in cities across the world, from the UK to Southeast Asia. This includes the following open access papers:

Chen, H., McFarlane, C., & Tripathy, P. (2023) ‘Density and pandemic urbanism: Exposure and networked density in Manila and Taipei’. Urban Studies (https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1755353/density-and-pandemic-urbanism-exposure-and-networked-density-in-manila-and-taipei)

Joiner, A., McFarlane, C., Rella, L., & Uriarte-Ruiz, M. (2022) ‘Problematising density: COVID-19, the crowd, and urban life. Social and Cultural Geography, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2022.2143879

McFarlane, C. (2021) ‘Repopulating density: COVID-19 and the politics of urban value’. Urban Studies, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00420980211014810

This paper written as part of a larger collective also examines density and the pandemic alongside a set of other key urban themes: Guma, P., Hodson, M., Lockhart, A., Marvin, S., McFarlane, C., McGuirk, P. McMeekin, A., Ortiz, C., Simone, A., Wiig, A. (2023). Post-Pandemic Cities: An Urban Lexicon of Accelerations/Decelerations. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 48(3), 452-473. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12607

Waste and the urban condition

Almost 25% of the 2.6 billion people lacking adequate sanitation live in urban environments, usually in informal neighbourhoods, and that proportion is growing. Residents in dense informal neighbourhoods often enhance precarious infrastructure over time by individually or collectively building or maintaining provisions, or using forms of social reciprocity between neighbours, friends and family in providing services, or by drawing on forms of vote-bank patronage with political parties, often shaped by religion, class, gender and caste. The relations between density and waste can be fundamental to both everyday life, health and well-being, and to urban politics. In DenCity, we examine how different urbanites experience and perceive the relations between waste and density, the inequalities that shape those geographies, and the possibilities for safer, healthier urbanisms that are genuinely inclusive of different groups. This has included research in several cities, and in Mumbai in particular. Available open access on this theme is a monograph and a paper:

McFarlane, C. (2023). Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife. London: Verso (https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1728967/waste-and-the-city-the-crisis-of-sanitation-and-the-right-to-citylife)

Tripathy, P., & McFarlane, C. (2022) ‘Perceptions of atmosphere: air, waste, and narratives of life and work in Mumbai’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 40(4), 664-682. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221110574

Density and value

Density is at the centre of urban change, and is often politicised. Building on Geographical and Urban scholarship, this work sets out a critical approach to understanding density through a focus on value. We review key approaches to density and show that while value is often at stake in efforts to manage, change, defend, or promote densities of different kinds, it has rarely been the explicit focus of critical research on density. We address this by outlining how density propositions entail a politics of value through three inter-related urban domains: speculation, regulation, and the popular, followed by consequences for future research.

Habermehl, V., & McFarlane, C. (2023) ‘Density as a politics of value: regulation, speculation, and popular urbanism’. Progress in Human Geography, https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325231189824

McFarlane, C. (2021) ‘Future Densities: Knowledge, Politics and Remaking the City’. In A. Amin, & M. Lancione (Eds.), Grammars of the Urban Ground. Duke University Press.

Chen, H., Chowdhury, R., McFarlane, C., & Tripathy, P. (2020). Introduction: rethinking urban density. Urban Geography, 41(10), 1241-1246. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2020.1854531

McFarlane, C. (2020) ‘The Force of Density: political crowding and the city.’ Urban Geography, 41, 10, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02723638.2020.1837527?journalCode=rurb20

This short commentary examines some of these questions in relation to the compact city: McFarlane, C. (2023) ‘Density and the Compact City.’ Dialogues in Human Geography. 13:1, 35-38.

Density and fragments

Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change. Fragments of the City is a book that connects the experience of everyday fragments on the margins of the city to urban densities, social infrastructures, and political action. How does the city appear when we look at it through its fragments? How are densities shaped by living with fragments, and how does the work of maintaining and politicising fragments reshape densities? The book explores infrastructure in Mumbai, Kampala, and Cape Town; artistic montages in Los Angeles and Dakar; refugee struggles in Berlin; and the repurposing of fragments in Hong Kong and New York. Fragments surface as material things, as forms of knowledge, as writing strategies. They are used in efforts to politicize the city and in urban writing to capture life and change in the world’s major cities. Fragments of the City surveys the role of fragments in how urban worlds are understood, revealed, written, and changed.

McFarlane, C. (2021) Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds. University of California Press (https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1120994)

Housing and dense living

This theme examines housing in both dense neighbourhoods and ‘overcrowded’ homes. The political economies and cultural politics of the city have long left marginalised residents in sub-standard homes, often stigmatised in ‘crowded’ domestic spaces. In Hong Kong, where we have conducted some of this work, sharp urban inequalities caused in part by the removal of rent control and intense speculation on property have led to hyper-dense housing patterns operated by logics of subdivision that are often rendered invisible. This could be seen as a spatial product of the speculation. During the pandemic, these inequalities in cities across the world were exposed through higher levels of infection, leading to debate about the future of housing and its place in the larger urban question. See for example:

Chen, H., & McFarlane, C. (2023) Density and precarious housing: Overcrowding, sensorial urbanism, and intervention in Hong Kong. Housing Studies (https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1874913)

McFarlane, C. (2020) ‘De/re-densification: a relational geography of urban density.’ City 24(1-2): 314-324 (https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1272928/).

Density on the move

Density and crowds are formed through all kinds of mobilities, including urban transit systems. Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, for example, is one of the busiest train stations in the world and a main hub used by 3.7 million people per day. Through interviews with commuters and station users, the DenCity project has examined how people perceive the ‘crowd’ at this vital interchange. This work has been published in an open access paper in Urban Studies:

Chowdhury, R. and McFarlane, C. (2021) ‘The crowd and citylife: materiality, negotiation and inclusivity at Tokyo’s train stations. Urban Studies, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00420980211007841

Urban markets

Street vending has been a critical means for urban grassroots livelihoods and urban economies. We have examined street markets in Hong Kong and Mumbai, exploring the legal-sensorial nexus where street vendors develop and manage market exchange intensity and forms of street vending and hawking. By collecting the daily encounters of the material, the atmospheric, and the socio-economic, this work aims to understand how sensorial densities work at the intersections of class, caste, gender, and race.