Abstract
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. Edited by Christopher Tilley, the volume is inspired by phenomenological thinking and presents fine-grained ethnographies of the practices of everyday life in London. In doing so, it charts a unique perspective on the city that integrates ethnographies of daily life with an analysis of material culture. The first part of the volume considers the residential sphere of urban life, discussing in detailed case studies ordinary residential streets, housing estates, suburbia and London’s mobile ‘linear village’ of houseboats. The second part analyses 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 deeply sensuous character of the embodied experience of the city is invoked in the thick descriptions of entangled relationships between people and places, and the paths of movement between them. What stories do door bells and house facades tell us about contemporary life in a Victorian terrace? How do antiques acquire value and significance in a market? How does living in a concrete megastructure relate to the lives of the people who dwell there? These and a host of other questions are addressed in this fascinating book that will appeal widely to all readers interested in London or contemporary urban life.
Highlights
Emphasising the role and significance of material forms in constituting social lives is an alternative perspective that arises directly from Bourdieu’s work and is emphasised in this book. Such a perspective has provided inspiration for many material culture studies in anthropology; we study the intimate details of people’s lives, the wider landscapes that they inhabit, the manner in which they appropriate, in a consumer society, an alienated system of commodities, select and personalise them and make them their own in their dress, the furnishing and provisioning of the home, or in terms of the contents of their fridges, the way they cook, what they store in the attic or throw away, how they tend their gardens, and so on
There is no prospect or possibility of producing an ethnography of the city in its totality, but we may hope to provide it by considering in detail the constellation of places within it that make it up
Through telling the story of the site, either through newly discovered or revived histories or through generating myths and legends, people grow familiar with the site, connect to it and generate strong relations to it; in a sense, they have hafted themselves to the landscape and developed a sense of belonging which is intimately tied to the landscape
Summary
Lane from north, before 1881. The brick wall enclosed the rear gardens of houses facing High Street Kensington. The small cottage at the bottom, used as a stable or a warehouse, was later incorporated into the northern sector of the Cheniston Gardens development. © RBKC Local Studies & Archives department
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