British Cities Research Articles

In Desperate Need: Public Sanitation in Contemporary London

AbstractThere has been a collapse in the number of public toilets in UK cities. Austerity cuts, a lack of legal requirements, and a failure to prioritise sanitation has led to significant health and equality impacts. Research on public toilets in the Global North focuses on their historical production, contemporary design, or on the experience of particular social groups, with less work bringing governance and social experience together. We argue for a focus on the “ungoverning” of sanitation, on how residents “learn” sanitation in the city, and on the need for radical transformation in sanitation approaches and delivery. Drawing on research in London, we set out the challenges for public toilet provision and make a case for a sanitation revolution in British cities. We focus on the experience of delivery drivers and residents with health concerns in order to illustrate the inequalities in provision and their consequences.

The relationship between social order and crime in Nottingham, England

AbstractStudies of organized crime in cities have traditionally concentrated on the global south or ethnic enclaves and traditional mafia territories within the global north. Here this study turns its attention to governance-type organized crime in the English city of Nottingham, where the main protagonists are white and British born. It investigates whether such a gang can govern communities by reducing ordinary crimes. We conduct in-depth interviews with local officials and analyze a novel dataset of the public’s phone calls to the Nottingham police from 2012 to 2019, encompassing spatio-temporal information and police-labeled crime types. We identify Nottingham’s ward of Bestwood as the site of an entrenched, governance-type organized crime group, whereas its most similar ward, Bulwell, is not. Further comparative analyses indicate that certain ordinary crime rates are significantly lower in Bestwood than in Bulwell. We conclude that governance-type organized crime can emerge in a country with a high capacity to police and in a nonimmigrant, less affluent community. Our findings suggest that traditional explanations of the emergence of criminal governance in cities need to be revisited.

‘Road runners’ and Fanta: Intersectional cultural food in/security among Zimbabwean migrants living in UK cities

The incidence of food insecurity among migrant and diasporic communities living in rich global North cities is growing. A key dimension of this is the absence of culturally appropriate food which is integral to both feeding and nourishing mobile bodies. In this paper, we deploy an intersectional approach to cultural food in/security to explore the foodscapes of Zimbabwean communities living in British cities. We unpack how and why food cultures are critical in shaping migrant experiences of food in/security and the diversification of food cultures over time and place and mediated by intersectional subjectivities. We map local, regional and transnational food supply chains as migrants seek to redress issues of access and availability to source foods familiar to them to maintain the cultural significance of food and food practices within families and diaspora communities.

Orations and the Didactic Motifs of Elizabethan Progresses

Memorializing Queen Elizabeth’s progresses and their pageantry from the middle-to-late sixteenth through the early seventeenth centuries requires that we examine how her royalty was represented in Medievalist art and prose. Ceremonial displays of Elizabeth’s aristocratic nobility included prayers, sermons, tribute tracts and ballads, sonnets, verse poems, personal letters, and brilliant speeches just to name a few of the major literary mediums. As Roy Strong wrote about in The Cult of Elizabeth, images were meant to be read, and the inscriptions placed on miniatures and portraits emphasized the significance of details in paintings. It became clear through the diverse speeches given at the Queen’s hosted lodgings at various English cities that evoking as much symbolism one could in writing and reading would endear Elizabeth’s pleasure, but it was not the only way of getting the Queen’s attention. Gift-giving was a favorite practice. As such, creative symbolism and objects of devotion needed other means of demonstration, and this had especially shown up in literary motifs and mythology. In this paper, I argue that historians must recognize the ways orations and speeches worked as publicized letters during the pageantry of Elizabeth, making her court’s progresses a means of political, social, and religious negotiations with representations of empire. These verbal acts of negotiation supplanted private relationships that predominated pre-Reformation England and made Elizabeth’s Tudor, imperial authority over church and state more visceral in uniting ceremonial practices and promoting England.

Culture-Led Regeneration in the UK——A Case Study on Hull

Culture-led regeneration is an important development of cultural policy in recent years. This paper takes the city of Hull, which was selected as a British cultural city in 2017, and discusses the strategy and implementation process of cultural regeneration. Analyzes the cultural activities of Hull City, and assess its impact on economic growth, social solidarity, and resident well-being. The study found that cultural regeneration significantly promoted the local economy, enhanced community cohesion, and improved the quality of life of the residents. However, Hull City also faces challenges in resource allocation and long-term sustainability. The conclusions of this paper show that cultural regeneration has reference value for other cities intentionally implementing similar strategies and helps to achieve sustainable and inclusive urban development.

The Concept of Political Rights of an Individual under the Law of Medieval English Cities in the 11th to the 14th Century

The Concept of Political Rights of an Individual under the Law of Medieval English Cities in the 11th to the 14th Century

Speeding up and slowing down: managing migrant children’s schooling and resettlement in an English city

ABSTRACT There is an expectation that schools generate certainty in migrant children’s lives in the processes of resettlement in host communities. However, there is also a critical body of literature highlighting a tension between an inflexible system of mass compulsory schooling that predominates in most affluent “destination” countries and the complex multi-dimensional nature of migrant children’s lives. In this paper, we examine the relationship between migrant children settling in an English city and their schooling, drawing on empirical data from two schools and a youth organization. Our empirical themes focus on the management of migrant children’s pace of learning and integration. Drawing on data from two English city schools we highlight factors that both “speed up” and “slow down” processes of resettlement.

Benefits of population-level interventions for dementia risk factors: an economic modelling study for England

Individual-level interventions for dementia risk factors could reduce costs associated with dementia and some are cost-effective. We aimed to estimate the cost-effectiveness of population-level interventions for tackling dementia risk factors. In this economic modelling study, we included recommended population-based interventions from a previously published review article for which there was consistent and robust evidence of effectiveness in tackling a dementia risk factor (tobacco smoking, excess alcohol use, hypertension, obesity, air pollution, and head injury). We only included interventions if they had not been introduced in England or were in place but could be extended. The interventions studied were increases in tobacco pricing, minimum pricing for alcohol, raising alcohol price, salt reduction policies, sugar reduction policies, low emission zones, and compulsory helmet use for cycling by children (aged 5-18years). We used published intervention effect sizes and relative risks for each risk factor and a Markov model to estimate progression to dementia in populations with and without the intervention, looking at lifetime risk, in the population of England. We estimated that reductions in excess alcohol use through minimum unit pricing would lead to cost-savings of £280million and 4767 quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained over an indefinite succession of age cohorts. Reformulation of food products to reduce salt would lead to cost-savings of £2·4billion and 39 433QALYs gained and reformulation to reduce sugar would lead to cost-savings of £1·046billion and 17 985QALYs gained. Reducing dementia risk from air pollution by introducing low emission zones in English cities with a population of 100 000or more (that do not already impose restrictions) would lead to £260million cost-savings and 5119QALYs gained. Raising cigarette prices by 10% to reduce dementia risk from smoking would lead to 2277QALYs gained and cost-savings of £157million. Making bicycle helmets compulsory for children (aged 5-18years) to reduce dementia risk from head injury would lead to cost-savings of £91million and 1554QALYs gained. Population-level interventions could help tackle life course dementia risk and save costs. UK National Institute for Health and Care Research Three Schools dementia research programme.

Solidarity, Worldmaking and Inter-Connected Geographies of Authoritarianism: Trade Unions and the Multiple Trajectories of Chile Solidarity

This paper intervenes in debates around the relationship between solidarity and worldmaking in the context of decolonisation and the Cold War. While work on worldmaking has drawn attention to key aspects of solidarity formation in this context (e.g. Getachew, 2019; Kelley, 2019), to date it has offered a limited engagement with the role of labour in the articulation of such solidarities. Here, we demonstrate how such a focus on worldmaking can help to highlight the multiple political trajectories that have been shaped through articulations between Chile solidarity and labour internationalism. Drawing on recent work on the Chilean Left, which stresses such multiple trajectories (eg Schlotterbeck, 2017), we provide three engagements with the opposition to authoritarian politics in different geographical contexts, foregrounding the role of exiled trade unionists involved in the Committee of the Exterior of the Central Única de Trabajadores de Chile (CEXCUT). These cases are the contestation of links between the Pinochet regime and Eric Gairy’s dictatorship in Grenada by Caribbean left activists in the Oilfield Workers Trade Union in Trinidad and Caribbean Labour Solidarity (CLS) in Britain; the role of Luis Figueroa of the CEXCUT and other Chilean exiles in shaping links between opposition to Pinochet and struggles for democratisation in the immediate post-junta period in Greece; and the role of maritime workers in British port cities such as Liverpool in contesting trade with Chile. We argue that through examining the relations between different trajectories of solidarity and interconnected geographies of authoritarianism, an engagement with worldmaking practices can help move beyond narrowly statist and methodologically nationalist frameworks.

Using traffic assignment models to assist Bayesian inference for origin–destination matrices

Estimation of traffic volumes between each origin and destination of travel is a standard practice in transport engineering. Commonly the available data constitute traffic counts at various locations on the network, supplemented by a survey-based prior estimate of mean origin–destination traffic volumes. Statistical inference in this type of network tomography problem is known to be challenging. Moreover, the difficulties are increased in practice by the presence of a large number of nuisance parameters corresponding to route choice probabilities, for which we have no direct prior information. Working in a Bayesian framework, we determine these parameters using a stochastic user equilibrium route choice model. We develop an MCMC algorithm for model fitting. This requires repeated computation of stochastic user equilibrium flows, and so we develop a computationally cheap emulator. Our methods are tested on numerical examples based on a section of the road network in the English city of Leicester.

Fragments of citizenship: contested mosque architecture in the North of England

This paper examines the planning process behind the construction of a mosque building in the English city of York, to demonstrate how it is entangled with contested ideas of national identity. We argue that the politics of religious architecture, particularly mosque planning and architecture, serve as a litmus test for the ways multiculturalism is experienced in contemporary Britain. We explore objections during the planning process for this mosque alongside letters to a local newspaper, where objections included the effect of the mosque on urban infrastructure, the symbolic identity of the mosque within the wider city, and how the mosque would affect claims to citizenship more widely. Objections to this mosque application indicate that architecture and the urban environment are core elements of national identity, and it is through the planning process (of religious buildings) that claims about ‘who is a citizen’ are articulated. Democratic planning processes around the construction of individual buildings can allow groups to organise resistance to much wider cultures of multiculturalism and act as platforms for Islamophobic sentiments. We argue that planning processes work as discursive registers through which architectural aesthetics, cultural identities and fears of otherness are wrapped into the wider politics of public space.

The household, the citizen and the city: towards a social history of urban politics in the late Middle Ages

ABSTRACT Histories of politics in the late medieval European town present a struggle between town oligarchs and town citizens. While the conclusions that historians draw differ, the stakes of politics are the same: exclusion, participation and representation in town government. Politics is the ‘public’ domain of officeholding, elections and voting, its actors exclusively male, its locations the council chamber, the craft guild, the workshop. Starting and ending with the evidence of a 1532 ‘insurrection of women’ in the English city of Norwich, this article seeks to reconceptualise town politics in the late Middle Ages. Its premise is that urban citizenship was a social and performative practice as much as a formal legal and political status. It argues that the relationship between home, household and family was fundamental to the lived experience of citizenship. The urban household was a complex source of political agency, where the official separation between citizen and non-citizen was difficult to sustain. The 1532 insurrection of women allows us to connect the politics of the household to the politics of the town hall and to write a social history of town politics, in which women were political actors.

How property relations shape experiences and transformative potential of urban growing spaces: Connecting land, food, and Earth justice perspectives

This study uses both socio-legal and theoretical methods to examine the ambivalent role of property regimes in food system transformation. Combining an Earth justice perspective with a small-scale empirical study of how property and land-use laws affected experiences of growing spaces in an English city that included some element of collective ownership or management, we argue for greater diversity in formal legal structures (e.g., tenancy models), but also in concepts of land relationships. Our discussion diverts attention from individual entitlements to allocation of responsibilities and opportunities for human and interspecies collaboration. Growers’ experiences were shaped by productivist property narratives but provide a material basis to think beyond individual entitlement, reframing issues of security of tenure and public access in terms of responsibility and connection.

The incidence and persistence of partnerships in a British industrial city: Glasgow, 1861–81

AbstractThis paper examines the prevalence of business partnerships in a late‐nineteenth‐century British city, using individual‐level data from post office directories and censuses. Focusing on Glasgow, we present a detailed picture of partnership number and type, demographic characteristics of the entrepreneurs who ran them, and how these businesses persisted over time. We show that partnerships were a key business grouping in the city and demonstrate that the partnership form was advantageous in manufacturing and that the majority of partnerships were formed between individuals without family ties. Furthermore, we offer new insight into business longevity, showing that partnership business survival broadly matched corporate survival rates in this period, with persistence data also suggesting that kinship partnerships were better able to deal with the perceived hold‐up problems associated with the partnership form.

Challenges for monitoring artificial turf expansion with satellite remote sensing.

Urban green spaces are central components of urban ecosystems, providing refuge for wildlife while helping 'future proof' cities against climate change. Conversion of urban green spaces to artificial turf has become increasingly popular in various developed countries, such as the UK, leading to reduced urban ecosystem services delivery. To date, there is no established satellite remote sensing method for reliably detecting and mapping artificial turf expansion at scale. We here assess the combined use of very high-resolution multispectral satellite imagery and classical, open source, supervised classification approaches to map artificial lawns in a typical British city. Both object-based and pixel-based classifications struggled to reliably detect artificial turf, with large patches of artificial turf not being any more reliably identified than small patches of artificial turf. As urban ecosystems are increasingly recognised for their key contributions to human wellbeing and health, the poor performance of these standard methods highlights the urgency of developing and applying new, easily accessible approaches for the monitoring of these important ecosystems.

Why philanthropic foundations collaborate with city governments: an exploration of three English cities

ABSTRACT This study analyses why philanthropic foundations are motivated to engage with city governments. Case study analysis of three contrasting English cities, Bristol, Manchester, and Newcastle, shows that philanthropic foundations can be a capacity-building partner of city government, providing funding and non-financial resources. Foundations are motivated to improve public services, advocate on policy issues, and fill funding gaps left by austerity. Furthermore, this study has found that foundations do not work with city governments when their priorities are unclear, they are hard to engage, or when there is a slow pace of change. City governments are motivated to engage with foundations to access resources, help amplify the voice of city governments, and because foundations are perceived as a less bureaucratic funder. Rather than austerity prompting cities to seek foundation resourcing, this study has found that a lack of internal capacity can prevent the city government from seeking foundation involvement.

Ancient Mycobacterium leprae genome reveals medieval English red squirrels as animal leprosy host

Leprosy, one of the oldest recorded diseases in human history, remains prevalent in Asia, Africa, and South America, with over 200,000 cases every year.1,2 Although ancient DNA (aDNA) approaches on the major causative agent, Mycobacterium leprae, have elucidated the disease's evolutionary history,3,4,5 the role of animal hosts and interspecies transmission in the past remains unexplored. Research has uncovered relationships between medieval strains isolated from archaeological human remains and modern animal hosts such as the red squirrel in England.6,7 However, the time frame, distribution, and direction of transmissions remains unknown. Here, we studied 25 human and 12 squirrel samples from two archaeological sites in Winchester, a medieval English city well known for its leprosarium and connections to the fur trade. We reconstructed four medieval M.leprae genomes, including one from a red squirrel, at a 2.2-fold average coverage. Our analysis revealed a phylogenetic placement of all strains on branch 3 as well as a close relationship between the squirrel strain and one newly reconstructed medieval human strain. In particular, the medieval squirrel strain is more closely related to some medieval human strains from Winchester than to modern red squirrel strains from England, indicating a yet-undetected circulation of M.leprae in non-human hosts in the Middle Ages. Our study represents the first One Health approach for M.leprae in archaeology, which is centered around a medieval animal host strain, and highlights the future capability of such approaches to understand the disease's zoonotic past and current potential.

Application of a novel remote sensing ecological index (RSEI) based on geographically weighted principal component analysis for assessing the land surface ecological quality.

In evaluating the integrated remote sensing-based ecological index (RSEIPCA), principal component analysis (PCA) has been extensively utilized. However, the conventional PCA-based RSEI (RSEIPCA) cannot accurately evaluate component indicators' spatially shifting relative significance. This study presented a novel RSEI evaluation strategy based on geographically weighted principal component analysis (RSEIGWPCA) to address this deficiency. Second, compared to the classic RSEIPCA, RSEIGWPCA was tested at English Bazar and surrounding areas using two-fold validation. In this regard, the Jaccard test from a different setting and correlation analysis were utilized to examine the geographical distribution of RSEI derived by PCA and GWPCA. The validation output revealed better effectiveness of GWPCA over PCA in assessing the RSEI. The findings revealed that (i) in RSEI assessment, the spatial heterogeneity of the dataset helped to formulate individual weights by GWPCA that was not performed by PCA; and (ii) the areas having higher RSEI were primarily located around the Chatra wetland of this study area, and the areas with lower RSEI were located mainly in the industrial part. It has been concluded that RSEIGWPCA is a helpful approach in the RSEI evaluating for the regional and local scale like English bazaar city and its neighbourhood.

Города Англии середины XVI века в Relazioni венецианских послов

The article examines the data of the final reports of the Venetian ambassadors on English cities. The information of the Venetian ambassadors about the cities of England, unfortunately, is brief. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that they basically boil down to pointing out that London is the main city of the country, that other cities of England are simply listed by the Venetian ambassadors, that the testimonies of the Venetians, albeit indirectly, help to recreate the perception of the cities of the English kingdom by the Venetians.

British Allotment to American Park: An Atlantic Crossing of the Garden Suburb Movement 1910–1930

Endorsement of open spaces internalized within residential blocks was an iconic concept promoted by the British garden city movement in the early twentieth century. Advancing various social goals, they were associated within a gendered ideology of domesticity, child safety, local food production, and community-centeredness. This article examines American responses through theoretical reformulation, endorsement, opposition, and uneven practical experiments situated against the maturing science of planned suburban development. Raymond Unwin included these spaces in a seminal morphological exposition, developing the concept of the quadrangle with a variety of uses including agricultural allotments, tennis courts, and playgrounds. Views of leading American community planners are canvassed, split between those promoting agricultural commons, landscaped gardens and playgrounds, and opponents citing upkeep and security concerns. Evolution of the interior park arguably peaked with Radburn which established a new iconic form and narrative of interior parks at a larger scale.