‘The car indispensable’: the hidden influence of the car in inter-war suburban London

Histories of suburban London underplay the importance of the car to inter-war mobilities; an emphasis on public transport has occluded our understanding of the role of motoring in the transformation of suburban life. This is in marked contrast to work on American suburbia that affords the car a prime role in suburban formation. This article uses information from dealer's sales records, motoring magazines and commentary on suburbia to examine the extent to which motoring was adopted by London's wider suburban middle classes in the inter-war years. It concludes that by the end of the 1930s, suburban motoring had highly heterogeneous levels of adoption, but, where it was popular, it changed mobility in a dramatic manner that prefigured wider developments of the late 1950s.     

Text-ured Brick: Speculations on the Cultural Production of Domestic Space

Why do over 80 per cent of Australians defy the many critics of suburban life and continue to flock to new houses on the fringes of our large cities? This question is explored using feminist poststructuralism and urban semiotics to read a Melbourne exhibition village. Using this method, a house, its floor plan and a promotional brochure can be seen as cultural artefacts onto which are inscribed oppressive social relations which are, nevertheless, actively engaged with. Herein lies one element in the powerful appeal of the suburban house.     

‘Highway to Heaven’: the creation of a multicultural,religious landscape in suburban Richmond,British Columbia

We analyse the emergence of the ‘Highway to Heaven’, a distinctive landscape of more than 20 diverse religious buildings, in the suburban municipality of Richmond, outside Vancouver, to explore the intersections of immigration, planning, multiculturalism, religion and suburban space. In the context of wider contested planning disputes for new places of worship for immigrant communities, the creation of a designated ‘Assembly District’ in Richmond emerged as a creative response to multicultural planning. However, it is also a contradictory policy, co-opting religious communities to municipal requirements to safeguard agricultural land and prevent suburban sprawl, but with limited success. The unanticipated outcomes of a designated planning zone for religious buildings include production of an agglomeration of increasingly spectacular religious facilities that exceed municipal planning regulations. Such developments are accommodated through a celebratory narrative of municipal multiculturalism, but one that fails to engage with the communal narratives of the faith communities themselves and may exoticize or commodify religious identity.     

Snowbirds and snowflakes: Mobility and aging across the Canada-United States border

Changes brought about by globalization such as the growth of the travel industry and increasing interconnectivity between places have opened up new lifestyle options for Canadian retirees. Commonly called “snowbirds,” thousands of Canadian retirees choose to spend their winters in warm destinations outside Canada, with most going to localities in the southern United States. Most snowbirds visit the same place every year and spend many years going back and forth between Canada and their chosen winter destination. Drawing on insights from both life-course theory and the new mobilities paradigm, this paper considers how the cross-border snowbird phenomenon links to wider processes related to aging. Qualitative interviews were conducted with retirees wintering in various communities in southern Florida. The findings of the study highlight the importance of understanding both aging and mobility as processes that intersect in variable ways over time to influence new geographies of aging.     

Beyond the everyday? Rethinking place meanings in tourism

ABSTRACT

Existing tourism scholarship on place meanings seems to retain an underlying assumption of a contradiction between tourist places and the mundane world. In contrast, this paper contends that the production of the meanings of tourist places is also closely related to everyday life. To make its case, it interrogates the creation of meanings of two scenic sites of Tianya Haijiao and Nanshan in Sanya, a famous coastal destination in southern China. Although both scenic sites have been recently developed, their significance stems from historical and cultural meanings in traditional Chinese culture, which are frequently communicated in people's daily conversations and practices. Besides, the meanings of the tourist sites are neither fixed by legitimate discourses nor dominated by tourism publicity; they are continuously shaped by wider socio-spatial events in mundane societies and re-interpreted through tourism mobilities in accordance with tourists’ everyday concerns. This paper echoes the ‘new mobilities turn’ in tourism studies and contributes to the discussions of the mundaneness of tourist places.     

The Making of an Australian ‘Airport City’

Globally, the changing nature of airports, and particularly the juxtaposition of general commercial land uses alongside aviation functions, is captured in the concept of the ‘airport city’. In Australia, commercialisation has impacted nearly all privatised capital city and general aviation airports. Essendon Airport's contested transformation from a run‐down general aviation facility into an emergent business and retail hub in Melbourne's north‐western suburbs serves as an instructive case study of the evolution of the airport city as a new suburban typology. Drawing in part on in‐depth interviews with key stakeholders involved in the redevelopment process, this paper examines the conflicting forces that have driven commercialisation since the late 1990s, the spatial outcomes and the wider planning issues arising.     

The Politics of Policy Circulation: Unpacking the Relationship Between South African and South American Cities in the Adoption of Bus Rapid Transit

This paper utilizes the introduction of bus rapid transit (BRT) in South Africa to unravel the role of South–South connections in local policymaking. While the South African systems are unmistakably modeled after Bogotá's Transmilenio, whose accomplishments have been touted as the low‐cost, high‐quality transport solution, the process through which other Southern cities influenced the circulation of BRT remains underexplored. In so doing, this paper asks how and why certain cities are brought into conversation with one another and what happens as a result? This analysis suggests that policy circulation is never a rational survey of best practices but a political process through which policymakers select their sites of learning in accordance with wider aspirations, ideologies and positioning. Illustrating the way in which policymakers deploy different meanings of the global South and their position within this construct to justify local policy decisions adds a critical dimension to understandings of policy mobilities.     

Suburban Identity in Paul Maitland's Paintings of Cheyne Walk

The aim of this article is to consider the extent to which Paul Maitland's paintings of Cheyne Walk addressed the problem of establishing suburban identity at the end of the nineteenth century. The emergence of the modern suburb during this period presented a particular problem with regard to how this form of urban living might be defined, understood and experienced. As part of a group of artists that could loosely by described as British Impressionists, Maitland was among the first to engage in a close study of this subject. This article situates Maitland's visual project within its wider cultural context, comparing his work with that of associated artists also interested in the suburban subject and in Cheyne Walk in particular and with a range of contemporary texts that addressed the complex problem of Chelsea's place identity, including guidebooks, letters, novels and the work of local historians. Drawing on the methodology of cultural and historical geography, this article highlights the extent to which place identity changes through time and how its formulation is based upon the economic and social structures of those who ‘live’ the place. Adopting and elaborating a range of visual signifiers associated with the modern suburb, including both its rural and working aspect, Maitland's paintings of Cheyne Walk provide a valuable and subtle insight into how this new urban space was being conceptualized at the end of the nineteenth century.     

Gendered mobilities in the making: moving from a pedestrian to vehicular mobility landscape in Shimshal,Pakistan

Although feminist geographers understand gender and mobility as mutually constitutive social processes, few studies explain how gender relations are constituted in particular mobility contexts, and how and why they shape mobility patterns in specific socio-spatial circumstances. We address these questions in an analysis of gendered mobilities in Shimshal, Pakistan, which until recently have taken shape in the context of a pedestrian mobility regime. The gender and mobility relationship has transformed as vehicular mobilities have replaced pedestrian mobilities with the construction of the Shimshal road. To demonstrate empirically the co-constitution of gender and mobility, we analyze aspects of socio-spatial context that have shaped gendered pedestrian mobilities, followed by those associated with the new vehicular mobility regime that are modifying gender relations in Shimshal. Shifting gender relations reshape corporeal mobility patterns. Road infrastructure has enhanced men’s and youth’s outbound travel as wage earners and students, respectively. These mobilities have reshaped women’s capacity to move, constraining their mobility beyond the village. As prosperity becomes contingent on outbound movement, men’s and youths’ social horizons and mobilities are expanding, while women’s compromised access to mobility as a social resource produces new mobility hierarchies and gendered exclusions.     

TWENTIETH-CENTURY RETAIL CHANCE IN THE HALIFAX CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT

The Halifax downtown area has experienced considerably change in the amount, type, and location of retailing in this century, exemplifying many processes and patterns typical of North American cbds. Owing to increased competition from suburban business districts, retail activity has remained fairly constant in absolute terms but has declined relative to the rest of the urban area. In response, the mix of downtown retailing has been reoriented to emphasize the district's comparative advantages, cbd retailers have differentiated their goods and services from those of suburban competitors but have also attempted to provide settings and amenities - notably, indoor malls and off-street parking - which mimic those found at suburban shopping centres. Such changes are investigated in this case study by means of two broad questions: (1) how and why has the cbd's overall mix of retail types changed through time, and (2) how and why have changes occurred in the location of retailing and retail types within the cbd?     

Moving with practices: the discontinuous,rhythmic and material mobilities of leisure

When considering mobilities within social life, researchers have emphasized the importance of enactment and embodied practices. Yet such understandings of practice as praxis—human action in general—have often left the relationship between practices and mobilities vaguely characterized. This paper therefore engages with an understanding of practices as praktik—distinct patterns of social action made up of interconnected elements—in order to explore how people move not only with cars and trains but also with practices. Praktik provides a context for studying the multiple mobilities of people, objects and ideas, highlighting important dynamics of performance and units of study. Leisure subcultures, the empirical focus of the paper, are important social practices and yet limited attention has been given to how they rely upon and are constituted by mobilities. Drawing upon a qualitative study of patchwork quilting and bird watching, the paper demonstrates that enacting leisure is inextricable from enacting discontinuous mobilities. Enthusiasts' goals lead to common experiences of travelling-in-anticipation and travelling-in-disappointment, while the systematic circulation of objects, such as bird lists and bird books, shape travel even when they are not moving alongside participants. In this way, leisure practices unfold through temporally marked patterns of mobility.     

The Sound of Debate in Georgian England: Auralising the House of Commons

St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster became the first permanent home of the house of commons in 1548. The building had to be adapted to conform to its new use. Visual and architectural adaptations to the space have been discussed in detail, but the building's new role also required improvements to the working use of the space as a forum for public debate. In this essay, acoustic techniques are used to explore how speeches and debate would have sounded during the Georgian period and consider how St Stephen's was adapted for this new use. The results demonstrate that, despite these alterations, the 18th‐century house of commons was not ideally suited to speaking or listening to debate. The listening experience was not uniform across the chamber, and its former use as a medieval chapel may have influenced how well certain positions in the chamber would have experienced speech.     

The Age of Clay: The Social Dynamics of House Destruction

This study provides some fresh insight into Neolithic domestic architecture through the analysis of architectural technology and the control over the practice of house construction and destruction. Examined on a regional or local level, architecture of the Neolithic is often presented as a fairly homogenous social practice over the large area of Southeast Europe. In viewing the Neolithic houses as homogenous and uncontroversial material culture, archaeologists have overlooked not only the possible variation and multimeaning of the Neolithic houses but also their striking and extensive means of destruction. The role of house conflagration, a practice that lasted during the entire Neolithic of Southeast Europe, has not been addressed in archaeological investigations. Indeed the phenomenon of burned houses has been treated as a series of lucky accidents during the Neolithic, which are primarily responsible for the preservation of Neolithic sites. Contrary this view, I argue that it is unlikely that the houses were burned as a result of a series of accidents or for any structural and technological reasons but rather that they were destroyed by deliberate burning and most likely for reasons of a symbolic nature. The causes for the practice of house firing and house abandonment as observed through the architectural evidence at the site of Opovo are believed to have been related to the need for house replacement and securing its postutilitarian visibility in order to show social and material continuity of the Neolithic society. In my view, a struggle for social and material continuity might have been a leading mobilizing force in creating and maintaining social practices and beliefs in the Neolithic society.     

How does a house remember? Heritage-ising return migration in an Indonesian-Chinese house museum in Guangdong,PRC

This paper is an attempt to integrate heritage and museum studies through exploring the complex relationship between the materiality of architecture and social memories with a house museum of return migration in Guangdong, PRC as a case study. It unveils that the ongoing process of memory is intrinsically intertwined with spatial and temporal dimensions of the physical dwelling and built environment and the wider social-historical context and power relations shaping them. I argue that it is the house as ‘object of exhibit’ just as much as the exhibits inside the house that materialises the turbulent and traumatic migratory experience of Returned Overseas Chinese, embodies their memories and exposes the contested nature of museumification. By looking at the socially and geographically marginalised dwelling of return migrants, the house draws people’s attention to the often neglected importance of conceptual periphery in re-theorising what is often assumed to be the core of heritage value. It points to the necessity to integrate displaced, diasporic, transnational subjects to heritage and museum studies that have been traditionally framed within national and territorial boundaries.     

'Help! The Poles are coming': Narrating a contemporary moral panic

In the years and months prior to the May 2004 enlargement of the European Union, transitional periods of two to possibly seven years were imposed upon free movement of labour for immigrant workers from new (Eastern European) member states by a majority of ‘old’ member states. This article aims to scrutinize fear of mass migration from new member states by examining where (ir)rationality and political opportunism meet in the perception of this particular flow of labour migration as a cause for contemporary moral panic. To this purpose, the article starts with embedding the notion of fear of mass migration in literature on moral panics, risk society and the ‘othering’ of economic migrants as strangers and folk devils. By means of a case study narrative of the decision‐making process on the free movement issue in the Netherlands, it is subsequently demonstrated that ‘politics of fear’ are deeply rooted in the uncontrollability of mobilities of an unknown magnitude and an uncertain impact on, for instance, domestic labour markets. Beyond rationalizable concerns of job loss, however, labour migrants from new member states are also feared as threats to borders of morality and identity in Western European societies. The narrative's results are placed within a wider context of current boundary drawings with regard to migration in the enlarging European Union.     

Bumpit: The Painted House at Lynsted,Kent

Abstract

The extensive wall-paintings at Bumpit are an important example of decoration in a late-Elizabethan-period house. They date to the last part of the 16th century and formed part of a very extensive scheme of building and embellishment. The house and its paintings are described in detail to provide a record of this important ensemble, and the characteristics of the paintings discussed to enable them to be seen in a wider context.     

The Making of an Australian Technoburb

North Ryde in Sydney provides an instructive case study of the emergence in little over a generation of a new suburban activity centre on a greenfield site. While its image is that of a siliconised ‘technopole’, the real significance lies in the evolution of the wider locality into some-thing more akin perhaps to an American ‘edge city’. The notion of the ‘technoburb’ seems the most apposite. The evolution of North Ryde is seen as exemplifying the restructuring of metropolitan areas into multi-nucleated regions, the strategic role of the state in setting certain ground rules for development, the rise of the information economy, the impact of globalisation of economic activity, the dependent nature of the Australian economy, and the gap that can exist between image and reality in an Australian suburban ‘hi tech’ environment.     

Onward Precarity,Mobility, and Migration among Latin Americans in London

Contributing to debates around the relationships between precarity, mobilities and migration, this paper examines the nature of precarity among onward Latin American (OLA) migrants as they have moved transnationally to multiple destinations from their homelands to southern Europe and onwards to London across different time periods. Drawing on primary research with over 400 OLAs, the discussion highlights how precarity maps onto onward migration trajectories in fractal rather than linear ways. In moving beyond a continuum approach to labour exploitation, the paper develops the concept of “onward precarity” to capture how migrants negotiate intersecting vulnerabilities in holistic spatio‐temporal ways as they move through different structural contexts across the world from origin, through transition to their final destination country over time. These negotiations are underpinned by multiple agentic tactics that revolve around resilience and reworking strategies as onward migrants traverse wider structures of disadvantage in situ and through mobility in different places.     

基于生命历程视角的郊区居民迁居行为重构——以北京回龙观居住区为例

城市居民迁居行为是城市地理学的重要课题,但以微观手法研究郊区居民迁居行为重构尚不多见。本文基于质性研究方法,以位于北京郊区的回龙观居住区为例,以微观的手法对城区拆迁居民、经历体制转型的中老年人、北京本地年轻人以及外地来京年轻人的迁居历程进行解读,寻找经济、社会和制度变革与个体生命历程的交集,进而洞察郊区居民迁居的一般性特征。在此基础上,从迁居机会供给、住房需求、住房获取能力、迁居决策4个方面归纳郊区居民迁居行为重构特征,并从宏观、中观、微观3个层面阐释重构机制。对郊区居民迁居行为重构的研究,有助于理解北京城市空间重构及郊区化进程。     

Sexualities,subjectivities and urban spaces: a case for assemblage thinking

In this essay, we argue that assemblage thinking has much to offer geographers attempting to conceptualize the interrelationships between sexualities, subjectivities and contemporary urban spaces. In our current research on queer mobilities, we found that despite the explanatory weight provided by mobilities approaches, two fundamental questions remained: how to conceptualise the nature of ‘the queer subject’, and how to better explain why certain kinds of urban spaces still seemed to support these newly mobile queer subjects. Here we speculate on the potential of assemblage thinking to formulate some new theoretical and conceptual responses to these questions. While quite preliminary, there is the potential to understand how interlocking (but temporary and unstable) notions of identities, subjectivities and mobilities (of ideas, people, knowledge, capital, etc.) can be ‘assembled’ in and across urban spaces, recursively reshaping sexualities and places.