School of Geography - Faculty of Environment

PROJECTS & WORK IN PROGRESS

Current Projects

Traditional markets in changing cities (with Dr Sara Gonzalez)

Traditional markets in Britain have suffered from years of difficulty and decline despite over a decade of government policies that have sought to regenerate city centres through consumption-based regeneration policies. By way of contrast, retail markets in many continental European cities appear to thrive. In this research, we attempt to understand how traditional markets can contribute to social inclusion and to lively and diverse urban spaces.

An important aim of the research is to gather and integrate information on different policy and practice in the governance of urban markets in a selection of European countries. The intention is to provide an advisory summary for relevant authorities, and to create a platform for specific guidance for city leaders both in the case study sites and more widely. We also engage with contested issues in the academic and urban policy arena, and ask whether markets can upgrade without compromising their social role, linking this inquiry into academic debate over gentrification and its consequences.

Urban Landscapes in Tokyo 

Current work involves the writing of two book chapters. One chapter, entitled ‘Patterns fray and partitions appear: Tokyo in a post-global era’ will appear in a book edited by Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen to be called Globalizing Cities Revisited Hyperglobalization, Deglobalization, and Neo-Liberalism in a Changing Spatial Order?. This book, to be published by Blackwell, will be a sequel to the same editors’ Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (2000), to which I also contributed a chapter. The second chapter, on ‘Modern Japanese Cities’, will appear in the Oxford Handbook of Global Cities, edited by Peter Clark.

New Belgrade: From Modern to Market

My research investigates the general context of urban restructuring in New Belgrade. With its immense size and expanse (over 40 sq km and a population of almost 250,000), grand boulevards and massive apartment buildings lined up in numbered blocks, New Belgrade is an unusual mixture of modernist vision and socialist planning. Designed as a federal capital for Tito’s Yugoslavia, it became a predominantly residential suburb.

New Belgrade is now being re-positioned and partly re-built as a business centre in a process of change driven largely by international capital. My work examines the following questions. How are new social and economic activities expressed materially in the urban environment? Where are new central areas of activity emerging, and new peripheries (at municipal and metropolitan scales)? How do government planners see their role?