Researcher Database
| Name | Research Interests |
|---|---|
| Dr Aidan Davison University of Tasmania | I am a human geographer and interdisciplinary researcher. My research interest in suburban life lies in the intersection of themes of nature, technology and sustainability. I am fascinated by the everyday constitution of moral life and its embedding in mundane material practices. My research has to date addressed the suburban origins of environmentalist cultures in Australia, the technological constitution of everyday life, critique of policy and activist discourses about the incompatibility of suburban sprawl and urban sustainability, the materiality of suburban nature, and the role of the suburban home in Australian nationhood. Keywords: everyday life, environmentalism, gardens, urban nature, practice, sustainability. |
| Anastasia Touati Ecole des Ponts Paris Tech/Université Paris Est | My PhD research deals with urban densification processes and the local policies that regulate them in the suburbs of the Paris-City Region (Ile-de-France, France), and of the Toronto Region (Greater Golden HorseShoe, Ontario, Canada). The study analyzes the underlying economic and socio-political mechanisms (land, political and regulatory issues, social and demographic composition of the neighborhoods, land and real estate markets etc.) of the densification policies and processes, in a multi-level policy context promoting densification (State or Province, Region, Municipality). Keywords: suburbs, urban intensification, densification policies, densification processes. |
| Antonia Mackay Oxford Brookes University | Antonia Mackay is a PhD student and Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes. Her research interests include: spectator ideology (a blurring of public and private spaces as inspired by Baudelaire’s philosophy) in fifties New York; the works of the Beats; suburban gender identities and manufactured proscription through; public and private division; interior versus exterior space; domesticity; Southernism and utopian architecture. Keywords: Cold War, American Studies, Masculinities, Identity, Feminist Corporeality. |
| Professor John Archer University of Minnesota | My book Architecture and Suburbia (2005) examines the history of suburbia from its genesis in late seventeenth-century Enlightenment England to its manifestation as the ideal of the American dream. My current research is engaged in formulating criteria for the understanding and evaluation of the suburban built environment in terms that account for the agency and material culture of those who live and work there. Keywords: daily lives, practices, aesthetics, history, built environment, material culture. |
| Dr Aysu Kes-Erkul Hacettepe University | My research is focused on urban sprawl and suburbanization, especially in terms of the preferences of urban residents. For my PhD dissertation, I studied the suburbanization process in Turkey from a Bourdieusian perspective. I analyzed the impact of different forms of capital on urban residents’ decisions to move to the suburbs. My past research has also included the local participation dynamics of conservation and restoration processes in historic towns. Currently I am researching the segregating effects of urban regeneration and the creation of new suburbs. Keywords: Urban segregation, suburbanization, urban culture and life-styles, gated-communities, revitalization of historic towns, regeneration. |
| Robert Bruegmann, Professor Emeritus of Art History, Architecture and Urban Planning University of Illinois at Chicago | I am interested in the decentralization of cities, suburbs and sprawl worldwide. I am particularly interested in infrastructure and in housing: middle class housing, public housing and informal settlements. Keywords: urban history, sprawl, built environment, infrastructure. |
| Dr Becky Nicolaides UCLA | Dr Nicolaides' principal current research project is the history of North American suburbanization. Her project is concerned with how suburbia has influenced patterns of social and civic engagement over the past half century. This project brings a historical perspective to questions of how the texture of suburban social and civic life has changed over time, why it has changed, and the implications for future planning approaches. In exploring these themes, she interrogates the critical roles that gender, children, and family life have played in these transformations, the social impact of racial politics, and the ways that immigration has changed the texture of suburban life. Keywords: history of suburbanization, planning, gender, family, racial politics, immigration. |
| Dr Brigid Rooney University of Sydney | I am conducting a focused investigation of how fictions for the past 100 years have indexed real Australian suburbs and communities, and how suburban topographies and topoi have been imaginatively reinvented and transformed in fiction. The examination of the real/imagined nexus will involve case studies and a critical monograph re-evaluating the cultural significance of Australian literary suburbia. Keywords: Australian literature, contemporary literary fiction, real and imagined suburbs, narrative time, fictional autobiography. |
| Dr Christy Collis Queensland University of Technology | I am a cultural geographer with a research interest in the economic, material, and cultural geographies of creative industries in the suburbs. I recently completed a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project, Creative Suburbia, with Terry Flew, Phil Graham, Mark Gibson, and Emma Felton on creative industries workers in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and Brisbane. See http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Collis,_Christy.html for publications. Keywords: suburbs, creative industries, cultural geography. |
| Dr Christopher French Emeritus Reader in History, Kingston Unversity | Focusing on the classic suburban town of Surbiton before 1914, my research is concerned with the people who lived in suburbia, the houses they occupied and the suburban communities they developed. Such aspects highlight the contradictions between the traditional perception and the reality of suburban life. The growth of Teddington as a London suburb is also a research interest. Key words: Surbiton, people, houses, communities, perception, reality. |
| Professor Carol Hager Bryn Mawr College | Professor Hager is an Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Center for Social Sciences at Bryn Mawr College. Her field is comparative politics and she is interested in issues of suburban sprawl and citizen participation in the U.S. and Europe (particularly the UK and Germany). She studies conflict and cooperation in land use planning with a focus on different ways of reconciling the goals of regional policy coherence and local empowerment. Keywords:sprawl, citizen participation, land use planning, collaborative planning, protest. |
| Dr Cheryl Cowdy York University, Toronto | My research explores the function and influence of suburban space and of suburban landscapes in post-war Canadian culture and in fiction and film for young people and adults. I am particularly interested in representations of suburban life that interrogate the meaning of geographical spaces -particularly the wilderness, the city, and the small town - as sites of Canadianness. Keywords: postwar suburbs, Canada, representation, children, adolescence. |
| Dr Claire Dwyer UCL | My research focuses on faith in suburbia exploring the intersections of faith, migration and suburban change. I’m interested in both the visible presence of faith communities in the suburban landscape in the form of suburban religious buildings and the practices of the suburban faithful. My current research explores the geographies of faith in suburbia in West London and in Vancouver where I’ve been focusing on ‘Highway to Heaven’ in the suburb of Richmond. I’ve also collaborated with photographer Liz Hingley and senior citizens from six faith communities in Ealing and Hanwell to produce a photography exhibition ‘Faith in Suburbia’ (see http://faithinsuburbia.wordpress.com/) Keywords: Faith, religion, ethnicity, migration, geographies of suburbia, West London, Vancouver. |
| David Kendall CUCR, Goldsmiths, University of London | David Kendall’s photography and research explore how spatial, economic and design initiatives, as well as participatory practices, combine to encourage social and spatial interconnections or conflict inside/outside world cities. http://www.david-kendall.co.uk Keywords: visual urbanism, photography, walking, roads, transport, territoriality, architecture, memory, mobility, migration. |
| David Jeevendrampillai UCL | As a member of the Adaptable Suburbs project my work takes a look at the role of movement memory and mapping in the suburbs. With an interest in the politics of knowing place my work looks at how movement is enacted, understood and communicated together with memory and mapping in moments of change in the material built environment. Keywords: adaptable suburbs, movement memory, mapping, built environment. |
| Dr Deborah Sugg Ryan University College Falmouth | I am interested in the design and material culture of the British suburban home from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. I am currently completing a book on the inter-war home, which focuses particularly on non-Modernist manifestations of modernity. I also have a substantial body of research on the history of the Ideal Home Show (formerly Exhibition), including an exhibition for the Design Museum (1993); my doctoral thesis (1995) and a monograph (1997). I am also undertaking a programme of knowledge exchange activities with Media 10, owners of the Ideal Home Show, to aid their understanding of the show's rich heritage and am working on a revised and updated edition of my monograph. Keywords: Ideal Home Show(Exhibition), housing, interior design, architecture, Tudorbethan, labour-saving, modernity. |
| Dion Georgiou Queen Mary, University of London | I am interested in local identity, leisure practices and cultural production in suburban areas, and how these are influenced by local infrastructures and economies, centre-periphery relations, and migration. My PhD thesis examines these issues through the prism of charity carnivals that took place in London’s suburbs in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Keywords: local identity, leisure, suburbanisation, voluntary action, modernity, London. |
| Dr Ellen Avitts Central Washington University | My research focuses on middle-class single-family housing at the turn of the twenty-first century. Looking initially at the developer’s furnished, walk-through model, I am interested in the rhetoric of house merchandising and the spatial configuration of the model home and ways in which they promote culturally perceived norms. Currently, I am considering the rhetoric versus the reality of domestic space through analysis of these houses as lived-in space to establish the extent to which the home dweller conforms to or moves away from prescribed ways of living. Keywords: model home, house merchandising, home, domesticity, material culture. |
| Dr Emma Felton Queensland University of Technology | Dr Emma Felton is a researcher in urban and suburban studies with a focus on socio-cultural geography. She has researched and project managed a large ARC (Australian Research Council) grant "Creative Suburbia" a qualitative study which mapped the experience of working in the creative industries in the outer suburbs in Australia. She is currently chief investigator of a small research project examining the use of internet technologies for assisting migrants to become re-established in host cities and suburbs. Emma is interested in the role of affect and its relationship to place experience. Emma is the co-editor and contributing author of the book Design and Ethics: Reflections on Practice (Routledge) and has written numerous articles and book chapters on creative industries in the suburbs, affect and the city, the role of the cafe in urban life. Keywords: Affect, creative industries, place experience, technology. |
| Professor Eunju Hwang Sogang University | I am an associate professor of English, and I teach twentieth-century American literature and culture. I am trying to investigate the interaction between the real and the imagined geographies of American suburbs in fictions and films, drawing a theoretical frame from Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism. I am interested in Shirley Jackson’s portrait of a suburb of San Francisco in 'The Road through the Wall' and the problem of suburban masculinity in Richard Matheson’s novels. At present, I am writing about Francis Lawrence’s 'I Am Legend' (2007) in comparison with Matheson’s novel of 1954 in terms of their differences in setting: one in New York City and another in Compton, California. I am also interested in the representation of global cities in literature and film. Keywords: twentieth-century, American suburbs, American fiction, American culture, global city, geocriticism. |
| Professor Flora Samuel University of Sheffield | Self build and suburban house extensions: to identify ways in which architects can better facilitate the process of self build and the creation of community space in the suburban context. Keywords: self-build, architecture, identity, community, extension, sustainability. |
| Professor Faye Hammill University of Strathclyde | I am interested in middlebrow culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. My research spans British literature (including work on suburbs in Stella Gibbons) and Canadian literature (including work on the idea of wilderness in an urban society). I also specialise in periodical studies. Keywords: magazines, middlebrow, Canada, interwar fiction, sophistication. |
| Ged Pope London Metropolitan University | The relation between literature and lived spaces, particularly the novel and the city and the obscured sites of slum, suburbs and various 'edgelands'. I explore how writing makes spaces liveable. My PhD thesis focused on London suburban fiction, from the 1840s to today. Other areas of interest include: London and literature, British literary Modernism, literature and technology, nineteenth century British fiction and culture, the post-war British and US novel and Literary Theory. Keywords: space, suburbs, semiotics, London, legibility, modernity. |
| Lucie Galčanová Masaryk University, Czech Republic | I am a researcher at the Office of Population Studies and a doctoral student in the Sociology Department at Masaryk University. The main focus of my studies, based mainly on qualitative research methods and in-depth interview techniques, is on the development of suburbia in the post-socialist context, particularly in the Czech Republic. Suburbia in the Central Europe represents, in spite of its historical importance as a housing form before the WWII, a relatively new cultural "dream" and new type of social imaginary of ideal home. My aim is to study the particular experiences and meanings that suburban housing and home cultures gains within the post-socialist context (its urban and landscape planning, housing policies, local community activities, local and regional governance etc.) applying the culturalist perspective in suburban studies that focuses on domesticity, home-making and family life as an important part of the transforming society, culture and public discourses on housing. Keywords: post-socialist suburbia, suburbanization, home, domesticity, material culture, identity, sociology, Czech Republic. |
| Gracen Johnson | My undergraduate research was on the past, present, and future of suburbia in a North American context with a focus on marrying design retrofits (like New Urbanism) with social retrofits (like Transition Towns). In particular, I looked at local food culture and urban agriculture as an appealing and low-barrier entry point for citizens to practice the community engagement necessary to make design improvements both meaningful and effective. For example, one can design a mainstreet and town square for a suburb, but only when the local citizenry wants to change their lifestyle will they choose to walk there and create a local farmers' market, etc. Keywords: retrofit, transition town, urban agriculture, Canada, new urbanism, community engagement. |
| Dr Hannah Ewence University of Chester | I am a modern cultural historian researching primarily on immigration to, and minority experience within, Britain from the late nineteenth century to the present day. My current research explores 'the urban' and 'the suburban' as backdrops for racial discourse and antagonisms in twentieth century British history. Through a comparative and multidisciplinary consideration of the suburbanisation of ethnic minorities in the postwar era, I am exploring the history and concept of multiculturalism, assessing how it has operated in practice within the supposedly conformist and conforming suburban environment. I am particularly interested in the spatial practices of minority communities living in the suburbs, especially in terms of the 'racialization' and gendering of suburban spaces and the ways that minority communities behaved within them. Keywords: Urban history, suburban development and garden cities, race and minority history, gender, multiculturalism and urban planning. |
| Amanda Hagood Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas | Historical American land use patterns, suburbanization and the environmental movement, the Transition Towns movement. Keywords: American, land use, suburbanization, environmental movement, Transition Towns. |
| Professor Richard Harris McMaster University | I have researched the history of suburban development in Canada and the United States over the past century. Currently, as part of the Global Suburbanisms project, based at York University (Canada), I'm helping to coordinate research on the history of suburban land and housing markets, with particular reference to North America, India, and South Africa. I am surveying media and residents' perceptions of suburban life in Canada, while exploring the varied names and meanings given to 'suburban' areas worldwide. With some trepidation, I am writing a book about the forms of, and processes shaping, suburbs around the world. Keywords: Global Suburbanisms, history, North America, India, South Africa, Canada, housing markets, media, residents. |
| Professor Ray Hutchinson University of Wisconsin-Green Bay | I am professor of sociology in the interdisciplinary urban and regional studies program at UW-Green Bay, series editor of Research in Urban Sociology (Emerald Press), editor of the Encyclopedia of Urban Studies (SAGE), and co-author of The New Urban Sociology. More relevant to our common project, Mark Clapson and I edited the recent volume on Globalization in A Global Society in the Emerald Press series. My current interest is in comparative suburbanization as a methodology and practice for evaluating our common place assumptions about the history of suburbanization and about the suburban world of the 21st Century. Keywords: comparative suburbanization, suburban history. |
| Professor Joanne Jacobson Yeshiva University, New York | Twentieth-century American autobiography and letter writing, American culture and literature, the American suburbs and creative non-fiction. Keywords: American culture, autobiography, letter-writing, twentieth-century, suburban culture. |
| Professor Jenny Gregory The University of Western Australia | Jenny Gregory is the Winthrop Professor of History at UWA. She has worked on the history of Australian cities and suburbs since researching her doctoral thesis on the development of middle class suburbia in Australia. Relevant publications include Claremont: a history (1998); City of Light: a history of Perth since the 1950s (2003). More recently she has been researching the planning history of cities and suburbs, co-editing a special issue of the Town Planning Review, 83:3, 2012, on town planner Gordon Stephenson who was active in Britain, Australia and Canada from the interwar period up to the 1980s. She is currently working on the reception of transnational town planning ideas in Australia and has just begun work on urban water history, as part of a Cooperative Research Centre on Water Sensitive Cities, which locates water as a central element in urban history. The availability or otherwise of water has been a key component in the story of Australian cities and this project investigates how governments and residents have adapted to water scarcity – in the past, the present, and potentially into the future. The project focuses on why Australian cities look like they do, and why the low density, detached house in the suburbs has been so central to ideas about what became known as the ‘Australian way of life’. Keywords: planning, water, urban, suburban, Australia, Perth. |
| Dr João Pedro Nunes ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon | I am an urban sociologist with a research interest in metropolitanisation, suburban types and forms and their relationship with social experience and cultural meaning. My work is concerned with the emergence of Lisbon as metropolis, specifically with the differentiation of the region’s residential spaces and urban structures, their role in the metropolitanisation process and in the making of the in-between city, and media and people’s perceptions on suburban experience. Bringing together planning, historical and sociological perspectives, my research elucidates the making of Lisbon as a Southern European medium-scale metropolis. Keywords: suburban growth and metropolitanisation, in-between city, Lisbon, Southern European Cities, suburban experience. |
| Dr Katrin B. Anacker George Mason University | Katrin B. Anacker is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University School of Public Policy. She is the Review Editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research and was the Co-host of the national conference "Suburbs and the 2010 Census" in Arlington, VA in July 2011. Her research interests include suburbs, housing, housing and urban policy, race and public policy, real estate markets, statistical methods, qualitative methods, and research writing. Katrin Anacker received a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from The Ohio State University in 2006. Before joining GMU she was a Post Doctoral Fellow and Research Assistant Professor at the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech in Alexandria, VA where she served as Co-Editor of the academic journal Housing Policy Debate and where she served as Conference Manager of the international conference "A Suburban World: Global Decentralization and the New Metropolis" hosted in Reston, VA in April 2008. Keywords: suburbs, housing, urban policy, race and public policy, real estate. |
| Professor Laura Vaughan UCL | Professor Vaughan has an extensive research track record of using space syntax to study the micro-scale of settlement form in relation to society. She is a Professor of Urban Form and Society at the Bartlett, University College London and is a member of the UCL BSGS Space research group. She is currently Principal Investigator on the EPSRC/ESRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council/Economic and Social Sciences Research Council) funded project Adaptable Suburbs project with four other colleagues with expertise in anthropology, geography, GIS and history. This is a 3.5 year study of the relationship between networks of human activity and the changing form of urban and suburban centres through time, focusing on London's outer suburbs during four epochs dating from the mid-19th century. See http://www.ucl.ac.uk/adaptablesuburbs/ for more information. Keywords: space syntax, London, suburb, interdisciplinary, settlement, urban form and society, migration. |
| Laura Johnstone University College Dublin | I am an architect and completed a masters thesis on the evolution and conservation on an area of Dublin's 19th century suburbs. For my doctoral thesis I am researching the influence of estate landlords on the morphology of the Victorian suburbs of South County Dublin from 1778 to 1900. I am focusing on the role of ground landlords and their agents in the evolution of large suburban areas of Dublin in the 19th century, particularly relating to architectural and suburban design, house type and street layout. My aim is to analyse the priorities of the estate and its impact on the heritage character of these Victorian suburbs, which is often undervalued and poorly protected. Keywords: urban history, suburban morphology, suburbs, planning, 19th century, conservation. |
| Lorenza Pavesi Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil | Lorenza was born in Italy. She graduated in Visual Communication from the University of Coventry, UK and obtained an Ma in History and Theory of Architecture and Town Planning from EESC-USP (Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil) with a dissertation on British Architectural critic Ian Nairn, the campaign against a type of landscape Nairn called ‘Subtopia’ and the Townscape theories that were developed by London based magazine The Architectural Review during the second post-war period. The Townscape Movement played an important role during the reconstruction period and was critical of suburban sprawl as well as the legacy of the Garden City planning model. Lorenza is currently a PhD student at FAU-USP (Architecture and Town Planning department - Universidade de Sao Paulo). Her PhD research also focuses on Urban Design and the reception and diffusion of the Townscape theories in England, in the United States, in Italy and Brazil. Currently (2013-2014) a Visiting Scholar at the City and Regional Planning Department (CRP) of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California, United States). Keywords: urban design, suburban sprawl, Townscape theories. |
| Professor Louise Johnson Deakin University | The gendered nature of suburban houses and shopping centre, changing manufacturing workplaces as well as the dynamics of Australian regional economies. Her most recent work has examined Geelong, Bilbao, Singapore and Glasgow as Cultural Capitals, looking at how the arts have been re-valued and urban spaces remade by the creative economy. She is currently researching how to build better suburbs, the nature of master planned suburban communities, waterfront renewal, migrants in regional centres and post-colonial planning. Keywords: gender, post-colonial, suburban building, shopping centres, regional economies. |
| Dr Willow Lung Amam University of North Carolina | I am a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I am currently writing a book on the politics of development, planning, and design in new immigrant suburbs in the Silicon Valley, based on my dissertation. Keywords: immigration, race, diversity, built environment, urban planning, urban design, high tech. |
| Dr Matthew I Burke Griffith University | My research interests include transport and land use interactions, travel behaviour and sustainable transport. I'm currently leading major ARC grants exploring children's active travel across neighbourhood types, the transport impacts of employment decentralisation, and the effects of new light rail investments. Keywords: transport & land use, travel behaviour, transport modelling, urban policy. |
| Dr Mark Clapson University of Westminster | I am a social historian, interested in the relationship between urban and suburban expansion and social change. My work is concerned with post-war England as well as comparisons between suburbanisations and new town development in England and the USA. I recently completed a study of American influences on urban research and planning in England. Keywords: urban and suburban expansion, social change, post-war England, new town developments. |
| Dr Magali Peyrefitte Middlesex University | I am currently lecturing in social science and in politics at Middlesex University. My doctoral research was concerned with British Asian suburbanisation in the city of Nottingham: I was particularly interested in British Asian narratives of suburbanisation as social and geographical mobility at the intersection of ethnicity and class. In engaging with these questions, my approach considered the diasporic as well as the domestic. In this, I also looked at the materiality of British Asian suburban home-making. I have a sustained interest in looking at the suburbs and I am authoring a website looking at suburbs around the world: www.aworldofsuburbs.org Concomitantly, I am conducting a small-scale research of a street and its inhabitants in the suburban town of Blagnac on the periphery of Toulouse in the South West of France. |
| Dr Mark Gibson Monash University | I have worked on creativity in the suburbs, particularly in the way creativity is affected by social attenuation and the substitution of mediated communication for face-to-face contact. I am interested in the way suburbia is framed in political debate as a utilitarian space; one of material rather than cultural or intellectual aspiration. I have recently completed a project, with Terry Flew, Christy Collis and Phil Graham, on creative practitioners in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and Brisbane. I also have an interest in multiculturalism in the suburbs following the shift of inbound migration from the inner city to the outer suburbs. Keywords: creative suburbia, social attenuation, suburban education, multicultural suburbs, Australian outer suburbia |
| Dr Matthew Whitfield English Heritage | Dr Whitfield is Investigator (Assessment Team South) for the Heritage Protection Department of English Heritage. His research is centred on English suburbs, many of which are important but nevertheless undervalued, threatened and neglected. While urban growth is a global phenomenon, aspects of British suburbanisation have a strong claim to international significance. Although suburbs have always been subject to change, since the 1980s they have suffered from particularly strong redevelopment pressures, while experiencing a steady erosion of character through incremental alteration. Given the threat to the historic environment of English suburbs, and a lack of understanding and appreciation of aspects of their buildings and landscapes, English Heritage has determined to undertake a major project on the subject. This project forms part of the National Heritage Protection Plan (NHPP), under Measure 4: Understanding: Assessment of Character and Significance in the Activity area 4A1 Historic Towns and Suburbs. The broad aim of the project is to examine suburban development from c.1850 to the present day, defining the characteristic buildings and landscapes of suburban environments, and assessing/articulating their interest and significance. A synthesis of existing knowledge is to be enhanced through an intensive programme of new research and fieldwork. The primary intention is to provide the context and understanding needed by professionals responsible for the protection and management of suburbs, but the project also sets out to boost public appreciation and awareness of everyday localities that are often taken for granted. Keywords: architectural history, heritage, conservation, protection, landscapes, buildings. |
| Michael Hayes University College Dublin | Michael Hayes is a tutor at the UCD School of Architecture, and much of his work focuses on the particular condition of the Irish suburb. He is editor of 2ha magazine, a bi-monthly publication focused on Dublin City and its suburbs. Each issue takes a particular field of study such as photography, language and typology, in order to analyse the suburban condition from multiple standpoints. Together, it is hoped that these fragments will piece together a better understanding of the realities and possibilities inherent to Irish suburbia. Keywords: Dublin, suburbia, magazine, multi-disciplinary, media, architecture. |
| Dr Michelle Johansen Raphael Samuel History Centre | Dr Johansen is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Raphael Samuel History Centre (University of East London, Bishopsgate Institute and Birkbeck College, University of London). Her research interests include the social history of the London suburbs. Themes of particular concern are workplace masculinity, social and societal networks and the leisure practices of an expanding white collar workforce in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. Popular and scholarly representations of the lower-middle class and the suburbs are also of interest. Keywords: London, lower middle class, suburbs, nineteenth-century, masculinity, leisure, public librarians, clerks, representations, networks. |
| Dr Michael John Law University of Westminster | Interwar suburban development with a particular focus on private mobilities in London. That is: the role of walking, cycling, motor-cycling and above all the car in the transformation of suburban life. Keywords: automobility, London, mobilities, arterial roads, roadhouses. |
| Dr Markus Moos University of Waterloo, Canada | Dr Moos is an Assistant Professor in the School of Planning, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo, Canada. His research is on the implications of the changing economy and social structure of Canadian cities, labour restructuring, housing markets, commuting patterns, and the relations between sustainability planning and social justice in cities. Dr. Moos' research on suburbs focuses on the form and socio-spatial characteristics of suburbanization in Canada. His research asks about the social, land use and transportation planning policy implications of different kinds of suburbanisms, conceptualized as different ways of living and working. He is part of the Global Suburbanisms research project led by Dr. Roger Keil at York University, Canada, and the Atlas of Suburbanisms project at http://env-blogs.uwaterloo.ca/atlas/ Keywords: Canadian cities, suburbanization,transportation, land use, sustainability planning, social justice. |
| Dr Alexandra Murphy University of Michigan | Dr. Murphy is a sociologist who uses ethnographic methods to study the suburbanization of poverty in the U.S. Drawing on three and a half years living and conducting fieldwork in a poor suburb, her research examines what daily life is like for poor families living in poor suburbs. This includes an analysis of how the suburban poor experience is similar and/or different from the urban poor experience in the US. Her research is also concerned with the organizational and political life of poor suburbs, including the ways that these institutions are effected by rising poverty and also how they, in turn, shape the everyday lives of the suburban poor. Keywords: suburban poverty, built environment, suburban politics, suburban organizations, race, ethnography. |
| Dr Nathanael O'Reilly Texas Christian University | Nathanael O’Reilly’s book, Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel, is the first book-length study of suburbia in Australian literature; it addresses a long-neglected and under-examined area within Australian literature and analyzes novels by some of Australia's most important writers from a new perspective, in addition to examining novels previously neglected by critics. Exploring Suburbia demonstrates that Australian authors who have explored suburbia since 1961 have moved Australian literature in a new direction, revealing that the literal and theoretical space between the city and the bush contains the most interesting and important engagements with contemporary Australian culture. Keywords: Australian suburban novel, postcolonialism, race, class, immigration, Australian suburbs. |
| Professor Nicholas A. Phelps UCL | Nicholas Phelps is Professor of Urban and Regional Development at the Bartlett School of Planning. He has broad interests in the political, economic and cultural basis of processes of suburbanisation. He is author of An Anatomy of Sprawl (Routledge), Post-suburban Europe, and Co-editor of International Perspectives on Suburbanization (Palgrave-MacMillan). He has published recent articles on suburbanisation in the journals Environment & Planning A, Urban Studies and Urban Affairs Review. He is the Europe research cluster leader for an international network of scholars examining 'Global suburbanisms' run from the City Institute, York University. Keywords: suburban politics, edge cities, urban sprawl, post-suburbs, the suburban economy. |
| Dr Nick Hubble Brunel University | My research encompasses both the humanities and social sciences, engaging with everyday life in the long twentieth century, including: research work with the social research organisation Mass Observation; reconceptualising the relationship between agency, literary technique, life writing and social transformation; ageing studies, the emerging field of intermodernism, suburban culture across the long twentieth century, middlebrow studies and science fiction and fantasy. Keywords: twentieth-century, Mass Observation, suburban culture, middlebrow, ageing. |
| Dr Nico Larco University of Oregon | Dr Larco is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Co-Founder/Co-Director of the Sustainable Cities Initiative. His research focuses on the urban design of suburban development - specifically on the suburban commercial centers and the development surrounding them. He is interested in the connectivity between these areas and how this connectivity affects resident travel and increases or decreases walking and biking. He also researches sustainable urban design and how these practices might work in suburban contexts. Keywords: Urban Design, Commercial Strips, Suburban Multifamily Housing, Connectivity, Transportation, Pedestrian. |
| Dr Paul Watt Birkbeck, University of London | Dr Watt is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. His research interests are the contemporary London suburbs, especially in relation to themes of class, race and place, and he has published several papers on these issues. He is currently undertaking a research project funded by the British Academy on 'Residential Mobility, Housing and Belonging in the London Suburbs'. This current project is a case study of inmovers and established locals in a fringe London suburb, and it builds upon a previous British Academy funded project he conducted which examined suburbanization processes in London and Essex. Keywords: London, inmovers, fringe suburbs, Essex, race, class, place. |
| Paige Glotzer Johns Hopkins University | How did ideas and practices originating locally ossify into the narrow vision of suburbia promulgated by American federal housing legislation? Beginning in the 1890s with the company that created Baltimore's first planned community, I trace the circulation of ideas about financing, planning, building, and selling spaces termed "suburban". Keywords: nineteenth-century, twentieth-century, planning, exclusion, policy, real estate. |
| Professor Philip Nyden Loyola University, Chicago | Collaborative university/community research methodologies; mixed-income communities; sustaining stable racially, ethnically and economically diverse communities; affordable housing; gentrification and displacement. Keywords: collaborative research, housing, diverse communities, gentrification, affordable housing, sustainable development. |
| Paul Smith University of Sydney | I am a human geographer. My research interests focus on the processes, mobilities, flows and relationships that produce the specificities of space and place. Within this broad research agenda I am particularly interested in uneven development, the geographies of difference, and social and environmental justice within rural and urban spaces. My PhD thesis examines the processes of new urban developments. The research focus is on how new suburbs in the form of master planned estates have emerged in contexts which are oriented toward highly mobile and globalised approaches to capital accumulation, while at the same time creating new suburbs that are stable, predictable and resistant to change. In exploring this theme I engage with both the discursive and material practices that are involved in the commodity circuits of master planned estates within the highly urbanised Lower Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, Australia. Keywords: discourse, material, practice, structure, agency, urban-fringe. |
| Dr Rupa Huq Kingston University | I am a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Kingston University. I've written various articles and chapters on suburbia and is by trade a sociologist with cultural studies tendencies. I am hoping to get two books out on these aspects of suburbia by 2013. My main focus is the UK but I am keen on developing international links to build future comparative projects. My interests are diverse spanning voting behaviour, protest, pop music and both religious and political extremism. Keywords: ethnicity, gender, political and popular cultural representation. |
| Dr Ruth McManus St. Patrick's College, Drumcondra, Dublin | As a human geographer, much of my work focuses on the physical and social development of everyday spaces. I have examined the development of Dublin’s suburbs in the twentieth century, looking at both public and private housing in my monograph 'Dublin 1910-1940, Shaping the City and Suburbs' (Dublin, 2002). Recent publications explore the development of suburban housing across Ireland over the twentieth century, and examine the landscape implications of suburban encroachments into rural Ireland during the so-called Celtic Tiger period. Keywords: suburbs, Ireland, housing, planning, twentieth-century, Dublin. |
| Dr Scott W. Allard University of Chicago | Scott W. Allard is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on issues of place and poverty, with particular attention to the suburbanization of poverty, the role of nonprofit human service organizations, and spatial accessibility of safety net programs. Keywords: poverty, safety net, nonprofit organizations, human services, spatial access, program participation. |
| Dr Sarah Edwards University of Strathclyde | Nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, cultural history, cultural studies, women’s studies: Edwardian and neo-Edwardian literature and culture, nostalgia and memory studies, life writing, middlebrow cultures, architecture and literature. Keywords: neo-Victorian, neo-Edwardian, literature and architecture, country house. |
| Dr Sherah Wells University of Warwick | My current research is concerned with the relationship between mental health and the production of space in post-war Anglo-American fiction. I am particularly interested in the way in which these ideas engage with post-war suburban culture. Keywords: mental health, geocriticism, domesticity, women’s writing, performativity, post-war. |
| Dr Laura Taylor York University, Canada | My research interests are the politics of nature in suburbia and exurbia. The goal of my scholarship is to use the combined potential of political ecology and landscape studies from human geography to create a conceptual framework for better understandings environmental politics in land use planning. See: http://taylorl9.blog.yorku.ca/ Keywords: exurbia, peri-urban, urban-rural fringe,political ecology, landscape. |
| Dr Timotheus Vermeulen Radboud University, Nijmegen | Dr Vermeulen is Co-Director of the University’s newly founded Centre for New Aesthetics and founding editor of the academic webzine Notes on metamodernism. He has written on critical theory, contemporary aesthetics, and film and television. His current research is centred on metamodernism, and representations of the suburbs. Keywords: contemporary aesthetics, critical theory, suburbs, metamodernism, film, television. |
| Dr Todd Kuchta Western Michigan University | Todd Kuchta’s book, 'Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present', draws on postcolonial theory, urban studies, and architectural scholarship to examine the relation between suburbia and imperialism in fiction by H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, and Hanif Kureishi. Keywords: imperialism, postcolonialism, race, class, British fiction, British suburbs. |
If you would like to be added to our Researcher Database, please email your name, affiliation, contact details and research interests with selected keywords to suburbs@exeter.ac.uk.
