Adaptable Suburbs: An historical spatial-ethnography and ‘auto-ethnography’ of suburban commercial practices

The ‘Adaptable Suburbs’ project is focused on understanding how small centres of socio-economic activity emerge through time, using Greater London as its geographical focus. It stems from a previous project which looked at twenty of London’s outer suburbs, see www.sstc.ucl.ac.uk. The research will provide evidence for policy decision making and for planning and design to improve the future sustainability of the aging built environment. It will also develop innovative methods for the integration of socio-economic data with information about the layout of urban areas.

A common concern of the Adaptable Suburbs project team, reflected in their previous work, is the question of “how the physical city both embodies and shapes the human city”. Based at the Department of Anthropology the student will work with other researchers to produce a rich ‘spatial ethnography’ of selected case study areas in outer-London. The ethnographies aim to create a narrative of social practices in peripheral suburban settlements with a particular focus on commercial activities in order to reveal the socio-economic structure of suburban life and its particular texture, for example by examining the extent to which the built environment is implicated in the organization of social networks and the relationship of home and work. The study is designed to provide a complementary, qualitative perspective on the multi-scale space syntax analysis done elsewhere on the project. Arising from this work the research project seeks to develop methods for using ethnographic findings to interrogate the primarily quantitative methods from the fields of urban design and geography.

This studentship takes an historical approach to ethnography to assemble a detailed historical account of socio-economic practices in suburban space over time. It brings anthropological methods to explore historical questions of the relationship between the transformation of the built environment, commercial development, movement patterns and social networks in suburban space. Approaching the suburban built environment from a material culture perspective, the research will provide a detailed account of the historical transformation of the suburban streetscape and representative building types. Liaising with otehr researchers to gain insights into the relationship between local and large scale spatial structures, this project must directly address the theoretical and methodological questions that arise when the micro-scale ethnographic approach engages with the multiple scale perspective of historical road systems analysis. Research for this studentship will draw on a wide range of cartographic sources, architects’ and surveyors’ plans, GOAD fire insurance plans and commercial directories as core empirical datasets. The ethnographic basis of the study will be provided by the systematic examination of local history sources (in both text, pictures and representative objects) and the assembly of an oral history archive in which the ‘remembered’ history of the suburb is recorded. It will also include work on an ‘auto-ethnographical’ project, in which local inhabitants will be asked to report and tag their local activities and networks on the project website. It is intended that the findings of the PhD research will help inform the research project’s overall aim of understanding processes of socio-economic adaptation in smaller settlements.