Thursday 25th October 2012 - The pleasures of an urban geographer

Although most of my days are spent in university administration and other related roles, I am an urban geographer at heart.  This trait comes out most clearly when I find myself in London or some other major city (other than Sheffield - although the way that Sheffield works also interest me).  I yearn to understand how people live their lives in the city: what degrees of choice they have; how they are constrained by, for example, the housing market or the transport system.  And I am interested in how all the different ways of life of ordinary citizens add up to the vibrancy of city life - the daily and weekly rhythms of activity.

Whenever I have meetings or other events to attend in London I try to get a train that will give me a little time to get the feel of the streets - either by walking to my destination or my getting the bus.  Yesterday afternoon I arrived at St Pancras at 1730 for an event in St James's at 1830 and I took the bus as far as the Strand.  It did the journey in 15 minutes.  The traffic was light and there were relatively few passengers.   A 1730 bus journey in Sheffield would be a very different story - London and Sheffield work on different daily diaries, with many of those working in London being at their desks until well after Sheffielders have gone home.  And when I took the tube much later that evening to sleep on my daughter's sofa-bed in her north London flat I was in the midst of others who were just going home from work.  But unlike many in Sheffield who go home first and then go out for the evening, those surrounding me had been out for a drink or a meal on their way home.  London works in a different way from most other UK cities.  Some years ago I found that there were similar differences between the daily rhythms of Paris and of its suburbs.  I was writing a book on Paris and came across an unpublished government report that enabled me to represent diagrammatically the life of the whole metropolitan area throughout a 24 hour cycle.

People sometimes ask me which is my favourite European city.  London is in some ways the one I know best, having been partly brought up there.  But there are vast swathes of London that I hardly know (except from maps - and I prefer to get the feel of a city through the soles of my feet).  I do still get a buzz in observing the changing scene in London - revisiting neighbourhoods after a gap of a year or two and seeing how things have changed.  Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury in the city centre; Richmond and Camden in the outer and inner suburbs - these are areas that I enjoy being in.

But for places that really excite me with their atmosphere, and the challenge of trying to understand urban life in a different cultural context, some of the best for me are the following:
- Sitting in the Hackescher Hof at the centre of the former East Berlin, or in a cafe in Prenzlauer Berg, and reflecting on the changes in ways of life in the city since the fall of the wall;
- Shopping in the so-called 'Turkish Market' along the Landwehrkanal in Berlin on a Tuesday afternoon, and watching the interchange of ethnicities and the breaking down of many potential inter-community barriers;
- Sitting outside the Brasileira cafe in Lisbon or walking up the nearby side streets to the Carmo and looking at the relics of old Lisbon in a neighbourhood that has yet to feel the full force of gentrification;
- Returning from time to time to the estate known as the Quinta do Mocho ('Owl Farm') near the airport in Lisbon and watching the 'normalisation' of life in what was once probably the most ghetto-like ethnic minority neighbourhood in the whole of Europe (I can explain why if asked!);
- Strolling the avenues in le Vesinet in the western outer suburbs of Paris, and seeing how some of the traditions of French rural life permeate the French capital.

These are the experiences that have driven my academic curiosity.  I look forward to my next visit to London - in less than two weeks time.