ABSTRACT
A city’s public life is constantly changing. Take our home city of London. A visitor from the city’s past, even as recently as a decade ago, would notice lots of subtle shifts. They would spot people navigating the city not with London A–Zs but with smartphones in their hands and headphones in their ears. They would see Londoners queuing up for oversized coffees to go, or topping up their Oyster cards to travel on the tube. They would notice people riding electric-hybrid Route-master buses, blue public Barclay’s Bikes, and jogging to work with a change of clothes on their back. They might find corner stores stocked with Nigerian SIM cards, Polish beer—Żywiec, Tyskie, Lech—and Romanian sausages sold next to Turkish cheeses. On weekends, they would encounter a city populated by farmers’ markets, museums open free of charge, and festivals of all different kinds. It is easy to overlook these sorts of gradual changes to a city’s public life when thinking in terms of bigger trends that are often the focus of urban scholarship. Contemporary London, in particular, is often described within the context of sweeping transformations. A long time world city, it has now emerged as a global city, a post-industrial control and command centre for transnational flows of information, capital, and labour (Sassen, 1991). The city’s political landscape has been altered by a new mayoral system and by national policies of neoliberal governance that have reshaped relations of state responsibility and private enterprise (Massey, 2007). Socially, London has become a super-diverse cosmopolitan hub defined by a tremendous influx of immigrants (Vertovec, 2007a) and the formation of new hybrid cultures. But it is also a city marked by widening income inequalities (Hamnett, 2003) and gentrification (Butler & Robson, 2003).
