Cities

The Cities Group is one of the largest research groupings of urban researchers in the United Kingdom with 11 academic staff members and 25 PhD students and research associates. The international profile of the Cities Group is evident with staff members of the group having held research and teaching positions in universities in Europe, North America, East Asia, Africa, and Australia. This profile is enhanced by a number of PhD projects that include single-city studies in Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Dar es Salaam, Shanghai and Taipei, as well as multi-centred investigations in Belgium, Canada, USA, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Taiwan and China.

Research by the Cities Group is focused on different aspects of social, economic, political and cultural change in cities. The group's research is intra-national and inter-national in scope including comparative analyses of major world cities, primarily in Europe, North America, Pacific-Asia and parts of Africa and Latin America. The research of the Cities Group seeks to understand the behaviour and interactions of governance structures, institutions, social groups, and individuals, as expressed in terms of socio-economic formations and physical transformations, across the range of spatial scales from the neighbourhood to the city region. Important elements of this research include: a focus on urbanism and social justice; fear, risk and security in cities; social exclusion; urban sustainability; the social construction and representation of urban issues; migration, housing and social change; urban economic change and social well-being; the cultural geography of economic power; gender and the city; urban public spaces; and the politics of city programmes for the poor.

The scope of research leads to a diversity of epistemological and methodological approaches adopted by members of the Cities Group, with current projects using archival and social survey analysis, ethnography, large-scale statistical data sets, and interpretative studies of film, landscape and written material.

The work of the group is not constrained by a single theoretical perspective on cities, but is characterised by a commitment to the pursuit of high standards of intellectual enquiry into, and multidisciplinary understanding of, urban processes and change. In particular, the group's research is united in its affirmation of space and geography as an integral component in contemporary urban change, while seeking to develop insights that are relevant for an understanding of urban public policy and the politics of sustainable cities.