Alan Mace

Email: alan.mace@kcl.ac.uk

Title of PhD thesis: London’s Inter-War Suburbs: constructing a sense of place in a mega-city region
 
Abstract: As London’s influence stretches over an ever-wider area are the inter-war suburbs really a place of retreat from the city proper or are they better understood as part of the core city? Many past studies have subjected the suburbs to the external gaze of researchers. However, few studies seek to address directly the lives of people in suburbia; how do they understand and make sense of the places in which they live? This research follows Savage et al’s work in Manchester and Butler’s in London by employing Bourdieu’s conceptual framework of habitus, fields and capital. This approach seeks to acknowledge the wider economic and structural forces that shape people’s lives in the suburbs whilst exploring how people develop their own understanding of place.
 
Joint supervisors: Loretta Lees and Tim Butler
 
Funding: University of Westminster

Alan works as a policy planner in London and lecturers in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Westminster. His focus in both roles is on community engagement in the planning process. His interest in the suburbs arises from earlier research including at the Young Foundation. Here, he contributed to a project on shrinking cities funded by the Anglo-German Foundation. The focus was on future housing demand in the core city areas of Leipzig and Manchester. However, the importance of the relationship between the suburb and the city soon became evident.

Mace, A., Hall, P., and Gallent, N., (2007) New East Manchester: Urban Renaissance or Urban Opportunism? European Planning Studies 15 (1) 51-65
 
Mace, A., Gallent, N., Hall, P., Porsch, L., Braun, R., and Pfeiffer, U.,(2004) Shrinking to Grow? The Urban Regeneration Challenge
in Leipzig and Manchester, London: The Young Foundation