Engaging Communities in City-making Archives | UCL Press

Fighting to Stay Put

Laurie Mcnamee — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 04:04:04 +0000

Fighting to Stay Put shows how grassroots communities and their coalitions collectively reclaim their spaces and places, forestall gentrification and resist displacement. Marginalized residents work together with academics, community organizations, workers’ unions, political parties and elected officials against pro-gentrification policies and planning efforts to reclaim the right to stay put in secure affordable housing. While there have been cross-class coalitions working on these issues for some time, the accounts featured in this book suggest that gentrification no longer simply pits the working class against the middle class.

The chapters showcase different strategies employed to claim the right to ‘stay put’ in local neighbourhoods, not only by mobilizing people and community but also through memory, art, law, documentaries and a caravan. Each local example is presented through the lens of a specific strategy of struggle, analyzing what has worked and what has not worked. This structure allows readers to focus on the local evolution of the strategy, allowing other activists to adopt, in full or part, the specific strategy in their local context. The examples allow readers to compare the implications, strengths, contradictions and shortcomings of each of the strategies illustrated, and to consider how strategies emerge from local context and global dynamics.

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Engaged Urban Pedagogy

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:32:05 +0000

Engaged Urban Pedagogy presents a participatory approach to teaching built environment subjects by exploring 12 examples of real-world engagement in urban planning involving people within and beyond the university. Starting with curriculum review, course content is analysed in light of urban pasts, race, queer identity, lived experiences and concerns of urban professionals. Case studies then shift to focus on techniques for participatory critical pedagogy, including expanding the ‘classroom’ with links to live place-making processes, connections made through digital co-design exercises and student-led podcasting assignments. Finally, the book turns to activities beyond formal university teaching, such as where school-age children learn about their own participation in urban processes alongside university students and researchers. The last cases show how academics have enabled co-production in local urban developments, trained community co-researchers and acted as part of a city-to-city learning network. Throughout the book, editorial commentary highlights how these activities are a critical source of support for higher education.

Together, the 12 examples demonstrate the power and range of an engaged urban pedagogy. They are written by academics, university students and those working in urban planning and place-making. Drawing on foundational works of critical pedagogy, they present a distinctly urban praxis that will help those in universities respond to the built environment challenges of today.

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Co-designing Infrastructures

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 04:46:04 +0000

Co-designing Infrastructures tells the story of a research programme designed to bring the power of engineering and technology into the hands of grassroots community groups, to create bottom-up solutions to global crises. Four projects in London are described in detail, exemplifying community collaboration with engineers, designers and scientists to enact urban change. The projects co-designed solutions to air pollution, housing, the water-energy-food nexus, and water management. Rich case-study accounts are underpinned by theories of participation, environmental politics and socio-technical systems. The projects at the heart of the book are grounded in specific settings facing challenges familiar to urban communities throughout the world. This place-based approach to infrastructure is of international relevance as a foundation for urban resilience and sustainability. The authors document the tools used to deliver this work, providing guidance for others who are working to deliver local technical solutions to complex social and environmental problems around the world.

This is a book for engineers, designers, community organisers and researchers. Co-authored by researchers, it includes voices of community collaborators, their experiences, frustrations and aspirations. It explores useful theories about infrastructure, engineering and resilience from international academic research, and situates them in community-based co-design experience, to explain why bottom-up approaches are needed and how they might succeed.

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