248 scholarly books by University College London and 4
start with L
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Landscape in the Longue Durée: A History and Theory of Pebbles in a Pebbled Heathland Landscape
Christopher Tilley
University College London, 2017
Pebbles are typically found only on beaches, in the liminal spaces between land and sea. But what happens when pebbles extend inland? The East Devon Pebblebed heathlands of the United Kingdom has a bedrock composed entirely of water-rounded pebbles. Using archaeological and anthropological perspectives, Christopher Tilley’s new book explores this region, from the Mesolithic to the Iron Ages, concluding with a twenty-first-century analysis. Tilley examines how the first early pebble structures built here still inform our contemporary culture, demonstrating how exceptional landscapes allow us to rethink continuity and change.
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Leading Cities: A Global Review of City Leadership
Edited by Elizabeth Rapoport, Michele Acuto, and Leonora Grcheva
University College London, 2019
Leading Cities is a global review of the state of city leadership and urban governance today. Drawing on research into more than two hundred cities in one hundred countries, the book provides broad, international evidence grounded in the experiences of all types of cities. It offers a scholarly, but also a practical, assessment of how cities are led, what challenges their leaders face, and the ways in which this leadership is increasingly connected to global affairs. Arguing that effective leadership is not just something created by an individual, Elizabeth Rapoport, Michele Acuto, and Leonora Grcheva focus on three elements of city leadership: leaders, the structures and institutions that underpin them, and the tools used to drive change. Each of these elements is examined in turn, as are the major urban policy issues that leaders confront today. The book also takes a deep dive into one particular example of a tool or instrument of city leadership: the strategic urban plan.
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Lockdown Cultures: The Arts and Humanities in the Year of the Pandemic, 2020–21
Edited by Stella Bruzzi and Maurice Biriotti Biriotti
University College London, 2022
How the pandemic has changed and reinvigorated the arts and humanities.
Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities have responded to the dominant crisis of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the roles of engineers, epidemiologists, and, of course, medics are assumed, this volume illustrates some of how the humanities understood and analyzed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past. The result is a book that serves as a testament to the humanities’ reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society.
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London's Urban Landscape: Another Way of Telling
Edited by Christopher Tilley
University College London, 2019
London’s Urban Landscape is the first major study of a global city to adopt a materialist perspective and stress the significance of place and the built environment to the urban landscape. Inspired by phenomenological thinking, the book presents fine-grained ethnographies of the practices of everyday life in London. In doing so, it offers a unique perspective on the city that integrates ethnographies of daily life with an analysis of material culture. The first part of the book considers the residential sphere of urban life, discussing in detailed case studies ordinary residential streets, housing estates, suburbs, and London’s mobile “linear village” of houseboats. The second part of the book analyzes the public sphere, including ethnographies of markets, a park, the social rhythms of a taxi rank, and graffiti and street art.
London’s Urban Landscape returns us to the everyday lives of people and the manner in which they understand their lives. The embodied experience of the city is invoked in the descriptions of entangled relationships between people and places and the paths of movement between them.
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