Open City Project: Field Data, 2021-2023

Solomos, John and Keith, Michael and Murji, Karim and Pile, Steve and Yazici, Eda and Cramer-Greenbaum, Susannah (2025). Open City Project: Field Data, 2021-2023. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857872

For urbanists such as Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett, the open city is incomplete, errant, conflictual, and non-linear. Unlike the closed city, which is full of metaphorical and literal boundaries and walls. This project explores these dimensions of city life, not as a dichotomy, but as a series of lived problematics, both social and political. The central dilemmas we will research relate to this overarching concern: what are the limits of the open city? This prompts specific issues. How open has the city been? How do people negotiate the open and closed aspects of their lives? What are the politics of living with others in the city?
This project is concerned with the ways that the turbulent micro- and macro-politics of city life enables people to live together. It explores older questions of social cohesion and newer questions of neighbourliness by exploring the ways that people move back and forward between everyday civility or indifference to forms of hospitality and community as well as the everyday issues that make a difference to patterns of co-existence and dwelling in the city.
As a city that is constantly being remade by its inhabitants, as well as experiencing considerable and on-going development, with pressures on public services and resources in housing, education and employment, London is an exemplary place to examine how people dwell or co-exist and even thrive in the city. In London, constant change affords people the opportunity to make different temporal and spatial claims over belonging to the city while also providing many everyday and structural sites of friction. This is arguably unique, yet London is comprised of ordinary places and ways of living, situated in unexceptional wider social and spatial arrangements, that enable wider lessons to be drawn.
Given this, the key research questions are: (1) In what ways has the city enabled or circumscribed practices of welcoming, generosity and solidarity within it? (2) in what ways does the city shape urban dwelling in times of perceived rapid social change? (3) How do people negotiate the variable (building, street, neighbourhood, city, national and transnational) geographies of settlement and mobility in their everyday lives? (4) How do old and new social cleavages play out in these social and spatial arrangements - and how can city government, and other civic actors, manage those cleavages?
Using a multi-scalar, mixed methods approach, the project will be able to explore the dynamics of London life at the city-wide, borough and street / tower block scales, using a blend of historical, qualitative, quantitative and online techniques. This will enable the project to understand the specificity of each case study site in ways that address the unique histories and geography of each location, while also drawing together the ways that the issues which emerge in each site around housing and other resources (e.g. the diverse and competing claims to belonging and ownership or the different space-times of city life) cut across specific locations. The project will draw on and utilise social media and digital methods to understand the relationship between physical, virtual and imagined spaces.
The project has been designed in collaboration with a range of stakeholders in London, including the Greater London Authority, Camden Council, and social movements such as City of Sanctuary. These stakeholders have all identified the question of migration into, and within, the city as a critical issue that urgently needs to be rethought. This project seeks to go beyond the various policies and politics of migration by looking at population churn, transformations in old and new forms of ethnic and racial difference, and spatial mobility to address the contemporary politics of the city. More, it builds on historical analysis to engage and synthesise a number of strands of social science disciplinary thinking to analyse and inform developments in policy and urban theory.

Data description (abstract)

The three-year project, funded by the ESRC, looked at the social and political life of the city to test whether the utopian ideal of the Open City exists in real life, and explore issues of race, migration, mobility and living with diversity. It explores how the city accommodates new forms of urban life, through the social configuration of its spaces and places, and looks at the ways urban government at the city-wide and borough scales reflect, promote or limit the idea of the Open City.

The concept of the Open City has been developed by architects, planners and theorists to describe a place of social integration, cultural diversity and collective identity, where different cultures and lifestyles co-exist and interaction leads to enrichment. It contrasts with urban spaces where commercial malls, gated communities and poor transport networks drive increased fragmentation and new diversities are characterised by dynamics of intolerance and antagonism.

The project investigated the assumption that the open city is the good city, or not, by examining the real lived experienced of the open and closed dimensions of city life.

The collection consists of the following data:
- Hilgrove Housing Estate Household Survey Data - 130 Households, data includes the raw survey data, the survey questionnaire, and the survey data analysis report including survey methodology.
- Ethnographic notes: Estates - Hilgrove and Chalcots Estate residents. Data include two field diaries extensive field work in North Camden 2021-2023.
- Ethnographic notes: Cycling - 9 Refugee and Asylum seeking women . Data include two field diaries from arts-based co-production project taking place during the summer of 2022 with women seeking asylum given bicycles by The Bike Project in London.
- Participatory mapping - Hilgrove and Chalcots Estate residents. Data include two maps generated from workshops with local residents discussing their ideas of neighborhood boundaries and locations, and the agenda for the workshop.

Downloads

Altmetric