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.
 

Christopher Tilley is professor of anthropology at University College London. He has written and edited numerous books on archaeology, anthropology, and material culture studies.