What do we learn about other formations of citizenship and association and participation from the perspective of the migrant? Hello. My name is Susie Hall, and today I'm joined by Les Back, professor in sociology at Goldsmiths University, Huda Taube, senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Cape Town, and Tariq Jazeal, professor in geography at University College London. We're here to discuss my new book, The Street Livelihoods and Marginal Citizenship in Britain, published by the University of Minnesota Press. I'm going to begin by reading a short extract from the introduction as a way to highlight the book's key concerns and then we'll open up to our discussion.

So here goes. A migrant is a person required and refuted by Western sovereignty. To inhabit this impossible dualism requires living with unstable status, readily questioned at the onset of national elections or economic crises, while tenuously embraced under the banners of celebratory multiculturalism. The migrants paradox is located in the brutal contradictions of border preserving politics and border expanding economics that increasingly constrict the life and space available to the migrant. This book is about the street life of the migrants paradox and what it means to make life and livelihood within a citizenship that is always called into question.

It unfolds from streets located in the far flung parts of de industrialized UK cities, where jobs are hard to come by and the impacts of state underinvestment are sorely felt. Within these cracks of capitalism, I explore the diverse formations of street economies and how they reflect the limits and possibilities of migrant city making. To tell the story of the migrants paradox through the commonplace banality of the street, is to write with two footings. One rests on the connection of state and street and how a political economy of displacement residualizes our humanity. Here it is crucial to show how the asymmetries of global migration intersect with the ongoing ferrosities of urban marginalization.

This conjuncture allows us to understand The UK migration system as part of a larger condition of human displacement that not only unfolds across global, national, and urban space, but also corresponds with related forms of dislocation and their colonial antecedents. The cumulative effect is to dislodge human prospect and citizenship by substituting it with precarity and denizenship. The other footing rests on righting the street as world, engaging with the experiences of encounter and exchange among shop proprietors in the urban margins of Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, London and Manchester. These proprietors talk about the hard work of navigating multiple border logics, and their claims to space contest the all too narrow questions of what is a border and who is a migrant. And I think at that point, I'd like to open up and hand over to Les.

Yeah. Thank you, Susie. It's so beautiful to hear you read, actually. The first thing I wanna say, having had the opportunity and the privilege to read this book first, is actually it's a very beautifully written and rendered book. Not only in its literary quality, but in the way that you visualize the different scales.

And I I imagine my friends and colleagues are gonna have a few words to say about this. Of this kind of these footings that you you sketch for us and how they are human footings, but they also the interplay or the the kind of the blurring or the moving across scale between the here and the elsewhere is happening all the time. And that's one of the things I think you do so so brilliantly, not just in this book, but in the way in which you attend to these questions and challenges. But I wanted to start by talking about the idea of of paradoxes and how they relate to both the cultures of racism and also might of bordering and and also the facts of multicultural. And I I it's something that occurred to me many years ago, and, I was trying to find a way to characterize London actually.

And one of the things that came to me through actually the writings of, Ambivalya Sivadandan is the idea that actually this is a paradoxical place. And I I coined this phrase a metropolitan paradox to sort of try and capture that. And and I wondered why you'd gone to the idea of the paradox. I mean, is it that paradox is something that is a tension that doesn't hold out for the possibility of easy resolution? You have to live with it.

Is that is that what what what drew you to that idea?

Oh, that's well put, Liz. I mean, I I think this idea of no easy resolutions and what it means to have to inhabit that is very much at the center of the book. So now I begin the book with one definition of a migrant as a person who is required and refuted, by Western sovereignty, and it's a sovereignty that's very much constituted by and through racism. But I end the book with another perspective, of a migrant as a person engaged in the practice of learning how to be unsettled. And I think in part, Les, this very much touches on your idea of the metropolitan paradox, where in your work you explore the intimate proximities of multicultural conviviality, but also the the pervasive proximity of racism in everyday urban life.

So that's certainly one aspect that the book attends to, but I also you know, I hadn't intended to do an ethnography of the migration system. But when you do an, a work like this over six years and you see, the immigration acts coming into play and you see the Brexit referendum coming into play and you see a number of national elections, being forged on anti immigration rhetoric, it became really important to understand the contradictory nature of the migration system itself. For me, the migrants paradox also highlights a very destructive political impetus in Britain that's organized around the system of border control. And it's one that seeks to curtail human movement and interdependencies. And I think it's also one where the border punishments are are significantly racialized.

So in the book, I also talk about the consistent production of inconsistencies in migration policy and political rhetoric and I think, you know, we're living with a system that's organized through less accountable forms of judicial review, much more bureaucratic discretion, increased outsourcing and privatization of control. And so the paradox is sustained by this very fragile illusion of control. To do that, it needs to really manipulate a politics of fear and implement violence and humiliation. And so, you know, a key question is, what does it mean to inhabit that paradox? But also, and this is something I really value in your work too, what do we learn about other formations of citizenship and association and participation from the perspective of the migrants?

Yeah. I think that's such a powerful insight that that is there. So, I mean, it's I love the way in which the book moves across very different streets around. You know, some of them were familiar to me. Some of them were not actually.

And and seeing the sort of patterns of of of repetition and also of difference that happen across the the different locations, you know, between Rye Lane and Rookery Road. I love that. It was just a really very vivid, very humane, but also chilling reminder of how these destructive, mortifying processes actually are are focused in very particular places through times. I mean, it's telling, isn't it, that, you know, some of the the way in which immigration control and raids actually are often very focused on exactly the spaces where people are trying to trade, make a life, make a future in the sort of the edges, if you like, as you put it. I I wondered if that that occurred to you as well.

It's the overlay, the proximity of all of those things at once in those sort of very, you know, particularly intimate places, but also places of of of opportunity, of trade, of commerce, of of making lives.

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think there is also something about the visibility of those places because they're very centrally constitutive of everyday life. So people are popping into their high street to pick up a phone card, buy a bag of rice, and and we're doing this on a daily basis. And so it's also very, unfortunately, a very effective space for the disciplining of anyone who is constructed as an outsider.

So very much, you know, the street is a place of making commerce, but it's also a place of uprising, protest, stop and search, all of these things converging in this public realm.

Thanks very much, Susie. It's really, really fantastic to hear you read from the book and to talk about the book. And and like Les, I I loved the book as well. And I think, you know, maybe some of my questions, follow on a little bit from what you and Les have just been discussing because I'm I was particularly interested in some of those patterns of repetition and difference that that Les referred to, but particularly through the lens of of trying to think about culture, really. You know, the the book does a fantastic job of focusing on what kinds of livelihoods, improvised lives, and sociality go on in on the these edge spaces that you write about.

And I really appreciate the ways that you bring all this into visibility to make an argument about how these are economically productive and creative spaces, especially in the context of austerity. I really think the work that the book does to to document these actually and to make an argument about the value of these spaces in the language of capital was really important, actually. But I wanted to to push a little bit, as I said, on the question of culture here, and particularly emergent forms of cultural production, expression, creativity that emerge from the street street culture, really. And maybe this is a slightly unfair question because I know it's not your task in the book. You know, your task is is quite explicitly to focus on livelihoods, not culture per se.

But I found that the book continually pushed me to to to the question of culture as a kind of haunting presence. And I, you know, I thought it got really close to some of these issues in chapters four and five on unheroic resistance and citizenships on the edge respectively. But, you know, of course, these are chapters that investigate the production of care, labor, livelihoods, producing, communities, through, you know, Simoni Abdul Abdul Malik Simoni's phrase, people as infrastructure. But I wanted to just ask what this looked and felt like culturally, you know, what are the emergent forms of expression in food, in music, in fashion, in hairstyles, beauty treatments? You talk about the beauty salons, for example, that create meaning in these kinds of edge spaces.

Now at times reading your book, and this does directly follow on from what Les just said, but at times reading your book, I had in my mind Steve McQueen's portrayal of the mangrove restaurant in late nineteen sixties Notting Hill in his BBC film Mangrove, which as he so carefully shows, you know, wasn't just a livelihood for his owner, Frank Critchlow, but for the community, it was a precipitation of a way of life and meaning making. And these, you know, as he shows in that film and as Les just said, these are the kinds of spaces that get raided, now as much as then. So I guess I just wanted to ask you what it sort of felt like doing this research, whether he had you had any sense of any, of these kinds of, I guess, emergent structures of feeling, to use Raymond Williams' phrase, in these edge spaces? And if so, how might we track the life of these structures of feeling?

Thanks, Tariq. Again, some fantastic comments and much food for thought. I mean, we went into and spent a lot of time in many of these interiors, and one in particular comes to mind. So I'm thinking of a Lima space on Stapleton Road. And, you know, Alima is a young guy in his early twenties.

He's come across to The UK from Sudan. He's had to traverse across a whole lot of national borders, over a number of years in order to finally arrive. And he rents out a basic terraced house that would have, a hundred years ago, been a house in place to house the working class who were then fueling the factories. And he recognizes in this terraced form the opportunity to run a number of parallel experiments. These experiments in, in, on the one hand are permissible because property values are still cheap, but on the other it's also about a young person's insertion of self into city and a kind of a magical trial and error urbanism.

In the front of the shop, he he very much deals in mobile phones and Internet cafes. That tells us an awful lot about the people who live there and can't afford computers or computer contracts. In the middle of the shop, he has a pool table where his friends from college are hanging out. But towards the back of the shop is the coffee space and there is a whole kind of transfer of the coffee culture from the Horn Of Africa. And again and again, particularly on Stapleton Road, we see in these interiors groups of people sitting, drinking coffee, talking.

The telly's always on in the background. It's usually Al Jazeera. And when we went into Alima's shop one of the days on Stapleton Road, it was the day that, Obama was given his first address to the Organization of African Unity. And I tell you, the discussion in the shop was heated. There was lots of agitation and arguing.

And and so, you know, there we have an array of about three distinctive forms of cultural expression all collocating. And if we went back, three months later, those would have been reorganized. The parts would have been rejigged. So I think what's so important is that Culture on the Street is about really everyday practices of making life and livelihoods, but in difficult circumstances. It's about making transactions, exchange, profit care, about political conversation, and it's also really about claiming a place.

And that means that we have all of these acts and incorporations of recalibration, refusal, and also uprisings. And I think this is about recuperating, meaning making into everyday life, and the ongoing struggle for alternatives. So I really love that phrase from Satnam Virdi when he talks about the self activity of racialized minorities in reshaping the adverse circumstances they find themselves in. And I think, you know, what's so interesting for us in this process of walking the street, getting to know it over a long period of time, is that it becomes really evident that culture is made both from the inside out and the outside in. Those things happen simultaneously.

At the same time, why wouldn't want to separate culture from the economy? I think these are absolutely integral formations, literally the making of life and livelihoods and the the search for meaning making in that in that overlap.

Yeah. And I I I think that's really important, and you really get that sense in the book about the inseparability of economy and culture in these edge spaces. And you just mentioned the pool table in the shop that you just spoke about. And I think that's hugely important because it draws your attention to, as a reader, to, you know, the questions around, you know, what goes on around this pool table? You know, what are people talking about?

What kinds of sociality and play are in action? And these are not at all disconnected of course from, the kind of livelihood work and economies, that your book so wonderfully teases out. Thank you, that's a really helpful answer.

Thank you so much, Susie, for, your beautiful reading today, but also this incredible book, which I think balances questions of precarity and possibility in looking at a set of, streets. And so building on what, Tarek has just asked in your response, your book, I was wondering if I could ask you to speak a bit more about methods. So the book offers a reading of the street through a careful and immersive engagement with sites and practices of walking, listening, looking, and talking, but also drawing and mapping. On the street, but also of spaces beyond the street, of these small and fine grade grained interiors, which we've just spoken about, like Alima's shop. And from the interiors of shops also to the wider engagements with local councils or, kind of, yeah, political spaces.

And you describe this as a series of interiors of bordering and debordering. I was wondering if I if you could speak further about reading the street and migrant through the interior and intimate as a way of understanding how people find a way of living a livable life with quotidian and everyday violence, where the intimate interior is the manifestation of that which is not reducible, or exhausted by mechanisms of control, which you show in some of these cases of where the coffee shop becomes a public space and a space of political discourse, for example, or conversation around what's an Al Jazeera, as you've mentioned, but also of the quotidian and everyday violence or ongoing and durable precarity. And I think related to that, does the interior and intimate become a method of working with refusal and repair?

Thanks, Huda. So maybe just to outline a little bit, the process through which we come to know a street. So, you know, ten years ago, I worked very much on my own. You know, I went and did a a set of ethnographies, and it was very kind of interpersonal. And I shifted, in the process in in this book to working in groups of people.

So we work in groups where there's generally, you know, an architect, a sociologist, a geographer. It sounds like, you know, we, we, we've got the start of a good joke going, but we, we walk the street, and we spend a lot of time literally just walking up and down. We begin with a very simple face to face survey where we try and speak to every proprietor along the street. And just like in the course of of of life, sometimes those conversations are very short. They take us so far and no further, and sometimes those conversations become extended.

And we move from the outside to the inside, and we get a a different sense of a set of realities and a a different kind of understanding of meaning making. What becomes apparent in these, interiors is the absolute, I don't want to say contravention, but aversion to assimilation. These are worlds in which people are really capable of engaging in and creative in making themselves present in space. So we see references to here and elsewhere. We see attachments to multiple affinities.

We see a number of experiments going on. Sometimes what's harder to see are, as you say, the violences that are also shaping the nature of these interiors. This became quite apparent when we shifted from London to cities, in the Midlands and and a little bit North of the Mid Midlands. You know, London is a is a place that is being subjected to an incredible process of property speculation. And this means that space becomes less and less affordable, and so this shrinks the availability of place for people, without access to significant incomes.

In Rye Lane, in Peckham, we saw that the subdivisions of space are in a way about cultural affinities, but they're also a practice of staying one step ahead of the market. And and that works, but we also I always wonder at what point will it run out? At what point will the speculation become so excessive, you know, that one is totally literally squeezed out of that space? And I think we have to be aware of the processes of displacement going on in our cities and explicitly the racial banishment, to use an aneroy's term, that is part and parcel of that. So subdivisions of spaces can be enormously creative and they can also be a survival mechanism, but one in which the clock is ticking.

In working from the inside out, I think there is a a momentary romance with the sensuality of the place, the sounds, the surfaces, but it's incumbent upon us to stay a little longer and then to follow what's being said to us and trace it through and back to other kinds of ways of knowing. So we go and look at estate agents' websites. We look at property values that are occurring in the area. We look at, practices of raids, etcetera. So the method becomes quite messy.

You know, we we're drawing. We're literally drawing in on a whole variety of threads in order to kind of comprehend the world from inside out.

Thanks, Susie. I think it's, it's a really interesting way of working to move from the outside inside and then back out again and, and constantly moving across, scales. You mentioned very briefly this phrase relational southernness drawing on, Gautam Barn's work. And I'd be interested in to hear a bit more and and kind of tracing a lot of your drawings also trace this arc of movement of people from the South to the North. And I'd be curious to hear on in thinking about the South as an access of knowledge and power and the way that you frame these streets as a space of ongoing coloniality, could we think of the South as part of this method and as a way of working beyond the grammars of CAPTCHA to refer to Hortense Spiller's, work?

Thanks, Huda. So, you know, I'm aware retrospectively that we make understanding through how we're positioned. You know, I've had a whole life making architecture in South Africa before I did a PhD. And so those influences, literally learning how to make a building or living in a place like South Africa means that I I see the street through those perspectives too. And so when I'm in Birmingham, I can't help but see Cape Town.

And when I'm in Manchester, I can't help but see Cape Town, or or Johannesburg. That's important because I think there's a presumption that there is a a Western logic of the economic that's regulated, controlled, formal. And what we learn is that the formation of economies is always a to and fro across space. The process of colonization can be reread in the circuits of the street as people find themselves, coming into The UK as part of that extended circuit of colonization and in that process become subjugated through processes of racialization. But they also bring with them an incredible capacity to make and that capacity to make maps onto existing capacities to make in the city and then we get this incredible infusion of what a shop could be like that doesn't look like a corporate rendition of a shop or what a public pavement could look like that doesn't look like an overly regulated pavement over scripted by local councils.

And I draw on extensively the literatures, and the ways of making that are apparently southern, but I'm also trying to defeat the binary division between a so called global north and a global South because I think it's much more mutually constitutive than that. And I think if we just, you know, follow this practice of city making, I think there's a a kind of global constellation of ages that transfers across the planet and across space, and it doesn't necessarily recognize our logics of north and south.

I wanna sort of extend this thing a question about I mean, you know, method is much more interesting than methodologists would have it. And I think, actually, I remember many years ago, talking to you, Susie, and and the way in which your sensibility fuses that architectural training and your capacity for ethnography. I remember once you said to me, I'm not really a proper ethnographer, at which I said, no. You can't say that anymore. You have a PhD as an ethnographer.

That means you're qualified, and you are. And I I think that's what kind of what is extraordinary about your writing is you have these different capacities to to range from the attention to scale, design, interior, the precision of that, as well as a feel for culture and the unfolding of cities and everything that's at play in that. And I wanna say this book actually is such a refreshing contrast to the talk about smart cities, you know, the informational city where the economists and the designers are in charge on without any kind of feel for cultures Tarek was talking about. I mean, I don't see any magical trial and error urbanism in those accounts of even the cities of the North. And and I I think I I would like listeners to I'd like to just encourage readers to think about this book in the in this these kinds of terms, how to write and represent and portray, cities, who operate at different scales and through which time and the past and the present is also in a complex interrelation.

And and also the relation between the economy and culture is in a very complex unfolding magical I love this idea of the trial and error the trial and error city. It captures something that seems very real to me or at least recognizable, and I can't say the same for some of those other accounts, to be honest with you. But it's just an appeal rather than a question. I don't know if you recognize any of it.

Thanks, Liz. I would love to be able to claim not to be a proper anything because I think that also gives you more freedom to be more experimental. But I am I'm really mindful of that wonderful evocation that comes from your book, The Art of Listening, where I think you you evoke this notion of listening with the eye. And I think a sensory way of coming to know is very integral to our process of of questioning and finding out. But I also, want to come back to this question of scale, which with, both you and Huda have mentioned this.

And I think what's important here for me is to think about scale as as always spatial and temporal. And so maybe we could think about scale as resonance or as the vibrations of how one part, connects with and affects another. And so one vibration very much in this book is about state and street, and how border regimes and their rollout of austerity governance and regeneration programs as well oscillates with everyday life, but another would be thinking through our interdependencies and possibilities of shared humanity. And I think because scale is relational, it's also not fixed. So I work with this idea also in the book of the scale of the migrants.

Here I turn to both how the state produces a very static scale. It produces a scale that is numeric and it's about aggregates and targets. And what that scalar rendition does is it completely eradicates the possibility of the human from our understanding of the migrant. I guess one central commitment, in all of our work, all three of us here today is is, the comprehension or the commitment to to start with a human as the kind of first point of frequency or oscillation. That's, central to all of this as well.

Thanks, Susie. That's I think that's a really useful discussion, and I wanted to pick up on the discussions around scale and methodology, and some of the discussions you you had with Huda around, space as well. I mean, like, Les, I also think methodology is far more interesting than than we often give it credit for. But, I it struck me when I was reading your book that there's a there is a spatial methodology at work, and maybe I would say this because I'm a geographer. But, you know, this you you have a commitment to, approaching the edge as always spatially relational, which you've already talked about.

Always dynamic, always composed of flows, global trajectories, and narratives. And Doreen Massey is a key figure through the whole of the book, specifically a a global sense of place essay. And incidentally, just to mark here that I think the street maps that you you have in the book are ingenious visual devices, really, really clever and effective. But I wanted to ask, whether you would go so far as to argue that this spatial methodology could usefully, be conceived as something like an ontology for our times or rather, a way of conceiving places and territories as in fact always already global dynamic stretched, etcetera, as Massey does. And if so, what the implications of this are for bringing your methodology to the analysis, not just of of edge spaces, but off the center as well.

And and I wanted to pick up here on you know, you mentioned the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, twenty twelve London Olympics very early in the book, which, was of course directed by Danny Boyle. And as you stress in that book, it's been commonly taken to try to signify to the world and celebrate Britain's post colonial multicultural present. And you kind of use that image to contrast with the realities of racialization and racism that many of the figures in your books, edge spaces have to deal with. And I absolutely agree with that. But I was recently reading, Corine Fowler's new book, Our Green, Unpleasant Land, which is a book that's emerged from her colonial countryside project just, just this year, I believe.

And she makes another really interesting and compelling reading of the twenty twelve opening ceremony where she remarks that the story about contemporary Britain's multicultural present only begins on the outskirts of London. And in the ceremony is preceded by a what she refers to as a historically inaccurate whitened version of of the British countryside and the English rural idyll. Now her point, of course, and the point of the project more generally is that the countryside as well was always already relational and spatially, you know, outward facing. The making of the English landscape is very aesthetics as a kind of bastion of Englishness. It was always already connected with the geographies of empire.

And this course is a point that Said makes in culture and imperialism in his reading of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, as well. So I guess what I'm saying is what I'm asking is, you know, I think there's something very profound and politically urgent in your spatial method that I wanted to kind of ask you about and ask you know to what extent you think it's important we we pull out from the street or the edge to regard the center as well in the ways that your book really usefully signals I think. So it's that kind of way of thinking spatially and and geographically that I was really drawn to.

Thanks, Tariq. I mean, a couple of points that I just want to make. The first is that interestingly, in the same way that the, British countryside is rendered as sort of homogeneous, and is is often racially white and so is the high street. So there's, very much a conservative commitment to the notion of the British high street and, of course, I think we all have a sense of how that probably looks and feels in the imaginary of those political claims. I think it was also really important in this work to get out of London.

It was really important to see how a periphery is shaped through quite particular processes of industrialization and also particular processes of, austerity governance. To go to places like the edge of Birmingham or the edge of Manchester tells us something quite different to the spaces on the edge of London. But I think if we return to the question of spatial method and also a certain kind of comprehension of scale, scale has to be about interconnectedness and it has to be about the relations across intimate and global resonances. Part of the problem as I see it is that so much of these questions of belonging and even of multiculturalism is because it's framed through the scale of the nation and there is a presumption there that the nation has this preemptive claim on the human and that that is essentially established through the mechanisms of sovereign borders and very specific designations of citizenship. But it's also that scale of the nation also has a very particular claim on multiculturalism, You know, it's multiculturalism as spectacle.

So it is that that scene from the from the London Olympics, but it's also multiculturalism as as target, you know, this whole diversity culture. I think what I'd like to think through more specifically as a kind of antidote to that, and it's not simply about a spatial methodology, but this this idea of solidarity, which is, I think, a comprehension that actually transcends space, and and how the varied circuits of solidarity move and shift across different scales. One of these that I mention in the book comes from, the amazing filmmaker, Manthia Diawara, and his idea of a solidarity of emotions. And I think that's really interesting in terms of the street politics that we've seen resonating across our cities here and elsewhere in the last year, right from fees must fall emanating from from Cape Town to Black Lives Matter, that these are collaborations, that actually transcend any particular notion of scale and they certainly defeat the the overworked rendition of of nation.

Thanks, Susie. Maybe just to pick up on this question of solidarity, and I think, the the kind of overdeterminism of the nation, which is which you're speaking about, I think that's something that as someone working in South Africa and in the South African context, that's that's spoken about a lot more, I think, in the South, where the limitations of the post colonial nation state are are, much more self evident, I think, in terms of the reach of what's possible, but also the violence of what's happens through this post colonial state. And so I think, again, there's something really interesting about your book and that you're bringing some of these conversations that I think are more present in when thinking about cities of the South to to cities of the North, but also drawing out these entangled relationships across time and also across space. So I was really struck. I think reading when you spoke about the long history of the history of Bristol as a slave, slave port city and what it means to actually, contend with that, like sit, sitting with history and sitting with the very long histories of extraction and violence.

I don't really have a question, actually. I think it's more, maybe a reflection if you could offer on ways of thinking about the kinds of ethics of solidarity. And I and maybe speaking a bit about, I know some of your work beyond your work in the academy or in the institution, you also work outside and maybe bringing some of that in because it seems from what I know of your work and, I'm working with you, that's a central part of forming some of these conversations and ways of seeing that push the academic boundaries.

Thanks Huda. I I guess, coming from a practice, a previous practice in life as an architect, you know, it's impossible to put up a building without hundreds of people being involved. And I think similarly, you know, it's impossible to make a book or to teach or to write, without the enrollment of, resonance across lots of people. But more explicitly here, we have been thinking about how we use this research that goes into this book in in different ways. And one of the ways is to is to tell the story and and to make that story available.

And then the other is to try and step into what I think are quite destructive planning and regeneration processes, in order to reveal a different understanding of cultural life and of economic life. Now really interestingly, in the first round that we attempted that intervention, I think our language was too close to the master's tools. So we would, for instance, put on the same page the kind of job provision on the street versus the job provision of a shopping center close by to the street, in order to kind of claim the street significance. And what was interesting there that were the planners were sort of mildly amused by our findings but not, necessarily feeling like they had to pay heed. Over a period of time, we began to be approached by activist groups to work with them within spaces that they were actively engaged in and had been for a number of years, almost as translators to take some of their forms of knowledge and to think about how we could translate these into contesting planning processes.

And that that has been a a really interesting process is is is where we we're holding hands with activists who are already incredibly well established and immersed in the places in in in which they are working and and trying to kind of make very reasonable claims. And so I think this this notion of research as solidarity is really important. It's not necessarily one that the institution of the university loves. You know, you can't show impact here, but it's incredibly rewarding. And, I'm thinking again of the project we made together with others on race, space, and architecture.

And that collaboration has really been infused by people adding fabulous layers of their own material into this. So it's solidarity, I think, is not simply about how we forge ahead with our own agenda, but how we listen, work alongside, prop up, occasionally translate. You know, it's it's again quite a patchwork process, but, really, I think becoming increasingly important to the way I see, myself, in relation to the institution of of academia.

That's a really important thing you've raised there, Susie, because I think it it leads on to the last big thing that was on my mind reading the book and thinking about it now, you know, at the moment when after coming living through the and with the pandemic in this very difficult sort of lockdown time that we're emerging from it. There's something as well, isn't there, in in the conduct of the work that of the craft that we all practice in our different ways that is about involving and developing dialogue, but also honoring and recognizing the role that others play in in the creation of the things that we try and make. There's a translation of a book that I was involved with. You mentioned in your book very kindly called Migrant City, which is a book written by lots of people, including some of the participants who were involved in it. And it's been translated into Japanese, this book.

So I thought what we should do in the spirit of that was to try and check-in with the participant authors from that project, which is Story of London and and the divided connectedness of London stages, if you like, about the experience of COVID nineteen and the pandemic. And Charlene Bryan, who is one of the participants, I met her at Westfield Shopping Center just this weekend. She said something to me that really has resonated with me. She said, well, the lesson of the pandemic is for us to all really confront as an ever present possibility that the prospect of death, of mortification, of that our lives are fragile and they are brief, and living in the pandemic, particularly for those communities of color and migrant communities, That's been an ever present thing. And she said this to me, which I'll be interested to know what you thought.

In a way, what that precipitates is us to either reckon with the side of your paradox that is about, you know, magical trial and error, making of a life in un inhospitable circumstances or embrace the phobic, anxious, for some hateful fear of the other and the fear of the outside, fear of the edge. And I just wondered what what you think about the book now. You know, obviously, it was researched before the pandemic, but it is emerging after it. And and I wonder what you think about the project that you've, you know, made so beautifully in this context.

Thanks, Les. I mean, really interestingly, two weeks ago, we went back to Rookery Road, did a a kind of a a re exploration of the street. And at the same time, a week before that, we'd been on on Brick Lane, another street in the center of London. It's really difficult to see these edges, as places that are always residualized. They're residualized by the market.

They're residualized by the state. And that's perpetual COVID or no COVID. It's been really important to think about casualization on the one hand as the market's disinvestment in labor. We've really seen that in the period of COVID. You know, who who becomes, the person who delivers your food on a on an on an Uber van or a Deliveroo bike.

But we also see the extended and pervasive nature of austerity governance, as the state's disinvestment in people, and I think that's still there. So one of the things that became very apparent to us in Rookery Road, over the past year there's been a process of taking homeless people out of the center of the city of Birmingham. And of course, where do they get displaced to? They get displaced to the peripheries where people are already having an incredibly tough time. And so the state layers these areas with cycles and processes and infinite levels of disposability and displacement.

And I think, you know, one of the lines that really always sits with me from the book is when we were on Rookery Road in 2015 and I asked someone how they'd fared in the two thousand and eight recession. And he looked at me, and and sort of said our people have always been in recession. So there's something about the proximity of death, the pervasive nature of recession that is always part of some people's lives And I I do wonder about the exhaustion of having to contend with that all the while and the possibilities nonetheless for some kind of vestige of creativity within that. And I don't know where the where the structures of support currently are going to come from, but I I think we're wearing the edges and the margins awfully thin. And, I think we need, we desperately need a restorative politics.

I think part of that is coming very much from the street and the movements of the street, but it's certainly not coming in this country from electoral politics. This is a matter of of grave concern because it's been, you know, decades that these streets have had to contend with punishment and extreme punishment in the last ten years.

I I, wanted just to mention the insights that Charlene offered at the weekend, but she may maybe would so what she said to me certainly what in that conversation, well, there is a a kind of a license and an empirical basis for that enduring hope that comes through. I read it in the pages of your book, and one that maybe I feel that we should be less less hesitant than to make claims for and to be proud of, actually.

So, Les, I absolutely agree. I think I think it is absolutely incumbent upon us to to never give these damaging structures the first or the last word. And I think, you know, for me, what has been so important about walking these streets and learning from these streets is just the rich and extremely assertive impertinence of crossings, you know, people doing all sorts of crossings, learnings, skilling up, experimenting all the while despite the structures around them. And I I I think that that's an incredible repository of of political energy and of human energy and of cultural resource that is just phenomenally important.

I just wanted to pick up on that because you said earlier in the conversation, Susie, that both spatiality and temporality are key to this project. And I think what you've just said resonates really well with that sense. I think that one gets from reading this book that it's a book that comes from a long, long period of engagement and research and sticking with the trouble, sticking with the community, sticking with the kind of structures of feeling and cycles and narratives in these spaces. And I remember having a a actually a similar conversation with Les about the Migrant City book actually. And there's something I think that's probably interesting to talk about here in relation to the kind of temporality of academic research today and and how, you know, I mean, this is certainly a book that when you read, you really, as I said, you really get a sense of the kind of the long duration, so to speak, of of you being with these communities as they've gone through these cycles of dispossession, racialization.

And as you put it, there's there's always this unheroic resistance that persists. And I just I just wondered if you had anything to say about the type of research that is required to produce a book like this and how it sits within the context of our broader academic landscape today.

I mean, I I should probably just face up and and and acknowledge that at the outset, I never knew this would be a six year process. We started collectively with a group of us looking at Rye Lane in London. It was only sort of two, three years later, that the question of, well, what if, you know, what would it be to to go and understand that in Birmingham or Bristol or Leicester? And so sometimes these processes actually unfold in quite intuitive ways, and I think that's really important to acknowledge. I think time is an incredibly important ingredient too, and that sometimes means that we need some funding, especially if you're doing it together and with people.

You know, it's it's it's often easier to go off on your own and and and make time within the circuits of academic life. But if you're working with a group, it is necessary to have some funding. Not not, you know, these enormous amounts that seem to support, these huge data projects, but small bits of funding that can get us to places to hang out for a while. I think there also has to be a willingness to engage in a wide array of sources. So you start by speaking to people and then a Brexit referendum happens or, an election campaign happens and and you have to then be prepared to follow some of those circuits as they unravel.

But it also then also implies a very different writing process. So this book, you know, took two years to write, and it took many rounds of of editing to because to get six years onto a a black and white format of a page is, tricky exercise. But, yes, I I have really valued the nature of the search this research precisely because it's been interdisciplinary. It's extended across space, and it's had time to evolve in which I can see circuits of power unfolding and resonating on the street. And it's been important to have have the time and space to reflect on those and incorporate those.

Thanks so much, Susie. That that's really wonderful and and and a really useful, answer. And thank you also for for this conversation. It's been really fantastic, to engage with the book, to to read this book, and to talk about it as well. I've taken a lot from the book, a lot of things from the book, actually, some of which we've talked about today and and not the least of which is, the importance of thinking spatially always about spaces that we might think are are residual, peripheral, emergent, but are always in some senses connected, and dynamically produced over long periods of time.

But I think another thing, you know, just following from our our last little exchange just now, another thing that I've really taken from this book is the importance of sticking with communities in the research that we do, and, how that is often quite difficult in the the kinds of, intellectual and academic landscapes that we find ourselves in today because of funding structures and and, audit cycles and all that kind of stuff that we're all very well aware of. Yeah. It's incredibly important to to to get a sense of communities as they evolve over long periods of time. And and that really comes through in the book, and I thank you for that.

Thank you so much, Susie. I think for this conversation, as well as, the book itself, and I think beyond the very rich ethnographies of these of these spaces that you speak about, I think for me, the book also suggests ways of developing a critique and a strategy for seeing street life, and life on the street and their entangled complexities, whether in the global North or South.

Me too, Susie. I'd just like to add to that, chorus of of appreciation really because, you know, I think it's it's really important to recognize and appreciate the value of books like this that insist on another way of attending to recognizing, understanding, feeling the life of cities. You know? Emmanuel Castells many years ago had a a jibe that he used against grand urban theory, you know, that we can't write about cities without citizens. And I think, you know, social theory of city life suffered from with that for quite quite a while.

But I I wanna say that I think this book makes me, focus on the important urgency of writing about cities beyond the citizen, beyond those people who are formal citizens and writing about cities in a human and humane way that operates on a planetary scale, a scale that is both as close to the as as the person next to you in the bus and the place where you go and buy your, you know, whatever it is you're buying, the cable that I needed for my headphones to today, for example, but also can range to the most, you know, the most, interconnected elsewhere. So we should thank you for that. And and and it's it's really precious that there is there are books that that take time and are written through time in this way.

Thanks so much to all of you. It's been such a fabulous conversation for me and a and a wonderful first airing of the book. And it's it's been really valuable also to consider some of your perspectives. So much, much gratitude, and thanks.