There are four notable advances to the research fields of Geography and Urban Studies:
1: A new approach to density. The project has demonstrated that in the context of people’s lives, high density is both multiple in form and nuanced in its interpretation. People ‘piece’ together perceptions of density as a series of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ experiences that connect home, neighbourhood, work, and leisure, & influenced by their individual circumstances. What this means is that for research, policy and practice it makes little sense, given that density is made meaningful in the city as a multifaceted experience in-and-beyond the home, to isolate density (e.g. by residential population). Instead, it helps to begin by learning from how density is encountered in the ‘lived city’. We can now show how that comes to matter according to social differences in income, gender, race, and disability, as well as cultural differences between cities/countries, and can use this to inform research and policy approaches. This is a significant advance on a research area that has usually defined density (1) in an isolated/narrow rather than integrated/expansive way, and (2) in advance of research rather than as a ‘bottom up’ result of it. This approach questions ideas that density is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in favour of a more nuanced approach, a theme that is being further developed in ongoing writing from the project, and does so with a genuinely international comparative scope across the world.
2: Repositioning density in relation to key urban challenges. The project has shown across several publications how density is both a challenge, especially in poor neighbourhoods or in busy commutes, and a resource, as residents and others pull together to alleviate and sometimes transform those challenges. This theme of density as both challenge and resource carries though DenCity publications on waste, everyday experiences in Dar es Salaam and Manila, housing & infrastructures (e.g. in Mumbai or Hong Kong, and in the pandemic (e.g. Taipei)), and travel (e.g. commuting in Tokyo). One of the book's, Fragments of the City (California, 2021), for example, focusses on poor neighbourhoods to show how the inequalities and politics of everyday urban materials both exacerbates the challenges of density while simultaneously being alleviated by organisations that emerge from and use urban density. This is significantly new way of conceptualising & researching urban density in relation to challenges in cities. It has also fed into rethinking the relationship between density and value, including in (and beyond) the pandemic, which we have argued in several of the papers.
3: The role of density in citylife. In Tokyo, Chowdhury and McFarlane demonstrated how people’s perception of the ‘crowd’ in the metro commute was not only about the experience of movement, but what it meant to live in the city. The crowd, we showed, can act as a symbol of citylife, including the identity of the city & the concerns/aspirations people attach to it. Connecting density to citylife is a new way of thinking about density in urban research, and has informed our research in other cities (e.g. Dar es Salaam, Manila, & London – four papers currently under review). Also related is the third monograph in progress, which connects density to the ‘good city’/‘good citylife’;
4: The importance of density for waste. In Waste and the City (Verso, 2023) and in arguments on the ‘perceptions of atmosphere’ in published pieces, the project demonstrated how understanding the inequalities and politics of urban sanitation – a DenCity Work Package that became an increasing focus of the project, including in research in London – depends on the relationship between waste and density. These set out new ways of thinking about density & waste.
