Ordinary social life depends on environments that make encounter possible without requiring encounter to be formally organised. The crucial condition is neither spectacle nor institutional grandeur but repeatable accessibility: places that can be entered, understood, used and revisited with limited negotiation. A tavern, café, library, market or pavement becomes socially consequential when its material arrangement and habitual use lower the threshold for presence among others. Social capacity is therefore spatial before it is programmatic. It emerges through doors that remain open, counters that support brief occupation, tables that tolerate duration, familiar routines, affordable transactions, recognisable temporal rhythms and a degree of behavioural looseness. Such spaces do not simply host social relations after those relations have been formed elsewhere. They participate in producing them by stabilising situations in which proximity, repetition and recognition can accumulate.
This capacity is epistemically difficult because it often appears trivial while it is functioning. Infrastructure, as Latham and Layton insist, is frequently transparent in use and becomes visible through interruption, closure or unequal access. Uría’s historical tavern reveals the same structure from another direction: its social importance was obscured by moral categories that framed drinking, gaming and informal gathering as disorder. The ordinary setting becomes legible only when analysis separates what authorities said the space represented from what people repeatedly did there. This is a methodological lesson of wider scope. Informal public life is easily missed when research privileges formal organisations, declared functions or exceptional events. Repetition, weak ties and unplanned coexistence require attention to practices whose significance lies precisely in their routine character.
Latham, A. and Layton, J. (2022) ‘Social infrastructure: why it matters and how urban geographers might study it’, Urban Geography, 43(5), pp. 659–668. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.2003609.
Latham and Layton refine social infrastructure by distinguishing several meanings that had begun to travel under the same term: people as infrastructure, the social relations surrounding hard infrastructures, infrastructures of social care, and the public or quasi-public places that support social connection. The paper’s iconic move is conceptual disaggregation. Rather than treating social infrastructure as an intuitively positive label for any socially useful place, it asks what kind of infrastructural work is actually being described. Its theoretical contribution lies in returning infrastructure to capacity: infrastructures facilitate, support, service and sustain activity, but they do so through different material, institutional and political arrangements. Methodologically, the text urges urban researchers to specify the infrastructural object, its users, its relations of access and its mode of support instead of relying on broad metaphor. This creates a bridge to critical urban geography, where infrastructure is simultaneously material provision, unevenly distributed capacity and political form. The concept becomes strongest when its empirical register is made explicit.
Latham, A. and Layton, J. (2019) ‘Social infrastructure and the public life of cities: Studying urban sociality and public spaces’, Geography Compass, 13, e12444. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12444.
Latham and Layton develop social infrastructure as a research framework for recognising the public dimensions of spaces that are routinely overlooked because their primary function appears mundane. Libraries, laundrettes, cafés, playgrounds, swimming pools, pavements and schools matter not only for what they formally provide but for the social capacities their material and institutional arrangements make possible. The article’s central contribution is to connect infrastructure, publicness, encounter and provision within one analytic language. Its methodological operation is infrastructural rather than typological: the question is not whether a place is officially public, but how its design, accessibility, routines, conventions and maintenance support repeated forms of co-presence, trust and connection. Drawing on Star, Klinenberg and traditions of public-space research, infrastructure becomes relational, embedded and often visible most clearly when it breaks down. This produces a precise bridge between urban geography and microsociology: collective life is sustained by ordinary settings whose social effects are distributed through repeated use rather than spectacular civic form.
Uría, J. (2003) ‘La taberna. Un espacio multifuncional de sociabilidad popular en la Restauración española’, Hispania, 63(214), pp. 571–604.
Uría reconstructs the Spanish tavern as a dense institution of popular sociability rather than the degraded moral environment imagined by hygienists, employers and reformers. Its iconic idea is multifunctionality: the tavern gathered conversation, political meetings, card games, songs, dances and everyday association within a setting whose informality made it difficult to reduce to formal organisational categories. The theoretical contribution lies in shifting attention from registered associations toward spontaneous, weakly formalised social relations, showing that popular life cannot be understood solely through institutions with explicit membership or statutes. Methodologically, Uría works historically through moral discourse, regulation and social documentation while reading against the grain of elite descriptions that cast tavern life as vice, disorder or alienation. The result is a model of informal publicness in which sociability is simultaneously voluntary, embodied and politically contested. The work bridges social history with urban sociology by demonstrating how ordinary commercial interiors can become crucial infrastructures of collective life.
Marquart, H. and Schicketanz, J. (2022) ‘Experiences of safe and healthy walking and cycling in urban areas: The benefits of mobile methods for citizen-adapted urban planning’, Transportation Research Procedia, 60, pp. 290–297. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trpro.2021.12.038
Marquart and Schicketanz demonstrate that mobility environments are best understood while movement is occurring rather than reconstructed retrospectively from static interviews. Their Berlin and Leipzig studies use go-alongs and ride-alongs with commuters and schoolchildren to capture ad hoc perceptions of safety, noise, pollution, vulnerability and route choice. The iconic methodological claim is that in-situ mobility reveals situational behaviour that conventional interview settings easily flatten. Participants encounter the street as a changing field of traffic, bodily exposure, memory and decision, and the researcher gains access to how prior experience is activated by immediate spatial cues. The work also stresses complementarity: mobile interviews become stronger when combined with participatory mapping, smartphone tools and group walks. The theoretical contribution is therefore modest but precise: walking and cycling are not merely transport modes but experiential interfaces through which urban environments become perceptible and evaluable. The paper bridges transport planning, health geography and qualitative mobile methods by translating situated experience into planning knowledge.
Zell-Ziegler, C., Thema, J. and Dünzen, K. (2024) ‘Using impact chains for a feasibility assessment of sufficiency policies in the mobility sector’, ECEEE Summer Study Proceedings, pp. 751–760.
Zell-Ziegler, Thema and Dünzen operationalise sufficiency by translating it into causal policy chains rather than treating it as a general ethical preference. The paper adopts the IPCC definition of sufficiency as measures and daily practices that avoid demand for energy, materials, land and water while delivering wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Its distinctive methodological contribution is the impact-chain framework, which traces the path from policy stimulus to behavioural, infrastructural and environmental effects while identifying supporting factors, barriers and risks. Seventy-four passenger-transport policies are examined across multiple strategies, including trip reduction, active mobility and modal shift. The analysis is valuable because it refuses to equate a low-demand intention with successful implementation: feasibility depends on administrative flexibility, public transport provision, distributional effects and political acceptance. The paper thus connects sufficiency research to policy design and implementation studies. More broadly, it turns “less” from a moral slogan into an analysable institutional mechanism whose consequences can be compared, qualified and tested.
Hall, C.M. (2009) ‘Degrowing Tourism: Décroissance, Sustainable Consumption and Steady-State Tourism’, Anatolia: An International Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 20(1).
Hall’s essay is an early and forceful attempt to move sustainable tourism beyond efficiency rhetoric toward limits on aggregate throughput. Its iconic idea is steady-state tourism: a system that permits qualitative development while refusing quantitative expansion that depletes natural capital. The theoretical contribution is the integration of degrowth, sufficiency and tourism studies against an economistic paradigm in which growth in arrivals, expenditure or GDP is treated as inherently desirable. Hall distinguishes efficiency from sufficiency and argues that sustainability requires both: resources must be used better, but demand, distance, replacement and consumption must also be moderated. Slow consumption therefore becomes more than an aesthetic of pace; it is a material strategy for reducing throughput while preserving meaningful activity. Conceptually, the paper extends lifecycle thinking from production into travel, asking research to account for the complete material trajectory of tourism experiences. It bridges ecological economics, sustainable consumption and tourism geography by relocating travel within the biophysical limits of the economy.
Guma, P.K. (2025) ‘Everyday Infrastructures of Urban Life’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13324
Guma displaces infrastructure from the spectacular register of megaprojects and technological novelty toward the ordinary systems through which urban life actually persists. His central intervention is to oppose the “modern infrastructure ideal” with a plural account of integrated, hybrid and techno-popular arrangements that operate through incompleteness rather than despite it. Three analytical registers organise the argument: incomplete relationalities, mundane temporalities and heterogeneous modernities. Together they recast infrastructure as processual, contingent, maintained and embedded in broader social and ecological relations. The methodological operation is comparative and conceptual, drawing on eastern African cases to show how roads, kiosks, networks and improvised arrangements coexist, overlap and mutate through use. Maintenance, waiting, repetition and repair become epistemically consequential rather than residual. Guma’s wider contribution is to urban theory and STS: he provides a vocabulary for analysing infrastructures that are neither failed versions of an ideal system nor temporary anomalies, but ordinary socio-technical conditions through which urban worlds are continuously composed.
Bartoletti, R., Sacchetti, F. and Mariani, E. (2025) ‘“It almost seems as if, in the forest, the city has disappeared”: Walking ethnography in an urban wilderness’, Ethnography. https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381251377865
Bartoletti, Sacchetti and Mariani treat walking as a situated epistemic relation rather than a transparent route to authenticity. Their ethnography of the Prati di Caprara urban forest in Bologna shows how movement through spontaneous urban nature recalibrates sensory attention, orientation and the relation between city and wilderness. The paper’s iconic operation is “controlled getting lost”: temporary disorientation becomes analytically productive because it exposes how place is known through recursive acts of orientation, displacement and reorientation. The go-along method is deliberately non-directive and minimally pre-structured, enabling detours, surprise and contradiction to enter the research process rather than be filtered out by a rigid itinerary. Crucially, the authors refuse the claim that walking automatically produces privileged access to experience; its value depends on context, attunement and the combination of routes, notes, audio and observation. The work bridges sensory ethnography, mobilities research and urban political ecology by making movement itself part of the object and condition of knowledge.
Witt, G. and Bernzen, A. (2026) ‘Solving space-related conflicts through degrowth approaches? Navigating tourism-driven housing challenges on the East Frisian islands’, Geoforum, 174, 104679. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2026.104679
Witt and Bernzen reposition degrowth as a spatial governance problem rather than an abstract macroeconomic doctrine. Their study examines tourism-dependent island economies where housing scarcity, second-home ownership, seasonal labour and visitor infrastructures produce conflicts between growth-oriented development and resident wellbeing. The theoretical contribution lies in joining housing degrowth to tourism degrowth, thereby treating land and dwelling not as passive containers of economic activity but as contested resources whose distribution structures everyday life. Methodologically, the paper combines qualitative content analysis of regional planning documents with forty-eight semi-structured interviews across four East Frisian islands, using peripheral island conditions as analytically concentrated environments in which growth pressures become unusually legible. Its wider significance lies in showing that degrowth becomes operational when translated into spatial priorities: decent housing, social equity, long-term quality of life and limits to touristification. It therefore connects political ecology to housing studies, regional planning and the geography of tourism.
Owton, H. and Allen-Collinson, J. (2013) ‘Close but not too close: friendship as method(ology) in ethnographic research encounters’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241613495410.
Owton and Allen-Collinson challenge the conventional assumption that emotional involvement contaminates qualitative research. Friendship is examined neither as methodological innocence nor as a licence for intimacy, but as a relation that can generate forms of access, disclosure and embodied understanding unavailable to detached observation. Their key operation is reflexive calibration: proximity must be made analytically visible, including its affects, asymmetries, expectations and ethical limits. The friend-researcher occupies a shifting position in which knowledge is produced through trust but is never guaranteed by it. This reframes bias as a problem of provenance rather than a defect solved by distance. Emotional reflexivity becomes evidentially productive when the researcher records how the relationship conditions what can be asked, seen, remembered and interpreted. The article links ethnography to feminist and relational methodologies, providing a vocabulary for long-term research situations in which fieldwork and ordinary social life overlap. It is especially important for any archive produced through recurring companionship rather than episodic professional access.
Cross, L. (2020) ‘Artist interviews and revisionist art history: women of African descent, critical practice and methods of rewriting dominant narratives’, Journal of Art Historiography, 23.
Cross treats artist interviews as a method for historicising experience that dominant art-historical structures have often failed to preserve. Drawing on more than a decade of interviews conducted through narrative arts writing, academic research and documentary film/video, she argues that the artist’s experiential knowledge can disclose social, cultural and institutional conditions obscured by canonical accounts. Her methodological operation is explicitly positional. Black feminist thought and the ‘outsider within’ perspective make shared cultural knowledge a resource for interpretation while retaining attention to differences within apparently common identities. Interviews become extended conversations rather than neutral extractions of information, capable of registering career navigation, exclusion, aesthetic inheritance and forms of knowledge that remain marginal to institutional archives. Cross therefore connects oral testimony to revisionist historiography and curatorial practice. The larger implication is that the archive is not merely incomplete by accident: methods of access, trust and listening determine which artistic lives become historically legible and which remain structurally under-described.
Thatcher, J. (2021) The Lives of the Interview: The Development of the Artist Interview in Twentieth-Century Britain and the United States. PhD thesis. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.
Thatcher transforms the artist interview from a transparent vessel of biographical information into an object with its own material and institutional biography. Interviews are performative and co-constructed encounters that continue to change after the conversation ends: recordings become transcripts, transcripts are edited, excerpts circulate in print or broadcast, and later repetitions alter both the artist’s position and the interviewer’s questions. Her diachronic method is particularly powerful because it refuses the fantasy of a definitive statement. An artist can revise, contradict or reframe earlier positions, while the same interview can acquire new authority through publication, citation and archival preservation. Thatcher’s emphasis on production chains—interviewer, artist, producer, editor, transcriber, publisher, broadcaster—also relocates authorship from a dyad to a network. The work bridges oral history, media archaeology and art historiography, showing that evidence about artistic life is inseparable from the technical forms and institutional passages through which speech becomes record.
Nilsen, A. (2023) Biographical Life Course Research: Studying the Biography-History Dynamic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44717-4.
Nilsen reconstructs biographical research as an inquiry into the dynamic between individual lives and historical conditions rather than as the recovery of self-contained personal narratives. Her decisive contribution is temporal stratification: biography is intelligible only through the interaction of individual timing, family time, cohort position, institutional change and historical period. The life course is therefore neither a fixed developmental sequence nor a retrospective story of self-realisation. It is a contextual trajectory whose transitions acquire meaning through their relation to changing structures. Methodologically, Nilsen defends biographical interviews, lifelines and mixed forms of evidence while resisting both causal reductionism and an unrestricted constructivism in which factual distinctions dissolve into narrative. The book provides a rigorous bridge between qualitative longitudinal research and historical sociology. Its relevance extends beyond sociology because it offers a precise way to study persistence and change without converting duration into destiny: the same life can be followed through different phases while preserving the asymmetry between event, memory, narration and historical circumstance.
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