Welsh School of Architecture guest talk series: “The City in the Country?" by Professor Clare Melhuish

This talk touches on the dominance of urban studies since sociologist Ruth Glass complained about the British elite’s lack of interest in the city in the 1960s, which she attributed to a romanticisation and idealisation of the countryside in the national imagination, subsequently highlighted by Raymond Williams (1973). Since then, despite debate about growth of rural-urban interdependence, rural diversification, and urban nature, there has been a corresponding lack of engagement with rural studies and ‘rural life’ as a sociological concept.

Over the last 20 years, in response to emerging policy on the climate crisis, ‘ecological urbanism’ has become a prominent concept in urban design and urban studies, while gathering criticism for its foregrounding of an exclusive urban narrative which effectively reinforces a perceived urban-rural divide (‘methodological cityism’, Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015). Mindful of Geddes’ early work in this area, Professor Melhuish will consider how the idea of ‘stretched-out’ urban-rural communities (Silk 1999) across multi-sited sociospatial networks might be investigated through an ‘entanglement of infrastructures, ecologies, and social practices’ (Carse 2016), and help us to re-position ecological urbanism within a ‘city-region’ framework that engages with rural studies, thinks across places in relation (Glissant 1990), and, following Carse, advances ‘the emergence of something fresh: the anthropology of the built environment’.

Clare Melhuish is Professorial Research Fellow in Anthropology of Built Environments at UCL Urban Laboratory in London. She  was Director of Urban Lab from 2018-2024. Her research has focused on the impact of large-scale urban development on the cultural infrastructure and social identity of local communities, in London, Doha and the Caribbean.

(Image: Map by William Hole from Michael Drayton, Polyolbion (1612/1622), Fourth Song. Framed drawing found in local market. Photo: C.Melhuish 2024.)