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Dr Regan Koch

Regan

Senior Lecturer in Human Geography

Email: r.koch@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 5405
Room Number: Bancroft Building, Room 2.09

Profile

 

I'm an urban and cultural geographer fascinated by public life in cities. My interests include varied forms of collective culture and sociality, and questions of how urban environments can be organised to help us live together in more mutually beneficial ways. Focused on contemporary London and cities across the U.S., as well as a burgeoning interest in Taiwan and China, my research to date has centred on three themes:            

  • Urban publicness. Public space has been a longstanding concern in critical urban scholarship, and my work has sought re-animate this field of study. This includes advocating for careful attention to how different spaces of public life are put together and to the affects that different kinds of materiality, infrastructure, modes of inhabitation, and forms of regulation have in making urban spaces what they are.  I am also interested on-going, everyday forms of negotiation about what is fair and appropriate for living together in a pluralistic society.
  • Urban sociality and collective culture. Cities are full of new cultural trends and innovations that overlap with, and sometimes go against, more established ways of living together - new ways of making a living, eating and drinking, socialising, getting from A to B, and meeting new people, to name just a few.  By examining different forms of social interaction, novel kinds of spaces and practices, and the efforts of entrepreneurs and innovators, I’m curious to explore possibilities for living together better in cities.
  • Representing and imagining cities. Parallel to my interest in urban public life is a concern with popular and academic discourse about cities and neighbourhoods. This includes examining how we understand and portray processes of urban change, new developments and trends, and the lifestyles and culture of different kinds of urban dwellers. In particular, I am concerned with understanding the work that different kinds of representation do and the geographical imaginations they enable.  

My work has been supported by grants from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC), Queen Mary's Public Impact Funds, Research England, University College London’s Graduate School, University College London’s Public Engagement Unit, the American Association of Geography’s Urban Geography Research Group.  

Over the past several years, I have served as the Director of The City Centre at QMUL, and been the QMUL Lead for LISS Doctoral Training Programme, Pathway 8: Urbanisation, Social Change and Transformation. I was organising committee member and communication director for the Royal Geographical Society’s Urban Geography Research Group, and was a founding member of the Stadkolloquium Urban PhD Research Network. 

Key publications:

  • Koch, R. and Miles, S. (2020) ‘Letting the stranger in: intimacy, technology and new geographies of encounter.  Progress in Human Geography.
  • Koch, R. (2020) Public, private and the appeal to common good: practices of justification in a peer-to-peer economy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45(2): 392-405.
  • Koch, R. and Latham, A. (eds) (2017). Key Thinkers on Cities. London: Sage. Available in Mandarin (2019) 城市思想家: ISBN: 978-7-5426-6502-7.
  • Koch, R. and Latham, A. (2013) ‘On the hard work of domesticating a public space’, Urban Studies 50(1) p. 6-21.
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