Carlos Lopez Galviz

Lancaster University | LU · Institute for Social Futures

What does utopian thinking have to offer students and scholars of mobility? Could ‘mobile utopias’ assist us in envisioning futures – including those of mobility – differently? Do utopias provide a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between mobile societies and lives and the environments against which these are formed? By providing diff...

The paper is the story of building a design research group from scratch. As there has been some recent interest in design research as a team-based activity, this article illustrates how we built the Imagination research team and how it continues to develop. This article gives us the chance to reflect on how far we have come in the last decade. Onc...

What explains the global proliferation of interest in ruins? Can ruins be understood beyond their common framing as products of European Romanticism? Might a transdisciplinary approach allow us to see ruins differently? These questions underpinned the Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project Reconfiguring Ruins, which deployed approaches...

Designology, London Transport Museum Covent Garden Piazza London WC2E 7BB, United Kingdom Admission: Adults £17/Concession £14.50 www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whats-on/exhibitions

World fairs anticipate the future. They are that rare occasion when countries around the world mobilise an important amount of resources to take part in an event the idea of which was first staged in 1851 in London. With a history that includes over 20 cities worldwide, the Expo has traced important developments around themes such as industrial pro...

This article provides an overview of pneumatic technologies in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western cities. As urban centres continued to grow and expand in the nineteenth century, networks of compressed air were introduced to provide public utilities and private services in a variety of domains, ranging from postal services to beauty pa...

Imagining the future of cities is often an exercise that is based upon the imagining of future transport infrastructure. The article explores this connection historically by drawing parallels between London, Paris and Shanghai since c.1851. It focuses on the role that symbols and mythmaking have in the process of envisioning both future transport a...

Innovation was central to developments in urban railway transport in nineteenth-century London and Paris. Innovation was often political, the result of an encounter between and across a range of actors, including railway entrepreneurs and their companies, railway engineers, civil engineers, architects, intellectuals, a range of authorities –local,...

This article explores the intersections between history, urban geography and archaeology in the context of the question “are we all archaeologists now?” Amongst scholars doing research around questions of space and place, increasingly consideration is being given to vertical architectures, including tunnelling infrastructures. The vertical stretch...

When the first section of the Metropolitan Railway opened in January 1863 in London, debates in Parliament emphasized the need to conceive of railways as a system of interconnected circles instead of the lines and termini that had been built since the 1830s. Similar debates took place in Paris around this time, although no plan was implemented befo...

In 1920 the Underground Electric Railways of London Company published two rather austere posters sporting the title ‘Off the beaten track’. The artist remains unknown but the motivation behind their production is quite clear. Between them the posters direct the more committed London tourist to six of the city’s hidden sights, lost amongst their lou...

The article explores the relationship between regulating traffic and structuring congestion in mid-nineteenth-century London. It examines plans for the opening of new streets and for the erection of dedicated structures such as subways and pedestrian bridges, as well as the debates around legislation regulating everyday practices, which included th...

Throughout the nineteenth century, railways in London and Paris were presented as instruments of urban change and social reform in line with the coincidences as well as the discrepancies between the interests of railway companies, on the one hand, and those of the municipal and local authorities of the two cities, on the other. In the process, the...

Using electricity in railway operation became a real option towards the end of the nineteenth century. Cities were, generally, the main recipients and instigators of its introduction as the new technology was to help alleviate the often insufficient provision of means of urban transport. Its introduction, however, was largely dependent on the polit...