Ash Amin

Amin argues that much of what makes a city liveable is not the relationship between neighbours but the silent working of its systems: water from the tap, the bus that turns up, rubbish that disappears. When they fail, you discover how much of coexistence rested on them.

Hence his critique of policies that answer social fracture with community cohesion programmes while neglecting infrastructure. For Amin urban equality is decided first in the reliability of services and only then in acts of togetherness.

A British geographer, professor of geography at the University of Cambridge, where he held the 1931 chair, and foreign secretary of the British Academy, Amin came to the city from regional economics, with studies on industrial districts and globalisation in the 1990s. With Nigel Thrift he wrote Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002), which proposed thinking of the city not as a bounded place but as a set of flows, networks, rhythms and encounters, and Seeing Like a City (2017), which follows that urban life through its infrastructures and routines.

Land of Strangers (2012) and his 2008 article on collective culture and public space develop his other concern: how strangers live together in increasingly diverse cities, and what role the street, the market and the library play in a coexistence that does not require being neighbours or friends. Critics reproach him for an analysis paying little attention to power and inequality; his contribution is a theory of the city as everyday sociability that has influenced the planning of European public space.