The Public Life of Cities, with Dr Regan Koch

Life in cities is always in motion. The past twenty years have seen cities get much richer with new towers and far more people. The streets are now filled with Ubers, electric-hybrid buses, delivery vans, bikes, e-bikes, scooters and joggers.

In cities like London and Paris, high streets are lined with global chains, but independents too: fitness studios, fried chicken shops, vape stores, estate agents, sim card stands, natural wine bars and brew pubs. Coffee shops are everywhere, full of people on their phones or laptops. These changes layer onto the city. Rideshare and delivery apps run on old roads, while consumer trends unfold within inherited architectures.

App-based sociality and takeaway culture grow without altering the skyline. Together, such innovations reshape how we live, work, socialise and share space. Change is not only technological or economic—it is social and cultural too.

This lecture draws on the work-in-progress for Dr Regan Koch’s forthcoming book, The Public Life of Cities (with Alan Latham at UCL) that explores these transformations.

It will look beyond skyscrapers or mega-projects to quieter reconfigurations of public life—at home, in streets and squares, commercial buildings and greenspaces, foregrounding a pragmatic mode of inquiry, one that seeks to broaden and diversify resources for further investigations into urban environments.

Drawing on fieldwork from the UK, US, New Zealand and Germany, the book will provide a practical, case study-driven exploration of how cities change—and this lecture is an invitation to consider public life as a series of experiments in how we live together.

Dr Regan Koch is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and co-Director of The City Centre at Queen Mary University of London. His work explores matters of urban publicness, collective culture, and the representation and imagination of city life.

His research focuses on London and cities across the U.S., with an emerging interest in China and Taiwan. He has examined trends in the management of public space, street food and markets, digital platforms for dating and sexual encounters, geographies of intimacy and privacy, and the politics of urban redevelopment.

He is the co-editor of Key Thinkers on Cities and has published in Urban Studies, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Progress in Human Geography.

This event is part of the Philip Ogden Paris Lecture series, an annual occasion marking the start of the academic year at the Institute in Paris. It features a major contribution to Franco-British academic exchange and offers colleagues, students, and friends of the Institute and Queen Mary University of London the opportunity to engage with new research that crosses disciplinary and national boundaries.

Host or Publisher University of London Institute in Paris