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About Me

I am Professor of Urban Form and Society and Director of the Space Syntax Laboratory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, heading an internationally-leading centre for the architectural research field of space syntax. I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2015.

One stream of research effort has involved reconstruction of Jewish settlement patterns in major cities in 19th century England, mapping business and census records to analyse the spatio-economic patterns of the communities at the time.

Charles Booth’s 19th century investigations were the starting-point for a large- funded study of London’s patterns of urban poverty in the past and present. I have been an advisor for a major exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands on ‘Jack the Ripper and the East End’; and an advisor the LSE Library for a new website to host their Charles Booth collection. My historical maps expertise led to my appearing in a BBC4 series, ‘Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession’ and I have advised on several other TV and radio programmes.

A related stream of work examines the religious history of minorities in London’s East End, I am currently collaborating with Survey of London and the writer Rachel Lichtenstein on a Memory Map of the Jewish East End.

Another major project has been an exploration of the evolution of London’s outer suburbs from the 1890s onwards to build up a picture of the changing socio-economic geography of twenty outer suburbs. The importance of historical research in understanding the inherent temporality of urban structure has been at the heart of this work.

Most recently I have published a book called ‘Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography’, which reviews over two centuries of social history through maps.

Allied disciplines such as Urban Morphology, Digital Humanities and HGIS have been influenced by methodological developments across the breadth of my research. Future work into the emergent nature of cities will entail scholarship on the evolution of urban micro-economies.

Recent Publications

Selected Publications

Monographs and Chapters

Vaughan, L. Mapping society: the spatial dimensions of social cartography. (London: UCL Press, 2018).

Vaughan, L., ed., Suburban Urbanities: suburbs and the life of the high street (London: UCL Press, 2015).

Vaughan, L., ‘The Ethnic Marketplace as Point of Transition’, in London the Promised Land Revisited, ed. by A. Kershen, (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 35-54.

Vaughan, L., ‘Mapping the East End Labyrinth’, in Jack the Ripper and the East End with an introduction by Peter Ackroyd, ed. by A. Werner (London: Chatto and Windus, 2008), 218-37.

Peer reviewed journal articles and conference papers

Vaughan, L, and Kerstin Sailer. 2017. The metropolitan rhythm of street life: A socio-spatial analysis of synagogues and churches in nineteenth century Whitechapel. In An East End Legacy. Essays in Memory of William J Fishman, edited by Colin Holmes and A. Kershen. London: Routledge.

Vaughan, L., Törmä, I., Dhanani, A., and Griffiths, S., ‘An ecology of the suburban hedgerow, or: how high streets foster diversity over time’, in Proceedings of the 10th International Space Syntax Symposium (London: University College London, 2015), 99:1-99:19.

Vaughan, L., Dhanani, A., and Griffiths, S., ‘Beyond the suburban high street cliché – a study of 150 years of London’s network adaptation to change’, Journal of Space Syntax, 4 (2013), 221-41.

Vaughan, L., ‘Urbanity, discontinuity and diversity: the significance of place in Jewish East London’, paper given at Tradition and Transition in Jewish, Christian and Muslim Cultures, ed. by L. Fischer (Woolf Institute, Cambridge University: Woolf Institute with the Open University of Israel, 2012).

Kershen, A., and Vaughan, L., ‘There was a Priest, a Rabbi and an Imam…: an analysis of urban space and religious practice in London’s East End, 1685-2010’, Material Religion, 9 (2013), 10-35.

Vaughan, L., ‘An analysis of the synagogue as centre of immigrant social solidarity in London’s Jewish East End’, invited paper at Religion culture and materiality workshop led by S. Watson (Open University, 2011).

Vaughan, L., Griffiths, S., Haklay, M., and Jones, C.E., ‘Do the suburbs exist? Discovering complexity and specificity in suburban built form’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34 (2009), 475-88.

Vaughan, L., and Geddes, I., ‘Urban form and deprivation: a contemporary proxy for Charles Booth’s analysis of poverty’, Radical Statistics, 99 (2009), 46-73.

Vaughan, L., ‘The spatial form of poverty in Charles Booth’s London’, Progress in Planning, 67 (2007), 231-50.

Vaughan, L., and Penn, A., ‘Jewish Immigrant Settlement Patterns in Manchester and Leeds 1881’, Urban Studies, 43 (2006), 653–71.

Vaughan, L., Clark, D.C., Sahbaz, O., and Haklay, M., ‘Space and Exclusion: Does urban morphology play a part in social deprivation?’, Area, Republished April 11 as “one of the best and most influential papers on inequality, poverty and exclusion published by Area” (2005), 37 (4) 402 – 412.

 

Media Coverage

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@urban_formation

Country Focus

England

Expertise by Geography

England

Expertise by Chronology

5

Expertise by Topic

Migration & Immigration, Religion, Urban History