Water mobilities in an urban fringe

: Exploring the junction of mundane mobile experiences and water-related challenges in Newham, East London

Abstract

This thesis examines the dynamic relations between water-related challenges and the mobilities of people living in urban fringes, focusing on surface water flooding, river contamination and waterfront regeneration. Grounded in the water mobilities framework, the research explores the habitual and intimate – in short, mundane – mobility experiences through which urban residents navigate water related and concomitant socio-spatial challenges, offering a situated alternative to the crisis-centric ways in which water-mobility interplays are commonly portrayed amidst escalating climate change.
The research is based on a qualitative study of Newham, a borough in East London (United Kingdom) and draws on data derived from semi-structured interviews with residents and place-based observations obtained through (auto-)ethnographic encounters. From Newham’s initial urbanisation as Britain’s industrial heartland to its recent designation as London’s regeneration frontline, water dynamics have always been inextricably intertwined with Newham’s urban condition. Surrounded by three rivers, Newham hosts some of London’s principal (waste) water management facilities and waterfront development sites and has endured recurring river contamination and flooding issues which are intensifying with climate change. Historically, Newham communities have also faced disproportionate stressors relating to poverty, stigmatisation, transience and infrastructural decline. The perpetual portrayal of Newham as an ’urban fringe’ by governmental authorities, developers and economic elites has both normalised these challenges and framed Newham as simultaneously excluded from and exploitable by London’s metropolitan apparatus.
The research positions the mundane ways in which residents move through Newham, from daily jogging to volunteering activities, as a principal analytical lens to understand both the lived implications of surface water flooding, river contamination and waterfront regeneration and the socio-spatial impacts and political undercurrents of Newham’s framing as an urban fringe. It shows how seemingly insignificant encounters, including inundated roadsides and privatised waterfronts, imbue residents’ mundane mobilities with experiences of inconvenience, compromise and denial. It argues that, through their perpetual and compounding influence, these experiences constitute mobility and water injustices, meriting an expansion of justice debates beyond the overt struggles often prioritised. The research also interrogates the mobilities of water, waterborne materials and ecologies and water infrastructures as key components to the (asymmetric) emergence and effects of surface water flooding, river contamination and waterfront regeneration. Thus considering the conflicting and co-constitutive mobile exchanges between humans and water is imperative to illuminate not only the everyday challenges of life in Newham, or the socio-political (re)production of uneven urban fringe geographies, but also pathways towards securing justice for human and non-human mobile entities in global cities.

Date of Award	Aug 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Julie Doyle (Supervisor), Nichola Khan (Supervisor) & Roxana Cavalcanti (Supervisor)