Research
Independent and collaborative research on streets, urban communication, infrastructure and public life.
Streets are serious.
Studying them can still be fun.
Studying them can still be fun.
Research · Publishing · Curatorial Practice
Street
Study
Group
An independent nonprofit organisation researching streets, public space and everyday life through publishing, fieldwork and curatorial practice.
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About us
We study how streets are lived, shaped, negotiated and imagined.
Street Study Group is an independent nonprofit research, publishing and curatorial organisation dedicated to the study of streets, public space and everyday life.
We support interdisciplinary research, publish open-access scholarship through Everyday Life: International Journal of Public Culture, Art and Design, and organise exhibitions, workshops and public programmes.
Our work connects academic research with lived urban experience. We are interested in how ordinary spaces are inhabited, governed, contested, communicated and transformed.
Publishing
Open-access journals, research reports and experimental forms of independent publication.
Curating
Exhibitions, workshops and public programmes that bring research into shared cultural space.
Current Research
Glasgow · Public Space · Visual Communication
Perceived
Neoliberal
Glasgow
We are inviting people who live, work or spend time in Glasgow city centre to help us understand how the city’s streets are experienced in everyday life.
The project looks at advertising, city branding, event publicity and public information. It asks how these messages are noticed, remembered and interpreted, and how they shape people’s impressions of particular streets and of Glasgow more broadly.
How do people notice and remember street-level messages?
How are advertising, branding and public information interpreted?
Do these messages feel useful, intrusive, familiar or simply part of the everyday background?
About the project
Across the city, we encounter many different kinds of street-level messages: commercial advertising, city branding, event posters, public information and other forms of visual communication on bus shelters, screens, banners, signs and everyday street surfaces.
These messages are a familiar part of the urban environment, but we do not always stop to consider how they shape our experience of the street, our impression of particular places, or our sense of the city more broadly.
Why Glasgow?
Glasgow has a strong public identity, a rich street culture and many different kinds of urban environments. Understanding how people experience everyday street messages can help us think more carefully about public space, visual culture and the changing character of the city.
Streets are not only designed and managed from above. They are also lived, used, interpreted and understood by the people who move through them every day.
Take part
Help us read
Help us read
Glasgow’s streets.
Thank you for helping us build a better understanding of how ordinary street environments are perceived in Glasgow, and why that matters.
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Exhibition Archive
Past exhibitions,
living questions.
Our archive documents exhibitions developed through research into public space, street furniture, everyday gestures and urban political life.
March 2025
Outside of
Outside of
Formality
A research-led exhibition exploring how everyday acts of appropriation reveal the political life of street furniture in London.
- Curator
- Sinan Wang
- Artists
- Adam Wang, Jinglan Lin, Jialu Chen, Yibin Liu, Max Livesey and Sinan Wang
Read the exhibition text +
Since the 1980s, London’s streets have undergone a transformation that feels both logical and unsettling. The privatization of public services has blurred spatial ownership, making it unclear what rights we hold within public spaces.
As street furniture installations proliferate, critical discourse around them has faded. Once public utilities, they have become commodities, serving corporate interests rather than the needs of urban dwellers. In this context, how can we reclaim London as our city?
While formal debates on public infrastructure have declined, everyday appropriations continue to express public agency. People repurpose, modify and engage with street furniture, asserting their presence in urban space.
Outside of Formality explores these subtle yet powerful acts as a form of spatial resistance. The exhibition extends the research project New Spatial Public–Political Conflict in Street Furniture and was the first event organised by the Street Study Group.
Featuring designers and artists from China and the UK, the works examine public appropriation, from abstract spatial adaptations to physical repurposing. Through this lens, the exhibition highlights how creative interventions can amplify public agency, challenge dominant power structures and reclaim the streets as spaces of collective ownership and participation.
August 2025
Plant a Lamppost
Plant a Lamppost
in the Exhibition
A curatorial project about everyday urban space, street furniture and the subtle politics of public life.
- Curators
- Sinan Wang, Teng Wang and Jialu Shen
- Artists
- Adriette Myburgh, Amos Yi Huang, Annie Colloby, Beatriz Santos, Bill Aitchison, Crystal Wu, Deyu Zeng, Don't Matter Labs (Chew Yunqing), Feliz Yuan, Henryk Terpilowski, Hongil Yoon, Indianna Solnick, Jialu Chen, Jiani Gu, Jingwen Li, Lisa Tustian, Lola Luk, Max Livesey, Minghao Wu, Qinru He, Riccardo Iacono, Rob Herbert, Shuhan Zheng, Xiaohua Liu, Yang Liu, Yanting Zeng, Yibin Liu, Yunchao Ke, Yunxi Wu, Zitong Hao and Ziyu Zhang
Read the exhibition text +
In 1956, British sculptor Arnold Machin chained himself to a Victorian lamppost outside his home, protesting the council’s plan to remove it. He later acquired the post and planted it in his garden. More than a defence of a street fixture, this act became a quiet yet powerful statement of individual agency in shaping shared space.
What does it mean to plant a lamppost today?
Plant a Lamppost in the Exhibition invites visitors to notice, inhabit and reimagine the spaces we move through every day. It explores how small, often overlooked actions— sitting, waiting and leaning—can become acts of presence, resistance and quiet reclamation.
At a time when access to public space is increasingly shaped by control, surveillance and exclusion, the exhibition asks: how can creative gestures reassert our right to the street?
Bringing together works in sculpture, installation, photography, painting, design, film and archival material, the exhibition examines how artists, designers and citizens use street furniture and urban surfaces to open up space—for negotiation, encounter and being seen and heard.
It is a call to stay with the unnoticed, and to read the street as a site of democratic possibility.
Small support.
More open research.
More open research.
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Support
Support
Street Study
Group
Help us keep independent research, open-access publishing and public programmes accessible.
Street Study Group is sustained through voluntary work, partnerships and public support. Contributions help us maintain the open-access publication of Everyday Life, develop independent research and organise exhibitions, workshops and public programmes.
- Open-access journal publishing
- Website, archiving and publication infrastructure
- Independent street and public-space research
- Exhibitions, workshops and public programmes
Street Study Group is an independent nonprofit organisation and is not currently a registered charity. Contributions are used solely to support its research, publishing and public activities. Donations are not currently eligible for Gift Aid.
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