Month:

An email comes in from Dave Hill (Guardian blogger/journalist): I’ve just discovered your blog and your post about Mayor Johnson’s housing policies and their implications. I’d love to learn more about your work in this area and your conclusions.Regards,Dave Hill; Guardian.  http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dave_hill/ 

Since I just did a short talk on this yesterday at the launch for UEL’s book “London’s Turning: the making of Thames Gateway” I have converted it into text here as a kind of reply to Dave:   

Continue reading “What IS the housing problem?”

Very good two days of discussion in a workshop of the EU 6th Framework programme concerning innovations in social inclusion (or prevention of exclusion).  Very impressive group of people old and young working on this and very good range of methodologies and integration of theory and praxis. Particularly good discussions on the need for abstraction from local cases rather than generalisation; on why terms like social capital and human assets should not lightly be used; useful grouping of ‘existential fields’.  The material will be on their web site http://katarsis.ncl.ac.uk/index.html    Then there was an excellent field visit to northern suburbs of Athens organised by Dimitra Siatitsa who is also playing a key role in our October conference of INURA http://inura08.wordpress.com/

There is much discussion about this, including some wry jokes about how little Boris will need to change in Ken’s Plan (and even less in his actual practices). Peter Eversden and Mike Back at LFCAS have done digests of what the Mayor said in his campaign http://www.londonforum.org.uk/news/governance/whats_new_with_borisand another document which I’ll put up shortly.   Clearly there will be less social rented housing produced, more favours for small shops and suburban areas….