Month:

Morning starts with IPD/Savills presenting at the German Gymnasium on the property market “performance” of regeneration areas. As we knew, very large amounts of money can be made out of ‘regeneration’, especially with the public sector ‘de-risking’ it. Not much is expected to happen in the near future, therefore. Small projects with short time-scales and no infrastructure / remediation costs may happen, at least in prime regions.

Then to UEL for a seminar on Docklands. Kicked off by Mike Raco, stressing that London Docklands need not have been like that: with  that huge amount of public money, different things could have been done, and the importance of getting alternatives onto the agenda. Good start. He used (¿ coined) the phrase ‘trickle up’. Continue reading “"Regeneration"”

Critical article on planning history of Northampton by ‘Jones the Planner’ http://www.jonestheplanner.co.uk/2011/06/future-is-northampton.html passed on by Owen Hatherley. Full of scenes from my childhood. I have added some stuff to it now he has turned the commenting on.

More urgent and important, we had a very rewarding conference of the Just Space Network with academics and students from the Urban Salon (a network of London univ geographers, planners etc) on Thursday. Many good short talks by activists.  It seems we did achieve something more than simply showing that there was opposition. Some details posted already at http://justspace2010.wordpress.com and more to come.  Dave Hill says the Plan is finally being published on 15 July so we’ll see whether Boris’s chaps have paid any attention to the panel report. We did well on challenging ‘urban regeneration’ and the Gypsies and Travellers got much of what they wanted. Julienne Chen who contributed so much last year, came specially from Amsterdam. A main aim was to work out better forms for collaboration and support from/with universities, and there is a ‘prototocol’ in draft + proposals for new seminars and a new module at UCL.  The atmosphere was very like an INURA meeting.