Category: planning

Tremendously stimulating discussion last Thursday on my latest version of paper on UK housing and land crisis. It’s all at Society Could…

I just was persuaded by Matthew Gandy to write a micro-essay for a book he is editing (or maybe curating is the modern word).  I must say I found it incredibly hard to do 1200 words – and overshot – and got upset about it.  It’s called (his title, including the ‘z’)
London for sale: towards the radical marketization of urban space
This is what I wrote:
edwards-constellations-20110705

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.

“City Finance Commission: setting cities free…”

Went to the launch today of a report by this “commission” set up by Birmingham, Manchester and ‘central London’.  It’s essentially a call for the decentralisation of government budgets to cities and to capture the mood of the coalition in favour of growth.  I have yet to read the report so this is a first reaction.  Continue reading “Growth / de-growth / pnuk”

Have just greatly enjoyed Owen Hatherley (2010) A guide to the new ruins of Great Britain, London: Verso. It’s a rollicking tour of the cities of England + Cardiff + Glasgow, evaluating and describing what’s been done to them in modern times. Sometimes gleeful, more often rueful or rude. Continue reading “a good critique of British urban 'development'”

That same Monday, 24 January, brought the meeting of the Urban Salon where Just Space discussed with academics (profs and students) the experience and scope for collaboration. We planned for 40 people to come and made sets of papers (principally the transcripts students had made from EiP recordings) and then 70 people came. It was extremely gratifying and useful. Continue reading “Stimulating monday 2… and…”

Feels like being a student, going to 3 lectures (by other people) in one week. A very adept short lunchtime lecture to a packed Darwin Theatre by Allan Penn on Who enjoys shopping in Ikea? Good fun and surprisingly critical of how IKEA is manipulating its users. Anyone keen to get an instant intro to space syntax would enjoy this and it is online here (audio streaming only). The video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkePRXxH9D4 and the relevant paper is here:
http://www.spacesyntax.tudelft.nl/media/Long%20papers%20I/alan%20penn.pdf
Then two events at LSE, one good, one trivial. Continue reading “going to lectures”

The Inura common office just sent this link to an animated chart on the crisis.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/debtris/

This is roughly the text of a talk given on Friday 11 November at an Urban Geography conference called Alternative Urbanisms, held in UCL.  Comments, criticisms and suggestions very welcome. Main text follows  the abstract. Slide show not included because of some copyright problems. Email if you want to look. Very constructive review/ writeup by blogger George Carothers at http://www.thepolisblog.org/2010/11/sharing-city-on-knowledge-and-academy.html

Abstract

This paper tries to sketch an alternative future for London arising out of the current crisis (seen in broadly Harvey-ish terms), the need for some big jump out of the prevailing orthodoxy and the (relatively) mundane but stimulating experience of taking part in the Examination in Public of Mayor Boris Johnson’s slightly adjusted version of Ken Livingstone’s London Plan in alliance with a lot of citizen groups.

It is conventional in left circles to deplore utopias and instead to stress that a better future would and should be forged through dispersed innovations emerging from successive struggles and contradictions. Continue reading “A London utopia”