URBLOG

Revisiting the Peckham Experiment

The Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham provided a model of community health work from 1930s-1950s.  Jonathan Freedman  considers the lessons in The Guardian and a forthcoming Radio 4 Long View on 27th November.

"Peckham is also a parable of a wider kind. The post-1945 rush to build a universal welfare state trampled on too many small, creative hives of ingenuity. [...] It could add up to a renewed notion of what the state is for - first to guarantee universal rights and then to nurture and encourage the kind of human-scale cooperation that made Peckham such a phenomenon. Ministers are right to look around for inspiration, but they shouldn't ignore our collective past: they might be surprised, and delighted, by what they find there."

Mike Cushman takes up the story.

[limited access] or the open city?

LSE Cities  Programme Lecture

Professor Kees Christiaanse - Visiting Professor, LSE Cities Programme
This lecture will address whether these conditions are destroying the sensible tissue of the open city, which are intended to encourage social interaction and balance. Are cities degenerating into secluded islands that denying a balanced urban totality? And how might the open city react to these developments?

Date: Tuesday 20 November 2007
Time: 6.30pm
Location: The Hong Kong Theatre

REFUGEE INTEGRATION

New research reveals asylum seekers’ and refugees’ experiences of integration

Refugees’ Experiences of Integration is a two year qualitative research project looking at the social aspects of refugees’ integration, particularly in relation to how these were experienced in two different localities, Haringey and Dudley, and across different groups of refugees and asylum seekers.

“One of the most significant things we noticed while doing the research was how much the asylum system itself hindered integration. The first step to improving integration has to be lifting restrictions to basic entitlements and civil liberties for people seeking asylum.”

RETHINKING GENTRIFICATION

The new gentrifiers

Joe Moran in The New Statesman

"The maturing of the housing market has shifted the emphasis away from the collective action of middle-class pioneers and towards large-scale developers and regeneration companies.[...] The idea of a frontier class, colonising up-and-coming areas, no longer makes sense when the housing market is largely sewn up by established homeowners. "

Towering ambition

Is a pioneering South Bank housing body compromising its principles by wanting to build tall? Steve Rose reports in The Guardian.

For many Coin Street Community Builders on London's South Bank has been a pioneering example  of social and affordable housing working with social enterprise in a hottly contested location. New proposals raise a different set of challenges to the ethos and direction of CSCB.

Riven by class and no social mobility - Britain in 2007

Guardian report on 'classless society'

• No change in 10 years of Labour rule
  · 89% say they are judged by class
  · Poll shows deep North-South gap

Yorkshire mill town tops environmental impact list

And the winner of the award for the greenest city in Britain is ... Bradford

The Yorkshire city more associated with dark satanic mills than rolling hills comes top of the environmental impact league table in the Sustainable Cities Index published today by Forum for the Future.

Families and Neighbourhoods

New report highlights the poverty gap

How much parents earn in England has a dramatic effect on how they view their neighbourhood and whether they believe they are able to do the best for their families.

Only 35 per cent of those on the lowest incomes feel confident that their neighbourhood can provide the best opportunities for their family, compared to 73 per cent of the richest.

WANTED: a black-british urbanism

No Leaders  Bonnie Greer in New Statesman

Black urbanism is not only an understanding of urban culture and experience from a black perspective - it also requires the active involvement of us, the black communities in cities and neighbourhoods all across the UK. Black communities should be more engaged in the process of designing and creating the very neighbourhoods and spaces of the metropolitan areas they have done so much to help revive over the past half-century.

Lynsey Hanley on Berlin

From The Guardian

Rich buyers drawn to the edgy, arty areas of cities end up changing them. Now they're taking Berlin.....What Berlin offers in its present state is an alternative to the idea of a capital city as money-making machine....