URBLOG

Is it all coming together in Thames Gateway?

THAMES GATEWAY DELIVERY PLAN LAUNCHED

The government has announced, More than £9bn is to be spent on projects along the Thames estuary on Europe's largest regeneration project,

Lucy Reynolds asks: Is it too ambitious?

"Thames Gateway is clearly an ambitious project and is very challenging because there are a number of different sub-regions within it with different characters, and it is not helped by the fact that there is a plethora of agencies involved."

Migrant housing myths exposed

The housing pathways of new immigrants

Some of the enduring myths about immigration and social housing in the UK are debunked in a new report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

"The new immigrants that we talked to were rarely skilled players of the welfare system. They typically had little choice and few options about where they lived and were often making do in poor conditions."

See also David Robinson in People, Place & Policy:

European Union Accession State Migrants in Social Housing in England

"The findings to emerge from this analysis are presented and contrasted against stories of unfairness and injustice in the allocation of social housing.  What is revealed is a yawning gap between perception and reality. "

3 MILLION NEW HOMES OR WHAT?

Monbiot on Housing Bill

"There is a legitimate debate to be had about where and how these homes are built. However - though it hooks in my green guts to admit it - built they must be."

SHRINKING CITIES

The  Shrinking Cities exhibition is now in Manchester and Liverpool.

"Cities are shrinking all over the world!  Shrinking cities are a cultural challenge to us. In the Shrinking Cities project, architects, academics and artists investigate recent developments in Detroit, Ivanovo, Manchester / Liverpool and Halle / Leipzig ."

David Hepher:new works

New works by David Hepher are currrently on display at the Flowers East Gallery. Hepher's paintings are created on a base of concrete. More recently he has begun to introduce a photographic element, balancing, as it were, the neutral graphic image of the buildings with the painterly surfaces created by the concrete and the graffiti.

WALKING THE M62

John Davies' M62 journal available to download

During the months of September and October 2007 Liverpool parish priest John Davies took a walk across the north of England following the route of the M62 motorway east to west from Hull to his home back in Liverpool. This is an edited version of the daily entries John posted on his walk website.

City Survivors

Anne Power: Guardian Society Profile

Activist and writer tells Lynsey Hanley that shortsighted urban housing developments dominated by one- and two-bed apartments are breaking up communities by driving poorer families out of the inner city

"Families are the litmus test of whether a city is really working. If a city isn't working for families it's very, very difficult to make the city work."

Anne Power's City Survivors: Bringing Up Children in Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods is published by Policy Press. See books column.

FAITHS FOR THE CITY

What makes a 'Good City'? Faith perspectives from Birmingham

  As Birmingham continues to evolve as a Multi Faith city, the need becomes greater for the different Faith communities to relate to each other and to the city at a variety of levels. As well as developing friendships and working together on common issues, it is important that the religious communities are able to contribute with substance to the pressing debates about the future of the city.

Six  theologians were asked to write on the subject of What makes a good city? These papers are based on respective scriptural texts, taking into account the history of their interpretation.

Harlem takes on university

   Higher education and urban transition ignites New York, as planning committee consider plans for university expansion in West Harlem.

"What we are talking about is change. Manhattan is changing and when that happens somebody loses out."

"People like me came here because we saw Harlem as the spiritual centre of African America, but also because we had a vision of the vibrant area it could become. Now we've realised that vision, but the nightmare is that now we are not rich enough to enjoy it."

"I have seen the university systematically erode diversity by driving out people of colour and the poor, and replace it with a sterile conformity of white upper middle-class students and faculty."

Regions should be doing more to reap economic benefits from London

London’s Links

A report from the Centre for Cities  exposes massive variations between England’s regions in terms of the gains they make from London’s economic success.  While London’s importance to the UK economy is indisputable, the economic benefits of a strong London are mainly felt in the Greater South East – and other parts of the UK are not tapping its full potential.