URBLOG

One London?

Change and cohesion in three London boroughs

IPPR / Government Office for London report explores the nature of the contemporary challenges to community cohesion in London and sets out how local actors have responded to them.

"...the capital faces its own very particular challenges to community cohesion, including lower levels of neighbourliness and inter-personal trust, families in the same street living on very different incomes and lacking shared experiences, and a very rapidly changing demographic make-up in a context of growing pressures on basic resources, especially housing."

Learning from Curitiba

Jaime Lerner's 'urban revolution' successfully transformed a congested, grimy, crime-ridden city into a world-renowned model of green living and social innovation.

'Taking care of a city is a process that you start, and then give the population space to respond.'

Guardian interview

Exemplar Open City talk at Somerset House Monday 31st March

Expanding urban learning

The latest newsletter from the Ecologies of Urban Learning program at NYTS.

Gentrification, depression, Harlem and more.

Download eol_newsletter_volume_2_issue_2_hot_off_the_press.htm

What legacy?

How will the claims made for the Olympic Park really play out in the lives of East Londoners?

The Olympics site is eating into east London's green spaces and few local residents will be around to benefit from the area's vast redevelopment, says Tony Lloyd-Jones.

'A new "green Olympics" site development will be of little more benefit to local residents than the current vast blue-fenced building site they will have to suffer until the Olympics is upon them, and for several years after as the legacy sites are redeveloped.'

Ghetto fabulous

Alex Bellos in New Statesman

Scarred by violence and political repression, Brazil's shanty towns have responded with an outpouring of art, music and film. But as "favela chic" becomes all the rage in the west are we in danger of glamorising slum life?

" Usually, the noise that governs favelas is the sound of gunfire. What you hear in AfroReggae is a sonic revolt: the regime of sounds that were suffocated by bullets returning to be heard. There are many different sounds . . . it's not a cacophony but an aesthetic posture intimately linked to an experience of favela life."

SUCCESS AND THE CITY

Learning from International Urban Policy

Latest Policy Exchange report

"Collectively, the message from these cities is clear: the most successful have the powers and ambition to initiate change, the freedoms to think and be innovative with policy, and the mechanisms to hold local change to account. Giving cities powers alone, however, cannot buck geography. The most successful also benefit strongly from their location, size and accessibility, and these are sometimes difficult areas to bring within the bounds of policy."

REGENERATION: PEOPLE & PLACE MATTER

Neighbourhood identity: people, place and time

Report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finds: “How communities are planned, then established, sets a physical and social template that has a long and sustained impact on neighbourhood identities. Crucially, this study has shown how place identity can act against the stated ambitions of renewal projects and cause social segregation.”

"Regeneration does not happen overnight..."

A £50m regeneration scheme changed little, say residents of a deprived estate, so this time they want to do things their way. Guardian report on Marsh Farm, Luton.

SCUPE Congress on Urban Ministry 2008

Advancing God's Reign in Our Cities  CONFERENCE BROCHURE 15-18  April  2008    Chicago

The Congress on Urban Ministry, organised by SCUPE - the Seminary Consortium on Urban Pastoral Education ,  is a biennial event of Christians engaged in and passionate about urban ministry.  This year the Congress will be focusing on Creating Redemptive Communities, Releasing Prophetic Imagination through Story, and Engaging in Justice, Reconciliation and Restoration.

"An unsuccessful city has closed its mind to the future."

Cities on the edge of chaos

Deyan Sudjic, co-editor of Endless City, asks if the city of the future will be a vision of hell or a force for civilised living?
"Cities are made by an extraordinary mixture of do-gooders and bloody-minded obsessives, of cynical political operators and speculators. They are shaped by the unintended consequences of the greedy and the self-interested, the dedicated and the occasional visionary."

"We need more than platitudes" Jonathan Meades reviews Endless City

Row over 'street in sky' estate

The future of a significant modern housing project is under threat.

Robin Hood Gardens was completed in 1972. It was intended as an example of the "streets in the sky" concept - social housing characterised by broad aerial walkways in long concrete blocks. The estate seemed destined for demolition but has won a reprieve.

The Building Design website has begun a petition which it hopes to present to English Heritage to get the "seminal" building listed. Lord Rogers has said:

"Peter and Alison Smithson built two seminal buildings in London - the Economist Building in St James' Street and Robin Hood Gardens in Tower Hamlets - both as good, if not better, than any other modern building in Britain. Whilst the Economist Building has been maintained and upgraded, Robin Hood Gardens has been appallingly neglected…”