The happy architect
"We could have done so much with the amazing period of expansion we had. Instead, we've built a huge amount of really bad stuff. We've been driven by commerce, the media, quick wins, one-liners."
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Recent Posts
- Glancey on the warning of Lakanal
- Research finds no bias in allocation of social housing
- “I’m sorry, you can’t drink here.”
- “Who Cares About Estates?”
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« Transition Cities Conference 2008 | Main | India's urban poor are being squeezed for living space »
November 21, 2008
URBooks
Setha M. Low: On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture
How the physical form of the plaza encodes the social, political, and economic relations within the city.Manuel Castells: Communication Power
Manuel Castells analyses the transformation of the global media industry by this revolution in communication technologies, proposing a new theory of power in the information age based on the management of communication networksAnna Minton: Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City
This passionate and vivid polemic shows us the face of Britain today, revealing the untested urban planning that is transforming not only our cities, but the nature of public space, of citizenship and of trust.Martin Jacques: When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World
The rise of China, India and the Asian tigers means that, for the first time, modernity will no longer be exclusively western. The west will be confronted with the fact that its systems, institutions and values are no longer the only ones on offer.Theology in Built Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture and Design
Reflections about space and place, and how they reflect and affect religious experience provide a challenge and an urgent necessity for theology. This is particularly important if religious practitioners are to become aware of how theology is given expression in the existential spatiality of life.Elaine Graham & Stephen Lowe: What Makes a Good City?: Public Theology and the Urban Church
Essential reading three years on from Faithful Cities.Nissa Finney: Sleepwalking to Segregation?: Challenging Myths About Race and Migration
"If you want to know what has really been happening in Britain in terms of ethnic segregation, how many ghettos exist, or whether immigration is a threat to social solidarity, this is the book to read." --Danny DorlingTerry Eagleton: Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Eagleton offers his own vibrant account of religion and politics in a book that ranges from the Holy Spirit to the recent history of the Middle East, from Thomas Aquinas to the Twin Towers.Owen Hatherley: Militant Modernism
'Hatherley’s championing of constructivism is grounded in the moral rectitude he discerns in it, as well as in a kind of aesthetic delight.' Jonathan MeadesMartin Wainwright: Leeds: Shaping the City
an authoritative and objective assessment of the redevelopment and regeneration of Leeds.Elaine Graham: Words Made Flesh: Writings in Pastoral and Practical Theology
Considers topics as diverse as science fiction, gender, consumerism, cyberspace and urban regeneration with the fundamental conviction that theology as 'talk about God-in-the-world' is always practical and public - and that it begins and ends in the complexities of the human condition: where words become flesh.J.W. Rogerson & J.J. Vincent: The City in Biblical Perspective
...explores the archaeological and social backgrounds to cities in the biblical world and draws out the implications of the deliberate ambiguities in the biblical text [and] and asks whether and how the Bible can provide resources for the city today, in a world in which the majority of earth's burgeoning population is located in cities.Scott, Baker and Graham (eds.): Remoralizing Britain?: Social, Ethical and Theological Perspectives on New Labour
Drawing together for the first time theorists from a range of disciplines and commitments, this interdisciplinary collection offers a reckoning of this New Labour decade.Andreas Huyssen ed.: Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age
...brings together leading scholars of cultural theory, urban studies, art, anthropology, literature, film, architecture, and history to look at non-Western global cities.Tristram Hunt: The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
A vital biography of the key victoran urban socilogist.Ched Myers: Binding the Strongest Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus
20th anniversary edition of mould breaking commentary. New preface and introduction by Sam Wells.Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
based on thirty years' research, demonstrates that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them - the well-off as well as the poor.Jeff Mapes: Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities
essential reading for the approximately one million people who regularly ride their bike to work or on errands, for anyone engaged in transportation, urban planning, sustainability, and public health—and for drivers trying to understand why they’re seeing so many cyclists. All will be interested in how urban bike activists are creating the future of how we travel and live in twenty-first-century cities.Patrick Wright: A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London
The reissue of a unique evocation of Britain at the height of Margaret Thatcher's rule, ...views the transformation of the country through the unexpected prism of every day life in East London.Tom Angotti: New York for Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate
Remarkably, grassroots-based community planning flourishes in New York City - the self-proclaimed "real estate capital of the world" - with at least seventy community plans for different neighborhoods throughout the city.Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community
Regenerating London explores latest thinking on urban regeneration in one of the fastest changing world cities. Engaging with social, economic, and political structures of cities, it highlights paradoxes and contradictions in urban policy and offers an evaluation of the contemporary forms of urban redevelopment.Mark Chapman: Doing God: Religion and Public Policy in Brown's Britain
Instead of promoting nebulous ideas such as ‘community cohesion’ the churches should demand social policies that will re-invigorate society at the grass roots level through the concrete redistribution of wealth coupled with radical steps to free local government as far as possible from centralised control.Richard Layard: A Good Childhood: Searching for Values in a Competitive Age
The result of a two year investigation by the Children’s Society tackles issues which affect every child, whatever their background, and questions and provides solutions to the belief that life has become so extraordinarily difficult for children in general.Sarah Nuttall: Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis
Johannesburg has become a place of intermingling and improvisation, a city that is fast developing its own brand of cosmopolitan culture.Furbey, Dinham, Lowndes eds.: Faith in the Public Realm: Controversies, Policies and Practices
....questions perceptions of a fixed divide between religious and secular participants in public life and challenges prevailing concepts of a monolithic 'neutral' public realm.Alan Billings: God and Community Cohesion
...suggests that the positive influence of religion will be in proportion to the ability of the faiths to see pluralism as a gift from God, and to accept that we live in a diverse society where a plurality of beliefs and values will exist until the world ends.Richard Reynolds: On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening without Boundaries
A beautifully conceived book and it is no surprise it took two years to draw together the wonderfully humorous yet deadly serious stories of those around the world who have taken up the mantle of guerrilla gardening.Paul Hoggett et al: The Dilemmas of Development Work: Ethical Challenges in Regeneration
...explores the ways in which front-line professionals, working with communities, identify and address the dilemmas inherent in the current UK policy context.Jon Coaffee et al: The Everyday Resilience of the City: How Cities Respond to Terrorism and Disaster
...argues that resilience is neither new nor necessarily about protecting ordinary people, but part of a long struggle over the control of cities.
