URBLOG

Surveillance city

These cities within cities are eating up Britain's streets

Anna Minton on how urban regeneration has seen entire districts pass into the hands of private companies – and their security guards.

This monitoring and surveillance of innocent activities, which does not necessarily require anti-terror laws, is taking place all around Britain as a result of the growing private ownership and private control of cities. Liverpool One, which spans 34 streets in the heart of Liverpool, is effectively owned by the Duke of Westminster's property company, Grosvenor, which leased the entire site, including streets and public places, from the council for 250 years. Cabot Circus in Bristol, Highcross in Leicester and what promises to be the biggest of all, Stratford City in London, are all owned and run by property companies.

DIY Streets

How locals transformed rat runs into public spaces

Getting cars cars to slow down instead of racing through backstreet rat runs benefits everyone from cyclists to residents. Clapton Terrace is one of 11 "DIY Streets", a nationwide project launched by sustainable transport charity Sustrans as a cheap solution to local traffic problems.

 "Residents take ownership, so it becomes a public space not just for car traffic but for play and doing everything related to civic life. It gives residents the opportunity to design streets how they want and take ownership. That is part of the philosophy."

two shopping centres from the inside

City Network and the School of Sociology at Kingston University guest lecture 

'Architecture and affect: two shopping centres from the inside' 

Professor Gillian Rose (The Open University).

The event will take place on Tuesday, 24th of November 2009, 5.30pm in

the C-Scaipe Debating Chamber of Kingston University (Penrhyn road campus).

Eco-blind-alley

For green living, head for Mumbai or New York  Simon Jenkins offers an alternative to the ecotown.

New York, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong are crammed with buildings and people, economising on walls, roofs, central heating, offices, open space and mass transit.

In Britain the VAT incentive to replace rather than restore buildings – the result of builder lobbying – is flagrantly anti-green. If Britain must build at all, it should build high-density, low-rise, which conserves energy more efficiently than high-rise.

Celebrating suburbia

London Transport Museum has announced its next major exhibition, SUBURBIA- which will open on 15 October 2009.

Suburbia will explore how public transport helped to create the myths and identity of suburbia and how it has featured in the cultural fabric of London and Britain over the last 100 years. The look of the suburbs will be explored through images of domestic and commercial architecture and gardens shown alongside pictures of the railway and Underground stations built to serve them. 

I’m proud to be a son of the suburbs  Richard Godwin in the Evening Standard

Wrestling With Moses

Mother Courage

A bicycling mother arrested for rabble-rousing, Jane Jacobs has set the agenda for urban planning for half a century. But was she right?

It was only when [Robert] Moses tried to bring light and air into the city that he was charged with elitism. Like Jacobs, he wanted to democratise space - it was just his techniques that were different.

Jacobs checked Moses's mad worship of the car and his despotic excesses. But in a world of faux cobblestones, pedestrian zones and hanging baskets, aren't we a little nostalgic for Moses's obsessive audacity - for an era when planners could transcend the nimbies to execute grand gestures in the public interest?

LSE Autumn Public Lectures

Events open to the LSE community and the public

 

Tuesday 6 October, 6.30-8pm

Bringing the Penal State Back In

SPEAKER: Professor Loïc Wacquant

 

Monday 19 October, 6.30-8pm

Beijing Inside Out: Caochangdi

SPEAKERS: Robert Mangurian, Mary-Ann Ray

 

Tuesday 10 November, 6.30-8pm

 The First Legacy Games: the physical and

socio-economic transformation of East London

SPEAKERS: Andrew Altman, Councillor Paul Brickell,  Ricky Burdett

 

Tuesday 17 November, 6.30-8pmC

Cities, Design and Climate Change

SPEAKERS: Professor Saskia Sassen, Professor Richard Sennett

Suburbs and eco-towns

Tristam Hunt: The suburbs are derided by snobs, yet they offer hope for our future

"Tight, compact cities such as Florence and Siena have been the inspiration for far too long. We now need to take a lead from Croydon and Kingston-upon-Thames."

Simon Jenkins: Ecotowns and turbines are a political slap in the face of the landscape 

"...ecotowns ignore the social dysfunctionality of new towns and are carbon extravagant, built from scratch with new infrastructure for car-dependent commuters."

Glancey on the warning of Lakanal

Our lethal estates    The Lakanal House deaths cast shame on Britain. We urgently need to audit all similar blocks.

The fact, however, that Lakanal House is no more unsafe than many other housing blocks of its type is not cause for concern but for a public outcry. How can such a wealthy country as Britain still house its people in lethal settings? Why is our housing stock so poor when Britain's public housing, a century ago, was often held up as a model to be copied across Europe?

...if Lakanal House is typical then we can expect more fatal fires in the future. Of course, there should be fire drills in such buildings, and of course residents should be offered the best possible information on how to survive a fire. But we urgently need to hold a national audit of these and similar buildings, to investigate their weaknesses, and to equip them with secondary fire escapes.

Architects Journal 

Our city centres are turning into secure enclaves that erode trust

Can we banish fear and loathing from the city?

While the centres of our cities are turning into secure enclaves, high security is also becoming an ever bigger feature of the homes we live in.

The real issue is that most people simply don’t know what is happening, presuming that because the streets have always been public, as far as they are aware, they will continue to be so.

Review by Owen Hatherley