URBLOG

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?

Legacy of the docks

Questions at 'the very centre of globalisation'

It is time to rethink the London Docklands development as simply a struggle between powerless locals and 'yuppie' colonisers.

The monumental Canary Wharf is central to the story of the Docklands and its success, but it is not the whole story. Beyond it there remain pockets that still await regeneration and renewal. The current interest in its evolution should be a reminder that 30 years on it is no less a work in progress than the Thames Gateway or the London Olympics.

Right to the City conference papers published

Most of the papers from the 'Right to the City' conference (Berlin, 6-8 November 2008) have been published in a special double issue of the journal CITY: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action .

This special issue of CITY (volume 13, issues 2-3) explores the theme ‘Cities for people, not profit’ through wide-ranging contributions by a diverse group of European and North American urban theorists, sociologists, planners and activists.

You can view the Editorial, Introduction and Tom Slater's paper on 'Missing Marcuse: On gentrification and displacement' for FREE online.

 

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

Wasteland war is won with guerrilla tactics

Joe Swift on guerilla gardening

The green warriors whose direct action transformed a bomb site into an inner-city garden that a whole community can now enjoy.

 How I transformed concrete tubs into a flourishing garden 'I became a guerrilla gardener over a decade ago. My family had moved to a kind of North London San Andreas fault where gentrification meets desolation...'

UN focus on Africa, India and China

 UNHabitat's  The State of African Cities 2008 proviudes a state of the art guide to issue facing urban communities across the continent.

'A worrying trend with the African urbanization process is that it is a process rooted in poverty rather than an industrialization-induced socio-economic transition as in other major world urban regions. Africa’s escalating urban problems have received less attention than warranted and now, at the dawn of Africa’s urban age, these need to be addressed.'

 

UNHabitat have also launched URBAN WORLD  The inaugural edition covers urban development in India and China, the Olympic impact on the environment

Migration and economic segregation reports from ippr

Floodgates or turnstiles? Post-EU enlargement migration flows to (and from) the UK

Fresh evidence on the scale and nature of migration from the eight new Central and Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 and, to a lesser extent, from Romania and Bulgaria, which joined in 2007.

A Tale of Two Cities: Neighbourhood segregation by income in two urban case studies

Policy and economic drivers interact with the processes of income segregation at different spatial scales. This research, from ippr, focuses on the processes at the local level. In particular, it explores the relationship between a neighbourhood’s income profile, and the housing market.

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."

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

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.