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).

Planning our urban future

World Habitat Day 5th October

The United Nations has designated the first Monday of October every year as World Habitat Day. The idea is to reflect on the state of our towns and cities and the basic right of all to adequate shelter. It is also intended to remind the world of its collective responsibility for the future of the human habitat.

UN Resources

Habitat for Humanity resources

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

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

Welcome to a world class place

CABE commissioned Ian McMillan to write Welcome to a world class place, a poem to mark the launch of the government’s strategy for improving quality of place. Ian is poet-in-residence for The Academy of Urbanism and Barnsley FC.

So here’s to world class places; cities of dreaming and myth,
Here’s to looking forward to streets and towns that dance.
Here’s to places we want to be in, places we want to love
Places built on light and history, and hints of sheer romance.

An optimistic street map and a smiling face:
That’s my definition of a world class place!

Recession opens possibility for community land

Common ground

The recession is shifting attitudes about land ownership, making it easier for local people to club together to buy sites - from inner London to rural Devon.

Practitioners  argue that urban neighbourhoods and villages around the country are crying out for new, equitable forms of land ownership - dictated by need, rather than by greed - to deliver affordable homes, new businesses and community facilities that are no longer at the mercy of markets.

Community Land Trusts a resource to assist you develop community land trust solutions for affordable housing, amenity and workspace in Britain.

Beyond studentification

Growing by Degrees: Universities in the Future of Urban Development

Given the effect that university expansion has already had on architectural and urban form around the world, Building Futures at the RIBA wanted to stimulate informed debate. This publication offers twelvefuture scenarios each projecting twenty years into the future to ask ‘what if’ certain trajectories of change take hold. Their impacts could be unexpected and greatly contribute to the role of higher education in cities.

What if all the students dry up? Peter Kingston in The Guardian

"A range of extremely worrying prospects do ... suggest themselves, and are worth keeping in mind...If only to ensure that they remain in the world of fantasy."