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.

Reviving cities in Europe and the USA

Learning from city recovery in Europe and the United States

A new study from Joseph Rowntree Foundation  investigates why cities decline, how they recover and how low-income communities within them fare under the impact of dramatic changes.

The study focuses on the fortunes of seven European cities – Sheffield and Belfast in the UK; Bremen and Leipzig in Germany; Torino, Italy; Saint-Étienne, France; and Bilbao, Spain.

'Although cities in Europe and the US face urgent pressures – including  the need to reduce radically their reliance on fossil fuels – their underused spaces, existing infrastructure, knowledge and skills base, and diverse populations open up new opportunities for urban progress and environmental protection.'

In Britain's dockland mirror, China is sailing into view

Tristram Hunt in The Guardian

Emblems first of empire, then post-industrial drift and rampant capitalism, London's docks are now in hock to a new power. [...] This unbecoming location on the Isle of Dogs has always told us a broader truth about the condition of Britain. In the Victorian era, the docks symbolised the prosperity and progress of empire.

Canary Wharf, an icon of modern capitalism, is now a totem of state-funded corporatism. The docks that once played host to the British empire and housed the finance titans of US imperialism are now in hock to a new power rising in the east.

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.

 

Empty, unlet and unloved

The new British high street Rotherham is typical of the small towns hit by recession and big-centre competition

This is not just Rotherham's problem, however. Nationally, an eighth of all high street shops are empty and unlet, twice as many as last year, with many towns seeing a slow, cancerous hollowing out of their streets that is as bad as here, or worse.

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

Yesterday's Tomorrow

Interesting reflections from the weekend's press on the architetcural legacy of modernism and Friday's BBC2 programme on the renovation of Park Hill Flats in Sheffield by Urban Splash.

Penthouse and pavement  Owen Hatherley in The Guardian

"Brutalism was never just an architectural style. It was a political aesthetic, an attitude, a weapon - dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people. After decades of neglect, its buildings are now either "eyesores" or "icons", fine for the Barbican's stockbrokers but unacceptable for the people who were always its intended inhabitants."

Jonathan Meades on Owen Hatherly in The New Statesman 

Hatherley  'makes a brilliantly audacious suggestion that will leave the Prince of Wales, Léon Krier and their “new urbanist” acolytes speechless: what if modernism was not imposed on a working class that really yearned for good old back-to-backs and outdoor privies but was welcomed “as part of a specific collective project”? Streets in the sky were paved with hope. Aneurin Bevan envisaged a National Housing Service.'

Filling the spaces

Artists are coming to a high street near you

Shops stand empty while artists struggle to find exhibition spaces. Why not put the two together?

Giving artists space on the high street helps demystify the process of creating art, taking it away from the private studio and putting it into the shop front; spaces don't come much more accessible than your former Marks & Spencer or Woolies. How many people outside the art world ever get the chance to see an artist at work?

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."

Planning for 'inclusive growth'

Inclusive growth in Bristol

According to a new report from the Centre for Cities based on Bristol , the recession could be the opportunity 'to set plans for mixed communities within an economic framework that links housing provisionto wider economic objectives.'

'The workless have typically been disengaged from the labourmarket for a sustained period of time, and face multiple barriers to employment. This is reflected in high levels of health deprivation and disability; barriers to housing and services; and education, skills and training deprivation.  [...] Housing plans for the new growth point will need to be closely aligned with economic development policies and initiatives that will tackle the underlying causes of deprivation. This will mean linking major development sites to more proactive engagement with the long-term workless...'