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?

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."

“I’m sorry, you can’t drink here.”

A Public Nuisance:  Tim Abraham investigates the increasing control of public space.

“Something is lost when our understanding of the public is reduced to consumers on best behaviour.”

Radio series on post war public building

Britain in their sites BBC RADIO 4 series

Tristram Hunt tells the story of architectural change in Britain over 60 years, tracing the country's changing idea of itself through three controversial public building projects.

In 1948, Peterlee was the future, an exciting New Town planned by architect Berthold Lubetkin for the Durham miners he idolised. Tristram asks why Lubetkin, most famous for London Zoo's Penguin Pool, left Peterlee before a single house was built.

As he looks back at Peterlee's troubled birth, Tristram dissects the furious debates which Lubetkin's failure sparked, and which marked the beginning of Britain's post-war architecture wars.

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 the peripherique

After the Pompidou, can Rogers transform the other side of Paris?

Ten of the world's most renowned architects present their strategies for a dramatic overhaul of the unvisted parts of the world's most visited city

"I don't know any other big city where the heart is so detached from its arm and legs"

Allotments and alternatives

"Demand for cultivation space in cities is suddenly booming. After two decades of steady decline, the waiting list for allotments is now 100,000 applicants long, and growing. For the first time in half a century, sales of vegetable seeds have outstripped those of flower seeds. Urban chicken coops and beehives are spreading." My alloted place - Ben Macintyre in The Times

Who needs a garden? Jane Perrone in The Guardian

canal boats, cemetries, railway embankments and guerilla gardening

"In Manchester a group called Abundance started out harvesting surplus apples from trees across the city and turning them into apple juice, crumbles and chutney to distribute to charities. Now it has transformed a scrappy corner of a car park into a fruit and veg plot, getting nursery school children involved with the growing."

As Time Runs Out - Re-Tracking 'The City'

  A series of seminars at Goldsmiths College, New Cross

in partnership with  CITY:analysis of urban trends,culture, theory, policy,action 

 2 March 2009, 13:00 - 14:00

 

Speaker - Eduardo Mendieta , Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York

Can we need what we never had? On continental and other philosophies and the global and urban order/disorder.

Location: Surrey House, The Orangery
 

9 March 2009, 13:00 - 14:00

Speaker- Adrian Atkinson. (Architect, Environmental Activist and Urban Planner)

Will there be Cities after the Crunch and After Oil?

WT 1204 Seminar room, Warmington Tower
 

16 March 2009, 13:00 - 14:00

Speaker- Bob Catterall, Editor, City Journal

'When the going gets weird...' London, San Francisco and Rio: What if academics have got it wrong?

WT1204 seminar room, Warmington Tower

The speakers are also featured in the Think in Kingston programme on 2nd and 10th March.

In the Dubai the losers are the invisible majority.

Dubai's six-year building boom grinds to halt as financial crisis takes hold

"I sold our land and took loans in the village to come here," said   a 20-year-old Bangladeshi farmer. "I paid the agent £2,000 to bring me. He said I would earn 1,500 dirham [£287] a month, but we are paid 572 dirham. When I return people in the village will want their money but I have none."

A  construction site manager said he had protested to his boss about the treatment of labourers. "We tell them to bring their clothes to work one day and then we send them home. It makes me feel sick. I asked why it had to be done so quickly and I was told a lot of them commit suicide and we don't want that on our hands."