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?
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Le Corbusier — The Art of Architecture is the first major survey in London of the internationally renowned architect in more than 20 years. This timely reassessment presents a wealth of original models, interior settings, drawings, furniture, photographs, films, tapestries, paintings, sculpture and books by designed and written by the architect himself.
Le Corbusier's concrete legacy in Britain has been both celebrated and reviled. Brian Dillon visits the vast complex of futuristic rot that was once the seminary of St Peter's, and finds hope amid the decay
As Liverpool asseses its year of culture DCMS Secreatry of State Andy Burnham considers the lessons and future possibilities of a British City of Culture competition in a speech at the University of Liverpool.
"...the long-term test of success is not whether the events ran smoothly - or grabbed attention - but whether going forward it changes the life chances of the people of this city."
In Liverpool's footsteps: now every city can aim to be Britain's capital of culture
"Britain's cities don't need imported spectacle, or visiting awards ceremonies, so much as a sense of their own worth. [...] If Burnham's dreams become a reality, the first British capital of culture should be somewhere whose accent you can cut with a knife, whose bricks are grimy with identity. Character is culture, as scousers knew long before the EU title came their way."
INVISIBLE CITIES will be the next in a series of new Jerwood Visual Arts exhibitions at Jerwood Space in Southwark.
'We struck upon the idea of conceptually focusing the exhibition around Italo Calvino's ‘Invisible Cities’ because it addresses the dilemmas of visual invention and illusion. Rather than illustrate the book, the painters in this exhibition have been selected for their various diverse strategies of stating the imaginary in terms of location. '
Invisible Cities at Jerwood Spaceruns from Wednesday, 21st January to Sunday, 22nd February
Transition Cities Conference 2008
A gathering of those who have been testing the Transition model in the cities, an Open Space conference to draw together and share ideas and insights, tools and techniques, exploring what works and what doesn’t in urban Transition. Programme.pdf
What is a Transition Town (or village / city / forest / island)?
BABYLON: Myth and Reality
The British Museum is hosting a major exhibition exploring the significance of Babylon, in its original Mesopotamian context, and in the subsequent cultural imagination.
A telling reminder of our enduring captivity to myth Madeleine Bunting
"...an exhibition in which archaeology dances expertly with myth. The reality of that Babylon (the material evidence revealed by excavation and above all the political and spiritual culture which emerged as scholars learned to read the cuneiform script) is confronted in every room with the other reality - the wild things that human imagination did to Babylon in the next two and a half millennia."
A two-day festival of social, political and cultural discussion taking place in London, 1 & 2 November 2008. Tickets are on sale now.
This year’s strands examine four cutting-edge issues in: The Battles for Prosperity, the Family, Biomedicine, and America.
What's after Culture? Assessing the Legacy
The Core Cities Theology Network 2008 Conference will be held in Liverpool,
Thursday 11th September to Saturday 13th September 2008.
The Core Cities Theology Network aims to create an environment of solidarity and support for those engaged in urban mission and public policy so that more effective ways of being the church in the core cities context might be enabled. Booking form.
Report of the 2006 conference Cities of Culture: whose Vision, which Agenda?
Steve Bloom: Trading Places: The Merchants of Nairobi
A unique portrait of the small traders of Nairobi. .... a place where slick advertising has made few inroads and shopping malls and supermarkets remain a rarity. Businessmen and women paint their own hoardings and signs, or call in friends who happen to be handy with a paintbrush.
Laurie Green: Let's Do Theology: Resources for Contextual Theology
...a classic text for contextual and urban theologians
Stephen Graham: Disrupted Cities
Infrastructure failure is a major factor in the lives of cities. This book explores the implications of this vulnerability through war, hurricanes, blackouts and sewerage failure.
Anthony Cartwright: Heartland
A passionate, page-turning story about grass-roots politics, football and the far right in a multicultural, working class town .
Jane Bicknell, David Satterthwaite: Adapting Cities to Climate Change: Understanding and Addressing the Development Challenges
A wide-ranging and detailed body of information identifying and assessing risk, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in urban cities in low- and middle-income countries.
David Owen: Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability
Owen finds in New York City, Manhattan in particular, a model that the rest of the country could profitably emulate. A city of "extreme compactness," New York "is the greenest community in the United States."
R. Horsley: Covenant Economics: A Biblical Vision of Justice for All
A reexamination of the economics of the Bible and its clarion call for economic justice for all.
Jim Krane: Dubai: The Story of the World's Fastest City
In the 1950s, with a few thousand souls scraping a living in a waterless desert by picking dates, diving for pearls, or sailing in wooden dhows to trade with Iran and India, Dubai was as poor as any village in Somalia or Sudan. Today freewheeling Dubai is everything the Arab world isn't.
Glenna Lang: Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of the Death and Life of Great American Cities
Accessible account of the inspiring story of the woman whose passion and dedication revolutionised the way we think about cities.
Anthony Flint: Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City
Documents the struggle in fascinating detail.
Michael Sorkin: Twenty Minutes in Manhattan
offers a testing ground for speculation about the way in which the city can be newly imagined and designed, to deal with pressing issues such as the crisis of the environment, free expression and public space, security and surveillance, the place of history, and the future of the 'neighbourhood'.
Joe Moran: On Roads: A Hidden History
'On Roads is a book that makes motorways safe for people .... explaining them in terms – historical, aesthetic, anthropological, political – not usually considered on Top Gear.' Owen Hatherley
Seyla Benhabib, Judith Resnik: Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender
....uniquely situates gender in the context of ongoing, urgent conversations about globalization, citizenship, and the meaning of borders
Setha M. Low: On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture
How the physical form of the plaza encodes the social, political, and economic relations within the city.
Manuel Castells: Communication Power
Manuel Castells analyses the transformation of the global media industry by this revolution in communication technologies, proposing a new theory of power in the information age based on the management of communication networks
Anna Minton: Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City
This passionate and vivid polemic shows us the face of Britain today, revealing the untested urban planning that is transforming not only our cities, but the nature of public space, of citizenship and of trust.
Martin Jacques: When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World
The rise of China, India and the Asian tigers means that, for the first time, modernity will no longer be exclusively western. The west will be confronted with the fact that its systems, institutions and values are no longer the only ones on offer.
Theology in Built Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture and Design
Reflections about space and place, and how they reflect and affect religious experience provide a challenge and an urgent necessity for theology. This is particularly important if religious practitioners are to become aware of how theology is given expression in the existential spatiality of life.
Elaine Graham & Stephen Lowe: What Makes a Good City?: Public Theology and the Urban Church
Essential reading three years on from Faithful Cities.
Nissa Finney: Sleepwalking to Segregation?: Challenging Myths About Race and Migration
"If you want to know what has really been happening in Britain in terms of ethnic segregation, how many ghettos exist, or whether immigration is a threat to social solidarity, this is the book to read." --Danny Dorling
Terry Eagleton: Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Eagleton offers his own vibrant account of religion and politics in a book that ranges from the Holy Spirit to the recent history of the Middle East, from Thomas Aquinas to the Twin Towers.
Owen Hatherley: Militant Modernism
'Hatherley’s championing of constructivism is grounded in the moral rectitude he discerns in it, as well as in a kind of aesthetic delight.' Jonathan Meades
Martin Wainwright: Leeds: Shaping the City
an authoritative and objective assessment of the redevelopment and regeneration of Leeds.
Elaine Graham: Words Made Flesh: Writings in Pastoral and Practical Theology
Considers topics as diverse as science fiction, gender, consumerism, cyberspace and urban regeneration with the fundamental conviction that theology as 'talk about God-in-the-world' is always practical and public - and that it begins and ends in the complexities of the human condition: where words become flesh.
J.W. Rogerson & J.J. Vincent: The City in Biblical Perspective
...explores the archaeological and social backgrounds to cities in the biblical world and draws out the implications of the deliberate ambiguities in the biblical text [and] and asks whether and how the Bible can provide resources for the city today, in a world in which the majority of earth's burgeoning population is located in cities.
Scott, Baker and Graham (eds.): Remoralizing Britain?: Social, Ethical and Theological Perspectives on New Labour
Drawing together for the first time theorists from a range of disciplines and commitments, this interdisciplinary collection offers a reckoning of this New Labour decade.
Andreas Huyssen ed.: Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age
...brings together leading scholars of cultural theory, urban studies, art, anthropology, literature, film, architecture, and history to look at non-Western global cities.
Tristram Hunt: The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
A vital biography of the key victoran urban socilogist.
Ched Myers: Binding the Strongest Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus
20th anniversary edition of mould breaking commentary. New preface and introduction by Sam Wells.
