URBLOG

Parkour at Portsmouth Cathedral

Urban sport takes over sacred space

Parkour  will be performed with organ music at Portsmouth Cathedral as part of a nine-day celebration of arts across the city.

"An unsuccessful city has closed its mind to the future."

Cities on the edge of chaos

Deyan Sudjic, co-editor of Endless City, asks if the city of the future will be a vision of hell or a force for civilised living?
"Cities are made by an extraordinary mixture of do-gooders and bloody-minded obsessives, of cynical political operators and speculators. They are shaped by the unintended consequences of the greedy and the self-interested, the dedicated and the occasional visionary."

"We need more than platitudes" Jonathan Meades reviews Endless City

Sounds of the Shanties

Hip-hop for peace

With Kenya still riven by ethnic violence, the country's rappers are using music to try to end the bloodshed.

Ghetto fabulous

Scarred by violence and political repression, Brazil's shanty towns have responded with an outpouring of art, music and film. But as "favela chic" becomes all the rage in the west are we in danger of glamorising slum life?

DOUBLE TAKE in Leeds

Strangely Familiar: an exhibition of two photographers who have captured the transformation of Leeds over the last 40 years shows how the city's landscape has changed - from factories and mills to cappuccino bars.

Guardian article by Chris Arnot

Photo Gallery

Strangely Familiar, by Eric Jaquier and Peter Mitchell, is at the PSL Gallery, Leeds, from February 27 until April 26.

CORE CITIES THEOLOGY NETWORK

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?

Bunting on civility

From buses to blogs, a pathological individualism is poisoning public life

  Our shared spaces have become a bear pit. This ever-crumbling civility risks our wellbeing and points to a bleak future.

The regeneration game

Why cities' plans for renewal often sound strangely familiar

'Why do city councils have the same ideas about how to grow? One reason is that they have the same people advising them. '

'...it would be good if the government put some power back into the hands of the regeneratees themselves. '

Lord's debate Olympic legacy 17th January 2008

'Things imposed on people by central bodies or external agencies do not work, nor do the more cosmetic kinds of regeneration initiatives that we sometimes find. Local participation and ownership, the right kind of infrastructure, a good quality built environment, the best kind of public space; all of these help to build sustainable communities.' Bishop of Newcastle

The City of the Future

Patrick Keiller at the BFI

The City of the Future is an exhibition that sets out to explore contrasts between the familiarity of old city fabric, the strangeness of the past, and the newness of present-day experience.  A virtual landscape composed of 68 early actuality films from the years 1896-1909, arranged in the gallery on a network of maps from the period.

SHRINKING CITIES

The  Shrinking Cities exhibition is now in Manchester and Liverpool.

"Cities are shrinking all over the world!  Shrinking cities are a cultural challenge to us. In the Shrinking Cities project, architects, academics and artists investigate recent developments in Detroit, Ivanovo, Manchester / Liverpool and Halle / Leipzig ."

David Hepher:new works

New works by David Hepher are currrently on display at the Flowers East Gallery. Hepher's paintings are created on a base of concrete. More recently he has begun to introduce a photographic element, balancing, as it were, the neutral graphic image of the buildings with the painterly surfaces created by the concrete and the graffiti.