Free online access for a limited period to a special issue of European Urban and Regional Studies. (available until
Special Issue: Migration Volume 16, Issue 3, July 2009
Diane Perrons Migration: Cities, Regions and Uneven Development
Jane Wills, Jon May, Kavita Datta, Yara Evans, Joanna Herbert, and Cathy McIlwaine London's Migrant Division of Labour
Alison Stenning and Stuart Dawley Poles To Newcastle: Grounding New Migrant Flows in Peripheral Regions
Peter Marcuse argues that the ultimate purpose of critical urban theory is to implement the demand for a Right to the City. Drawing on the work and witness of his father Herbert Marcuse, and on his own work and experience as a lawyer, planner and urban scholar and activist, he focuses on the differences between the crisis of 1968, which produced the demand for the Right to the City, and the crisis we confront today. He asks: 'Is another world not only posible, but realistically attainable?'
Peter Marcuse's lecture in London on Tues 6 Oct at 6.30 pm at UCL.The venue is Cruciform LT2, Cruciform Building, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. See the website www.ucl.ac.uk/mapsfor directions.
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.
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.
Individualism and Community: From Discord to Harmony
Stephen Thake's presentation to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's symposium on Social Evils is available below.
"We live at a time when we face shared concerns and have the greatest need for solidarity and agencies that are able to address them effectively but our myriad of actions contribute to making the situation worse. In the short term, the costs are masked as the actions of the rich are felt most severely on those least able to manage the consequences." “Countering individual excess is not just a question of addressing a social evil but of social justice and environmental sustainability.”
Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann's reshaping of Paris and today's explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation”and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.
Harmonious Cities
The report from UN Habitat adopts the concept of Harmonious Cities as a theoretical framework in order to understand today's urban world, and also as an operational tool to confront the most important challenges facing urbanization and development processes. For the first time, preliminary findings of a global analysis of spatial, socio-economic and environmental dimensions at the city level are presented in order to promote greater understanding of the dynamics and forces that promote harmony in cities. The book also analyses the determinants of urban growth or decline, which can help guide planners in supporting processes that lead to harmonious urban development.
'In a survey of 120 major cities New York was found to be the ninth most unequal in the world and Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, and Miami had similar inequality levels to those of Nairobi, Kenya and Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Many were above an internationally recognised acceptable "alert" line used to warn governments.
India was becoming more unequal as a direct result of economic liberalisation and globalisation, and that the most unequal cities were in South Africa and Namibia and Latin America. "The cumulative effect of unequal distribution [of wealth] has been a deep and lasting division between rich and poor. Trade liberalisation did not bring about the expected benefits."'
In July, citizens of ten major world cities were surveyed for the World Social Summit (WSS) to find out how London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, New York, Mumbai, Beijing, Tokyo, São Paulo and Cairo experience fear and insecurity. The report, Fear in the Mega-Cities, presented to the WSS in Rome reveals much about the state of global anxiety.
Frank Furedi in New Statesman
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.
2 October Transforming Cities Across Europe Professor Anne Power (Social Policy, LSE)
16 October The New Economy of the Inner City: ‘Precarious Reindustrialization’ in the Cultural Metropolis Dr Thomas Hutton (Community and Regional Planning, University of British Colombia)
30 October Industrial Fantasia: Reconstructing the Industrial City in England, c.1930-1980 Professor Simon Gunn (Historical Studies, University of Leicester)
13 November Fluid Architectures: Ecologies of Hybrid Urbanism
Professor Simon Guy (Architecture, University of Manchester)
27 November The New North South Divide
Professor Danny Dorling (Geography, University of Sheffield)
11 December Comparing World Cities
Professor Peter Newman (Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Westminster)
Seminars are held on Thursdays 5-6pm in the Pyramid Room, Department of Geography, King’s College London, Strand, WC2R 2LS. All are welcome.
For further information please contact: emma.street@kcl.ac.uk.
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.
