URBLOG

50 years of Death and Life

Jane Jacobs : seer of the modern city

Jane Jacobs' classic book on urban living is 50 this year. Our current leaders would do well to read it.

"Jacobs was there first, and with a hard-headed, modern understanding of the sort of relationships that are needed in modern life, and the sorts of community that contemporary cities can offer. Her belief that urban planners and architects should not be realising visions, but creating and preserving resilient, inclusive and adaptable neighbourhoods – places which can largely look after themselves – still resonates."

King’s College London Autumn term Cities Seminar programme

Cities Group Seminars

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.

 

Octavia Hill revisited

Tristram Hunt considers the legacy of the social reformer

"And as ministers grapple with re-engineering the welfare state, it is not Keynes, Marx or Giddens who provide the inspiration, but Hill, the most versatile of late Victorian social entrepreneurs."

"As the era of Fordist bureaucracies crumbles, the space for pre-statist social enterprise is re-emerging. Yet the problem with this 1900s civic settlement is its dependence on a sense of Christian duty. Hill saw herself as a lonely, Puritan missionary toiling among the fallen. "