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OC61 Cities Save the World
‘Cities Save the World’ was the title of the 50th anniversary congress of the International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP) which took place in 2015 at a plenary in Rotterdam preceded by parallel workshops in 12 cities in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany: Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Delft and the Hague, Deventer, Dortmund, Eindhoven, […]
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OC 55: “Legalities of Space”: from squatting to tolerated occupation
Right to land Controversies over ‘legalities of space’ affect a wide variety of peoples. ‘IdleNoMore’ supports the struggle of first nations for what they believe to be their immutable right to their land and their way of life (see the previous post OC 54). Such controversies take many different forms in diverse circumstances. On […]
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OC 50: East London Transformations
After the games Now that the London Olympic Games have closed their doors and a fence has been re-erected around the whole site it may be a good time to reflect on what urban transformations lie in stall for the East End. The third European Urban Summer School (EUSS), initiated by the Association of European […]
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OC 49: Openness through Cooperation
Openness: a construct of social relations Openness of cities can be understood literally as spaces and places open to all. At a theoretical level, urban thinkers are construing openness of cities as the outcome of social relations which, in turn, are influenced by the dynamic of urban change. These notions were conceptualised around May ’68, […]
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OC 46: Are Cities Open for Age?
Fear of Age A major scare story reinforced by the lack of recovery from the banking disaster is built around the fact that societies in the developed world are aging. The England and Wales 2011 census data just published confirms that people are living longer and they start to make more babies. Migration is the […]
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OC 42: Open City – Open Mind
At a crossroads For reasons unexplained, I have always marked the arbitrary change in time, the passage from one western calendar year to the next, with a message to my trans-spatial diaspora of family, friends and colleagues. This lone drawing of the year is supposed to express the passage of time in a landscape of […]
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OC 40: Anatomy of Riots – Snapshots
Causes and remedies Riots in Britain, demonstrations to end oppression in the Middle East, sit-ins against the excesses of capitalism worldwide have stirred up the establishment, from the political classes to the popular science writers. They all grapple for explanations and corrective interventions. Yet, the jury is out on the evidence base. When young, media […]
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OC 39: Openness and the Fear Industry
Now that the tears over 9/11+10 are drying up, what happens to the ‘fear industry’? Fired by the war on terror it is doing really well. The surveillance and anti-terror industry has mushroomed and is well under way of becoming too big to fail. In the name of war on terror, states have restricted civil […]
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OC 37: Open Cities Blog – Follow-up From British Council Open Cities Blog
British Council URBACT Open Cities project Up to now, all the posts on my Open Cities blog constituted inputs to the blog I was invited to write for the British Council for its Open Cities project website. This project, funded by URBACT II has been completed in May 2011. I have reviewed some of the […]
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Spirit of ’68
This is a new spontaneous experiment. The working group “Spirit of ’68” emerged spontaneously from a discussion at the third TINAG -This Is Not A Gateway Festival in autumn 2010 on the events in and around 1968, in Paris and elsewhere. The question was why this promising social movement did not have lasting effects, and […]