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post 10 Sustainable Approach to Design
RCA exhibition 2017 The Architecture and Interior Design programmes of the Royal College of Art had ventured out from their premises in Kensington Gore to a disaffected fire station in Vauxhall where it staged its end of the year exhibition. The large hall suited the exhibition installation made of blond wood for the stage and […]
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Revolution at the V&A (p6)
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world” This quote from the nineteen-sixties by Margaret Mead was greeting visitors to the Revolution exhibition, currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It is an encouraging thought in our times of globalisation, dominated by corporations with turnovers well above […]
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OC 59: “Planning Times”
this post is about the CORP conference 2013. It took place in Rome, in alternance with conferences in Vienna and its surroundings from CORP had been initiated in the 1990s. About CORP CORP (Competence Center of Urban and Regional Planning http://www.corp.at/index.php?id=18) has both staying power and innovative drive. Started at the Technical University of Vienna […]
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OC 58: Remaking Cities
About Café-Diplo Café Diplo is a sister discussion group of “Les Amis Le Monde Diplomatique” which supports writings and tradition evolved around Le Monde Diplomatic newspaper of which there exists an English edition. The debates are arranged around the Café-Diplo’s global anti neo-conservative liberal tradition which covers a wide range of issues. http://mondediplofriends.org.uk/index.htm The future […]
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OC 57: Munich observed afresh
Imperial traces No matter how long ago and for how long a city has been a seat of domination, no matter how often its power has waxed and waned, a presence of its historic glory remains unmistaken. Munich is one such historic seat of power, wealth and might. The biased eyes of an urbanist will […]
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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 44: The Street: Bastion of Open Cities?
What is an open city? How does it manifest itself? When people walk through the city they experience it through its ground floor: the street, the pavement, the green, but also how buildings relate to these spaces. Within a stone throw, a city can send many contradictory messages to passers by from its ground floor. […]
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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 38: Can Cities Be Too Open?
The limits to openness During a perfect summer day I was ambling on the boulevards of Paris, enjoying its public realm, open to anyone from anywhere. I did what many people do in open cities, I settled down on a pavement café with a paper and watched the world go by. I came across an […]
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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 […]
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Open Cities 33 Gentrification and Openness
Cities are changing all the time but who is benefiting from such change and how does it relate to city openness? Regeneration is a widespread means to transforming specific parts of cities where places tend to lose value. For our purpose the question is whether this process is making cities more open or more closed. […]
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Open Cities 32 About Barriers and Openness
It is timely to think about barriers when so many human beings are risking their lives to tear them down. Is it a primal urge of mankind to be unbound, free to move and think, free to assemble and undertake common pursuits? And is the urge for freedom, for openness so strong that people are […]
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Open Cities 4 Openness and Closure
Open Cities 4 Openness and Closure Welcome to open cities Bright sunshine, holiday time. Many of us plan to take off somewhere to the beach, the mountains, the countryside. Yet, many city dwellers choose to visit other cities. They enjoy to displace themselves for a short while, physically and mentally, to experience another place, immerse […]