Highlights of a speech given by Dave Clements, social policy editor, Future Cities Project at the Future of Community festival, March 4th 2006
While our conference ignored the fact that Britain has the second lowest workplace fatal injuries in the EU; and its construction fatalities are half the EU average; the HSC conference was admitting that it has lost control of a 'sensible balance in the management of risk.'
Bill Gething of Feilden Clegg Bradley started it by proudly stating, that when it came to environmentalism: 'I am a fascist.' Even though he recognised that the right-wing language could seem to be a glib use of heavily loaded concepts, he explained that he was serious.
Such is the current level of self-doubt in the West, that architects, traditionally renowned for making bold statements, are now marketing themselves on how small an impact they can make on the world.
For those who believe in the concept of Gaia - the planet as a living organism - the latest European Environment Agency (EEA) report reads like a sick note.
These days, it seems that democracy with no prefixes and a capital 'd' is too difficult a concept for many politicians to endorse wholeheartedly.
This year sees the 150th anniversary of Haussmann's appointment as Prefect of the Seine, engaged to draw up the plans for Paris, one of the greatest, most audacious proposals in town planning ever seen. How would Haussman have survived if he had to deal with the miserablist tendency of modern day Britain? This article relates to the forthcoming Future Visions: Future Cities conference at the LSE on December 6th
The government's energy policy will take the UK down an exhausting route.
A review of the three public forums organised by the Transport Research Group and held at the Bloomberg Auditorium, London in February 2003. A series of weekly evening debates, attended by 170 people each week, the panel and audience were asked to explore the issues of Congestion, Infrastructure and Mobility by Dave Clements
We've come a long way since the smog days of 1952.
Why are children in poor neighbourhoods more at risk of traffic accidents?
In a recent article in the Washington Post, architect and professor of architecture, Roger K Lewis bemoans the proposed rebuilding New Orleans. 'Why, ' he asks, 'do we stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that there are places on the earth's surface - wetlands and floodplains, seismically active regions, arid deserts, steep hillsides and cliffs - where erecting cities endangers not only humans, but also the natural environment.'
Frequently, the research is not worthy of the name. All too often, research proposals are devised to fulfil the need to write a paper, as opposed to the principled need to interrogate a meaningful question. On every level, this rush to meet assessment criteria is demeaning the educative process. Former chief executive of the Further Education Funding Council, David Melville has bemoaned that ‘there has also been severe dent in the esteem in which research at this level is held.’ Until research ceases to be a means to an end, esteem is the least of its worries.
The current infatuation with the past, with (the pretence of) unity, with cultural identity; with place as an emotional haven, or with therapeutic mechanisms to help us situate ourselves in the world, is summed up in the clamour for urban memory. As a result, there has been a rise in the 'place-making' industry, as new theorists attempt to counter the sense of societal alienation by associating the role of 'places' with our sense of self.
On the anniversary of Baron Haussmann's masterplanning of Paris in 1853, we explore the achievement, the vision and the ambition and wonder whether this sort of Grand Projet could happen today.
Green or sustainable architecture is driven by a desire to eliminate the risk from construction processes and minimise the impact of development. This impulse is damaging and impossible to satisfy.
Where Diamond warns against "excessive" development, for many in the developing world it is precisely the lack of development that leaves them poor and hungry.’
The constant doubling and twinning of characters who are linked and contrasted in different ways - Orhan and Ka (literary), the sisters (blood), Fazil and his blood brother (religion). There is the weaving in of the novelistic tradition from Kafka to Borges which always escapes mere novelty.
That we look to that we look to examples of foreign cities for success, says a great deal about the lack of ideas, confidence and vision at home. This insight is profoundly important. To make his point he suggests that in all the anxiety about the place of the English city within the European context, ‘English architectural culture (Lord Richard) Rogers has become the self-appointed prophet of doom.’
The clue is in the title ‘cultures and natures’: this book is sustainability meets relativism, and it basks in the vacuity of ‘critical pluralism.’
What a refreshing change, as they say. This is a book that oozes calm intelligence and an ease of imparting knowledge that at once informs and avoids patronising its audience.
A Dark Age is the dead-end of culture. Essentially, her premise is that cultures have tended historically to die out as a result of external forces invading and destroying the memories of the subjugated peoples or countries, whereas this is not the danger today. Today, more than at any time in history, Culture with a capital ‘C’ is in danger of imploding; of being destroyed from within.
The message – the inevitability of our downfall as we overstretch ourselves – is no doubt familiar to contemporary audiences, but quite alien to the visionary writing that inspired Asimov's short stories in the early 70s. Here we review the book and the movie to see the changed way in which we view ourselves.
Under headings such as ‘What should scare you most’ or ‘these figures should shock you’ the author berates us for our energy-profligacy. Rising expectations, he makes the equation, inevitably mean continued climate change. It’s as simple as that. We must divorce resource use from illusory notions of well being without delay, if we are not to succumb to the threat posed by what he describes as the single biggest problem facing humanity.
‘Even though Britain has the longest commute times in Europe, commuting still takes up just a measly 46 minutes of our day… that’s 23 minutes each way. Surely we should be getting this so-called problem into perspective.’
by Greg Klerkx
Do we need NASA anymore? According to Greg Klerkx, NASA is the main barrier to realising the potential of a human future in space. Conceived during the Cold War as a means of defeating the Soviets in space, the agency has since evolved into a timid bureaucracy, jealous of its monopoly on space activities and afraid of innovation. Klerkx documents how the agency, determined to defend jobs and funding for its main programmes, the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, has strangled independent attempts to create commercial opportunities in space.
by John Gray
Why does J.G Ballard call the book ‘exhilarating', Will Self named it as his favourite book of the year and Brian Appleyard states that ‘read properly this book will give you peace’? It is unlikely that it was the prospect of human extinction that these writers found so exciting.
The Future Visions: Future Cities conference held at the LSE in December, supported by the Architects Journal, examined the role of the city through the prism of politics, culture and economics
Reviewed by David Clements
This synopsis examines some of the issues arising out of the final plenary at the Future Visions: Future Cities conference.
Reviewed by David Clements
People "should be told to be braver" if the widespread and socially-damaging fear of crime and strangers is to be beaten, said Miranda Sawyer, author of "Park and Ride" in her presentation to the Future Visions: Future Cities conference.
Peter Schwartz, as one of the world's most eminent futurologists - or scenario planners was advisor to Spielberg movie, Minority Report, imagineering urban visions of the future to make Phillip K Dick's science fiction visually believable. Last month he was in London to launch his new book, Inevitable Surprises: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century.
edited by Marko Home and Mika Taanila
When (the Futuro house) was installed aboard a ferry on the Thames at the 'Finfocus' export fair in the Sixites, the Daily Mail wrote: 'This object, looking like everyone else's idea of a flying saucer from outer space, is the Finnish idea of a perfect weekend cottage.'
by Anne Power and Richard Rogers
(This book) is very convincing, in the same way that a Blairite speech is: once you reflect on the platitudinous nature of the content you realise that there is nothing definitive in it at all.
by Marina Benjamin
What became of our dreams of the aspirations that fuelled the ‘space age’ of the 50’s and 60’s? In this fascinating study Marina Benjamin takes on this problem in a fresh and innovative way.
by Alain de Botton
This fascinating book, written by Alain De Botton, examines the diverse motives that moved great men of the past … He does this by juxtaposing their great experiences to the far less heroic experiences of De Botton himself.
by James Gleick
Faster is a quick paced, entertaining description of the spread of technology and its impact on our lives.
by Sean Topham
The author enthuses about the Space Age while simultaneously being appalled by its excesses.
by Stephen Barber
Barber's tone has a kind of eulogising conservatism about it, a remembrance of things past.
by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin
In their final analysis, universalism is disregarded as a failed Modernist project.
by Susan Greenfield
Greenfield, renowned neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, indulges her literary ambitions to create a speculative dystopia owing much to Huxley.
