Forthcoming Events

Throughout 2010:

mantownhuman debates

A series of discussions on key issues relating to architecture and design

Sessions include:

The Carbon Footprint Fetish:
Architecture and climate change

Whatever the successes or failures of Copenhagen, the discussion of climate change is still a dominant political issue. Given that buildings are said to cause 40 percent of carbon emissions, architects have positioned themselves at the forefront of the fight against global warming. However, at what cost... when an architectural magazine editor recently became an object of derision for deigning to challenge the orthodoxy of climate change?

This session will explore:
1. How architecture has become increasingly bureaucratised: with carbon counting and emissions' calculators often producing more heat than light.
2. The nature of uncritical influence, where Bioregional, WWF, Merton Council, Joseph Rowntree, Biffa, Energy Savings Trust, WRAP, BRE, EcoHomes, Sustainable Homes, Carbon Trust, the Nottingham Declaration, Forum for the Future, etc, etc, etc. Who are they… and why are they dictating environmental standards
3. Why architects portray themselves (and their clients) as problems to be reined in.

On all of these issues, it seems that architects and designers are losing their critical faculties. It's a strange world where architects are seeking more constraints. This open debate will suggest that architects should maximise - rather than minimise - their footprint.

Design Like You Give A Dam:
The benefits of 'socially irresponsible' design

Today 'design' is regularly prefixed with words like 'inclusive', 'participatory', 'community-centred', 'sustainable', 'ethical', 'ecological', 'efficient', 'carbon-neutral', 'socially-engaging' or 'environmentally-responsible'. This discussion will explore why the mere act of designing has taken on such a moralistic mantle?

Whether it is Designing Out Crime or Architecture for Humanity; whether it is for local empowerment, better governance or behaviour change; what business is it of designers to play politics? This session will explore:

1. What's so good about being virtuous?

2. Isn't 'responsible' design the very opposite of 'challenging' design?

Don't Shoot The Messenger:
Evidence-based architecture

How often have you heard the phrase 'research shows' as a way of defending a project? 'Research shows', they say, 'that this design is unimpeachable'.

Similarly, 'evidence-based' is often little more than a reference to some focus group survey or vox pop that actually 'proves' nothing. Building designers no longer seem to have the confidence to present their work in its own terms, relying instead on spurious 'research' to show that it works. Unfortunately, this displays a cynical contempt for both research... and the audience.

Instead of suggesting that green spaces are good things in their own terms, CABE cites 'research' that shows that 'a walk in the park… has been proven to reduce the risk of a heart attack by 50 per cent'. By this logic, refusal to fund green spaces is tantamount to euthanasia. But everyone is at it… Instead of defending the need for 'windows' in functional or architectural terms, BDP prefer to argue that they have 'been proven to improve the speed of learning.' Nowadays, landscape designers justify their role because 'a view of roads and traffic produces higher stress levels in the blood than a view of nature'; engineers suggest that fresh air 'increases performance' and everyone suggests that 'sustainable architecture' is inherently 'good architecture'.

This event will suggest that whenever you hear the words 'it has been proven', you should think twice about its validity; but mainly you should question its appropriateness. Shouldn't architecture be explained and defended… rather than justified?

The Spaces In Between:
Resolving conflict through urban design

In the Eighties, the fact that public space was being privatised was rightly criticised . Unfortunately, there is little or no criticism today that private space is being made public; that is to say it is becoming more and more acceptable to be suspicious of the private citizen. We are no longer supposed to inhabit public space as private individuals, but instead we are encouraged to act as publicly-accountable persons at all times.

In the interests of a sanitised urban realm, we are expected to behave in a way that is publicly acceptable or risk public opprobrium or even institutional intervention. No chewing, no spitting, no running, no smoking, no drinking, no photography, no acting suspiciously, and no assuming that your erstwhile innocuous actions cannot be challenged and stopped. Why are architects and urban policy wonks complicit in managing our private selves in civic space?

Happy-Clappy Architecture:
Designing For Well-being:

Society, it seems, is deeply ambivalent about the benefits of 'progress', 'development', 'affluence' and 'consumerism'. It may be a useful way of excusing the recession, but is it really a good thing that 'growth' is regularly frowned upon.

Lord Layard advocates that everyone should be encouraged to be 'thankful for what they have'. Nick Rosen, in Living Off Grid argues that 'two billion worldwide are living without mains power, water or phone�(and) many of those people are happy as they are.' Without having asked them, he might be surprised that many of those beg to differ. The New Economics Foundation's Happy Planet Index puts the poorest countries at the top and the industrialized countries way down at the bottom and proudly boasts that by adopting the happiness agenda, 'underdevelopment is turned on its head'. After all, they may have nothing, but they are rich in smiles.

So what is the role and function of happiness and architecture? Is it an end goal? As Alain de Botton argues: 'great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment'. So do 'quality of life' issues matter more than material development... and what impact does that have on architecture? Should China and India follow the Western model of urbanization if it doesn't lead to happiness? Should the built environment attempt to make us happy� and what on earth does that really mean?

What Role for the Third Sector?

Watch this space for further information of upcoming events? More..

Email: martin_earnshaw@hotmail.com for details.

Previous Events

26th November 2009:

Minimum…. or Maximum Cities?

After the Crash: Recharging Metropolitan Life

Convened by Alastair Donald, Min-Max Cities Group, Dept of Architecture, University of Cambridge

What is the future for cities? Are they expanding at an ever-increasing rate or are they being abandoned and shrinking into oblivion? Are cities polluted, overcrowded and anonymous, or are they dynamic centres of innovation and culture? Are they sociable or anti-social?

How might new opportunities be maximised and social advances realised? Are our creative talents best employed in seeking a 'minimum' city as a means to retrench, rethink and rebuild? Or is a 'maximum' urbanism the answer, based on expansive cities for a dynamic and globalised planet?

From transport systems to energy grids, from social networks to economic activity, this is the forum in which to debate the implications of min/max alternatives. And given the often fraught debates over lifestyles, liberties, aesthetic values and technologies, to clarify the architectural and cultural attributes that can best help address the urban future.

Sessions include:
The Anxious City: The Dilemmas of Growth
The Agile City: Local Ties versus Global Reach
Powering the City: Innovating Energy Supply
The Future City: Rewriting the Rule Book

15th October 2009 7:30 til 9:30pm

Late-Nite Review: Sustainability in Architecture

Brewhouse Yard, London EC1V 4LJ

Architecture is seldom seen without the prefix ‘sustainable’. But what does it mean? Richard Rogers says sustainable architecture means ‘the humanising of the built environment’. Spencer de Grey insists that sustainability the equivalent of ‘good design’ while Leon Krier says that today’s ‘unsustainable architecture’ is the ‘architecture of excess’. Conversely, these could simply be examples of what Financial Times’ architectural commentator Edwin Heathcote calls the ‘glib mantra of sustainability’.

Champions of sustainable architecture will explain their ideas to, and be grilled by a panel of critics:

Presenters: Cany Ash, partner, Ash Sakula Architects, Chris Bannister, director of Hopkins Architects [Building Magazine's Sustainable Architect of the Year 2008].and Craig White, director White Design

Panellists include: Charlie Luxton, Five TV; Karl Sharro, KPF; Keiran Long, editor, Architects' Journal; Keith Papa, director, BDP; Professor Joe Kerr, head of Critical & Historical Studies department, RCA; Amin Taha, director, Amin Taha Architects.

Part bear-pit, part celebrity wrestling, part rigorous review, the point of the discussion is to see if the architects – and panellists – can convey their ideas successfully, but also to see if those ideas themselves stand up to criticism.

Come along for a beer, a 7:30 start and the architectural challenge of the year. The event is free but please email austin.williams@thenbs.com if you want to come.

29th October 2009:

Exploring the city limits

Whereas many of us used to maintain that ‘city air makes you free’, today we seem less sure. We worry that urban environments erode community and make us stressed. But also we look to cities in the hope they can help explain who we are, and shape who we should become. Our personalities, identity and levels of creativity are all said to flow from the places we live in. So to what extent can where we live explain who we are? What is the social and cultural impact of design? Is rebuilding the city a means to rebuild society, or even just to make us feel better?

Speakers include:
Dr Jason Rentfrow, Dept of Psychology, University of Cambridge, researching Personality and the City,
Emily Cockayne, author, Hubub: Filth Noise and Stench in England,
Rick Muir, Institute of Public Policy Research, co-author The Power of Belonging. Identity, citizenship and community cohesion,
Dolan Cummings, Research and Editorial Director, Institute of Ideas and a co-founder of the Manifesto Club.

Chair: Alastair Donald, Min-Max-Cities Group, Martin Centre, University of Cambridge and co-author, ManTownHuman.

Exploring the city limits…. is a free event. Reserve a place by mailing min-max-cities@arct.cam.ac.uk

1st November 2009 12:30 til 13:30pm

India's Future: Slumdogs or Millionaires?

LISTEN HERE:

While India is showing signs of economic dynamism, its development is not without problems. Cities like Bangalore and Mumbai are implementing slum clearance, decanting large numbers of people into newly-built homes, a process involving costly infrastructure development as well as causing unrest. Some condemn this as gentrification; others argue the city should develop organically; still others suggest if it ain’t broke, why fix it? National Geographic explored Dharavi, the massive slum at the heart of Mumbai, and found ‘once you get accustomed to sharing 300 square feet of floor with 15 humans and an uncounted number of mice, a strange sense of relaxation sets in’. Following the success of Slumdog Millionaire, slum tourism has taken off, with highlights including gawping at a stall of six toilets serving 16,000 people.

Urban strategist Jeb Brugman says negative views of the slums reflect ‘a Raj or British period mentality’. For him, slums are centres of creativity and dynamism; necessary precursors to development. Indeed, the slum economy provides a sixth of India’s GDP, and slum-dwelling is no barrier to economic development. With the new Four Seasons hotel towering over the nearby shanty-towns, and land prices in Mumbai reaching record levels, change is certainly underway in Dharavi, but the contradictions of the Maximum City are clear, with bosses in luxury on one side of the road and slum-dwellers facing them in squalor.

In his best-selling book Imagining India: Ideas For A New Century, IT entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani notes ‘with a factory worker costing 80 per cent lower than averages in developed markets, India can become the next big source of manufacturing labour in the world’. So is India creating a society of equals, or relying on inequality and cheap labour to survive? Speaking symbolically of India’s relationship with the world, as well as its internal difficulties, Deepak Chopra echoes Aravind Adiga and asks whether ‘the slumdogs will one day rise up against the millionaires’.

Panellists: Sunand Prasad, immediate past-president, Royal Institute of British Architects;

Professor Stuart Corbridge, co-author 'Reinventing India';

Parminder Bahra, Poverty and Development correspondent, The Times

Chair: Austin Williams, director, Future Cities Project

Broken Britain: Can we fix it?

30th April 2009

Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 4QH

In their famous post-war study "Family and Kinship in East London", Young and Wilmott romanticised a period when a sense of community seemed to thrive. Today, in contrast, there is a widespread conviction that we live in a "broken society" with endless stories of feckless parents or feral children, and a collapse of "respect" and "trust". Will government initiatives such as Community Service Volunteers, Citizens Panels and Commissions on Integration and Cohesion help to create new social solidarities? Or do such official interventions threaten to undermine the very relations they seek to create?

Yvonne Roberts, senior associate, The Young Foundation
Eamonn Butler, director, Adam Smith Institute; author, "The Rotten State of Britain";
Alastair Donald, urban designer, researcher and co-editor, "The Future of Community";
Steve Wyler, director, Development Trusts Association;
Chair: Austin Williams, director, Future Cities Project & Battle of Ideas' committee member

Sponsored by Bishopsgate Institute; Institute of Ideas and the Future Cities Project

Cities in Literature

18th April 2009
2: 30pm – 4:00pm

British Library, Conference Centre, Main Auditorium, 96 Euston Road, London

With over half the world’s population now living in cities, and Mumbai set to become the world’s largest by 2015, questions about what makes the experience of living in cities distinctive take on a new urgency.

Panellists:
Mani Sankar Mukherji (Sankar): ex-street hawker whose novels Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya were made into films by Satyajit Ray.
Suketu Mehta author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. Awarded Guggenheim fellowship for a New York follow-up.
Namdeo Dhasal is a maverick Marathi poet who founded the militant Dalit Panther modelled on Black Panther. Awarded the Padma Shree for literature.
Austin Williams is director of the Future Cities Project and the architectural producer of NBS Learning Channels.
Chair: James Boyle is the founder of Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature and Glasgow UNESCO City of Music and Chair of the British Council in Scotland.

Building Urban Communities - What is a City?

18th February 2009

A decade on from Towards an Urban Renaissance, the word ‘community’ takes precedence over the ‘city’, and ‘designing behaviour’ is frequently prioritised over ‘personal freedom’. Do these new labels mask the fact that we have lost sight of what “a city” really is?

Speakers:
Hank Dittmar: Chief Executive, Prince's Foundation; Karl Sharro: Future Cities Project; Quentin Stevens: University College London; Dan Hill: Urban Initiatives; Edwin Heathcote: architecture critic, Financial Times - tbc;
Chair, Alastair Donald: urban designer, researcher and writer; founder member of ManTowNHuman; Co-Editor, Future of Community
Hosted by the Urban Design Group

The Future of Community: Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated

Martin Earnshaw, Dave Clements, Alastair Donald & Austin Williams (Pluto Press)

We are constantly being told that we are losing a ‘sense of community’. This book shows that the notion of community is actually under threat from the very thing supposed to protect it: relentless government intervention.

Read more on the Future of Community BLOG here

Launched at the Belfast Salon. Read more here...

Thursday 23 October 2008

Late-Nite Review: INNOVATION

Go on almost any architectural website today, and you'll find proclamations of how "innovative", "forward-thinking" and "experimental" they are. But what does it really mean?
Sean Griffiths, director, Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT); and
CJ Lim, director, Studio 8 Architects
presented one of their innovative projects …and were grilled by:
Helen Groves, architect director, Bristol, BDP
Kieran Long, editor, Architects' Journal
Jeremy Myerson, director, Helen Hamlyn Centre and InnovationRCA
Karl Sharro, KPF and co-founder, ManTowNHuman
Amin Taha, director, Amin Taha Architects
Benedict Zucchi, board director, BDP
Chair: Austin Williams, director, Future Cities Project

Sunday 2 November 2008

Building the Future

(Watch this video here) Some feel we should have a veto in urban planning that affects us; critics argue that consultation privileges NIMBYish concerns over expert opinion and the national interest.From the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building to Canary Wharf; visionary urban designs have regularly been driven through by ambitious politicians and architects. What gives us the best buildings - masterplanning or public consultations? Should we celebrate the 'making things happen' mentality or respect public opinion?

See the debate here

Speakers:
Alastair Donald: urban designer, founder member of ManTowNHuman, Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge.
Richard Brown: urban policy consultant, led GLA's work on the London 2012 bid and Thames Gateway development programmes.
Tony McGuirk: chairman, BDP (Building Design Partnership), architect and urban designer.
Steve McAdam: architect, founder and director, Fluid Design; visiting lecturer, London Metropolitan University; consultant, Council of Europe.
Chair:Michael Owens: senior urban regeneration expert; former head of Development Policy at the London Development Agency.
The event was sponsored by the Building Design Partnership

Manifesto: Towards a New Humanism in Architecture

mantownhuman

"I love this manifesto - it has guts and irreverence and gusto. Almost every aspect of it is designed to upset and maybe that is the point. It is wilful and dangerous, with a strong tone of belligerence." Will Alsop

Read the manifesto here... Email: ManTownHuman

BBC "Newsnight" coverage of the Manifesto: WATCH HERE...

The Enemies of Progress: The Dangers of Sustainability

See Blog for more information and updates

1. THE NEW PAROCHIALISTS
Transport and mobility denied

2. THE OPT-OUTS
Energy and the end of universal provision

3. THE LIMIT-SETTERS
Architecture's loss of humanity [listen to interview on Chicago Public Radio]

4. THE INDOCTRINATORS
Environmental educators' underhand tactics

5. THE PESSIMISTS [read an edited sample]
Putting the brakes on China and India

6. THE NEW COLONIALISTS
The Developing World's sustainable underdevelopment

7. THE MISANTHROPISTS
America's unease with Modernity

CONCLUSION
Reclaiming the future

Visit the Enemies of Progress blog site for further details, reviews and upcoming events

Should We Build More Roads?

Shanghai Administration Institute Programme, University of Oxford

The Human Footprint: Have we gone too far?

Austin Williams; Corey Powell, editor of Discover magazine; Ronald Bailey, science correspondent, Reason magazine; and Professor Emeritus Martin Hoffert at The New School, 55 West 13th Street, New York

For more information click here

The Therapy Rooms - building esteem or housing discontent?

Nowadays, buildings are credited with changing our behaviour, promoting our welfare, and addressing intractable social problems. For instance, it has been argued that large windows in schools improve students' performance; natural ventilation increases productivity in offices; well designed homes and neighbourhoods prevent anti-social behaviour; healthy sports stadia reduce spectator obesity; and hospitals with soothing decor help people get better quicker.

This debate addressed the question of whether we have lost our ability to argue for better provision in its own terms and for its own sake. No doubt the way buildings are designed do make us feel good, but how transient is this response? In order to tick the right funding box, is it justifiable to over-claim for the immediate benefits of a project, or do we lose something in the process?

The Bartlett School of Architecture, London

Read Dave Clements' speech from the conference here