Cities lectures at LSE, Spring 2010

One of my new year's resolutions: attend more of these! LSE's always good at big public lectures - perhaps not such high-profile urbanists in 2010 as in previous years, but with a clear environmental theme this year they're sure to be worthwhile. See you there?

Delivering a Low Carbon London
Date: Tuesday 2 February 2010
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House
Speaker: Isabel Dedring

Isabel Dedring will discuss developing and implementing a vision for a low carbon London. She is environment adviser to the Mayor of London, and has also been director of the policy unit at Transport for London.


Sustainable Housing: how can we save 80 per cent of our energy use in existing homes?
Date: Tuesday 9 February 2010
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: New Theatre, East Building
Speaker: Professor Anne Power

This lecture addresses how we can drastically reduce energy consumption and consequent carbon emissions by considering existing buildings. Anne Power, professor of social policy, is head of LSE Housing and Communities, a research group in the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion.


Reading London (part of the LSE Literature Festival)
Date: Saturday 13 February 2010
Time: 1-2.30pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speakers: Professor Rosemary Ashton, Dan Cruickshank, Leo Hollis, Hans Ulrich Obrist

How do we attempt to understand the sprawling "modern Babylon" that is London, with its layers of social, political and cultural history? Can art, architecture and literature help us to 'read' this complex city?

Rosemary Ashton - prof. of English lit & Bloomsbury literary culture
Dan Cruickshank - architectural historian and television presenter
Leo Hollis - history of London, inc. The Phoenix: the men who made modern London
Hans Ulrich Obrist - director at the Serpentine Gallery


The City Solution: Climate change and transport design
Date: Monday 8 March 2010
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Janette Sadik-Kahn

Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, has transformed the way New Yorkers think of sustainable transport and realised some dramatic and effective projects and policy changes in a brief period – including the part-pedestrianisation of Times Square. She will explain how creative public transport solutions can address the environmental impact of cities and improve the quality of urban life.
Part of the Urban Age: Cities and the Environment series

Urban-related lectures at LSE, Autumn 2009

Cities and the Environment
Urban Age with the Ove Arup Foundation Cities and the Environment series
Speaker: Peter Head, chair: Ricky Burdett

Date: Wednesday 14 October 2009
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

By changing patterns of urban behaviour, cities can meet the challenges of climate change. How can advanced technologies help create sustainable cities and self-sufficient urban form?
Peter Head is director of ARUP. Ricky Burdett is Centennial Professor of Architecture and Urbanism and Director of Urban Age at the LSE.


Beijing Inside Out: Caochangdi
the James Stirling Memorial Lecture on the City organised by the LSE Cities Programme in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Center for Architecture, New York
Speakers: Robert Mangurian, Mary-Ann Ray

Date: Monday 19 October 2009
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

The speakers examine the problems and possibilities of one of many dynamic new urban villages redefining the city of Beijing.
Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray are both Stirling Lecture Prize-winners and principals of StudioWorks Architects in Caochangdi.


The first Legacy Games: the physical and socio-economic transformation of East London
a Cities Programme and London Development Agency Legacy Now Team public debate
Speakers: Andrew Altman, Councillor Paul Brickell, Professor Ricky Burdett, Roger Taylor

Date: Tuesday 10 November 2009
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

This event explores the planning and physical development of the Olympic Park after the 2012 games as well as the wider socio-economic benefits the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games are bringing.
Andrew Altman is chief executive of the Olympic Park Legacy Company. Paul Brickell is executive member for Olympics and public affairs at Newham council and chief executive of Leaside Regeneration. Ricky Burdett is director of Urban Age at LSE and principal design advisor to the London 2012 Olympics. Roger Taylor is director of the Host Boroughs Unit.


Cities, Design & Climate Change
Urban Age Understanding Cities series
Speakers: Professor Saskia Sassen, Professor Richard Sennett

Date: Tuesday 17 November 2009
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

With cities contributing upwards of 75 per cent of global carbon emissions, urban design is increasingly important when planning for climate change. This discussion examines the creative urban design solutions coming out of the world's cities.
Saskia Sassen is Robert S Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Richard Sennett is professor of sociology at LSE and NYU.

Cities lectures at LSE - Spring 2009

LSE's consistently excellent public lectures programme (follow on Twitter) has the following cities-related lectures this spring:

Architecture as Investment
Monday 27 April 2009, 6.30pm
Professor Alejandro Aravena, Professor Ricky Burdett, chaired by Tyler Brûlé

The challenge to provide affordable housing is a global issue. At a time when market forces are eclipsing architecture’s social value, Elemental’s pioneering housing is transforming urban communities in Latin America. Prof. Aravena is director of Elemental in Santiago de Chile (and Mr Brûlé, of Monocle magazine, just has the best name ever).

The Tycoon and the Tough: towards a comparative anthropology of urban marginality
Thursday 7 May 2009, 6pm
Dr Joshua Barker, Professor Chris Fuller

Anthropologists often use key figures, such as the street tough, the child witch, and the flâneur, as a means to elucidate, personify, and critique underlying dynamics of social and cultural transformation. It is a method that is widely used, but seldom scrutinised. In this lecture Joshua Barker uses examples from his research in the slums of Bandung, Indonesia, to argue that this method can make a powerful contribution to a comparative anthropology of urban marginality.

Picturing Poverty: London past and present
Wednesday 27 May 2009, 6.30pm
Sue Donnelly, Mishka Henner, Professor Gillian Rose, Dr Mike Seaborne

From Charles Booth’s 19th century maps and early photographs of East End tenements, to rich-poor divides in Hackney, this discussion will consider old and new ways of seeing poverty – understanding the underlying political processes that serve to reproduce and reduce it. Sue Donnelly is head of Archives at LSE. Mishka Henner is a photographic artist. Gillian Rose is professor of cultural geography at the Open University. Mike Seaborne is senior curator of photographs at the Museum of London.

All That Life Can Afford
Tuesday 26 May 2009, 7pm
Mishka Henner

What does poverty in London look like? And can photography expose the often hidden mechanisms that keep the rich divided from the poor? Mishka Henner discusses the making of his photographic essay, All That Life Can Afford, deconstructing its production to reveal the negotiations and obstacles involved in visualising poverty.

The Fog of Games: Legacy, Land Grabs and Liberty
Reporting the London Olympics
Thursday 28 May 2009, 7pm
Mark Saunders, Martin Slavin

The Olympics are brief and transitory television events that disguise and justify mega projects of vast urban restructuring that permanently distort our cities for the benefit of a few business interests. The common features of these mega projects are unprecedented land grabs, the peddling of myths of ‘regeneration’ and ‘legacy’ benefits, the sweeping away of democratic structures and planning restraints, the transfer of public money into private hands, and ‘information management’ to hide truths and silence critics.
Mark Saunders is an award winning independent documentary filmmaker, media activist and writer. Martin Slavin's continuing interest in photographing and writing about urban experiences, development and natural life is encapsulated in his current focus on the 2012 London Olympics in his neighbourhood.

City-related lectures at LSE this autumn

There are a thousand reasons why the LSE is brilliant, and one is the quality of its evening lectures. The full list is available here, but below are details of the best on urban and spatial topics. I'd like to attend them all, but that'll be easier said than done!

Tues 21 Oct, 18:30 - Running Cities: London in context
Sir Simon Milton, Prof. Ricky Burdett, Deyan Sudjic
What is the new administration's vision for London? Speakers discuss how to design and manage the powerhouses of the global economy, assessing London's development compared to the megacities of the world.
Simon Milton was appointed deputy mayor for policy and planning after serving as chairman of London's Local Government Association. Ricky Burdett, chief adviser for the London 2012 Olympics, and Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London, are co-editors of The Endless City.

Tues 21 Oct, 18:30 - Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City: social order revisited
Prof. Robert Sampson & Prof. Paul Gilroy
A look at classic urban themes as they are manifested in the contemporary city, focusing on social reproduction of inequality, the meanings of disorder, and the link between the two.
Paul Gilroy is Anthony Giddens Professor in Social Theory at LSE. Robert Sampson is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences and chair of sociology, Harvard University.

Tues 4 Nov, 13:00 - Big Ideas: Richard Wilson
Richard Wilson is one of Britain’s most renowned sculptors. He is internationally celebrated for his interventions in architectural space draw heavily for their inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction.

Weds 12 Nov, 18: 30 - Desiring Walls
Prof. Wendy Brown
In this lecture, Professor Wendy Brown will draw on discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory to examine the desire for walls in the context of eroding sovereignty. Why the current proliferation of nation-state walls, especially amidst widespread proclamations of global connectedness and anticipation of a world without borders? And why barricades built of concrete, steel and barbed wire when threats to the nation today are so often miniaturized, vaporous, clandestine, dispersed or networked? Why walls now and how are they to be understood? While acknowledging variety in the explicit purposes of the new walls, this project argues for comprehending the recent spate of wall building in terms of eroded nation-state sovereignty. Above all, the new walls consecrate the boundary corruption they overtly contest and signify the ungovernability by law of a range of forces unleashed by globalization.
Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Thurs 13 Nov, 18:30 - Our Urban Future: the death of distance and the rise of cities
Prof. Edward Glaeser
Improvements in transportation and communication technologies have led some to predict the death of distance, and with that, the death of the city. In this lecture Professor Ed Glaeser will argue that these improvements have actually been good for idea-producing cities at the same time as they have been devastating for goods-producing places. What, then, does the future hold for our cities?
Ed Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard.

Tues 18 Nov, 18:30 - The Politics of Mobility
Peter Hendy
Sprawl versus dense? Public transport versus private car? This debate will outline how London's transport strategy shapes - and is shaped by - environmental policy, quality of life and political imperatives.
Peter Hendy is commissioner of Transport for London.