Minimum or Maximum Cities? A conference

Keen to go to the Minimum or Maximum Cities conference, held by the Min-Max-Cities group in the University of Cambridge's Architecture department. It's on Thursday 26th November 2009 in Cambridge and looks to be well worth the £20 registration fee and a day off work. They are asking:

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?

...So one year on from the economic crash, how should we seek to reinvigorate our urban centres? Some welcome the current mood of caution as appropriate for hazardous times. Others argue a lack of belief in the benefits of an urbanised future is a cause for concern. So should the priority be to dampen expectations and settle for minimising potential problems? Or should we be more ambitious and experiment with new ideas and technologies that could maximise future gains? 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?

And the programme goes like this:

9.00 - Registration and coffee
9.30 - Welcome and Introductions

9.35 – 11.05 The Anxious City: The Dilemmas of Growth
"For the first time in history half the world's population live in cities, yet the celebrations have been distinctly muted. Rather than advancing civilisation, cities are said to be on "the edge of chaos", and bring out our "lurking paranoia". Some have claimed the roots of recession are spatial, and that sprawling cities point to a "whole system of economic organization and growth that has reached its limit". Just-in-time contemporary urban lifestyles are said to threaten the frail systems of a brittle society.
So how should we account the sense of exhaustion and limits that have become central features of western discourse on cities? Are cities today too dynamic and spiralling out of control? Or do they suffer from a surfeit of controls?" Is resilience a dynamic, positive message, or one that implies cities are vulnerable?

11.30 – 13.00 The Agile City: Local Ties versus Global Reach
"The ambition to travel further and faster has often been held up as a virtue. Not so long ago, there was enthusiasm for the idea that Jet Packs and Flying Cars could represent the future of urban transport. These days the outlook on travel is less clear cut. We seem less likely to dream about flying cars, than to express concerns about flying and cars. At a time when local accessibility rather than metropolitan mobility excites policymakers, fast citywide, regional or global connections seem less of a priority than measures to promote cycling and walking.
Expanding one's geographical range has often been associated with the positive ambition to broaden one's horizons. So is the new maxim of living more simply and more locally likely to prove inspirational enough to city dwellers?"

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch & Exhibition
Exihibition Space - Paper City: Urban Utopias

14.00 – 15.30 Powering the City: Innovations in Energy
"From the impact of increasing oil prices to the benefits of investing in renewables and smart grids, energy has become central to the discussion on recovering from recession. And whether through 'passive houses', 'transition towns' or 'low carbon cities', the question of sustainable energy now figures prominently at all scales of architectural and urban thinking.
So how should designers view the elevation of energy efficiency as one of, or perhaps even the defining criterion of design quality? Does the current emphasis on localising supply and 'off grid' solutions mean that universal supply and scale efficiencies have had their day? Does the recent focus on altering individual behaviour represent a welcome broadening out of the concept of innovation? Or does it indicate that controls and regulations are taking precedence over discovery and experimentation?"

16.00 – 17.30 The Future City: Rewriting the Rule Book
"What might represent a way forward? From ‘slow cities’ to ‘creative cities’, and ‘liveable cities’ to ‘hungry cities’; from ‘aerotropolis’ to ‘postopolis’, and the ‘compact city’ to the ‘città diffusa’; there are any number of ideas out there that purport to represent a basis for the future city. But is what is on offer today ambitious, challenging and bold enough? Do the visionaries of today respect current rules and accept contemporary limits? Or are they the ideas of risk takers who are attempting to move beyond?
In this final session we invite three teams of aspiring urban visionaries to present and defend their min/max solutions for the future city. This is your chance to crit their ideas… and through doing so, to flesh out your own."

17.30 – 19.00 Wine Reception

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.

What I've been working on in these weeks away from this blog - this is the introduction to my Masters dissertation entitled Dust: Disturbing the Domestic:

I first started thinking about dust when lying on the sofa in my flat, procrastinating on putting together a dissertation proposal. Eyes casting around for things to do other than study, I noticed that an enormous amount of dust had gathered under the table. Where trapped by chair legs it was forming dustbunnies, tangles of an oddly purpleish fuzz and hair that were a prodigious size seeing as I had swept only a couple of days previously. It didn't seem fair. I had to be the one to blame – my previous flat had been excessively dusty too, but that was clearly due to sharing it with two engineering-student boys. Now, living alone, this dust had to be my responsibility – yet I was neither balding nor scrofulous, and my flat's soft furnishings were not becoming threadbare. Where was this material coming from? I was disturbed.

The problem of dust was clearly a more interesting question than any possible dissertation. How frequently did I need to clean in order to prevent dust, daily? But that would be silly. The dust was quite a pleasing colour and safely out-of-the-way, so perhaps I should just leave it? After all, dust wasn't really yucky – it just sat there quietly – and cleaning to avoid my dissertation was clearly procrastination to be discouraged. I had thought I lived in every inch of my tiny flat, yet on reflection dust marked all the spaces in which my presence was absent, the out-of-the-way places my feet didn't tread and my body didn't occupy. Dust sat in corners, under the bed, and on top of the cooker hood, while the rest of the flat acquired discarded clothes and coffee stains, traces instead of use. And paradoxically this dust marking all the places I wasn't was nonetheless made of me, made of my skin and made of hair no more dead than that attached to my head. It suggested a sort of hidden embodiment-apart-from-the-body, dispersed over space and time. The accumulation of dust was like the accumulation of the past, which must at some point become suffocating to the present – housework the only thing preventing the transformation of the home into a nightmarish haunted house. What if dust could be sentient, like the animated soot particles in the film I'd watched recently, Spirited Away? This stuff was weird, intriguingly so.

I decided I wanted to do some serious thinking about dust.