Power Up!

I dropped into a Friends of the Earth seminar designed to empower community groups to take on the vested interests - with money - in the planning system. I admitted to the organisers that I wanted to come because I felt the UCL course was lacking in planning law, and I wanted to know more. And they still let me come to their drop-in session and enjoy free sandwiches! Quite impressive that so many people are willing to dedicate so much of their free time to causes such as fighting the closure of a local park. A lesson perhaps in how much spaces mean to people, and how much they invest personally in them.

Homage to the tube

Map of cities with planned or current mass transit systems. I love it!

Demos - The big society

Ben Rogers (son of Richard) has set up a new think tank, incubated by Demos, called Centre for London, just in time for the mayoral elections. I went along to a conference they organised with LSE on the Big Society, or rather the importance of the suburbs to the Big Society. Participants were mixed between those who think the suburbs will grow in importance (Laura Vaughan of UCL, who whilst on maternity leave discovered that her suburb of Borehamwood didn't shut down while commuters head to work) and those who think outer London (particularly the East) is getting too much attention.
The event was testing theories ahead of next year's elections. Contributions were interesting, but it was really an excuse to try to attach the topic du jour - Big Society - to what everyone credits for Boris having won the last election - focussing on outer London.

Cities - love 'em or hate 'em?

After a raft of eulogies on city living (Glaeser's Triumph of the City, Andrew Marr's Megacities), Nature magazine has sought to redress the balance by examining the 'city living is not natural and therefore must be harmful' school of thought. A study seems to say that the stresses of city living affect your brain and could explain the higher incidence of mental health in cities as opposed to non urban areas (cited in The Guardian). Certainly a recent to visit to Paris seems to bear this out. Within half an hour, I had spent a fruitless 20 minutes trying to recharge my SFR phone in an SFR shop (which turned out to be 'pas possible'), recoiled in horror at a horrendous queue in the supermarket, witnessed a spitting 'putain de merde' exchange between shop vendor and customer, and had my suitcase kicked off the metro because it was in someone's way. Don't get me wrong, I love Paris. But the city is schizophenic, a crazy mix of all that is good and bad about city life. The study might offer an explanation for why Paris may be be more aggressive than similar cities like New York and London: apparently stress levels are affected by how in control of your life you feel. And with job insecurity at panic levels in France (meaning people cling onto jobs they hate), maybe therein lies the explanation.

How Paris encourages civilised behaviour on its crowded buses

'If everyone made their own rules, everything would go to pieces.' This is how Paris is trying to encourage civilised behaviour on its overcrowded buses. Unlike London buses where you mostly get a seat, you often have to stand on French buses, and at peak times (or most of the time on the number 26 to Paris' 20th district) travel can be an ordeal, especially when it is hot and tempers get frayed. I'm not sure whether this campaign will work, however. In my experience, reason is not always the best tactic to adopt with French people.......

OpenCity Documentary Film Festival

UCL is hosting what they are billing as the "largest and newest documentary film festival in London," OpenCity. In a verbose ramble, Festival Director Michael Stewart seems to be saying that he wanted to focus on the ontold stories of city living. The program looks good however, and for anyone willing to watching a film in a cramped lecture theatre, there was a lot to choose from.I opted for Srdan Keca's Mirage (2010), a short film about the ugly underside of Dubai which won praise from Time Out. It makes life in the glittering Mirage seem highly impersonal: the living quarters of the workers who sweat to built the fancy towers look like prisons (Keca, unable to afford a hotel, lived among them), and their lives are mostly filmed as part of the scenery. Even the heart breaking letters home (genre "I'm miserable, but I hope you are ok. Please write to make it more bearable") are removed from those speaking who we don't see. The charming young Serbian director said he might have gone a little too far, but I think perhaps it works like that. We are reminded of the reality behind those towers from their voices, and the depersonalisation seems somehow fitting. Dubai is willing to pay top dollar for the fanciest materials to show-off its wealth, but when it comes to wages, they will squeeze the workers dry. I couldn't help thinking that someone should publicise the average wage of each tower. Maybe that would embarrass the uber-rich into paying a decent wage.

Next up I went to see the Bartlett's favourite planning professor, Mark Tewdwr-Jones, and panel present a series of short films from the archive about London in an event dubbed Metropolis Reborn. Films screened included:

The City (1939) - How london copes with crowding, delay and more people and movement. Striking for its attempt to manage the flow of traffic and people without a thought for social problems.

All That Mighty Heart (1962) - life in the late 50s; London waking up at 6am and going to bed at midnight, London transport from life on the underground to green, country buses in the suburbs, Steveange new town centre, building the Victoria line. Refreshingly I thought, filmmakers displayed a total lack of cynicism, perhaps because they didn't know the gloom that was around the corner.

Top people (1960) - billed as a "look at life" series, building utopia, living in high rise, building the Barbican and London Wall, accommodating the rise of the car with new roads, underground car parks, bringing life and residents back to the city of London.

The films gave the panel an opportunity to rant at bankers and the general evils of society (including letting Billingsgate market close after 1,000 years on the same site: which sounds terrible until you think that maybe just because something has been done a certain way for a long time doesn't mean there aren't better ways of doing it. Cities do need to move with the times or they risk becoming decaying museums). They did release a few interesting nuggets of information: a tunnel runs from east to west London which shuttled post across the city at great speeds until last year when the almost bankrupt Royal Mail figured it would be cheaper to go by road (not counting costs of congestion that we all pay). The Thames apparently carries as many ships as it ever did, only they are larger and stop at Tilbury. And more of London was destroyed during the 1980s as developers thought to squeeze more money out of the land than during the Blitz.

Life in low-income neighbourhoods

This evening, I went to see what the good folks at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation had to say about life in low-income neighbourhoods. Presenting the results of a three-year study into the relationship between poverty and place at the NLA, researchers from Sheffield Hallam University didn't really have anything new to say (although Professor Ian Cole had a great turn of phrase and should do TV). The idea was to give ordinary people a voice, and what they had to say should be a surprise only to people who are out of touch (and sadly, those people probably aren't listening). Cole and his team used personal narratives from people living in six "ordinary" disadvantaged neighbourhoods (ie not the worst, statistically) including Oxgangs in Edinburgh (pictured) and West Kensington in London, showing them through short films, photographs and visual narratives. I'm in favour of ramming home the message to policy makers that life is so much more varied than housing choices. But the exhibition, Communities Under Pressure, feels more like an art show than a research project. And I was slightly suspicious that researchers found what they wanted to find. According to them, there was no evidence of Broken Britain, and low-income communities are just as disparaging about benefit scroungers and the work-shy as the hawkiest hawk of the Tory party. I'm not sure if I buy that. Sure, employment options for many are probably not that enticing, and in the short term it may seem preferable to claim benefits. But if there was more social pressure to pay your way, I don't think you would see generations of families who have never known work. I think people are more resourceful than that, even those whose options don't look great at birth. I know this view is controversial in England. But having worked in jobs that many people look down their noses at (and been proud to do so), I have respect for the people who do what they have to do to pay the bills, and I know that provided they have a good manager, they get a sense of self worth from it. I agreed with Julia Unwin, the foundation's CEO, that too often the voices of the disadvantaged aren't heard in policy debates. And I agree with Cole that the resurgence of the notion of the deserving and undeserving poor is incredibly distasteful. But let's not gloss over the facts. In some parts of the country, significant numbers of people have given up hope about making a positive contribution to society. We should ask ourselves why.

As for the study's conclusions about the importance of place, architects are going to be disappointed: it's not about fancy new buildings and shiny squares. What researchers found was that if your friends and family are located in one part of the world, it takes a certain kind of person to cut those ties and head to the big unknown city. So policy makers should concentrate on making all of Britain better, and not just the parts that work (ie South East England).