taCity

Author: Oli

  • Subverting the aesthetics of decay

    Originally posted on Landscape Surgery: The aesthetics of decay have been well versed of late, not only within academic literature, but also mainstream media and online via blogs and other social media. We have seen an aquarium in an abandoned shopping mall in Bangkok, entire disused airports in Cyprus and an whole abandoned island used…

  • We have always been Creative

    Just a quick note to say that over on the OpenDemocracy website, they very gracefully decided to publish my response to this piece by Adam Lent for the RSA. The headline argument is that the last 250 years has not seen a sudden surge in the creative spirit, it has seen the appropriation of…

  • Baudrillard on Functionality

    This one I may actually use in its entirety… “Every object claims to be functional, just as every regime claims to be democratic. The term evokes all the virtues of modernity, yet it is perfectly ambiguous. With reference to ‘function’ it suggests that the object fulfils itself in the precision…

  • Harvey on Urban Entrepreneurialism

    Another quote that I seem to be going back to a lot when talking about the shift from urban managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism and city marketing… “Many of the innovations and investments designed to make particular cities more attractive as cultural and consumer centres have quickly been imitated elsewhere, thus…

  • De Certeau on Walking

    As I’m currently finishing off my first monograph, it’s customary of course to (re)read some of the great texts that formulated the ideas of the book in the first place. So I thought I’d start a blog series that block quoted some of the prose that has inspired/is inspiring the…

  • Miéville’s ‘The Scar’ & the Global City

    China Miéville’s ‘The Scar‘ is the second novel in the Bas-Lag series, and quite possibly, the best. There are plenty of excellent reviews of the book elsewhere and I don’t intend to add to them here. Rather there is an interesting allegorical reading (one of many it has to be said) to…

  • Who Framed Roger Rabbit as urbanist critique

    Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) is no doubt a classic film. It was technologically innovate, and spliced the detective film-noir genre with the comic, slapstick animation of classic ‘toons of the 1960s and 70s. Truly, a masterpiece of Hollywood cinema, and if you are not familiar with the film, you can…

  • A city’s obsession: A commentary on the BBC’s ‘London and the Rest’

    The show currently on BBC2, Mind the Gap, is well worth a watch as it covers many of themes that are important to modern urban geographical studies (you can watch it on the iPlayer, but only till 17th March), notably those being taught at undergradute level, not least by me…

  • Long Live Southbank: Petition delivery

    So it’s done. 20,000+ petitions submitted from the Long Live Southbank campaign to Lambeth Council, apparently the largest number of objections ever raised to a single planning issue in the UK (see the ITV “news” segment on it here or the BBC one here). To be sure, there is no guarantee…

  • A few subversive things…

    I haven’t posted in a while, and I can blame that on a number of things – illness, marking, administration, family – but  the bulk of most of my ‘free time’ has been devoted to writing (the fact that writing is now something done in our free time is I…