taCity

Author: Oli

  • Life in Pruitt-Igoe

    16th of March, 1972 at 3.00pm precisely. That is when Charles Jencks proclaimed ‘the death of modenism’, as the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St. Louis was razed to the ground. Many commentators of architecture and city living in general claimed it was the representative ‘end’ of the Cities of the Future which…

  • My networking is not working!

    Just a quick post to let you know that my latest paper has been published in Economic Geography (abstract is below). It is a conceptual paper on the merits of latency and dysfunction in the networking paradigm within economic geography literature, and perhaps the wider social sciences as a whole. It…

  • CFP: Spatialities of Digital and Creative Work, RGS-IBG 2012

    Call for papers: RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2012 2-5th July, University of Edinburgh Session convenors: Rachel Granger, Coventry University, UK Oli Mould, University of Salford, UK  SPATIALITIES OF DIGITAL AND CREATIVE WORK While research on the growing and highly influential digital and creative industries has been well-represented in recent years, this…

  • Cities and the Creative Industries – a quick rant…

    Having secured some funding to study MediaCityUK in-depth, it is a great opportunity to grapple with that old problem of the ‘spaces’ of creative industries. I have always tried to write/research/teach around the intersection of urban geographies and the creative industries, yet it seems that despite much academic literature to…

  • City-Regions of regions of cities?

    On one of my daily walks across the campus of the University of Salford, I came across something that really encapsulated some of the current thinking of the local area. It was a piece of cardboard, maybe 5 inches by 15, wedged in the grills of the heras fencing that…

  • Cross-discipline creativity and Steve Jobs

    It is perhaps with a little bit of poetic justice that I saw Mark Brittin of Google speak at MediaCityUK two days before Steve Jobs passed away – the message Mark gave was one that Steve had been actively living and preaching pretty much his whole adult life. I’m not…

  • Spaces of failure

    While the media gaze has been on the Olympic site in the East End of London, the new Westfield shopping centre has quietly been rising from the dirt, and today, opens it’s doors to the public. While some have questioned whether a multi-million square-footed shopping megaplex will attract the custom…

  • “To City or not city”

    I read an article on Urban Acupuncture that cropped up on my RSS feed not too long ago and given it’s proposal of more community focused and localised approach to urban planning, it certainly struck a chord. Eerily reminiscent of what Jane Jacobs proposed back in 1968, the Finnish architect,…

  • Ode to the 21st Century

    In the 21st century… What is making the news is now news, You can make money just by moving money, Politics is now about anything but politics, You now have to be taught how to teach, Having an education does not make you educated, The police need policing, Being creative…

  • An open letter to Mr. Willetts

    Dear Mr. Willetts, It is becoming increasingly clear the way in which you and the rest of the coalition government wants universities to operate. You have outlined today that you want to give students more ‘consumer power’ putting students in the ‘driving seat’. Well, that’s that then. We, as university…