taCity

Author: Oli

  • MediaCityUK, it’s too early to tell…

    Having just spent the day at ‘The Impact of MediaCityUK‘, I am left feeling slightly disheartened as to the way in which those in charge of it’s development are orientating themselves. If you know nothing of the MediaCityUK development, then this will all come as a surprise to you, but…

  • Creative Exchange(s)

    Having just given a keynote talk at the Creative Exchange (slides above, or if you’re browser isn’t letting you see them, click here), it has been a genuinely invigorating experience to talk to and get feedback from creative industry businesses, entrepreneurs and freelance workers. The talks and Q&A sessions all had…

  • Top 5 city destroyers of all time

    I have made no secret of my distain for the recent Transformers films by Michael Bay. In my youth, I absolutely adored the original Transformers cartoons and toys, and the original animated Transformers movie, for me, is still one of the best films/stories ever produced. However, seeing the trailer for…

  • What a silly planker…

    After the death of an Australian man who was ‘planking’, I can’t help but feel that the news coverage has been a little bit too ‘hang-ringing-y’ – and there have been some calls to ban it altogether (although further examination of this story suggests that the Australian PM did not call…

  • The folly of Coalition Creative Industry Policy

    This article cropped up on my RSS feed this morning which was interesting and relevant enough to tweet about, but thinking about it a bit more, it got me slightly riled, and not just because it’s Clegg. The headline (as is usually the case with these things) is slightly misleading,…

  • Visualising Cities: Part 6… JB Cities

    Does anyone else think that it’s not a coincidence that Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne have the same initials as James Bond? It’s more than a passing homage, the two nefarious super-secret agent characters, Bauer and Bourne have more than a passing resemblance to a ‘revamped’ James Bond 2.0 type…

  • The UK’s Cultural Quarters

    The notion of the cultural quarter is one that has been around for a while, yet is still being refined. Many cities across the UK have initiated the planning and development of a cultural quarter in an attempt to to stimulate growth and attempt to ‘re-vitalise’ the local economy along…

  • Practising urban diversity

    I’ve been reading Sharon Zukin’s latest book, and it is a stark reminder of the plight of current urbanism. While focused solely on New York, the sentiments hold true for a number of other cities around the world (but by no means all). In criticizing Jacobs, a bold move it…

  • I hate EveryOne

    When you read stuff like this, it really does make you realise the folly of structuralist thinking, or more accurately, the curse of the ‘ism’. I remember reading something by Marcus Doel once when the opening line was “I hate everyone” (I forget in which one of the myriad of his marvellous essays it…

  • Avatar: Latour’s NEW favourite film

    I recently watched Avatar again for the first time since the cinema. Perhaps it was the 3D extravaganza or maybe the nose-pinchingly obvious imperialist overtones, but I seemed to miss the first time round that one of the main proponents of the film is the intertwining of the human and…