taCity

Author: Oli

  • Homogenous Townscapes: The case of Guildford’s Picture Palace

    Having spent the last few years studying cities and extolling the virtues a more inclusive, democratic and less hegemonic urban environment, it was with a certain amount of exasperation that I recently heard some sad, and quite frankly, bewildering news concerning my home town of Guildford. For years now, there…

  • Conceptualising Fictional Cities

    Technology is reproducing cities very rapidly. Or shall I say producing cities? Not artificial cities, but experiential cities that are pure hyper-reality, a simulacrum space par excellence (to mesh Baurdiallardian and Deleuzian language). Reproducing cities is as easy as driving a car with a camera mounted on top and putting the…

  • 5 ways to improve the effectiveness of PhDs

    Having completed my PhD late last decade, it still seems to hold me in it’s irrevocable claws. Not the subject matter, I’m comfortable with that, but the process itself and it’s insufficient capacity to equip me and countless other PhD graduates with the relevant skills for the academic (and quasi-academic)…

  • Somewhere between eclecticism and inter-disciplinarity….

    In researching my latest working theoretical (co-authored) paper on the network paradigm, I recently reread Gernot Grabher‘s paper entitled “Trading routes, bypasses, and risky intersections: mapping the travels of  ‘networks’ between economic sociology and economic geography“. The paper was in a Geography journal (Progress in Human Geography) and describes the…

  • Global Urbanist post

    Another quick pointer toward Global Urbanist, for whom I have recently written an article. The post briefly discusses the Creative City concept and the problems with ranking them. This forms part of my wider writings on the city, and I will be speaking on the topic in Istanbul in November,…

  • Parkour paper

    Just a quick post to let you know that the guys over at American Parkour have published my Environment and Planning D paper ‘Parkour, the City, the Event‘. You can read it here. If you don’t have access to the full paper from the journal website or your library doesn’t…

  • Breaking Bad: A Review

    Ever since The Wire and Battlestar Galactica finished, I’ve been looking for an episodic drama that is more than your terrorist-chasing, baddie-bagging, clock-ticking thrill ride. Dexter was OK, House is too convoluted, Lost just got boring and the British dramas simply cannot compete at the moment (although Luther, I here,…

  • An appreciation of the Monorail

    Ever since I visited the Epcot centre when I was only 7 years old, I have been fascinated by Monorails (please check out the Monorail Society for all your single-tracked needs, it is a really fantastic resource). They have always seemed to go hand-in-hand with progressive technological wonderment, and a sense…

  • Politics of Creativity or Creative Politics?

    It’s taken a bit of time for the dust to settle on the coalition government and already we are seeing them attempting to tackle the chronic economic malaise that we currently suffering from. Public sector cuts seem to be high on the agenda and within that we have already seen the abolishment of…

  • Video lectures worth taking the time to watch… Part 2

    It’s been a long time since I posted the first set of video lectures, but I’ve been accruing a few more since then so thought it pertinent to post a second set. These are an eclectic bunch, but encapsulate the rhizomic essence of modern day phenomena and resonate with my own…