Category: Global Cities
-
Exploring Blackness of the Inner City: A Review of Netflix’s “The Kitchen”
As an urban geography professor, there are some films that are so on the nose with regard the themes that pervade my teaching and research encounters that they demand a closer inspection: and Netflix’s The Kitchen by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya is one such film. Set in a near…
-
Using Google Street View Archive as Gentrification Research
You may or may not be aware at the archival potential of Google Street view, but ever since the search engine behemoth has been photographing and spying on as much of our cities as it can, it has created a rather useful, freely accessible public archive of outdoor space. Archival…
-
Planetary Safe Mode? Turning Lockdowns into a tool to fight Climate Change
The pandemic that currently grips our world has been many countries go into unprecedented lockdowns multiple times. Characterised by stay at home instructions, education going online, the closure of non-essential businesses; they have caused misery for millions. However, in some parts of the world they have had unintended benefits such…
-
Glass War: The New Materials of Gentrification
Stand on London Bridge on a sunny day and look East, you’ll see the towers of Canary Wharf glistening in the distance, the Shard looming to your right slicing into the sky, and the bloated curves of the Walkie Talkie shimmering like a newly blown glass vase. Walk further west along…
-
Reflections on the Aylesbury Occupation
At the same time that the nation tuned into the first TV debate of the 2015 general election, the Aylesbury Estate occupation reportedly ended. One event saw a bunch of lowlifes bickering about how to run a doomed institution, the other? Well….
-
Walking the Berlin Wall
One cannot have failed to notice the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall over the weekend. Coupled with Remembrance Sunday, it has created a milieu of memorialisation over the weekend that has invoked process of grief, global strife, hegemonic power, activism & resistance, personal loss and spirituality. There has been…
-
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…
taCity 