Category: Urban diversity

  • Am I a gentrifier?

    I’ve recently moved. I moved from a small flat to a house to accommodate a growing family, but in order to afford to do so, we had to move out of the area we were in, to a smaller town/village nearby that has a large traveller community, a significant Nepalese…

  • 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…

  • “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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…