Star stuck
Read my article for CLES-New Start on the new phenomenon of celeb-regeneration “I spoke too soon. Regeneration isn’t dead. It’s been given the air-kiss of life by celebrities.” Image credit: Colin Bottomley Twitter: @ColinNW1
Prick Tees
Read my review of ‘A Passion to Build’ and ‘A Quiet Catatrophe’ for 3AM Magazine “Sex, power and money – corrupting influences are at the heart of two books about city building and branding.” Image by Ian Britton: http://www.ianbritton.co.uk/
A sorry state
Read my article for CLES-New Start on the role of the state in reviving poor places “The current debate is stuck, sterile and simplistic. Do you want top-down regeneration or bottom-up regeneration? I don’t want either.”
My old house – one year on
Read my article for CLES-New Start on my old house – one year on “Derelict houses have been a familiar sight in my career. But that doesn’t soften the impact when the problem is brought home in a stingingly personal way.”
Children of the Jago
Read my review of The Child of the Jago for 3AM Magazine As Orwell put it in his essay on Charles Dickens, the heroes are saved, but the author “delights in describing scenes in which the “dregs” of the population behave with atrocious bestiality”
Fragile cities
The return of anti-urban development. Read my review of 2011 for the European Centre for the Creative Economy “Keeping the economy running is all that matters; but concrete makes a very poor engine fuel.”
Public Policy in the Community – review
Read my review of Prof. Marilyn Taylor’s revised Public Policy in the Community “If we want ‘community’ to be a meaningful agenda with radical potential, we have to engage with its difficulties and paradoxes. If we don’t, it becomes the Werther’s Original of the policy cupboard, something nice and sweet, but not very fulfilling.”
Social policy and social media
Read my article for CLES-New Start on how social media is shaping social policy “There will always be a need for specialist social policy journalists. And if we value them, we must find ways to pay for them. But the role they play in future will be different.” Image credit: Colin Bottomley Twitter: @ColinNW1
Regeneration in hard times
Download the presentation I gave to the Economic Development Resource Centre at the University of Greenwich More info from the event is available here: http://edrec.wordpress.com/ Keep an eye at the Centre’s important thinking on ‘economic insurgency’.
We need to talk about conflict
Read my article for CLES-New Start on the need to deal with community conflict As Saul Alinsky put it, ‘Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.’
When a Book is Not a Book
Read my review of Shaun Keaveney’s appalling ‘R2D2 Lives in Preston’ “Shaun Keaveny’s R2D2 lives in Preston is not a book. It has words and two covers, but so does a sick bag. R2D2 Lives in Preston is not a book.”
The end of regeneration
Read my article for CLES-New Start on why the end of regeneration is just the beginning “It was clear then that the assumptions and business models which had underpinned regeneration for decades no longer worked. They had been beached by post-crash financial realities, and lay in the sand ‘like old systems which await / The [...]