URBLOG

Rebel Cities: The Urbanization of Class Struggle

David Harvey at LSE Thursday 10th May

Harvey explores the contemporary reality of cities as the arenas for revolutionary politics. To what extent can current movements be described as 'calss struggle'? How do these movements draw on 'right to the city' discourse in thier attempts to tranform societies as well as the streets?

See also

Hatherley on Harvey

 'For Harvey, the left must be modern and urban or it will remain powerless.'

Patrick Keiller commission opens at Tate Briatin

The Robinson Institute

Renowned artist and film-maker Patrick Keiller, has created an ambitious new project for the Tate Britain Commission 2012.

Patrick Keiller is one of Britain’s most critically acclaimed independent film-makers. Over the past 30 years he has developed a range of imaginative and highly original films which combine deadpan images of British landscape, rural and urban, with a witty narration which draws together wide-ranging literary anecdotes, historical episodes, current affairs, economic critique and offbeat humour.

The most notable examples of Keiller’s distinctive approach to film-making are the series of essay films that chart the progress of the fictional character Robinson, an elusive would-be scholar who wanders the English landscape, taking the viewer on unpredictable journeys.

Guardian review

Hatherley on Keiller:  How Patrick Keiller is mapping the 21st-century landscape

Riots report published

After the riots

The Riots Communities and Victims Panel’s final report was published on 28 March 2012. This sets out the final findings and recommendations for action to help prevent future riots.

The wide ranging issues and recommendations tackled in the Panel-s final report include:

• Families aren’t getting the support they need. The Panel supports the Government’s Troubled Families Programme, but found that the overlap with rioters is limited. Government and local public services should develop a strategy incorporating the principles of the Troubled Families Programme to help 500,000 ‘forgotten families’ turn their lives around.
• Communities told the Panel that young people need to build character to help them realise their potential and to prevent them making poor decisions, like rioting. Schools should assume responsibility for helping children build character.
• Children are leaving school unable to read and write – one fifth of school leavers have the literacy skills of an eleven year old, or younger. Where schools fail to teach children to read and write they should pay a financial penalty, used to help the pupil ‘catch up’.
• Communities and young people told the Panel that having a job is key to people feeling that they have a stake in society. Government and local public services should fund together a ‘Youth Job Promise’ scheme to get young people a job, when they have been unemployed for a year.

Lockdown London: Bread, Circuses and CCTV

Welcome to Fortress London

Stephen Graham describes howLondon 2012 will see the UK's biggest mobilisation of military and security forces since the second world war and the effects will linger long after the athletes have left.

'..large swaths of London and the UK are being thrown into ever deeper insecurity while being asked to pay for a massive security operation, of unprecedented scale, largely to protect wealthy and powerful people and corporations.'

'...the homeland and Olympic security boom is being fuelled by the widening adoption of the idea of "asymmetric" war as the key security idea among nation states, militaries and corporations. Here, rather than war with other states, the main challenge for states is deemed to be mobilising more or less permanently against vague non-state or civilian threats that lurk within their own cities and the infrastructures that connect them.'

'Looking at these various points together shows one thing: contemporary Olympics are society on steroids. They exaggerate wider trends. Far removed from their notional or founding ideals, these events dramatically embody changes in the wider world: fast-increasing inequality, growing corporate power, the rise of the homeland security complex, and the shift toward much more authoritarian styles of governance utterly obsessed by the global gaze and prestige of media spectacles.'

Architecture at its toughest

From New Statesman

Concrete poetry

Thirty years after the opening of the Barbican Centre in the city of London, Amanda Levete celebrates a much maligned brutalist masterpiece that has become fashionable once more.

'This is architecture at its toughest and it commands respect. The serrated tower profiles are beautifully articulated, the jagged water stains on the curved concrete balconies only enhancing the form. Podium flats look on to a lush landscape and water, some on piloti striding across the lake.'

'The Barbican is a microcosm of the changing political and aesthetic mores of the past 60 years. The flats were designed during the heady years of the postwar social-democratic experiment and a significant number of them were designated for subsidised housing. The corporation would be the landlord and residents would be tenants.'

'Today, the City is synonymous with discredited financial institutions. Perhaps it is time for their denizens to act with a sense of civic responsibility and to imagine a new model for financing and managing social housing. They could start by learning from the Barbican.'

 

 

 

Violence and disorder: the heart of the far-right

From voting to violence? Far right extremism in Britain by   Matthew Goodwin and  Jocelyn Evans.

This groundbreaking study looks into who supports the far right in Britain, and why, and their attitudes towards violence and disorder.

See alos

Ukip shares more with the far right than it admits

Far right hardcore 'willing to prepare for armed conflict'

Hope not Hate launch magazine

Congratulations to the Hope not Hate Team on their new publication. Thjis will become essential reading for those concerned with the rise of racism and the far-right.

"The  HOPE not hate magazine contains exposes and investigations of hate groups with more positive stories about how communities are coming together. In our first issue we reveal the secret rich backers of the BNP - many of whom choose not to be party members precisely because they want their identities to remain hidden."

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Welcome to Tooting

A new chapter for URBLOG, a new location and hopefully some new perspectives and challenges. Westminster to Tooting is only 6 miles but a desk in Church House is very different to a parish beat. Thanks to Transpontine for the good wishes and situation analysis which I hope can be lived up to. A determined effort in the coming months to provide a regular mix of theology, comment, links, urbanism, cycling and more.   Here goes with three things that have caught my eye. AD

Estate Churches Report from Birmingham

Strengthening Estates Ministry is a report of a consultaion and a significant resource for work in estate communities. Drawing on the experience of clergy, community workers and residents of estates in the West Midlands the report reasserts a determination to live and encounter the missio dei within marginal communities and a refusal to model local church life according to the norms of an increasingly suburban church.

What kind of life? Archbishop on riots report

Rioting is the choice of young people with nothing to lose

The Archbishop of Canterbury writes in response to the Guardian's Reading the Riots report.

“England risks a repeat” of the summer riots “unless the government and civil society do more to ‘rescue those who think they have nothing to lose’”.

'To ask if the riots were "political" or "opportunistic" is pointless. These are not people who live complacently in a culture of entitlement, nor are they, for the most part, committed criminals. Neither are they heroes of democratic protest, Britain's answer to Tahrir Square. They are people who have vague but strong longings for something like secure employment, and no idea where to look for it; who on the whole want to belong, and live in a climate where they are taken seriously as workers, as citizens – and as needy individuals; and who have got used to being pushed to the margins and told that they are dispensable.'

'How do we as a society back up good lessons in the home and show that we corporately want what a good family wants – mutual attention and affirmation, stability and emotional literacy, a sense of value that doesn't depend on accessories?'

'Demonising volatile and destructive young people doesn't help; criminalising them wholesale reinforces a lot of what produces the problem in the first place.'