Placetique

Category: Built Environment

  • ‘Mapping the Space of Flows’: the geography of the London Mega-City Region

    I’m pleased to be able to post here the penultimate version of an article that Duncan Smith and I recently had accepted to Regional Studies. In this article we look at ways of combining ‘big data’ from a telecoms network with standard BRES employment data to generate a more nuanced understanding of where ‘work’ happens…

  • Problems of Scale

    So on Friday I went to hear my supervisor, Peter Hall, on a panel discussion with Hank Ditmar (of the Prince’s Foundation) and Will Alsop (famous architect/urban designer). The title for the discussion was “The Object, the City & the Region“, which didn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with the actual discussion…

  • Slow-Motion Mortgage Wreck

    Over at Naked Capitalism, there has been a lot of talk about the risk of default in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As someone without a mortgage or a home part of me is kind of enjoying the whole debacle since I rather foolishly half-believe that I can sit on the sidelines and watch this…

  • Visiting Bilbao

    The idea that a ‘starchitect’ could regenerate an entire city effectively began with the ‘Bilbao Effect’, and a host of other cities have jumped on this particular bandwagon. Apparently, you pretty much have to get Gehry, Calatrava, Foster, Rogers, or Liebeskind on board in order to be considered (by other mayors at least) a world…

  • Local Employment & Public Transit

    The Guardian reports that proposals for Britain’s new ‘eco-towns’ were found by a government panel to be ‘inadequate’. The two most oft-cited problems for the ones that weren’t “little more than a typical existing housing scheme” were local employment and transport.

  • Redevelopment of the West Village

    From an article by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair I was led to a web site opposed to the the redevelopment of St Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village section of Manhattan. Aside from the fact that Protect the Village is a really nice, simple site, it got me thinking about the redevelopment of dense…