June 04, 2005
Why museums matter
Let me give you an example. In the museum we have a pyxis that was once a container for the Eucharist and stored in a church treasury. Yet it was made under the Ummayad dynasty, the Muslim rulers of North Africa and Granada until the late 15th century. It is decorated with birds and various animals set against a lush pattern of arabesques--intricate patterns of interlaced lines. Although this is a typical Islamic motif, it traces its origins to the vine and acanthus scroll ornament of the late antique classical world, and the pattern itself refers back on the other hand to early Syrian textiles.
[Via Arthur's Seat]
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April 03, 2005
Government relaxes ban on new out of town supermarkets
Under pressure from the Treasury, John Prescott's Office of the Deputy Prime Minister announced that developers could get permission to build on greenfield sites if there is no suitable inner-city land available in particular areas.
Oh where have you gone John Gummer, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you...
This is just so stupid to be unbelievable, although given this government nothing really does surprise me. Out of town shopping centres kill existing retail developments, and make it harder for the poor and the less mobile to buy cheap food.
And one does wonder what on earth this has got to do with the Treasury... is the Treasury really the guiding hand behind all government policy, or just a convenient scapegoat?
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Stores have suppliers by 'short and curlies'
Despite this minor wee problem, the OFT seems to have decided that retailers were treating their suppliers fairly... rather than continuing their investigation 'till they've actually figured out what is going on in the supermarket business...
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March 29, 2005
Beyond suburban - Exurb growth challenges U.S. cities
CNN.com - Exurb growth challenges U.S. cities
Using satellite photos of nighttime lights to measure sprawl, he has concluded that his family, and a third of all Americans, are living in "exurbia" -- places just beyond the suburbs where the country looks like country again, beyond the limits of most studies of urban growth.
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theboxtank
theboxtank: a weblog focusing on big-box retailing.
[Similarly, check out the new urbanist...]
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January 21, 2005
How to lie with maps, aka read the legend carefully
The Guardian has an interesting section on ethnicity in London, including maps of the distribution of ethnic and religious groups.
Before you get too astonished by the patterns on the maps, you should look very closely at the legends and how the wards [?] have been grouped.
All of the maps use a 4 class chloropleth, probably chosen so each class has the same number of wards [reasonable]. What you get however, is marked swings in the size of the bands - if we look at the concentrations of Bangladeshis, we see the bottom band is 0 - 1% of ward population, while the top band is 10 - 58% of the population. Such large bands exaggerate the concentration of ethnic groups - the data for White British [at the bottom of the page] looks like a classic pattern of inner-city abandonment/white-flight, although even in the lightest shaded areas the population can be almost 50% white.
If all the maps had used the same classification pattern [and here it would have been better to do 0 - 20%, 20 - 40%, 40 - 60% and >60%, we would have seen rather different results.
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January 20, 2005
Big cities face mayoral referendums
Which is in and of itself sufficient reason to hold referendums[ae??] - local authorities in the UK have a rather bizarre yet utterly complacent belief in their divine right to rule.
After all, we do need to be developing the new generation of David Blunketts, don't we??
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January 13, 2005
"There's nothing so permanent as rust"
Or so sayeth the modern Shakespeare, Stuart Hall.
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November 15, 2004
Congestion fees are working, or not, maybe.
Congestion fees in London are reducing congestion, and radically reshaping how Londoners use both cars and public transport. This we know. The other effects of charging are, to put it mildly, less well understood and if we are honest they are also largely unexamined.
In particular, we know very little about how charging affects retailers. Charging does have some significant positives for retailers - in particular it is very good for their logistics systems. The negative impacts are, however, very poorly understood.
While retailers [particularly John Lewis] argue that the charge is behind a drop in sales, we know that consumption patterns in the UK are still rather fluid and that:
- mobile customers are still migrating away from inner city retailing to out of town shopping centres
- direct retail competition to central London is growing, particularly in other city centres [especially in Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow
- online shopping is still growing fast in the UK: this is money that isn't going directly into high-street stores
So, how much of the retail decline in central London is the fault of the congestion charge and how much attributable to wider patterns of retail restructuring...?
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November 12, 2004
Vow to fight Princes Street tanning salon
No Mr Anderson, it's not, and that's why they want to open there. Princes Street has been in decline for quite a while, a decade by my estimate.
Major retailers are either bailing out being priced out, or considering large-scale reconstruction. Even Mr Anderson recognises that much of the street is unusable .
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November 05, 2004
Transport guru in call for free shop parking
Which is of course completely useless for shoppers who park on the street...
Transport guru my ****. But then we are talking about the man who allowed cars to park in bicycle lanes, so we shouldn't be too surprised.
A better alternative would be to tax out of town parking. That would even things up a bit...
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October 29, 2004
New adventures in policing - the drunk tank
Would you believe that in Scotland, with its drink culture and culture of drink-related violence, there isn't a single drunk tank?? Not even in Glasgow???
If Eric Milligan ever went out on a weekend in Edinburgh he'd envisage several people being taken in every bloody hour...
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October 03, 2004
Recycling, or not.
There is no more typical British approach to a problem than this: thinking that we can be encouraged to recycle more by designing a new recycling logo.
The fact is that many of us, particularly in Scotland, have no home/kerb-side recycling facilities, which in the 21st century is quite the [under] achievement.
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October 02, 2004
Agency predicts 20% drop in house prices
Agency predicts 20% drop in house prices
It's called a speculative bubble folks... and it's popped.
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September 16, 2004
Headlines...
The latest in a long line of almost perfect newspaper front pages from the Daily Record...
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September 05, 2004
No, that's not it...
Mobiles kill off more phone boxes
No, this isn't really the story of the impact of mobile phones, it's the story of BT cutting costs and justifying it by blaming mobiles. Many people don't have telephones [which is why there was a need for phone boxes in the first place], don't have/can't afford mobiles, can't get a mobile reception, have dead batteries etc. and have a thousand and one reasons why they may still want to use phone boxes.
Saying that people can still use other phone boxes that are close by is a nonsense - it's pretty clear from this that BT isn't just thinning out its network, but completely pulling out of many rural areas. And even in a city, who besides BT knows where all the phone boxes in a neighbourhood are? Are they going to put maps up telling you how to get to the remaining phone boxes?
Now admittedly phone boxes are not free, and it does cost BT a small fortune in maintenance, as some boxes are repeatedly vandalised - the ones across the street from my old flat had their glass sides smashed in once a week, every week, for over a year - but that's a failure of the local police more than anything else.
The fact that BT is responsible for phone boxes is a bit of an anachronism, given that they used to be the monopoly phone provider - back then everyone indirectly contributed towards their upkeep just by using the phone network. Nowadays, with the deregulation of the phone system, that model doesn't work any more. Given that BT isn't allowed to subsidise the costs of phone boxes from its other revenues, OFTEL needs to step in to mandate a surcharge on all phones and providers to spread the cost of maintaining the service more widely. Otherwise we will end up with phone boxes/internet kiosks in the richer areas where the service is most profitable and nowt in the poorer ones.
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August 18, 2004
On bad buildings
BBC NEWS | X-list plan for 'vile' buildings
A good idea, which may be long overdue in some eyes but which may cause all sorts of disagreements... still, anything which gets people talking about space and place and buildings is probably a good thing. Surprisingly, and it is a surprise because it concerns Edinburgh City Council, there is a long-term discussion going on now which does aim to see large amounts of Princes Street knocked down to build something more appropriate...
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August 16, 2004
Defending the indefensible
Council Leaders defend a bigger Kinnaird
A massive expansion of the Fort Kinnaird shopping centre will be "in the best interests of the whole city"
Well, the expansion won't be massive, and it won't be in the best interests of the city as a whole, but it will certainly be in the best interests of the City of Edinburgh Council, who are desperate to get every penny in taxes out of retailers that they possibly can.
Another two fingers to the city centre retailers, but then the council doesn't seem to think much of them anyway, so that's no real surprise.
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August 12, 2004
Declining architecture...?
Marginal Revolution: Further thoughts on declining architecture
Yes, it is true that Europeans and Asians may place a higher premium on design than Americans, and this may be because we live in denser cities and individual buildings have a greater impact, and the mistakes of the 60s and 70s still weigh upon our consciousness. There is a link between density and the automobile, but it is a nuanced relationship and there are issues like house and plot sizes, and architectural/social styles that also have considerable impacts.
On the other hand, we also have many preserved historic areas, and this may function directly or indirectly to raise architectural standards - i.e. 1) how will a building look in its pseudo-preserved surroundings, and more often 2) you need to provide a good enough design to get permission to knock old buildings down, which seems to be one of London's favourite ways of planning.
I do find the whole fetishization of European construction bizarre, to put it mildly. The very best buildings are beautiful works of art, the average ones often poor, if not rubbish. There is a distinct lack of qualified tradesmen [a problem which I dare say is not limited to Europe], and the economics of the industry are profoundly skewed - a friend who is a carpenter doesn't build cabinets, he makes forms for poured concrete, as the pay's markedly higher. The Scottish Parliament has been built partly by Romanian carpenters, as they couldn't get enough of the local variety.
And at the end of the day we have to realise that since the emergence of the post-war modernist movement, there has been bugger all relationship between architecture and most construction.
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Recycling reaches all-time-high
BBC NEWS | Politics | Recycling reaches all-time-high
But not, of course, in Scotland, where we appear not to believe in such things.
<sarcasm>Perhaps the native thrift make such things unnecessary...?</sarcasm>
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August 11, 2004
The healthy city...
The Death of the Diner in New York City
Saw this on megnut last month...
Different people have different indicators of the health of a neighbourhood: some look at vacancy rates, others look for hardware stores. When community icons like these close, neighbourhoods change, permanently, and rarely for the better.
PS: "The healthy city" and an article on cheeseburgers. Whoops...
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More on buildings and place
City Comforts Blog: Not enough time this morning..
More on buildings and place, and the relationship between them, and how this relates to urban form. The difference between site and place [i.e. the role of a building's context and it's affect on its surroundings] should be a key practical [and theoretical] distinction between urban disciplines, particularly between architecture and geography. The fact that it is not is quite an indictment of the latter.
This article in Making Places is a pretty good summary of where I'm coming from.
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On the decline of urban architecture
Marginal Revolution: Has urban architecture declined?
Wandering around Edinburgh, Tyler ponders a perceived decline in semi/modern urban architecture. There are a couple of reasons for this he misses:
1. Postwar architecture developed free of the design constraints inherent within the pre-war planning system in the UK. The post-war need to rebuild meant that local authorities lost the ability to refuse planning permission for eyesores [etc.].
2. Postwar planners developed a love for eyesores, and a deep longing for the ability to redesign cities in a 'rational' way [particularly to suit the needs of the automobile...]. It will take at least another 50 years to fix these mistakes in the UK.
3. The regeneration of housing stock, particularly the very poor housing for much of the working class, was the impetus behind much post-war suburban design/development, rather than the continued development of upper/middle class suburbs.
Tyler is right to say that we do idealise times past - in urban terms not only do we idealise past times but we also often profoundly misunderstand them. The Royal Mile today is very much not a "historic" street, but a product [mainly] of the 1890s and the 1990s.
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/964722
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