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From Elizabeth Rosenthal in the New York Times:
While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation. More…
Kevin Ward is Professor of Human Geography and Director of cities@manchester at the University of Manchester. He is one of the featured plenary speakers at the Spaces and Flows: Second International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies, 17-18 November 2011 at the Monash University Prato Centre, Prato, Italy.
He is a geographical political economist with interests in urban politics and policy, on the one hand, and work and employment on the other. His current work explores urban policies to see where they come from, how they travel, where they end up and what these journeys means for the cities the policies pass through. Theoretically, this involves rethinking what is meant by ‘the urban’ in urban politics, as elements of different places are assembled and reassembled to constitute particular ‘urban’ political realms. More…
From Misha Lepetic at 3 Quarks Daily
Much as the 20th century taught us that central planning failed our nations, the 21st century will teach us that central planning will fail our cities.
It is commonly known that sometime in the last few years, we have passed the milestone, with half of the world’s population now residing in cities. Somewhat less known is the projection that 60% of all people will do so by 2030 – that is a rate of almost 180,000 persons moving into cities every day. This is a trend of such immensity that it is basically irreversible, and yet city governments (as well as their state-level counterparts) are ill-equipped to handle it from just about any point of view. Specifically, urban growth will mostly occur within the context of peripheral, unplanned environments, where physical, social and legal infrastructure is present in only the most arbitrary, self-organizing fashion. When coupled with the increasing frequency of extreme weather events that is the true consequence of climate change, the resilience of cities themselves is called into question. More…
The second issue of Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies has now been published.
Volume 1, Number 2 contains:
Continue reading ‘Spaces and Flows Journal, Volume 1, Number 2 published’
Julie MacLeavy is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol, UK. She will present a plenary presentation at the Spaces and Flows: Second International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies, 17-18 November 2011 at Monash University Prato Centre, Prato, Italy.
In her research she aims to develop a ‘cultural political economy’ reading of state intervention and its geographies. This requires the application of methods, ideas and concepts drawn from the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences to investigate issues of ‘traditional’ political-economic concern, including labour market regulation, welfare provision and urban renewal. Her early work concentrated on how narratives of social exclusion had been consistently employed to legitimate temporary labour market attachments as a recurrent objective in welfare policies and participation in urban regeneration schemes in the UK. More…
From Gulliver at The Economist…
LONG COMMUTES are terrible. But you already knew that. I had a long commute once, for less than a year. It was tolerable at first—I did a lot of sleeping on the train. But as veteran commuters know, a commuter train isn’t the best place to sleep—and unless you can sleep standing up, you had better make sure you get on first. Even the snoozing didn’t help me in the end—I eventually developed back problems from how I was sleeping. That put an end to that. Nowadays my commute to work is around 20 minutes—and zero if I work from home.
Why do I bring this up? Slate‘s Annie Lowrey had a great piece late last month rounding up the best research on the effects of commuting on human health and happiness. The article is pegged to Swedish researchers’ discovery that a commute longer than 45 minutes for just one partner in a marriage makes the couple 40% more likely to divorce. But Ms Lowrey ends up running through the whole litany of traditional commuter complaints—that it makes us fat, stresses us out, makes us feel lonely, and literally causes pain in the neck—and finds research to prove that the moaners are, more often than not, right. “People who say, ‘My commute is killing me!’ are not exaggerators,” she concludes: “They are realists.” So why do we do it? Here’s Ms Lowrey: More…
Recently published papers in Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies include: