Kategorie: Original Blogs CliffHague.com
-
Levelling Up
What is ‘levelling up’, what are the barriers and how do you overcome them? On 15 July 2021, UK Prime Minister Johnson gave what was intended to be a major statement on ‘levelling up’ the country. It received a tepid reception, with a general consensus in the UK press that it was vague and repackaged past promises…
-
For inclusive planning confront exclusion
To make places inclusive, planners and placemakers need to understand exclusion. ‘Make cities and human settlements safe, inclusive, resilient and sustainable’. SDG 11 set a clear path forward for planners. Making planning an inclusive process is a central theme of the New Urban Agenda. The RTPI has called for an ‘inclusive recovery’ from the Covid pandemic, saying that this…
-
Participation?
How to have your say in the planning system. A scandal has broken out over a controversial decision by the English planning minister. As has been widely reported in the UK, the Minister, Robert Jenrick, overturned the recommendations of the independent Planning Inspector and awarded a consent for a £1billion 1,500-apartment, 44-storey development in London.…
-
The Square: the guilt and fragility of a comfortable urban life
The film The Square is about more than the excesses of contemporary art. It explores the conditions on which people are able to live in cities. In his film The Square, director Ruben Östlunddissects the contemporary urban condition. Certainly squares are geometrical shapes, and the geometrical motif is one of several images and sounds that carefully knit this film…
-
Kes Revisited – The welfare state and community in the late 1960s
Ken Loach’s film, Kes, was released in 1969. What does it tell us about lifen a coalfield community – then and now? Ken Loach’s film Kes will be familiar to many, since it was one of the most acclaimed British films of the 1960s and has continued to get airings ever since. It tells the…
-
Blow for Smart Cities as Toronto project is scrapped
The recent decision by Alphabet to scrap its ambitious waterfront regeneration project in Toronto is a landmark in the short history of smart cities. Sidewalk Labs‘ Toronto Waterfront project was a flagship for the Smart Cities movement. Early in May 2020 it was abandoned. The germination, contestation and demise of the scheme will be mulled…
-
Force Majeure movie review: Explosions in a landscape
The film Force Majeure focuses on the tensions within a marriage, but it also depicts the tensions between people and the natural environment. The original Swedish title of Ruben Östlund’s internationally acclaimed film Force Majeure is Turist, which is „Tourist“. The pivotal drama in the film is the moment early on when an avalanche of snow threatens to bury the winter…
-
Why the CV19 pandemic is a planning issue
The global pandemic raises some important questions about the links between public health and planning. With whole countries shut down and a soaring death toll, there are signs that it will not be long before a debate about the trade offs between health and economies becomes heated. At the moment, the professional body in the…
-
WUF10 – Disasters waiting to happen
This is my third daily blog from the 10th World Urban Forum. Today has not been a disaster! Far from it, there have been some really good stories to hear at the World Urban Forum. But I want to put the theme of disasters at the heart of this blog. In yesterday’s blog I mentioned the World…
-
The Divide between Government Action and Community Action
Can we break the glass ceiling dividing community action and government action? On the second day of the 2020 UN-Habitat World Urban Forum, I have sensed a divide between the actions of governments in the formal sphere and the scope for empowered communiies to make a difference on key issues such as adapting to the…