Monthly Archives: July 2009

Hackney Wicked Art Festival

This weekend is the Hackney Wicked Festival. There are special exhibitions in different galleries, open studios and some other events and performances. You can have a look to the programme in http://www.hackneywicked.com/index.html

Suggested Reading: Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith with an afterword by David Harvey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
I’ve been working on Lefebvre’s theorisation of space off and on for about 8 years now, and in that time quite a bit has changed in terms of how The Production of Spaceis understood, or engaged with, in the [...]

Reading the urban public spaces of China

 

The last two decades debates on the future of public life and public spaces have been markedly western-oriented, negativist and raising often questions: does public space still matters for our public life?
To counter these views, I would like to offer a different and non-western perspective for the discussion. Here, I will talk about the case [...]

Sensing Cities

[SOUND ARCHITECTURE, A BBC World Service programme]

“Professor Trevor Cox, science broadcaster and acoustic engineer explores the idea of aural architecture – architecture for your ears.
Now, through new technology and a new way of thinking, acousticians and architects are working together to create spaces that both function better but also look good too.”

[...]

A Revaluation of Public Space in Toronto (1955-2005)

Paper presented at the 2009 Anglo-American Conference of Historians “Cities” in London.
You can download the full paper with images here.
INTRODUCTION
What we will look at in the next twenty minutes is a study of three iconic projects in Toronto that were all planned and built between the years 1955 and 2005: City Hall and Nathan Phillips [...]