The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream of cause and effect relations. This compromise would eventually jeopardise their subjectivity and the ability to critically consider reality. Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances.

Habermas’s collaborative action theory takes communication as its main object of analysis following the author’s sustained interest in the public sphere as a dimension where democracy can happen through participation. The public sphere is fundamentally a linguistic construction, created and maintained by language. The study of communication is therefore crucial to the theory in order to recognise the obstacles and the constraints that prevent individuals from participating and contributing their ideas to the debate. The theory is based on two elementary concepts. The lifeworld is the ever-changing network of connections established between individuals, which can have a communicative or normative nature. The lifeworld is continuously colonised by abstract systems. These can be described as pre-emptive networks, structures that are constructed with the purpose of staying fix, of providing some frame to the human interaction, like the economic order with the market place or the political or administrative order with the bureaucracy. They are based on instrumental rationality, and are superimposed to the lifeworld to constrain its ever-changing nature.

The core of Habermas’s theory contribution to the debate on good practice in planning is in the distinction between lifeworld and system, between planning imposed because of functional rationality and planning that emerges from and through communicative rationality. To instrumental rationality, Habermas opposes communicative rationality. From this point of view, among the many sources from which the German social theorist borrowed, Sigmund Freud is an important one. Rather than in his formulations and terminology, Habermas is simply, selectively interested in psychoanalysis as a method based on language. Conversation is used in psychoanalysis both as a method to reveal and heal disorders. Psychoanalysis, if successful, provides the patient simultaneously with emancipation and rational understanding of their issues. Similarly, Habermas with his theory wanted to provide an intriguing tool to both explain the relation between language and repression and solve it. Unbalances of power affect social structures, which in turn affect individuals. For Habermas, language is both a way to reveal and to heal them, i.e. to change the understanding of the world and to augment control of the subjects on their reality.

Reality is formed through interaction between actors and actants, a collective process that combines objective and subjective knowledge: as Judith Innes put it, ‘Information that influences is information that is socially constructed in the community where it is used.’ Another important element of the theory from this point of view is the idea that ‘social illness’ emerges from the fragmentation of symbolic contents. Again, language allows for the re-symbolisation of isolated symbolic contents, by conveying them into the public sphere. Communicative action brings people together, because it allows to rescue isolated pieces of content (a spatial distortion) through acquisition into the public domain. Issues emerge and are understood by verbalisation: this is the hermeneutic value of communication. This part of the theory was particularly important in the formulation of the practice of placemaking in urban planning and design, i.e. the process of finding a rationale to new elements of the built environment by associating them to former desires, symbols and narratives of an existing or imagined community.

Also the built environment has a twofold nature and is both a text and a medium of communication. Its basic blocks are units of information and its structure is a syntax that connects them. Communication is constantly required because of the collective dimension of the human effort to colonise and inhabit the environment. Cities and neighbourhoods come into being at the point where all forces involved reach a balance, and the planner’s aspiration is to transcribe and inscribe these processes into the built environment.

Since the nineteen-sixties, planners and urban designers have created innovative, participative approaches and methodologies to encourage stakeholders to take part to the planning process and let communities emerge through consensus-building. The Team 10 left the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) as early as in 1953 in disagreement with the then hegemonic model of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. The architect and planner Giancarlo De Carlo founded the  International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) in 1976 to make extensive use of methods as public consultation and open debates in most of his projects. Today the charrette methodology is particularly popular in land use and urban planning. It consists in short, intense periods of consultation and design, to which all stakeholders are invited. Communicative rationality is a crucial element to these approaches and Habermas is often quoted by planners and scholars who report and comment on similar projects. However, what Habermas’s theory should suggest to planners who adopt these approaches is not only to set aside emotion and ownership of ideas, and most importantly to avoid consensus thinking.

‘Open form’ is a term sometimes used for flexible or polyvalent forms of creative expression, where the arrangement of the parts or sections is indeterminate or left up to interpretation. Some open artworks can appear structurally incomplete, either because meant to be representing an unfinished activity or because hinting at spaces and concepts outside their own limits. Similarly, planners who want to act as facilitators and allow for the participation of all stakeholders must include in their work aleatory, extemporary elements. It is this very openness that creates opportunity and means of critical reflection through language and premises truly collective action on the basis of the validity of propositions and lines of argument rather than established power relations.

Of course, as long as planners are involved in the process, truly open planning remains an imagined ideal, because the very opportunity and means for stakeholder participation must be designed or designated and is subsequently implicitly limited and possibly susceptible to external influences. Nevertheless, at least from a conceptual point of view, stakeholder participation allows planners to soften the boundary between the output of the planning process and its context, subsequently creating a linguistically more homogeneous system.

The charrette methodology has been in recent years very often used by proponents of ‘New Urbanism’, an alternative to traditional low-density urban sprawl. Sophie Bond and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett in 2007 wrote a detailed examination of a charrette process in a small town in New Zealand and noted how the use to a single type of participatory tool can represent a constraint in itself. Another limit to participation is the fact that professional designers and planners openly and inevitably pursue a New Urbanism agenda, despite the fact that they present themselves as facilitators. Charrettes and similar processes are hardly truly neutral and inclusive and in the worst case scenario they can easily be ‘hijacked’ used by authorities or interest groups simply to provide an aura of legitimation for their agenda. Moreover, local administration or private sector actors can dilute the power of participatory planning by creating ‘artificial’ or ‘redundant’ stakeholders in the form of partnerships or local groups. Tore Sager, on the other hand, in 2005 pointed out that the role of dialogue in communicative planning does not necessary ensure the best outcome, because ‘results are generated not only by amalgamation of preferences but also by the amalgamation of argument’. When different externalities or incomparable preferences are involved, dialogue does not easily result in a balance of all interests through communicative rationality and in accordance with democratic criteria: ‘Usually, only some of the pro-and-con arguments about a plan refer to impacts measured on comparable scales, like a monetary scale’.

The model of the planning process based on the communicative action theory, with its emphasis on components of discourse and deliberation within a group, does not take into account how individual actions are affected by rules, community and the physical environment. From this point of view, planners interested in creating theoretical models to explain and present findings, should integrate elements of theories that deal with the social construction of knowledge and the Actor-Network Theory, which largely focuses on the interaction between human and non-human actors. However, a major contribution of communicative action theory has certainly been to stimulate debate about the nature of the planning profession, giving practitioners the opportunity to think of themselves as facilitators. Alternatively, planners can reclaim their role in researching and interpreting what solution grants the most positive externalities, by identifying with the user and defining what would be desirable, usable and useful. Also this approach adjusts the top-down strategy introduced by modernist planning and brings the user to the negotiation table from which the built environment emerges. As a task it includes addressing a range of desires, physical and emotional issues that go beyond the simple functional needs summarised by the notion of instrumental rationality. Such an approach requires a great effort of identification with the user/citizen, an effort perfectly symbolised by the image of the planner exploring the territory in person rather than analysing it through maps and models.

A lot has been already said about the slums of Mumbai and their role within the city’s memory and identity. Dharavi, which is supposedly the largest of Mumbai’s slums, figures very prominently in most of these discourses. Dharavi has developed and expanded over the last few decades largely due to its central location within an otherwise very dense and expensive city, making it the preferred locus for migrant workers who relocate from all over the country to Mumbai, who either come to Dharavi and later move out of it, or alternatively live there permanently. Dharavi is thus defined by this constant state of displacement and flux, in the number of people, their living and working conditions and in its continuously altering edges with the city.

Within this organic and fluid urban condition, any attempts at mapping and documentation seems static and inert against an intrinsic transience. This has been evident since the announcement of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project by the State Government, which has led to an urgent demand for surveys, maps, recorded statistics and future projections, that are constantly being verified, revised and updated, making architecture’s engagement in Dharavi seem more like a tryst with numbers and their accuracy, operating outside of a larger design narrative.

Times of India, Mumbai Friday June 12th 2009

My interests in Dharavi are multilayered, but at this point I have been largely focussed on one particular predicament; any kind of intervention into its many complex and heterogeneous realities leads to an eventual confrontation with what I refer to as its ‘temporariness’. In reaction, the collection and organisation of information generates a grid of datums and constants that offer a fixity or permanence, connecting the disparities and more importantly, ultimately controlling the resultant responses.

For example, when faced with the enormous challenge of counting the exact number of households in Dharavi, the government had to deal with the problem of trying to figure out who exactly qualifies as a ‘permanent’ citizen of Dharavi, permanent enough to warrant a newly reallocated flats in the redevelopment. To resolve this issue, the year 1995 was considered as the datum point; wherein if you lived in Dharavi anytime before the year 1995 you are considered a bonafide resident of Dharavi. 1995 since has became a much debated datum, that in its arbitrariness has become an issue of dispute. Similarly, the size of the reallocated flat was decided to be an area of 300 sqft, a number that stems from area codes set up by the Slum Redevelopment Authority of Mumbai. 300 sqft is the size of every new flat irrespective of existing occupied areas, which has again been disputed given the organic nature of the current live-work areas.

These are but two examples, but hopefully they make the point. My interest in these abstract numbers and the ‘expert systems’ i.e organisations that control these numbers and their dissemination, comes as much from their ability to offer a finality within an otherwise constantly mutating situation, but also from their enormous ability to define the future directions for Dharavi, wherein the design narrative is essentially governed and constrained by these numbers and what they imply. The numbers are collated often with the use of self created normative standards, to then themselves become the normative in the future.

To come back to the original question, how does architecture begin to approach conditions of extreme organicity and informality?  Maps and statistics as tools are unavoidable, but how do you deal with a situations like Dharavi where one needs to reflect the organicism and ‘temporariness’ of a place without falling into the constant trap of data, their verification and amendment?

I understand these questions as just one aspect within the incredible complexity of working in Dharavi, but nevertheless significant.

Contributor’s bio: Deepa is an architect from Mumbai, currently based in Chicago. She recently completed her MA in Histories and Theories from the Architectural Association in London. Her current interests stem from examining architecture’s modes of production and representation, especially when they are determined by processes that organize and classify statistics to shape the perception and comprehension of the city. Deepa has a Masters in Architecture from the US and a Bachelors in Architecture from India.

The separation barrier sneaking by Abu Dis from the al-Quds University campus, on 8 December 2010. These Palestinian landscapes are naturally very contrasted and defined, and with their sparse vegetation they often resemble the backdrops of some Italian early Renaissance paintings.

The wall in its context is a text-book example of low entropy structure. Like an ice-cube, its structure is really orderly, but it requires a great deal of work to bring it into that state and its entropy is naturally ever increasing. Low entropy means highly organised but also highly dishomogeneous. An ice-cube at room temperature will inevitably melt and the state of matter and the temperature eventually reach a balance. Balance is homogeneous temperature and texture. This process can only be delayed by continually applying work, which in the case of the ice-cube means keeping the fridge switched on, and in the case of the wall spending energies and human lives to keep the separation neat and strict.

The university campus was barely saved when in 2003 the wall was threatening to cut right through it. The barrier in this picture hardly seems capable to withhold the urban buildup above it. The houses populate the slopes of the hills, and as they thrive and proliferate they seem on the point of overwhelming the concrete fence underneath like a wave.

Al Bayyadah is a town in Cyrenaica that was founded in 1938 and originally called D’Annunzio, after the famous Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. These agricultural settlements were built around an architectural core formed by a church, an administrative building, and a section of the Fascist party, which functioned as space for events and public gatherings: “God, Fatherland and Family”. The image is taken from a publication called “The Twenty Thousand. Photographic Documentary of the First Mass Colonial Migration in the frame of the Intensive Demographic Colonisation Plan”: I Ventimila. Documentario fotografico della 1. Migrazione in massa di coloni in Libia per il piano di colonizzazione demografica intensiva (Tripoli: Maggi, 1938).

Art historian Elisabetta Longari on Domus decries the damage that the Italian colonial architecture in Libya suffered through the Allied bombings in the Second World War and the erratic post-colonialist fury of the dictator. I had once the chance of viewing the videos Lorenzo Pezzani shot during the first stages of his research in the after-lives of colonial buildings in Libya. It is surprising how much has been left behind, most interestingly the colonial settlements, which in their structure are surprisingly similar to the West Bank settlements of today. It is true, as Longari says, that what is still standing survived “simply because there was no will to destroy it”. She adds that true conservation of the built heritage also means “renovate, reinterpretate, rehabilitate” and calls on the Italian government and other Italian institutions to intervene to save this wealth of heritage. This is a delicate task, not only because of the risk to reiterate colonial attitudes to space, but especially because to this day an atlas of the afterlives of this as other colonial architecture is still lacking.

Alessandro Petti of Decolonizing Architecture proposed that three general approaches can be discerned in dealing with evacuated colonial architecture: destruction, re-occupation, and subversion. Destruction is often based on the desire to turn time backwards, reverse development into virgin nature, or into a tabula rasa on which all potential forms of development and land use would be possible. This is a very appealing approach, particularly given the abhorrence aroused by colonial development, although demolitions or even the forced ruralization of built-up areas may sometimes create further planning problems or environmental damage. Another strong temptation present throughout the histories of decolonization was re-occupation of colonial buildings and infrastructure and reuse them in the very same way they were used under colonial regimes. Such repossessions tended to reproduce some of the colonial power relations in space: colonial villas were inhabited by new financial elites and palaces by political ones, while the evacuated military and police installations of colonial armies, as well as their prisons, were often used by the governments that replaced them, recreating similar spatial hierarchies. Subversion, finally, aims at profanation of structures that are both symbol and instruments of spacial control, in order to restore the common use of spaces. The first stage when looking at colonial architecture in Libya should be investigating how and whether these strategies have been used and – in perspective – how they could be used on buildings and urban centres on which intervention is still possible.

The word I like in Longari’s article is “reinterpretation”. In fact, we also have to reckon with the fact that no building should be allowed the privilege to last forever. In a way, sometimes the energy spent in harnessing the space must be released to be vital again – and this is a form of reinterpretation. Sometimes monuments that crumble down are not “lost”, but “regained”.

The right the local population indeed has to be granted now is exactly the right to reinterpretate. These attacks launched today with the Odissey Dawn operation will surely claim more lives, may they be Libyans or mercenaries. The Europeans could not afford losing access to Libya’s oil, the Arab League is happy to do away with the Libyan dictator’s antics and the international public opinion could not take the news of the brave rebels being crushed any longer. A tricky alliance of intentions, most certainly. We cannot anticipate where this will lead, but in the short term anything seemed better than just seeing mercenaries slaughtering freedom fighters. In the medium term all depends on the right leadership emerging from the rebels, a leadership that is able to twist this mismatched alliance of intentions and reinterpretate it toward the best outcome for the Libyan people.

Have just greatly enjoyed Owen Hatherley (2010) A guide to the new ruins of Great Britain, London: Verso. It’s a rollicking tour of the cities of England + Cardiff + Glasgow, evaluating and describing what’s been done to them in modern times. Sometimes gleeful, more often rueful or rude. The underlying analysis is a solid leftist and modernist one, but it’s very tacit which I quite enjoy.We don’t get theoretical or synthetic chapters and this remains a collection of magazine articles commissioned by BD; it doesn’t really work as a book. The editors at Verso were either lazy or defeated. Still it’s great to have. On Milton Keynes (p91)

The 1982 station square designed by the architects of Milton Keynes Development Corporation (Stuart Mosscrop, Derek Walker and Chris Woodward) is one of the most remarkable Modernist set pieces in Britain, a bracing landscaped plaza flanked by three perfectly detailed Miesian blocks…

Then on Nottingham University’s Jubilee Campus designed by Make (p71)

In its combination of jollity, bathos, vacancy and authoritarianism, it sums up the Blairite era in three dimensions.

I’ll add some more gems as I come to them.
But I should post a warning: this book is ruined by the apallingly poor presswork (by Scandbook AB in Sweden) in which the many photographs all appear in a narrow range of greys. It’s the kind of production which got offset litho a bad reputation when I was 20. It doesn’t have to be like that as most architectural/design publishers know (and the Hyphen Press is specially good). But if this is the best Verso can manage then I should take your illustrated book elsewhere when you write it.

LATER (28 Feb) I just went to talk he gave at UCL. It was a great shock because I had expected another jaded old leftist like myself (60-70) but he turned out to be young, maybe 30. (Allan Cochrane said to me afterwards, when I told him, that I should have guessed his age from the way he wrote about Manchester music in the book. I just don’t know about Manchester music… )

Apart from that, all was well. He did quite a good talk, and it was great to see the pictures in legible quality (and in colour). His analysis is a bit flaky (not very carefully theorised) just like in the book, but basically sound and strong and refreshing. We could do with a lot more such writers.

In one respect I thought the talk less good than the book: he couldn’t resist a lot of references (mostly negative) to stars while a virtue of the book is its appreciation of good non-star architects where he finds their work. He’s a bit obsessed with architects, actually. But at least he does examine their work in the context of the funding streams, development companies, political regimes and so on which generated them.

It’s better than most of the John Punter collection on the Urban Renaissance where there is precious little good stuff, despite all John’s efforts.

House prices in Los Angeles

It is widely accepted that inflow of capital into financial sector and built-environment sector has contributed to alleviate the problem of accumulation of capital from the tendency of falling rate of profit. It is also pointed out that this adaptation of capitalism does not resolve the problem but delays and even aggravates it.(Harvey, 1984) It is undeniable that current global crisis of capitalism is to do with overflow of capital into these sectors. Compared with various researches on the adaptation of capital in financial sector, there are few in built-environment sector. The reason is partly due to a lack of arenas for debates based on commonly agreed theories on land rent. Although Marxian land rent theory provides a decent place for debates, it has constraints to be developed further as the theory is mainly based on the agricultural context. Although some researchers have contributed to develop the theory for urban context (Walker, 1974; Ball, 1977; Evans, 1999), it still needs to be synthetically reviewed.

The purpose of this paper is to review Marxian land rent theory for an urban context, especially for the urban residential sector, and to make a basis for following research on how capital resolves its crisis of accumulation in the built-environment sector and how the crisis becomes aggravated. Firstly, it reviews four categories of Marxian rent and examines whether they are relevant in the urban context, especially in the residential sector. Secondly, it investigates interrelationships between categories of rent in the residential housing market.

You can see my full paper by following this link:

http://www.iippe.org/wiki/images/d/d4/CONF_VALUE_PARK.pdf

One of the things that they illustrate (as shown above) is the percentage of ethnic minority and women speaking in a selected sample of ‘recent’ (2008) conferences and festivals on the topic of cities.
In their short and graphical analysis they highlight that ‘theories and policies that shape our cities are created, delivered and measured by a limited and self referential group of people’ (1).
It is interesting to notice that in all the selected events (with the exception of the ‘TINAG festival’) the participation of women or minorities group speakers is not more than a quarter of the whole of the speakers (and more than once stays below 5%), particularly if we realize that 51% of London’s population are women (2005 data) and almost 30% are from non-white ethnic groups (2004 data) (2).
Together with what has been happening in the physical planning of cities, it seems that also when discussing cities problems ‘public participation’ has become a common term. A term that in the majority of cases is no more than a vague figure of speech…
Although some graphics and captions are more into aesthetics than into real quantitative understanding, I found this an interesting way of illustrating the degree of democracy existing in current discussions of our cities (and particularly in such a diverse place as London). Maybe it is possible to make a direct comparison with the degree of democracy in physical urban planning…that I find mostly ‘insufficient’ and ‘dominated’ by a few.
Consequently, not only events ‘like these’ are needed (1), and ‘there is no doubt the “urban conference circuit” needs to be turned upside down’ (1), but more importantly (in my opinion) ‘statistical’ representations like these should be promoted, so that we know from where we are speaking when looking for more democratic and diverse alternatives for the whole planning system.

References:
(1) http://thisisnotagateway.squarespace.com/storage/2008%20Statistics%20TINAG.pdf
(2) http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_compendia/fol2007/Focus_on_London_2007.pdf

Spiralling into Modernism

In the book Participation, Claire Bishop underlines three common aspects of participatory art: the desire to create an active/thinking subject who will be able to formulate their own social/political position from the experience of the work; asserting a socially oriented and egalitarian position for themselves by ceding part of their authorship to participants; and the restoration of a social bond in a community through the collaborative elaboration of meaning.

On a recent visit to Barking I saw “Through the planned cities fire will rage“, an exhibition of participatory art between Laura Oldfield Ford and a group of years 10 and 11 students from local schools. Given that my own research touches on the social interactions that constitute the regeneration project in the particular context of the Barking Town Centre I was interested to see how the principles outlined above applied in this specific case. Here the collaboration happens during the development process, with some of the projects (like Barking Town Square) already completed and others (like most of Barking Riverside) still under development, which gives this type of event a vital importance.

The imagination of the students is fantastic and some of the pieces offer genuine moments of reflection. For example a map of the borough with clearly marked unhappiness right of the centre and the great unknown of Dagenham further east: the recognized political divide of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Another group of drawings questioning the value of change and its ‘façades’ in the town centre. There are also moments of levity: is Barking spiralling into Modernism or is it not? The darkly metaphorical Happy Birthday! comic strip. And moments of downright, well… see drawing of plane flying into One Canada Square below. Certainly, the collaboration has succeeded in engaging students with urban issues by which they are directly affected and that must be commended. The participants are indeed given a better position to formulate their own critique of their local socio-economic and political situation. The whole of the work is clearly and thankfully representative of the ‘fire’ of adolescence. (On a marginally and I’ve-listened-to-it-recently related note, let me plug Robert Harrison’s podcast on Pink Floyd.)

The following quotation is taken from the Council’s website:

Ford’s own work uses the strategy of psychogeography to coax out the hidden narratives in the city and formulate a critique of urbanism. In the case of Barking and Dagenham it is the issue of housing that forms the crux of contention. For this new work she imagines militant groups emerging and the planned uses of the new regeneration schemes radically subverted. Her work references the Blitz, 1973, 1981 and points in the future to set out alternative possibilities.

I want to pick up four elements from this description, because although the work of the students is in many ways engaging, I think the handling of the issues at hand and principles of participation need some criticism. What first struck me is how much of the artist’s own aesthetics seem to come through the students’ work. It appears evident from the artist’s own work that there is a tendency to draw on dichotomies, be it planned/unplanned or construction/destruction. This strong dialectic aspect appears to come through quite clearly in the students’ work. The arrangement is fragmented, relies heavily on contrasts (in both form and content) and is primarily oppositional. This leads to a second point: I question whether the students are exploring their own experiential perception of their city through the loose (and highly subjective) framework of psychogeography or rather through the lens of the organiser’s oppositional stance on planning and private development. This again is not to say that the work itself is without merit, but that the premises posited by the artist are not entirely congruent with the result. And certainly not all the pieces are representative of this point. But these first two points should be weighed against the ‘desire to create a thinking/acting subject’.  ‘Through the planned cities fire will rage’ recalls a critique of Modernist town planning from the mid-twentieth century rather than an accurate critique of contemporary practices. Some images featuring One Canada Square, for example, raise the question of whether the intention is not off the mark. Being explicitly critical of private development and branded commercial hegemonies is excellent, but it becomes a tricky line to follow when urban planning is brought in under the same critique. The absence of government planning often goes, as was evidenced in the late 1980s at Canary Wharf, hand in hand with the market’s desire for deregulation. The last point touches on the ‘alternative possibilities’ that are explored in the work. Because the premises of the critique draw on moments of tension and crisis the ‘collaborative elaboration of meaning’ has a hard time escaping wholesale rejection to look more at positive transformation. Could the ‘radical subversion’ of the built environment be gentle?

Home?

No spirit

Change is overrated

Happy birthday!

Future!!

I love this city

The Bartlett Planning informal talks on places and cultures are back with ‘Galicia: (re)presenting a Spanish regional space’, by Diego García Mejuto, research student at the Bartlett School of Planning.

• When: Wednesday 20^th January at 4:30pm
• Where: Room 5.17b, Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0QB

All welcome

Contact information: Amparo Tarazona Vento, a.vento@ucl.ac.uk

This month a new initiative was launched at the Bartlett School of Planning. The ‘Lonely Planner’ series consist of informal talks given by Bartlett Planning PhD students on places they are very familiar with, followed by questions and discussion. The aim of these talks is to learn and discuss about certain places through the speakers’ first-hand knowledge of them. Both their content and format are open to the presenter, who in terms of the former may focus not only on the places themselves, but also on spatial practices and planning policies related to them. Concerning their format, the talks may include descriptions, narratives, stories, etc. using those materials considered adequate, such as texts, poems, images or videos.

The first talk was given on 3^rdDecember by research student Kiavash Soltani, on the ‘Cities of Iran’. Following a thread defined by the classification of the 5 selected cities according to their main features (the Environmentally sustainable city, the Religious city, the Cultural city and the Modern city), he provided an informative insight into the characteristics, spatial practices and planning issues of Iran’s urban areas. In short, we were delighted with a polyhedral view of Iranian cities that included Iranian traditional music, ingenious solutions for cooling dwellings and their (mis)interpretation in contemporary architecture, major ancient urban developments to improve the image of the city, Western influences on planning, and spaces for social interaction such as public baths, sport venues or even cars, as Kiarostami brilliantly depicted in his film ‘Ten’.

The next Lonely Planner talk will take place in January, on the Spanish region of Galicia. We look forward to seeing you there.