The Urban Islands Project – reviving places:
www.urbanislandsproject.net
The Urban Islands Project is part of an ongoing project SPACEPILOTS introduced in 2009 under the title of Unlocking the City, aiming to excite young people about their city, engage them with their environment, and to empower them to get involved in the actual shaping of places.
We are inviting [...]
December 15, 2009 – 10:17 am
The ‘sociology of public space’ is a research area still rather unknown and unexplored. Until recently, most social sciences conventional wisdom was that the public realm was inhabited and asocial (Simmel, 1903, Wirth, 1938). Their essential argument was always that public spaces of the city were densely filled with visual and sounds stimulus overload and [...]
October 6, 2009 – 11:55 pm
[REMEMBERANCE OF SMELLS PAST. A BBC World Service programme]
“How do smells impact on memories and emotions? Science is unraveling how a whiff of perfume or a newly mown lawn can offer us a free ticket back to our childhood.”
August 27, 2009 – 11:26 am
Living Landscapes Lecture Series*
Autumn 2009
Session 1 (5 October 2009): Public space and politics
Session 2 (2 November 2009): Art and agency: art and the creative city
Session 3 (7 December 2009): Alternative/subversive urban practices
Time: 18:30 – 20:30
Location: The Building Centre, Store Street, London, WC1E 7BT, (http://www.buildingcentre.co.uk)
Free admission
*Sponsored by the AIA UK and hosted [...]
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 [...]
[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.”
[...]
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 [...]