China’s environmental transformation

“The environment” has long exercised the minds of the Chinese government. It was one of the first developing nations to introduce sustainable development on a national and regional policy level and it rewrote its Constitution way back in 1982 – five years before the Brundtland Report – pledging to “protect the environment”.

Blade Runner’s Retro Futures

by Dr. H J McCracken

We are now only two years from the dateline of the original Blade Runner. Ray Bradbury’s melancholic future of Martian settlement and abandonment, The Martian Chronicles, has since long passed, and along with it of course, 1984.

Book Review: After Europe by Ivan Krastev

Ivan Krastev is a respected, left-wing intellectual and professor at Sofia University. He has written several pithy books, mainly about democracy. His commentaries are insightful, with colourful details and images enlivening his academic prose.

Book Review: The New Philistines by Sohrab Ahmari

Ahmari packs his polemic with a pistol in his pocket, gunning for what he perceives as the art world’s ‘obsession with identity politics’ which he argues has come to dominate and disfigure our culture.

The middle-class home

Compared to the many stories recorded about the British aristocracy or the Dickensian working class in London, there is still very little known about the capital’s middle classes and their domestic lives.

Book Review: The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart

By Justine Brian | 03 June 2017 ‘The Road to Somewhere’ is a sometimes brilliant, but ultimately frustrating and flawed, attempt to understand contemporary Western politics, as seen through the apparent realignment in British society in the wake of the shock Brexit vote in 2016. Relying on a wealth of surveys and polls, Goodhart  argues we are seeing the creation, or perhaps clarification, of “two great subterranean value blocs of...

Book Review: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

by Martin Earnshaw | 02 April 2017 After the election of Donald Trump last year protesters chanted that he was “not my president”. Hyperbolic rhetoric is the prerogative of the protester but for years now it has seemed that the USA is not one but two countries. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind has been hugely influential in understanding this problem. Haidt sees the political differences between red states and blue states as...

Design Museum Design

by Sam Giles | 27 November 2016 Author to over 50 books, founder of Habitat, leader of the Shad Thames redevelopment, influential restauranteur and prolific designer, there is much to laud in Sir Terence Conran’s contributions to London’s dominant cultural scene. Since the founding of his Design Museum in 1989, perhaps the most admirable yet understated of his achievements, a concerted effort has lingered to establish an institute of...

A Chinese Utopia?

Review  by Pierre Shaw  [ Oct 2016] Shenzhen is the city of miraculous conception, born from nothing and yet emerging now as one of the planet’s most ferociously rapid urban developing city. From humble border town beginnings just 35 years ago, Shenzhen has thrown itself onto the world stage projecting its population from 300,000 to 12 – 15 million (no-one seems to know the exact figures). It is yet another step in China’s march...

Mad, bad and dangerous

The media reports that more than a quarter of architecture students in the UK have reported mental health issues. This reply points the finger at where the real lunacy lies. In May 2016, the National Union of Students (NUS) issued a report that concerns about debt are affecting the mental health of 36 per cent of students. A 2015 report by Universities UK titled “Student mental well-being in Higher Education” says that “every year one...