Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder
Peter Smith | 15 February 2007 Did you give flowers on Valentine’s Day? Planning to give Easter eggs next month? (Maybe eat them if not give them?) Be warned: celebrations and vacations are increasingly the environmental campaigner’s hook to lecture us on our bad habits. Noting that cut flowers for Valentine’s bouquets are increasingly imported to the UK, green campaigners have voiced concern over ‘flower miles’ applying the...
Building Esteem or Housing Discontent
Dave Clements | 27 February 2007 The government’s obsession with child poverty has always struck me as a little strange. I don’t mean to pretend it doesn’t exist. But why child poverty? Why not address poverty itself? Children are only poor because their parents are poor surely, not because they are poor parents. Perhaps by foregrounding the vulnerable child, awkward questions about how people can be so poor today in an otherwise more...
In the dark about energy policy
Alastair Donald | 14 January 2007 The Times recently carried news of an ‘innovative’ plan to save energy and beat global warming. Apparently trials in Exeter suggest that removing lights and illuminated signage, and dimming thousands of streetlamps throughout Devon will be a useful way to cut carbon emissions and beat global warming. The manner in which city lights are viewed has changed over time, and offers some interesting...
Environmental Impact Assessments: Guidance Documents
Alastair Donald | 10 January 2007 Future Cities Project respond to DCLG’s consultation paper proposals from two publications on the subject of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) This paper responds to two publications: (i) proposed amendments to existing Circular 2/99 on EIA, and (ii) new draft EIA procedural and good practice guidance to replace the current publication “EIA Guide to Procedures”. The main changes...
Rod Eddington’s unedifying proposals
Austin Williams | 16 December 2006 Rod Eddington’s transport study is the latest in the long line of Treasury-driven policy initiatives designed to counter the lack of political certainty in government circles. While ministers are noticeable by their absence in real transport debates, refusing to discuss any clear initiative for fear that it might turn around and bite them on the bumper, it is much easier to have a third party do it...
Technology and Obsolescence
‘Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America’ by Giles Slade; Harvard University Press, 2007. 336pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 30 November 2007 I wasn’t looking forward to this book. The title seemed to sum up two popular contemporary pastimes, a despondency about societal progress and a condescension towards American (over)consumption. With its dust-jacket displaying a mountain of discarded computer...
Ornaments of the Metropolis
‘Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern Urban Culture’ by Henrik Reeh; MIT Press, 2006. 264pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 28 November 2006 Siegfried Kracauer is less well-known in this country than his friend and fellow critical theorist, Walter Benjamin. Even though they both wrote on the subject of urbanism, Kracauer effectively moved on from a critique of architecture to specialise in the sociology...
Care Matters: Green Paper
Future Cities Project | 28 November 2006 Future Cities Project respond to ‘Care Matters: Transforming the Lives of Children and Young People in Care’, a Green paper from the Department for Education. While the Government expresses confidence that the proposals set out in this Green Paper will deliver a step change in the outcomes of children in care, for all the grandiose rhetoric the proposals are in fact rather modest....
Community Anchors
Dave Clements | 4 November 2006 In the latest issue of Interchanges, a newsletter produced by the Centre for Creative Communities, the strapline reads ‘Community? What Community?’ It notes the media’s obsession with the ongoing ‘fragmentation of society’, and New Labour’s worries over ‘community cohesion’, that also features strongly in the Local Government White Paper published last week. But it then descends into the...
Does Every Child really Matter?
Dave Clements | 30 October 2006 At his trial, Manning said that Kouao [his partner, the girl’s great aunt] would strike Victoria on a daily basis with a shoe, a coat hanger and a wooden cooking spoon and would strike her on her toes with a hammer. Victoria’s blood was found on Manning’s football boots. Manning admitted that at times he would hit Victoria with a bicycle chain. Chillingly, he said, ‘You could beat her and she wouldn’t...
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