Taking a Risk
Austin Williams | 8 September 2005 On the very day that the Architects’ Journal was holding its conference on changes in Health and Safety legislation, focussing on how to manage risk, so the House of Lords was hosting a conference focussing on worries that risk culture had gone too far. So at the same time that I was getting a short shrift from Stephen Wright of the Health and Safety Executive for questioning what I called the...
Sustainability and the moral right
Austin Williams | 12 May 2005 ‘The problem is that people like you think that they can deny the reality of events: like David Irving, you are denying the problem.’ Now I’m used to being insulted, but it still amazes me how many people that I have never met before, feel as if they have the right to insult me simply because they are unable to come to terms with the fact that I have a contrary position to them. However,...
ESSAY: False Urban Memory Syndrome
Austin Williams | 13 May 2004 The urban memory debate is one in which aspects of the city (town, or village) – hidden quarters, alleys or buried artefacts – are revived into the modern setting to provide an added dimension to people’s appreciation of the built environment. Not only that but abstractions such as memories, historical events or folklore from a previous generation are captured, reinterpreted and given a...
The Anxious City
‘The Anxious City: British Urbanism in the late 20th Century’ by Richard J Williams; Routledge, 2004. 281pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 28 April 2005 This is a very well researched, incredibly detailed and thoroughly insightful critique of the apprehensive period in which we live represented in a critique of a number of British cities. Through a series of case studies of cities across the UK, Richard J Williams, lecturer...
The Academics of the Madhouse
Austin Williams | 31 March 2005 Revised criteria for university research funding are causing much protest. But is the solution being argued for any better? The ‘strictly private and confidential’ memo sent to Daily Telegraph staff in February outlined five criteria on which their performance and hence their status in the compulsory redundancy hierarchy would be judged. The five categories were: 1. Approach to work (their...
Dark Age Ahead
‘Dark Age Ahead’ by Jane Jacobs; Random House, 2004. pp241 Reviewed by Austin Williams | 13 January 2005 Aged 88 when this book was published, Jane Jacobs is certainly the grande dame of urbanism and it must be worrying for this book to be described on the dust jacket as ‘the crowning achievement’ of her career. While its title sounds like yet another millenarian offering – in the spirit of Sir Martin Rees’ ‘Our Final...
Commuting: The Life Sentence
Austin Williams| 8 June 2004 The one aspect of the daily grind that is guaranteed to provoke an opinion is the commute to work. Congested roads, overcrowded trains, packed buses and sweaty tubes – it’s been said that if travel broadens the mind, commuting shrinks it back. Few would contest that the transport infrastructure is in a sorry state. But if the commuting experience is really so bad why do so many of us continue to do it? ...
Real Development
Austin Williams | 17 March 2004 When Sebastian Tombs, Chief Executive of the RIAS recently announced that “sustainability has been recognised formally by the RIAS as one of the keys to successful development of the built environment’ he was simply voicing what is now a commonplace assumption; that Sustainability Rules OK. Admittedly, there appears to be no alternative to sustainability, but since nobody really knows what it...
Tomorrow's World
David Clements | 13 December 2003 ‘One year ago, Tomorrow’s World was cancelled,’ announced Austin Williams, convenor of the one-day conference Future Vision: Future Cities and chair of the final plenary ‘Tomorrow’s World: Visions of the Future ‘. Indeed, as the knowing laughs from the audience suggested, even though the reference was to the former BBC flagship of TV Science, the implications are wider...
Dan Dare, or Dan Daren't
‘Future Visions: Future Cities’ Conference, London School of Economics, 6 December 2003 Reviewed by Dave Clements | 11 December 2003 The Future Visions: Future Cities conference, supported by the Architects Journal, examined the role of the city through the prism of politics, culture and economics. Future Visions: Future Cities (FV: FC) was billed as an exploration of ‘city visions: past and present’, taking on the...
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