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...
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...
Design Like You Give A Damn
‘Design Like You Give A Damn: Architectural Responses To Humanitarian Crises’ by Architecture for Humanity (Eds), Thames & Hudson, 2006. 336pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 9 September 2006 Cameron Sinclair’s long-awaited book begins with a personal journey of social and ethical awareness, which has taken him from a lowly ‘CAD monkey’, as he describes himself, to a fully-fledged professional humanitarian. He now heads...
Tackling Overcrowding in England: A Discussion Paper
Dave Clements | 14 September 2006 Future Cities Project respond to ‘Tackling Overcrowding in England’, a consultation paper by the Department for Communities and Local Government, September 2006. ‘Increasing housing supply and reducing overcrowding will be priorities for this Government.’ The remit of this consultation paper ostensibly concerned with ‘tackling overcrowding’ is so curtailed by the unspoken premise of...
Camouflage
Camouflage by Neil Leach; MIT Press, 2006. 289pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 1 July 2006 After the Alan Sokal affair, cultural studies writers have been nervous of transgressing the boundaries between pretentious quackery and insightfulness. Reviewers too, tread cautiously for fear of humiliation. This is a pity, because such intellectual caution tends to obscure the rare occasions when a cultural studies’ book hits the nail on the...
Mobilising Active Citizens
Dave Clements | 4 March 2006 At election time every politician faced with a drubbing claims to have no time for opinion polls. For the rest of us, the general view seems to be that consultation is all very well but there’s a lot of it about and nothing much seems to come of it. The more cynical talk about government by ‘tick box’ or ‘focus group’. And to be fair, there may be something in this. After...
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...
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...
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