Two Cases for the (Floods) Defence
‘Atlas of the New Dutch Water Defence Line’ (010 Publishers) & ‘Facing up to rising sea levels (Building Futures, RIBA) Reviewed by Austin Williams | February 2010 Contrary to the implication in its title, the Atlas of the New Dutch Water Defence Line has nothing to do with global warming and flood management. The book is a historical assessment of the network of watercourses known as the Nieuwe Hollandse...
Corroding the Curriculum: Sustainability versus Education
Austin Williams | February 2010 (Academic Questions, Springer Link) This essay explores the ubiquity of the sustainability agenda in higher education in the United Kingdom (with some parallel examples from the United States) with a view to pointing out its corrosive influence on educational ambition. In so doing, I suggest that the prevalence of sustainability within education has only been possible because academia has lowered its...
Modern Man Made Flesh
‘The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: or the murder at road hill house’ by Kate Summerscale; Bloomsbury, 2009. 400pp Reviewed by Sarah Boyes | 01 November 2009 June, 1842. A small detective division is created in the London Met, by special permission of the Home Office. Camberwell’s Jack Whicher is one of a small group of new detectives, on a salary of £73 a year, who is allowed to shed the traditional bobby’s blue and wear plain...
Reflecting on Britain’s New Towns
‘Britain’s New Towns: Garden Cities to Sustainable Communities’ by Anthony Alexander; Taylor & Francis, 2009. 199pp Reviewed by Alastair Donald | 21 October 2009 When Ebenezer Howard, clerk, utopian thinker, inventor and spiritualist, attended a séance in 1926, he received this message from his first wife: “You have accomplished more than you know”. It’s unclear what the former Mrs Howard thinks of the New Town...
Powerful Connections
Martyn Perks | 20 October 2009 The Times restaurant critic Giles Coren recently experimented with Twitter—the phenomenally successful online social networking tool. He used it to review London’s Criterion restaurant using his mobile phone. With Twitter, you can send individual messages or ‘tweets’ up to a maximum of 140 characters each. Starter, main course and dessert all followed. By the end of the meal Coren had sent 19 separate...
In a Right State
Martin Earnshaw | 20 October 2009 Is being fat a lifestyle choice or is it caused by circumstances beyond your control? Will the recession create a nation of alcoholics? Across a range of issues, it seems, the recession is taking a devastating toll on our well-being. One in ten have been drinking more heavily because of the recession the Telegraph reported in June while a Which? survey reported in March that the recession could...
Building Resilience
‘The Everyday Resilience of the City: How Cities Respond to Terrorism and Disaster’ by J. Coaffee, D. Murkami-Wood and P. Rogers; Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008. 304pp Reviewed by Alastair Donald | 28 September 2009 Whether through ecological breakdown, terrorism, pandemics or crime, cities are now widely perceived as permanently ‘under threat’. Consequently, creating ‘resilience’ has become a key concept in public policy, and...
THEATRE: A New World
‘A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine’ by Trevor Griffiths, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, London. September 2009 Reviewed by Thomas Gartrell | 25 September 2009 In 1791, Tom Paine began the Rights of Man – his defence of the ongoing French Revolution – with an address to George Washington, the first President of the newly founded United States of America. Paine presents him with “a defence of those Principles of...
“Carbon psychosis”
Austin Williams | 24 September 2009 On the 70th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s death (23 September 2009), it is tragic to realise that many people are still debilitated by the affliction known as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Freud characterised it as Obsessive Neurosis. Others describe OCD – a disorder that compels a person to commit ritualistic actions – as a physiological disorder caused by neurological triggering...
Dongtan: the eco-city that never was
Austin Williams | August 2009 It was nice while it lasted, but now, it seems, the dream is over. The long-awaited, much-feted eco-city of Dongtan – described by environmental campaigner, Herbert Girardet as ‘the world’s first eco-city’ – has bitten the dust. After four years of presentations, proposals and puff, the universal praise has proven to be a little premature. Dongtan, a new city development (three quarters the size of...
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