Category: observations

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Interesting job: 5 year(!) RF in Urban Processes, Resilient Infrastructures and Sustainable Environments

Saw this job advertised at the University of Salford, it looks like a fantastic opportunity for someone – and of interest to geographers I’m sure:

5-year Research Fellowship within School of the Built Environment/UPRISE, University of Salford

The School of the Built Environment is seeking to appoint an exceptional candidate for a 5 year Research Fellowship within the newly formed UPRISE Research Centre. UPRISE brings together the expertise and research strengths of three existing groupings: the Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF), the Centre for Disaster Resilience (CDR) and SURFACE – Inclusive Design. UPRISE develops critical and engaged research and practice around the themes of Urban Processes, Resilient Infrastructures and Sustainable Environments.  The distinctiveness of the Centre is in exploring and excavating the boundaries and inter-relationships between these issues, with an emphasis on championing inclusive, resilient and sustainable spaces and places and a commitment to people and communities.

For more information and to apply, please see http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ALT619/research-fellow-uprise/

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Historic Bristol on Film (incl. pre-computation cybernetics)

Bristol 24/7 posted a bunch of links to different films held on the BFI’s “Britain on Film” websites/repository (which is an incredible resource!) with some extraordinary glimpses of Bristol in the past, see the reposted list below.

I was really struck by the ‘Control Room‘ film from 1942 which describes the networks of reporting and action that are performed through messengers and telephones to coordinate action to respond to and mitigate air raid damage. It’s effectively the same principles as espoused through the cybernetics of Stafford Beer: “the art of effective organisation”. Fascinating (and slightly scary) to watch how labour intensive it was to do this…

Panorama of the River Avon to Portishead (1902)
A journey down the Avon Gorge. Watch out for the entrance to the underground Clifton Rocks Railway and the wooden warship Formidable, plus loads of trams trundling along. You’ll also notice that this was shot before the main road along the Gorge linking Bristol to Avonmouth was constructed.

Lord Methuen’s Visit to Bristol (1902)
Moustachioed gents and street urchins alike seem as interested in Mitchell and Kenyon’s new-fangled movie camera as they are in the arrival of the Boer War hero by horse and carriage. Lady Methuen appears to be clad in an entire unfortunate furry menagerie.

Bristol (1920)
How the Yanks saw us in 1920. Includes the usual ‘charabancs across the suspension bridge’ sequence. A few more shots of Clifton (Vic Rooms, Clifton College, Birdcage Walk, etc) and that’s yer lot.

Control Room (1942)
Stiffly acted wartime drama-doc about coordination of civil defence during WWII bombing raids. It centres on the bombing of the junction of Linden Road and Coldharbour Road in Redland.

Bristol, British City (1951)
Back in 1951, the City Council commissioned this rather scrappy bigging-up Bristol film to promote the city at the Festival of Britain. He’s not credited, but it’s part-narrated by the late Sir Robert Wall, who went on to become leader of the Tory group on Bristol City Council and helped Thatcher to draw up the ‘right to buy’ legislation. “A stranger might find the tempo of life here easy-going. The air is mild, the voices are soft. We have been here too long to get flustered about everyday living,” rhapsodises Bob, sounding for all the world like some pot-smoking, trip-hop-loving nouveau hippy. But it’s not long before he’s praising those fine “merchant adventurers” for bringing us all that lovely tobacco and stuff. Of slavery there is not a single mention and Colston is described solely as a philanthropist. Still, it’s lovely to think that we’re part of “a continuity of pleasant and civilised living for more than a thousand years”. Wonder what they’d have made of 21st century Stokes Croft.

City of Bristol Coronation Celebrations (1953)
Silent colour footage of sundry civic dignitaries, sportsfolk, street parties, tightrope walkers, marching bands and, mysteriously, young chaps in grass skirts celebrating Her Maj’s coronation. There’s probably never been quite so many Union Jacks, flags of St. George and ‘Long Live the Queen’ banners in the city centre. Even Temple Meads station (pictured above) got a patriotic makeover. It looks like a UKIP wet dream.

See the full original post on Bristol 24/7.

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Workshop> Exploring Virtual Control, UCL (olympic park)

UCL urban lab are hosting an interesting workshop called ‘exploring virtual control’ at the London olympic park.

“The UCL Urban Laboratory is hosting a workshop on Tuesday 18 August in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to interrogate the mechanics of control within privatised public spaces. If you have any interest in the privatisation of cities, security design, city governance policy or the post-Olympic legacy”

It’s something of a coup to have it at the olympic park – and got me thinking of Francisco Klauser’s excellent work on these forms of control.

Here’s some more details:

This workshop held at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford serves as an introduction to the mechanics of control within privatised public spaces. Participants will learn about the way in which privatised public spaces are planned, built and monitored, before devising their own ways of mapping and documenting private public spaces. The workshop is organised by UCL Urban Laboratory, and led by the artists and built environment researchers Max Colson and Ollie Palmer, as part of a current exhibition hosted by RIBA. Book here.

The workshop consists of a series of structured group exercises and conversations, during which participants will choose to work on a photographic or mapping project. Please state your preference when applying.

Ollie Palmer is an award-winning artist, freelance designer and brand consultant based in London. He has worked commercially with BBC Worldwide, UCL and the V&A Museum, as well as leading projects for a number of other UK-based companies. As an artist, he has exhibited work at the V&A Museum and The Science Museum’s Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, as well as being selected as artist-in-residence at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Max Colson is an artist based in London using photography, video and animation. He was the artist-in-residence at UCL Urban Laboratory between September 2014 and June 2015, funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. Virtual Control: Security and the Urban Imagination, his first UK solo exhibition, is at RIBA 6 July – 21 September in London this summer. He was selected as one of the UK winners of the 2013 Flash Forward Emerging Photographer competition, and was shortlisted in the OPEN14 at Brighton Photo Fringe. He has exhibited in C/O Berlin, London, and this summer as part of ‘Data Rush’ at the Noorderlicht Photo Festival.

Limited places are available for this workshop. Tickets cost £20 or £15 for concessions (students/disabled/unemployed/over 65). Please book on the UCL Online Store. Contact Jordan Rowe for more details.

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Reblog> “Beach body ready”: Fitness holidays and the ‘natural’ body

Over on Geography Directions, a recent post by Kate Whiston features research by my colleague Jo Little, in particular a recent article in The Geographical Journal entitled ‘Nature, wellbeing and the transformational self‘. Both the post and the article are well worth reading!

‘Beach body ready’: Fitness holidays and the ‘natural’ body

Source: Wikimedia Commons

It’s that time of year again; the holiday season is in full swing and many of us will be taking some much-needed time off for rest and recuperation during the summer. But instead of lazing about on the beach, drinking cocktails, and eating ice cream, increasing numbers of Brits will, in fact, embark on ‘fitness holidays’. Instead of crash-dieting in order to get ‘beach body ready’ pre-holiday, fitness holidays aim to have you ‘beach body ready’ post-holiday, having made some lasting changes to your habits and mind-set. Little’s (2015) paper in The Geographical Journal approaches this relatively new phenomenon from a geographical point of view, considering the intrinsic links to nature and the body.

Read the whole post.

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Reblog> The Urban Politics and Governance of Social Innovation in Austerity

Over on his blog CityFragment, Colin McFarlane recently posted about an interesting new project:

The Urban Politics and Governance of Social Innovation in Austerity

I’m excited to be part of a new project investigating the connections between austerity, social innovation and urban politics in Europe. The project is led by Joe Painter as Principal Investigator, and the co-investigators are Paul Langley, Sue Lewis, Antonis Vradis, and myself (all based in Geography at Durham). It is funded through the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Urban Transformations programme (coordinated by the University of Oxford).

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In the project, we will compare whether and how austerity impacts social innovation across three
European cities that are experiencing quite different forms of austerity – Athens, Berlin and Newcastle – and will examine the implications for urban politics. We will do so by investigating alternative finance, grassroots mobilisation and community provisioning in the three cities.

Although I live near Newcastle and know one of the other two cities – Berlin – very well, this is the first time that I’ll be involved in a research project on European cities. It’s also the first sustained opportunity I’ve had to be part of a team examining the geographical impacts of austerity on cities. So being part of this is an exciting and challenging prospect!

More information is available here.

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What might happen when ‘things’ design themselves?

I’ve been meaning to flag this for a while… Chris Speed at Edinburgh (who gave the ‘dancing with data‘ talk I posted a while ago) is leading a project called ThingTank:

The ThingTank project identifies that ‘things’ may soon know more about lives than we do and may also be able to make suggestions about what is missing. The purpose of this project is to explore the potential for identifying novel patterns of use within the data that is streamed through the interaction between people and things, and things and things. Our project builds on research and innovation that has been established by the three investigators across the fields of Internet of Things, Social Experience Design and Machine Learning. Through a better understanding of how what data can tell us about how we use objects, new models of use will emerge and reinvigorate the role of things and people within design and manufacturing.

The project offers some interesting provocations both as research outcomes and as innovation in methods. It’s worth looking at this write-up by Chris on his website Fields.

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UK now a mobile-first country

Ofcom, the quango that regulates communications activities in the UK (i.e. broadcasting, mobile phones and internet service provision), has released a report that suggests that the UK population (according to their survey) generally prefers to use their ‘smartphones’ as the principle means of accessing the internet.

They include a few other interesting findings:

During 2014, 4G subscriptions leapt from 2.7 million to 23.6 million.

…

Smartphone users with 4G are shopping online more than those without 4G (55% of 4G users do this compared with 35% of non-4G users); banking more online (55% versus 33%); watching more TV and video clips online (57% versus 40%); making more face-to-face and voice calls over the internet (28% versus 20%); using services such as Snapchat to send more photos and videos (49% versus 36%); and instant messaging more with services such as WhatsApp (63% versus 50%).

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One in three adults (34%) turn over and check their phones within five minutes of waking up. For young people, checking social media messages before breakfast is even more crucial – around half (49%) of young people aged 18-24 check their phones within five minutes of waking up.

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Most 16-24 year olds are watching on-demand and catch up programmes on computers and smartphones rather than on a TV connected to a set-top box.

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Normal service now resumed

historical picture of a man leaning so his nose touches a grindstone

Hello to anyone that actually reads this blog! I’ve been on a ‘stay-cation’ en famille and I’m now back ‘at’ work… for the various values of location that implies for an academic that commutes and makes an office wherever is practical.

So, ‘nose [back] to the grindstone’…