I have been reflecting on two French films, made in Paris in the mid-1960s. Among other things, they are both about alienation in the modern city, and in Paris in particular.
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On October 8th we had the referendum on the Balsall Heath Neighbourhood Plan, of which I have been the coordinator for the Neighbourhood Forum. We had a 90 per cent Yes vote on a 22 per cent turnout, and I let out a big sigh of relief and had a beer.
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I used to teach architecture students with an urban designer called Mike Menzies, who also taught them environmental psychology. One thing I learnt from Mike was about Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.
Comparing House Builders’ approaches to Urban Design - a pilot study to understand its role and value to the industry
October 2015
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It’s always a delight to learn about unexpected connections between places and people, which you would struggle to make credible if you were writing fiction.
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On a wet Tuesday evening in December my partner Polly and I went to the Lamp Tavern, a tiny back street pub in the industrial district of Highgate, on the next block from the river Rea.
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In UD130 I wrote about Albion, the proposal for a garden city in the Black Country which a team from MADE, the West Midlands centre for placemaking, submitted for the Wolfson Prize. It started as a subversive gesture, and we got more serious as we progressed.
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Is it permissible to make changes to someone else’s work of art? In 1919 Marcel Duchamp notoriously modified the Mona Lisa by adding a moustache and a goatee beard.
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One of the highlights of my year is the annual Flatpack film festival, now in its eighth year. It’s run by Ian Francis, a friend, who like me works from an office in the Custard Factory in Digbeth.
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I was a teenage racing cyclist, almost permanently attached to my bike by the shoeplates on my paper-thin kangaroo-skin racing shoes, and covering about 10,000 miles a year.
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I was recently in a meeting with planning officers and a national housebuilder, to discuss a proposal to build a town extension. Among other things we discussed the local centre proposed on the plan, which had a footprint labelled Retail Unit.
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In March a friend of mine, Ben Waddington, ran the first Birmingham Walking Festival, Still Walking, with 14 themed walks over three weeks. A nice conceit, as Birmingham is not the first place you associate with the pleasures of strolling.
