Monthly Archives: November 2013

UN-Habitat launches new publication ‘Streets as Public Spaces and Drivers of Urban Prosperity’

20 November 2013

UN-Habitat launches new publication ‘Streets as Public Spaces and Drivers of Urban Prosperity’.

This UN-Habitat’s publication, authored by Dr. Gora Mboup, makes a first attempt to integrate streets into the five dimensions of prosperity measured by the City Prosperity Index (CPI). These five dimensions – productivity, infrastructure development, environmental sustainability, quality of life, and equity/social inclusion – are all strongly linked to the quality of the street pattern.

You can read the full report here.

LSE Cities’ Austin Zeiderman at ‘New Urban Formations: A Conference on Comparative Urbanization’, Beijing

On 15-16 November 2013 at ‘New Urban Formations: A Conference on Comparative Urbanization’, the Stanford Center at Peking University in Beijing, Austin Zeiderman gave two lectures. The conference was focused on putting Chinese urbanisation in comparative perspective and bringing insights from Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and Europe. Austin’s first talk looked at the history of Latin American urbanisation and contemporary challenges to urban governance in the region. The second was on land, dispossession, and urbanisation in Colombia.

LSE Cities’ Suzanne Hall at Learning From Kilburn

18 November 2013

Joining the experimental university ‘Learning From Kilburn’ initiated by Tom Keeley from Space Makers, Suzanne Hall is running a two part exercise with local interest groups and individuals  on understanding Kilburn’s street economy. The first week involved a lecture and discussion, and this week participants have a chance to report back on their own research findings.

For more information follow the link: http://learningfromkilburn.com/tagged/Classes

LSE Cities announces new research project: Configuring Light/ Staging the Social

8 November 2013

Light is a material through which we organise social space; it is the infrastructure of everyday life, entering into the ways in which social life and interaction is staged and enacted in specific social worlds.

Configuring Light/ Staging the Social is a multidisciplinary research programme that forges an integral dialogue between social sciences, design, architecture and urban planning focused on light as one of the most fundamental features of social life. It is coordinated by Dr. Don Slater and Mona Sloane of the Department of Sociology in the London School of Economics and Political Science in collaboration with Dr. Joanne Entwistle of King’s College London.

The project has recently launched an international seminar series funded by the ESRC. The seminar series will begin in Spring 2014 and will develop a platform for practitioners and academics to cross boundaries between social sciences, humanities, architecture and technology and develop new concepts, methods and information to understand light as material culture. Confirmed speakers of the seminar series include professionals and academics from Qatar, New Zealand, USA, Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom.

For more information, please visit https://lsecities.net/objects/research-projects/configuring-light-staging-the-social

Ricky Burdett on the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge selection committee

LSE Cities Director Ricky Burdett has joined Carlo Ratti and Geoff Mulgan on the Bloomberg 2013-2014 Mayors Challenge selection committee.

The full selection committee is comprised of:

  • Christian Bason, Director of MindLab (Denmark)
  • Till Behnke, Founder of betterplace.org (Germany)
  • Ricky Burdett, Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Director of LSE Cities (United Kingdom)
  • Bruno Giussani, European Director of TED (Switzerland)
  • Lamia Kamal-Chaoui, Advisor to the Secretary-General and Former Head of the Urban Programme at the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) (France)
  • Christine Leitner, Senior Policy Advisor at the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth (Austria)
  • Maria Manuel Leitão Marques, Full Professor at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra and Former Secretary of State for Administrative Modernization (Portugal)
  • Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive of Nesta (United Kingdom)
  • Bertin Nahum, President and CEO of Medtech SA (France)
  • Carlo Ratti, Director of MIT Senseable City Lab and Founder of Carlo Ratti Associati (Italy)
  • Silvija Seres, Independent Investor and Board Member and Managing Director of TechnoRocks (Norway)
  • Iván Tosics, Managing Director of Metropolitan Research Institute (Hungary)

For full details, visit http://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/