Applications for Urban Age Scholarships, which provide tuition fee awards up to £15,000 towards participating in LSE’s Executive MSc in Cities, are now open. The scheme is funded through the Urban Age Programme, a joint initiative between LSE Cities and the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft, the international forum of Deutsche Bank. The deadline for applications is 12.00 GMT (noon), Monday 26 March 2018.

Julia King, Research Fellow at LSE Cities will deliver a guest lecture at UCL on 1 February 2018. The lecture, which will be delivered to Urban Innovation and Policy MPA students, will draw on King’s research on Incremental Infrastructure, a project to identify, design, and prototype sanitation interventions in the context of marginalised and peripheral communities in Delhi.

Julia King, Research Fellow at LSE Cities, will chair “Transforming Cities? Gentrification and Urban Contestation in Istanbul and London” on 7 February at the London School of Economics. The talk will draw on examples from two or Europe’s biggest cities to reflect on the consequences of urban regeneration and gentrification on social justice and public spaces. The panel is organised by Centre for Policy and Research on Turkey (Research Turkey) and LSE SU Turkish Society.

Ricky Burdett, Director of LSE Cities and Urban Age, will moderate a public debate at the Norman Foster Foundation Digital X Workshop in Madrid on 16 January 2018. The workshop will explore the relationships between architecture and an increasingly prevalent digital world. Burdett will be joined by double-amputee Hugh Herr, whose bionic limbs are aimed at eliminating disability, and Kent Larson who directs the City Science group at the MIT Media Lab. Burdett has contributed previously at the Normal Foster Foundation, including on the Cities Panel of the Future is Now Forum alongside Michael Bloomberg and Norman Foster in June 2017.

Experiencing Density: Life in London’s New High-Density Housing is a research project exploring how residents experience new high-density residential environments in London, and what factors condition liveability and social sustainability. The project builds on recent  surveys, onsite interviews and focus groups with residents, which revealed a number of key challenges and opportunities associated with new-build high-density developments, and an older report on Density and Urban Neighbourhoods in London. The next phase of the project, funded by the GLA, will compare high-density developments built within the last 10 years with older high-density typologies built in the late 1800s, the 1930s, and the 1970s in blocks generally described as ‘successful’. The findings from the project will feed into the development of the new London Plan and potentially also Supplementary Planning Guidance on density. The research project is jointly organised by LSE Cities and LSE London.

A new Global Review of Finance For Sustainable Urban Infrastructure working paper has been released by the Coalition for Urban Transitions. The paper, authored by LSE Cities and PwC, finds that key finance mechanisms required to plug an estimated annual global infrastructure investment deficit of US$1 trillion may already be under national government control. The paper finds that transforming national urban financial systems can enable growth and sustainable development if national policymakers overcome significant investment, regulatory and institutional barriers, including lack of upfront public capital, lack of institutional capacity, institutional inertia, high perceived risk and low perceived returns, and imperfect information.

Philipp Rode, Executive Director of LSE Cities, spoke on Frontiers of City Governance [video] on 7 December 2017 at the Oskar von Miller Forum in Munich. Rode drew insights from the Centre’s ongoing research into New Urban Governance.

Professor Richard Sennett, Chair of the Advisory Board at LSE Cities and Centennial Professor of Sociology at LSE, was appointed OBE for services to design in the 2018 New Year’s Honours. Through his research and extensive writings, Professor Sennett has explored how individuals and groups make social and cultural sense of material facts – about the cities in which they live and about the labour they do. How cities are designed is a key area of research at LSE Cities.

Commenting on the announcement, Professor Sennett generously said, “The real honours should go to the Cities Programme at LSE, where I did the work for which I’ve been recognised.” Professor Sennett also contributed to founding the Urban Age project and was part of  one of three evening Urban Talks [video], which were central to the official Habitat lll programme in 2016 and focused on the design of cities.