Editorial: Embodying an Anti-Racist Architecture

field: Issue 8 Embodying an Anti-Racist Architecture responds to two appeals. The first is a demand. In September 2020 our students at the Sheffield School of Architecture, University of Sheffield published the ‘Anti-Racism at SSoA: A Call to Action’, a document condemning the ways in which the school and university institution are complicit in systemic racism in architecture, and demanding ‘immediate action and concrete change’. The second appeal is less explicit. In 2007 Renata Tyszczuk and Doina Petrescu launched the inaugural issue of field: a new journal intended to create an open forum for the practice and research of architecture. The first issue was appropriately dedicated to exploring indeterminacy, recognising the difficulty of defining the contours of architectural practice and research. As the name of the publication suggests, the journal emerges from the conviction that research into spatial practices involves, by necessity, ‘interlocking yet distributed fields of knowledge’

English urban commons: the past, present and future of green spaces

This book presents a novel examination of urban commons which provides a robust base for education initiatives and future public policy guidance on the protection and use of urban commons as invaluable urban green spaces that offer a diverse cultural and ecological resource for future communities.This book's central argument is that only through a deep understanding of the past and a rigorous engagement with present users can we devise new futures or imaginaries of culture, well-being and diversity for the urban commons. It argues that understanding the genesis of, and interactions between, the different pressures on urban green space has important policy implications for the delivery of nature conservation, recreational access and other land use priorities. The stakeholders in today’s urban commons, whether land users, policy makers or the public, are the inheritors of a complex cultural legacy and must negotiate diverse and sometimes conflicting objectives in their pursuit of a potentially unifying goal: a secure future for our urban commons. This book offers a unique and strongly interdisciplinary study of urban commons, one that brings together original historical investigation, contemporary legal scholarship, extensive oral history research with user groups and research examining the imagined futures for the urban common in modern society. It explores the complex social and political history of the urban common, as well as its legal and cultural status today, using four diverse case studies from within England as exemplars of the distinctively urban common. These are Town Moor in Newcastle, Mousehold Heath in Norwich, Clifton and Durdham Downs in Bristol and Valley Gardens in Brighton. This book concludes by looking forward and considering new tools and methods of negotiation, inclusivity and creativity to inform the future of these case studies, and of urban commons more widely.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the commons, green spaces, urban planning, environmental and urban geography, environmental studies and natural resource management