Shaping Cities: Culture as Development Work

Culture is (as Raymond Williams argued) a way of life, evidence and expression of a set of mutable values produced in but also conditioning people’s encounters with the world. The question, now, is: what ways of encountering the world will produce sustainable urban development? The challenge for policy and planning, then, is that change is produced in everyday life and often despite policies developed in political, social and cultural institutions to be delivered from a position of authority. This is not to say that policies have not at times been progressive; indeed, the planners and designers responsible for the concrete housing projects on the peripheries of many European cities were progressive, often socialists, and inspired by the modern promise that a new society can be engineered through design. The difficulty is, as Marvila demonstrates, it cannot be done through design alone, and perhaps does not begin there at all. If social change is to take place, perhaps it begins in a mutual interaction, a dialogic exchange in a space between dwelling and the ways in which consciousness becomes formalised in design or planning. Otherwise, in a separation of concept from actuality, of art from life, and of design from the occupation of space, is a hiatus in which fear and distrust are likely to grow. Opposition then takes the form either of vandalism or a desperate resistance which fails against the greater force of the dominant society or culture

Art & social transformation: theories and practices in contemporary art for radical social change

Critical writing on public art in the late 20th century in the UK and USA either legitimized public art as an extension of studio art intended to widen its public, or implied a new relation to public space - as demonstrated in texts by Cork (1995) and Phillips (1988) respectively. This suggests a polarization of art's aesthetic and social dimensions. A deeper understanding of the relation between these dimensions is found in the work of Marcuse, Bloch and Adorno. Marcuse, in his early work, sees art as serving the needs of bourgeois society by displacing ideas of a better world to an independent aesthetic realm; Bloch sees art as giving form to hope, shaping a recurrent aspiration for a better world; Adorno sees the tension between the aesthetic and social dimensions of art as unresolvable, and, like Marcuse in his later work, sees art's autonomy as a space of criticality. But, as Bloch argues, conditions for change are non­ contemporaneous, fostering culture which is both progressive and regressive. In this respect, Gablik's appropriations of other cultures may be seen as regressive, whilst Lippard's concern for locality offers art a basis for progressive intervention. The introduction of the local, as a point of reference alongside the aesthetic and social, leads to consideration of three cases of art practice: Common Ground's Parish Maps (1986-96), the Visions of Utopia Festival coordinated by the Artists Agency (1996-8), and 90% Crude (1996--), a project by PLATFORM in London. The originality of the thesis is in its investigation of these cases; and equally in making connections between them and the elements of art criticism and critical theory noted above

A Post-Creative City?

Culturally-led urban redevelopment became the norm throughout Europe during the 1990s. It was rationalized as the idea of a creative city – a city for a new creative class – and characterized by the insertion of new art museums in post-industrial zones, the designation of cultural quarters, and the adoption of city branding strategies based on reductive images of the city as a cultural site. In some cases, local cultures were marginalized; in others, the promised new prosperity did not arrive while the aestheticisation of space led to gentrification. The creative city is not a socially coherent but – in contrast to the modernist city of public well-being – a socially divisive city, in which culture as the arts is privileged over culture as the articulation of shared values in everyday life. The 2008 financial services crisis has interrupted this trajectory, however, providing an opportunity to re-assess the idea of a creative city and the values implicit in it. Alternatives emerge in direct action – notably Occupy in 2011-12 – and activist art. Could there be a post-creative city? Could the creative imagination of diverse urban groups lead to new socio-political as well as cultural formations? That might be another urban revolution

Interruptions: Testing the Rhetoric of Culturally Led Urban Development

Summary. Since the 1980s, the cultural industries have gained a key role in strategies to deal with urban problems, seen as able to provide a new economic base in post-industrial settings. Cases of flagship cultural institutions such as Tate Modern or the Guggenheim in Bilbao imply that a cultural turn in urban policy delivers urban revitalisation. Following the turn in Glasgow's fortunes after being European Capital of Culture in 1990, it is easy to understand how city authorities and developers alike are captivated by cultural projects. But there are questions: is advocacy for the creative industries to be trusted? To what extent can policies and strategies which are successful in one city be mapped onto others? And to what extent do cultural producers, such as artists, subscribe to the party line? An increasing number of voices of dissent in the arts suggest an alternative approach to urban regeneration. This paper questions the rhetoric of the cultural industries and investigates emerging alternative scenarios

Disobedient Cultures: Art, Politics, and Resurgent Hope

When political change is remote the only prospect for change is in the realm of imagination. Herbert Marcuse responds to this in his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978) after the failure of revolt in Paris in 1968. He argues that although art cannot change the world as such it can change how the world is apprehended. Thus art’s imaginative potential is part of a wider pursuit of freedom. The paper argues that the situation is bleaker today than in the 1970s. Neoliberalism enforces a regime of consumerism even more now than then, and operates globally. Still, hope reappears in direct action from the anti-roads campaigns of the 1990s to anti-capitalism in the 2000s and Occupy in 2011-12 (after a much longer history of direct action). Today’s direct action and campaigning is specific, however, in addressing the trajectory of global capital. It also accepts its own ephemerality—leading Occupy to reject the processes of representation and issue no programme, instead inviting people to be present among others of like mind in the effective creation of a new society within the old. The paper asks to what extent art remains part of this picture of radical alterity, and whether Marcuse’s critical aesthetics remain helpful. Among issues raised are Marcuse’s Enlightenment view of art as autonomous creativity (rather than contingent on production within an art-world); a blurring of the divide between art institutions and the cultures of protest, as in the exhibition Disobedient Objects in London in 2014; and that appropriation may be art’s perpetual burden

Participation: housing and urban viability

In the global North, housing tends to be seen as a sub-sector of the construction industry. In the global South, in contrast, it might be considered more as a verb – housing as the activity of meeting basic needs for shelter. As such, this process is frequently undertaken by users themselves, in the informal settlements which surround most cities. While these settlements were once regarded as a threat to the urban order (or urbanization), today there is increasing recognition that self-build and self-managed housing meets the needs of urban development in ways which are usually more sustainable as well as lower-cost than standard housing schemes (whether in the public or the private sector). This paper begins from the question as to how far the lessons of informal settlements in the South can be applied in the North. It looks at the status of informal settlements in the new South Africa, and at two schemes in the UK: the Coin Street development in London, managed by tenants; and Ashley Vale self-build housing in Bristol, in southwest England. These are not seen as exemplary but simply two cases which can be compared and contrasted in the terrain of new approaches to building cities for the future

The contructivist paradigm and some implications for science content and pedagogy

Through a comparison of the widely-held traditional view of science with the constructivist view of science, we argue that the constructivist view of the content of science has important implications for classroom teaching and learning. This alternative view of science concepts as human constructs, scrutinised by application of the rules of the game of science, raises many challenges for teachers. Reconceptualisation of teachers' views of the nature of science and of learning in science is important for a constructivist pedagogy. We argue here that open discussion of the 'rules of the game' of science would contribute to better learning in the classroom, since learners would be better equipped to change their existing concepts by knowing more about the nature of science itself

Emissions and removals of greenhouse gases from land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland: 1990-2012

This report presents a summary of the net emissions and removals of greenhouse gases for 1990-2012 by the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry sector of the UNFCCC National Inventory for each of the UK Administrations (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland)

Molecular simulations of supercooled water at the interface with lipid bilayers

The transition of water into ice is a fundamental natural process; however nucleation is a rare event in the context of molecular simulations and the underlying mechanism is not well understood. The formation of ice is a key issue in the context of cryopreservation, where cellular damage occurs due to extracellular ice formation at temperatures well above the homogeneous freezing point of pure water. Thus such ice formation must be driven heterogeneously. The primary intention of this thesis is to consider whether lipid bilayers, as found in cellular membranes, may be the agent driving such heterogeneous nucleation. Via molecular dynamics simulations, a number of phospholipid and lipopolysaccharide bilayers were investigated to see what happens at the interface with supercooled liquid water. While these bilayers do appear, to varying extents, to act as ice nucleating agents, their potency as such does not appear to be strong enough to be the key facilitator in such ice nucleation. In addition to the question as to whether bilayers promote ice nucleation, the structural and chemical reasons are discussed, particularly in comparing the di_erent bilayers with each other. This is a key advantage of molecular simulations as compared to experimental techniques. In addition to molecular simulations, vesicles were synthesised experimentally and examined using dynamic light scattering to support the validity of the simulation setup. As an aside from the topic of ice nucleation, additional simulations were run of the permeation of small drug molecules through lipid bilayers. These simulations employed enhanced sampling techniques, and resulted in computing a free energy surface which was consistent with experimental data. xvii