Forgotten Plotlanders: Learning from the survival of lost informal housing in the UK.

Colin Ward’s discourses on the arcadian landscape of ‘plotlander’ housing are unique documentations of the anarchistic birth, life, and death of the last informal housing communities in the UK. Today the forgotten history of ‘plotlander’ housing documented by Ward can be re-read in the context of both the apparently never-ending ‘housing crisis’ in the UK, and the increasing awareness of the potential value of learning from comparable informal housing from the Global South. This papers observations of a previously unknown and forgotten plotlander site offers a chance to begin a new conversation regarding the positive potential of informal and alternative housing models in the UK and wider Westernised world

Schools and skills of critical thinking for urban design

© 2017, © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper explores possible ways in which urban design can engage with critical thinking and critical theory. After a brief explanation of the terms, with particular attention to the Frankfurt School of thought, it provides various answers to the question as to whether urban design is critical or not. One categorization applied to planning critical theory is then used to explain the potential for employing critical theories in urban design. Critical thinking skills are then argued to be helpful for enriching the literature of urban design in order to achieve better practice. The conclusion is that urban design can benefit from critical creativity, which is an embodiment of critical thinking within the limits imposed onto creativity. In this paper, the ways in which urban design can engage with both critical theory and with critical thinking are explored in order to achieve better critical creativity in the field

Scott King : public art

Public Art by Scott King brings together a series of proposals inspired by the relationship between contemporary art and urban regeneration. King’s what-if? scenarios include A Balloon for Britain, in which the artist devises a scheme to re-invigorate the country’s ten poorest towns and cities, Postcards from The Sculpture Park, printed ephemera from a holiday camp-cum-correctional facility, and Infinite Monument, an audacious proposal to rebuild the Tower of Babel. This publication includes three graphic novellas illustrated by Will Henry: Anish and Antony Take Afghanistan, I Dream of Dalstonia and New York Rural, the second of which imagines pop-up/independent coffee shop/microbrewery culture as a tool for fundamental urban renewal. The political, cultural and economic issues that bind public art and urban regeneration are further examined in texts by Owen Hatherley, Andrew Hunt, Tom Morton and Matthew Worley and in interviews with Robert Hewison and Lynda Morris