Public Lecture Series 2011-12
The School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape launched it's Public Lecture Series in 2011, showcasing inspiring speakers currently researching, writing or practicing within the built environment and related fields.
All lectures are free, open to all and will be held in Culture Lab at 5.30pm unless otherwise stated. If you would like to join our mailing list, require any further information, or to book a place for our lectures please contact Anne.Fry@ncl.ac.uk
Recordings of past lectures can be viewed via Vimeo.
Monday 17 October
Anna Minton : Ground Control : Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century
Anna Minton is a writer and journalist. She has worked as a foreign correspondent, business reporter and social affairs writer and is the winner of five national journalism awards. After a decade in journalism, including a stint on The Financial Times, she began to focus on longer projects for think tanks and policy organisations. She is the author of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Viewpoint on fear and distrust and an associate of the consultancy, The Placeteam. She is a frequent conference speaker and is invited to speak to a wide range of audiences, from art Biennales to policemen. She appears regularly on television and radio and is a contributor to The Guardian.
'Ground Control' is about the architecture of boom and bust and the climate of fear it creates. Based on a journey around Britain, it tells the story of how our cities have changed as a result of American policies towards property, crime and planning, first introduced by Mrs Thatcher and continued enthusiastically by New Labour.
Creating cities based on rising property prices, speculation and debt is neither economically viable or socially desirable. 'Ground Control' argues that increasing control over the environment removes personal and collective responsibility, undermining trust between people. This model is broken but there is another way of doing things which relies on a more cooperative, continental approach, built on a mixed economy which emphasises public life and shared space, strengthening civil society in the process.
Wednesday 23 November **Devonshire Building 5pm**
David Schlosberg : Climate Justice, Adaptation, and Sustainability: A Capabilities Approach
David Schlosberg is Professor at the Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney. His general interests are in environmental politics and political theory. He teaches courses on environmental politics, environmental and climate justice, and contemporary political theory. His environmental research focuses mainly on environmental and climate justice, environmental democracy and participation, and the political theory, tactics, and organization of environmental and environmental justice movements; his theoretical research deals with issues of pluralization, difference, justice, and engagement in contemporary theory and political life.
Professor Schlosberg has held visiting positions as a Lecturer in Political Theory at the London School of Economics (2000-01), a Fulbright Senior Scholar and Fellow in Social and Political Theory at the Australian National University (2003-04), and as Barron Visiting Professor in Environment and Humanities in the Princeton Environmental Institute and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University (Spring 2009). His work has also been supported by the National Science Foundation. Current work includes the application of the capabilities approach to justice theory to conceptions and practices of ecological justice, indigenous environmental justice, and climate justice. Schlosberg is also co-editing, with John Dryzek and Richard Norgaard, the Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, to be published in 2011.
One of the major political discourses surrounding climate change policy, at both the global and local level, is that of climate justice. Climate justice theorists have articulated a range of frameworks for understanding the relationship between the impacts of climate change and conceptions of justice and fairness; they include polluter pays models (historical responsibility), fair share models (equal allocations of emissions), and various rights-based models (development rights, human rights, environmental rights). This paper argues that there are three key weaknesses in this current literature. First, many approaches simply miss some key ideas about justice that have been developed and debated in the last decade or two - in particular, theories of recognition and capabilities. Second, the vast majority of these approaches to climate change are focused on frameworks of prevention or mitigation, rather than on how justice can be applied to the inevitable need to adapt to climate change. Third, climate justice has avoided a discussion of ecological justice, or human responsibility toward non-human nature. In response to those weaknesses, this paper argues for a broadly defined capabilities approach to climate justice that can: bring recognition to specific impacts and vulnerabilities brought on by climate change, offer a normative framework for adaptation policies, and address the needs and functioning of human and nonhuman individuals and communities.
Thursday 9 February 2012
Anthony King : Tales of Three Cities: New Delhi, London and New York
Anthony King is Emeritus Professor, Art History and Sociology, State University of New York, Binghamton and now lives in the UK. He has been Visiting Professor in Architecture, University of California Berkeley and was, for five years, Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He has also taught at the Architectural Association and at the Development Planning Unit, University College, London.
Anthony King has published extensively on the impact of colonialism, postcolonialism and globalization on cities and the built environment, and on the social production of building form. His publications include Colonial Urban Development (1976, 2006), Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (1990), Global Cities: Postimperialism and the Internationalization of London (1990), Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment (ed.1980, 1984), The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (1984,1995), Culture, Globalization and the World-System (ed.1991, 1997, with translations in Japanese, Arabic, Turkish), Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis (ed.1996) and Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (2004). Other recent essays are in N. Brenner and R. Keil, eds. The Global Cities Reader (2006), A. Cinar and T. Bender, eds. Locating the City: Urban Imaginaries and the Practices of Modernity (2007), H. Berking, ed. Cultures of Globalization and the Globalization of Cultures (forthcoming). With Thomas A Markus, he co-edits Routledge’s Architext series on architecture and social/cultural theory.
In his influential book, The Production of Space (1991) Henri Lefebvre sets out his oft-cited ‘conceptual triad’ of space: spatial practice (the spheres of) ‘production and reproduction . . . and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation’; representations of space, including ‘conceptualised space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, . . .’ and representational spaces, ‘space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols . . . the space of inhabitants . . users . . a few writers who . . do no more than describe’.
Following Lefebvre, it is this lived space that will be explored in this lecture. Drawing on lived experience of three cities, their institutions, subjects and relationships, the lecture will examine how, as scholars, our work (research, writing, teaching) is influenced and moulded, even generated by very specific spaces and relationships.
Wednesday 7 March 2012
William Rees : What's Blocking Sustainability? Why is the world sleepwalking into global ecological crisis?
William Rees is a Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His teaching and research emphasize the public policy and planning implications of global environmental trends and the necessary ecological conditions for sustaining socioeconomic activity. Much of his work is in the realm of ecological economics and human ecology. He is best known in this field for his invention of 'ecological footprint analysis', a quantitative tool that estimates humanity's ecological impact on the ecosphere in terms of appropriated ecosystem (land and water) area. Dr Rees’ book on this method, Our Ecological Footprint (1996, co-authored with then PhD student Mathis Wackernagel) is now available in English, Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian and Spanish. He is presently supervising several eco-footprint projects ranging from the sustainability implications of globalization to getting serious about urban sustainability.
Prof Rees is also a founding member and recent past-President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics; a co-investigator in the ‘Global Integrity Project,’ aimed at defining the ecological and political requirements for biodiversity preservation; a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute and a Founding Fellow of the One Earth Initiative. Drawing parts of his answer from various disciplines, Prof Rees’ current book project asks: “Is Humanity Inherently Unsustainable?” A dynamic speaker, Prof Rees has been invited to lecture on areas of his expertise across Canada and the US, as well as in Australia, Austria, Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, the former Soviet Union, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden and the UK. In 1997, UBC awarded William Rees a Senior Killam Research Prize in acknowledgment of his research achievements and in 2000 The Vancouver Sun recognized him as one of British Columbia’s top “public intellectuals.” In 2006 Prof Rees was elected to the Royal Society of Canada and in 2007 he was awarded a prestigious 3-year Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship.
We claim to be a science- and knowledge-based culture; humans are uniquely endowed with capacities for high intelligence, forward planning, moral judgment and compassion for others. Yet, these qualities are rarely prominent in international forums ostensibly designed to ensure the sustainability of the human enterprise. Modern society seems dedicated instead to national and global development models that: a) inhibit cooperative planning for global security; b) systematically undermine the life-support functions of the ecosphere; c) increase socioeconomic inequity and; d) deplete even renewable forms of ‘natural capital’ essential for the maintenance of global civilization.
How can we account for such gross cultural and ecological dysfunction? What prevents H. sapiens from exercising the qualities that make us uniquely human in defending the long-term collective interests of our species? This presentation provides a partial answer to these questions while posing another: “Are ‘modern’ humans unsustainable by nature?”
Thursday 15 March 2012
* APL Annual Lecture * - This has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances
Richard Sennett : The Architecture of Cooperation
Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He has been a Fellow of The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Richard 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. He focuses on how people can become competent interpreters of their own experience, despite the obstacles society may put in their way. His research entails ethnography, history, and social theory. As a social analyst he continues the pragmatist tradition begun by William James and John Dewey.
His first book, The Uses of Disorder, [1970] looked at how personal identity takes form in the modern city. He then studied how working-class identities are shaped in modern society, in The Hidden Injuries of Class, written with Jonathan Cobb. [1972] A study of the public realm of cities, The Fall of Public Man, appeared in 1977; at the end of this decade of writing, Mr. Sennett sought to account the philosophic implications of this work in Authority [1980].
At this point he took a break from sociology, composing three novels: The Frog who Dared to Croak [1982], An Evening of Brahms [1984] and Palais Royal [1987]. He then returned to urban studies with two books, The Conscience of the Eye, [1990], a work focusing on urban design, and Flesh and Stone [1992], a general historical study of how bodily experience has been shaped by the evolution of cities.
In the mid 1990s, as the work-world of modern capitalism began to alter quickly and radically, Professor Sennett began a project charting its personal consequences for workers, a project which has carried him up to the present day. The first of these studies, The Corrosion of Character, [1998] is an ethnographic account of how middle-level employees make sense of the “new economy.” The second in the series, Respect in a World of Inequality, [2002} charts the effects of new ways of working on the welfare state; a third, The Culture of the New Capitalism, [2006] provides an over-view of change. Most recently, Professor Sennett has explored more positive aspects of labor in The Craftsman [2008], and in a study of cooperation to appear in 2012.
Monday 14 May 2012
Eric Parry : Architecture and Ambiguity
Founder and Principal of Eric Parry Architects Eric Parry studied architecture at the University of Newcastle (1970-1973), the Royal College of Art (1976-1978) and the Architectural Association (1979-1980).
Eric Parry Architects was established in 1983, the year he was appointed as a lecturer in architecture at the University of Cambridge, where he taught until 1997. Significant early projects include an office building at Stockley Park, Foundress Court at Pembroke College, Damai Suria luxury apartments in Kuala Lumpur and the urban interventions at London Bridge. The innovative 30 Finsbury Square won the practice much acclaim and was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 2003. The office building Aldermanbury Square is now complete and has also been shortlisted for the Stirling Prize, and the Renewal Project at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square has won many awards since its completion in 2008.
Eric was elected Royal Academician in 2006. He was President of the Architectural Association in 2005-2007, and a council member since 1995. He served as Chair of the RIBA Awards Group and was a member of the Kettles Yard Committee and the Arts Council of England Visual Arts and Architecture Panels in previous years. Eric serves as an External Examiner at schools of Architecture in the UK and has held lectureships at the University of Cambridge, Graduate School of Design, Harvard, USA and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.