At last, a law to stop almost anyone from doing almost anything | George Monbiot. Until the late 19th century much of our city space was owned by private landlords. Squares were gated, streets were controlled by turnpikes. The great unwashed, many of whom had been expelled from the countryside by acts of enclosure, were also excluded from desirable parts of town. Social reformers and democratic movements tore down the barriers, and public space became a right, not a privilege. But social exclusion follows inequality as night follows day, and now, with little public debate, our city centres are again being privatised or semi-privatised. Street life in these places is reduced to a trance-world of consumerism, of conformity and atomisation in which nothing unpredictable or disconcerting happens, a world made safe for selling mountains of pointless junk to tranquillised shoppers. Now this dreary ethos is creeping into places that are not, ostensibly, owned or controlled by corporations.
The existing rules are bad enough. All this is about to get much worse. A Jewish cultural centre in London: Take Woody Allen, add a side of schmaltz, hold God. The South Bank skateboarders shouldn't veto our community dreams | Billy Bragg. No one can doubt that the South Bank is a hub for skateboarding in the UK. Thousands have signed the Long Live South Bank petition, opposing the relocation of the undercroft skate park as part of the Festival Wing redevelopment plans.
The campaign has given skateboarders, many of them young people, their first taste of activism. Nor can there be any doubt that we are living in a time of austerity. When the government wants to make cuts in spending, arts funding is always near the top of the list. The Southbank Centre has not been immune and as a not-for-profit charity, it has been forced to think hard about how to generate income. Raising ticket prices for concerts would be one way to make more money, but that has a knock-on effect of excluding those with little disposable income. And anyway, as the popularity of the skate park shows, the South Bank is as much about what happens outside of the buildings, on the many different designated spaces. Grasp The Nettle.
Can skaters save their South Bank home? – gallery | Art and design | The Observer. Activists warned to watch what they say as social media monitoring becomes 'next big thing in law enforcement' - Crime - UK. John Cooper QC said that police are monitoring key activists online and that officers and the courts are becoming increasingly savvy when it comes to social media. But, speaking to The Independent, he added that he also expected that to drive an increase in the number of criminals being brought to justice in the coming months. "People involved in public protest should use social media to their strengths, like getting their message across. But they should not use them for things like discussing tactics. They might as well be having a tactical meeting with their opponents sitting in and listening.
"For example, if antifascist organisers were discussing their plans on social media, they can assume that a fascist organisation will be watching. Mr Cooper QC's warning comes after a New York court ordered Twitter to hand over messages posted on the site by a demonstrator belonging to the Occupy Wall Street movement in America.
Mr Cooper QC added: "activists are putting themselves at more risk. Take back the Greek streets, with art. Common Sense – Introduction « The Return of the Public. ‘A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.’ Tom Paine Something is happening that does not yet have a name. In Europe and North America the citizens of democracies have taken to the streets and disrupted the orderly circulation of ideas, images and goods. They have seized public spaces and re-imagined them as sites of liberation and free speech between equals. Either these occupations and assemblies will come to be seen as pale imitations of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, imitations that never seriously threatened the powers of the world.
A governing order can only survive if its needs and demands pass as the conclusions of an uncontroversial common sense. These claims no longer convince. Many of us have experienced life as a series of defeats. In the confusion those who benefited from the old dispensation are busy grabbing what they can. And here is something strange. The language used here is as clear as its author can make it. Where are you from originally. Embed Code options over 1 year ago, Shoreditch, London, England.
What to know about covering the conventions - Journalist Security. Members of the press get their first look at the site of the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa. Security zones have been established outside to ensure people's safety. (AP/Brian Blanco) If May's NATO Summit in Chicago is any indication, journalists covering events outside the national political conventions in Tampa, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C., later this summer can expect that everyone--mainstream media, bloggers, citizen journalists, protesters, and bystanders--will have a camera of one kind or another.
With the widespread proliferation of cellphone cameras, capable of recording high-quality images along with audio and video, it seemed like everybody was documenting everything and everyone. In Illinois, there was heightened concern that police would be enforcing the state's Eavesdropping Act, which criminalizes (with a possible sentence of 15 years in jail) audio recording of police officers performing official duties in a public place without their consent. The (Secret) City of London. Art on the Underground - Michael Landy - Acts of Kindness. I was on my way back from work and my eye was watering.
A lady got off and dropped a pack of tissues on my lap as she left the Tube. It had a note which said "I hope tomorrow is a better day for you". Hurrying thro' the ticket barrier to catch a train, the barrier behind me closed,clamping my suitcase with a vice-like grip! The alarm sounded but no help came until a young man, coming off the train saw my plight and tried to open the barrier using his oyster card not just once... but twice.It was all to no avail, but the Act of Kindness and the connection had been offered and that was heartwarming. Whilst standing on a busy Tube train on my morning commute, I felt someone tap me on the arm. I'd been told I was having my pay cut due to ongoing health problems.
The train was really crowded & I was feeling really nervous about my first day teaching classroom music at a primary school. I was 17 and my father had just had a very serious stroke. I was coming up the escalator at Victoria. Art on the Underground - Michael Landy - Acts of Kindness. I didn't know it at the time but I was suffering from the after effects of a nasty concussion.
I thought I was just feeling a bit under the weather on my way into the office. The Tube was packed, stuffy and I started to gag. I tried to pretend I wasn't surrounded by strangers looking at me, and desperately searched for tissues or anything suitable in my bag. Nothing. I had just split with my boyfriend and was carrying everything I owned across London. I was running for the bus on my first day of work, and I was only 19 so it was my first ever real job. One night after I'd just moved to London I went for some drinks and got far too drunk, and tried to get a bus home. At about 6 months pregnant I was on a crowded Tube feeling rather invisible as I stood yet again for the whole journey. I was coming up the escalator at Victoria. After a generally miserable week and a particularly difficult day - I was returning home on the Jubilee line. It was the 7th July.
Gentrification. Public land should remain so. Developments associated with the Olympics could yet pioneer the alternative models needed around Britain ©Chris Rice On the face of it London 2012 and the centre of Bradford have little in common. The link between this post-industrial city and the Olympics is the property developer Westfield, although their experiences of the Australian mall builder could not be more different. Westfield’s signature mall at Stratford City, through which most visitors to the games must pass, is a gateway to the Olympics.
Both these projects got the go-ahead during the boom years and started to founder as the financial crisis loomed. The similarities between Stratford and Bradford ended as the first rumblings of the crash were being heard. The government financed the Olympic Village and Lend Lease – another Australian developer that had acquired the development rights for the village from Westfield and had pledged to raise the finance – was paid to manage the project. Will Self: Walking is political. She stumbles through the city streets, her eyes now unfocused – absorbing a confusion of grey, brown and red parallelograms, that she knows to be crushingly weighty, and yet which she feels to be as insubstantial as dandelion spores – and now locked on the faces of those others who pass by her with such fixity that, if she concentrates on a single physiognomy, she senses that with only a little further effort she would be able to deduce everything about that individual: his age, occupation, sexual history, political affiliations, the names of his family and friends.
For milliseconds she is transfixed by the uniqueness of his personality – and then he is subsumed once more into the crowd. She is disoriented – and yet her progress is a perfectly plotted trajectory through urban space: she looks into the glowing multifaceted jewel in the palm of her hand and here other parallelograms interleave, shuffle and montage in response to the tweezer motions and baton-flicks of her fingers. Public spaces in Britain's cities fall into private hands | UK news. When it opens this week, Granary Square will be one of the biggest public spaces in Europe – a focal point for the regeneration of King's Cross, a neglected part of London. It will be managed in a private estate of 10 plazas and parkland near the rail hub.makes this clear.
"Welcome to King's Cross," it reads. "Please enjoy this private estate considerately. " Over the past decade, large parts of Britain's cities have been redeveloped as privately-owned estates, extending corporate control over some of the country's busiest squares and thoroughfares. It appears from the scale of the change that privatisation of space is now the standard price of redevelopment. There are, of course, significant benefits to the redevelopments, though some worry that Britain's landscape is being slowly redefined by private ownership in two ways.
Tower bridge and the Millennium bridge, both owned by the City of London, were reserved for invited guests and closed to the public. 'A new piece of city' Occupy London protesters evicted from St Paul's square. The Occupy London camp at St Paul's Cathedral has lost its legal fight to remain in place. Once the injunction was ordered, bailiffs and officers from the City of London Police (a separate police force directed by the Corporation of the City of London, whose council is elected by the companies in the financial district, with more votes going to larger companies) gave the camp five minutes to vacate.
Judging from the liveblog maintained by The Guardian, it sounds like the procedure was remarkably orderly, with the police and the camp both taking steps to minimize conflict with one another. Catherine Brogan, a poet and high-profile member of the Occupy movement, said it made sense for the authorities to come on a Monday night. "There was talk of prayer rings and of other people coming down to support us when this happened, but many of our supporters are elderly or obviously live in areas other than the centre of London, so this would have caught them by surprise," she said.