Public Lecture Series 2012: Urban Psychosis - A Tale of Two Cities. How does the design of cities affect the people that live there? Can understanding architecture through the act of walking help us heal our uneasy relationship with the built environment? Chair: Akram Khan Speakers: Graeme Evans, John Roberts, Will Self Graeme Evans will consider how the design of cities reinforces urban dystopias. John Roberts, through a variety of examples, will explore how spaces of popular protest in cities emerge and why public authorities are so concerned to regulate them.
Graeme Evans Graeme Evans is currently Director of the Cities Institute and Professor of Urban Cultures & Design at London Metropolitan University, and was formerly head of research at Central St Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London. Prior to academe, his career spanned executive posts in the Home Office, in international energy, property and transport industries, and as director of an arts, media and technical aid centre, Inter-Action, in north London.
John Roberts. Will Self - Walk - Kennedy Airport - Manhattan - Report. Will Self to become a professor of contemporary thought. Will Self is to contribute to courses on urban planning, human geography, journalism and creative writing at Brunel University. Photograph: Rex Features Since graduating from Oxford in the early 1980s, Will Self's career has been nothing if not diverse.
He has swept streets, drawn cartoons and made cold calls; he has written as a maverick political journalist, a psycho-geographer, satirist and self-declared flâneur. Now he is going back to university – this time in a role that marks his most respectable stage to date – as professor of contemporary thought at a London university, with licence to dream up new courses and research projects that reflect his eclectic interests. Self takes up the new chair at Brunel University, in Uxbridge, west London, next week. He will be teaching undergraduate and post-graduate students at the university's school of the arts and its school of the social sciences. He added that Brunel attracted him for "psycho-geographical reasons". The Olympics Drugs. I was getting on so well with Gillian Welch. Then David Cameron butts in | Stewart Lee | Comment is free | The Observer. Last week, I was reading Word, the culture primer for time-poor ageing hipsters, a midlife crisis in magazine form.
Apparently, in December, the Tory feminist MP Louise Mensch, (whose ill-judged jokes about Occupy protesters on a recent Have I Got News for You sank slowly and silently like quern stones dropping down a deep Cotswold well) took David Cameron to see Gillian Welch, the alternative country pioneer. But should horrible people be allowed to go to cool stuff and ruin it for nice people?
I loved Gillian Welch. Once. "I Dream a Highway", from 2001's Time (The Revelator), occupies a hazy space where mountain music dissolves into visionary minimalism, while "No One Knows My Name" explores brilliantly the social weightlessness of adoptees. But now David Cameron has tapped his Tory toe to it. And so now I have to throw all my Gillian Welch CDs away. Why was Cameron there anyway? What soul mates can jazz-loving Ken Clarke possibly find at Tory conferences? Neil Young - Needle and the Damage Done.