FYI,

"Future Vision: Future Cities"
sponsored by the Transport Research Group and LSE Cities Programme
http://www.transportresearch.org.uk/FutureCities.htm

: A one-day conference to be held at the London School of Economics,
: Old Building, Houghton Street, London WC2
: Saturday, December 6th 2003

: Tickets: £12 and £8

: Speakers include:
: Laurie Taylor (broadcaster); Miranda Sawyer (BBC Late Review and
: author 'Park & Ride'); Jonathan Glancey (architecture critic, The
: Guardian); Dr Henry MacCracken (Paris Observatory); Dea Birkett
: (author and travel writer); Sean Topham (author 'Where's My Space
: Age'); David Satterthwaite (UN Human Settlements Programme); Penny
: Lewis (Prospect magazine); Phil Mullan (author 'The Imaginary
: Timebomb); Daniel Ben-Ami (author 'Cowardly Capitalism); Austin
: Williams (Technical Editor, Architects' Journal) and many more....

: For more information and booking, contact:
: mail@...

: Arrivals & introduction

: 10:00 Opening remarks
: On the 100th anniversary of Ford's production plant, the
: Harley-Davidson and the Wright Brothers' first powered flight, as
: well as Britain's first Garden City at Letchworth and the 150th
: anniversary of Haussmann's planning for Paris, this conference is
: timely. It will examine transport and city visions - past and
: present - to understand what's changed? It will cover issues of
: risk-taking and risk-aversion; visionary thinking versus low
: horizons; and techno-fears and techno-solutions. This conference
: attempts to capture the pioneering spirit.

: 10:15 - 11:30am OPENING PLENARY
: Dan Dare or Dan Daren't
: Whatever happened to the jet-pack; the monorail; the personalised
: Lear jet; Maglev; automated highways; the long-haul flights by space
: shuttle? Commonplace aspirations for the future in the Sixties,
: which seem to have been replaced by more sober transport predictions
: in the Noughties. Nowadays, aviation policy demands restraint,
: transport gurus cycle to work, and space travel is deemed to be too
: risky.

: Whatever happened to the Walking City; intelligent homes; climatic
: domes; Plug-in cities; New Towns; underwater houses; and domestic
: robots? Today, what place is there for labour-saving devices when
: saving resources is preferred to saving time; what role is there for
: the city when city planners promote urban villages; what place for
: human intervention when nature is prioritised; and what about urban
: growth when urban compaction is the new big idea?

: Have we lost our vision or are we just more sensible?

: Readings: "What the Victorians Did for Us," Adam Hart-Davis,
: Headline. 2001
: "Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition," Bent Flyvbjerg,
: Cambridge University Press. 2003
: "Where's my Space Age? The rise and Fall of Futuristic Design," Sean
: Topham, Prestel, 2003
: "Tunnelling to the Future: The Story of the Great Subway Expansion
: That Saved New York," Peter Derrick, New York University Press. 2001
: "The Victorians," A N Wilson, Hutchinson. 2002

: 11:30 – 12:00 Coffee & Tea Break

: 12:00 - 13:00 CONCURRENT WORKSHOPS
: From Dystopia to Myopia: "Metropolis" to "Blade Runner"
: A look at the changing historic visions of the city using different
: cinematic examples from different periods. Has the image of the city
: become more dystopian? Can we achieve a useful examination of the
: subject through a cultural rather than a political critique?
: A discussion with film clips

: Readings:
: "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Philip K. Dick, Gollancz,
: 1999
: "Projected Cities: Cities and Urban Space," Stephen Barber, Reaktion
: Books. 2003
: "The Cultural Economy of Cities: Essays on the Geography of
: Image-Producing Industries," Allen J Scott, Sage. 2000
: "I. Robot," Asimov, Collins. 1971

: or
: More Speed; Less Haste
: Whatever happened to the dream of the 24-hour city - and would we
: lose something if we achieved it? Were we better off – or just
: better organized - when we traveled less and worked more regular
: hours? Some people argue that we have diminished our pleasure in
: life by forgetting to take time to enjoy things. Why is speed – in
: transport and in everyday life experience - regularly portrayed in a
: negative way? Should we learn to slow down or move up a gear?

: Readings:
: "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything," James Gleick,
: Pantheon, 1999
: "Living on Thin Air: The New Economy," Charles Leadbeater, Penguin,
: 2000
: "The Sky's the Limit: policies for sustainable aviation," Simon
: Bishop and Tony Grayling, Institute of Public Policy Research. 2003
: "Thrust: the Remarkable Story of One Man's Quest for Speed," Richard
: Noble, Partridge. 1998

: 13:00 - 14:00 Lunch

: 14:00 - 15:00 CONCURRENT WORKSHOPS
: Megapolis: The dense city question
: Often, the discussion of cities, densification, urban migration,
: etc, is a coded way of talking about the population question? Are
: there too many, or too few people living in cities? What differences
: are there in the debate relating to First World cities and
: Developing World cities? Should we take up more space or less?

: Readings:
: "To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform," Ebenezer Howard, new
: edition with foreword by David Lock, Routledge (Taylor & Francis).
: 2003
: "Cities for a Small Planet," Richard Rogers, ed Philip Gumuchdjian,
: Faber and Faber, 1997
: "Sustainable Cities in Developing Countries,"Cedric Pugh, Earthscan.
: 2000
: "The Population Bomb," Paul Ehrlich, Buccaneer Books, 1997
: "The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Cities," ed. David
: Satterthwaite, Earthscan, 1999
: "Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century,"
: ed David Gissen, Princeton Architectural Press, 2003
: "The UN Strategic Vision," UN Human Settlements Programme, May 2003,
: downloadable from:
: http://www.unhabitat.org/documents/HabVision030505Public.pdf
: "The State of the World's Cities Report 2001,"
: http://www.unchs.org/istanbul+5/statereport.htm

: or
: To Boldly Go…?
: After the Columbia disaster, has space travel had its day? In the
: 60s we dreamt of space colonies, or interstellar vacations, (and
: Electric Sheep). But back then - in an era of Mutually Assured
: Destruction – did this reflect something of a survivalist mentality?
: Were Gerard K O'Neill's Island One, or even the terrestrial versions
: of Buckminster Fuller's Spaceship Earth or Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti,
: positive aspirations?

: Is space travel just another way to get away from it all? Is space
: the final frontier or just the preserve of rich tourists? Is space
: an irrelevance, an escape or an ambition? Is it a thing of the past?
: After all, what is space travel for?

: Readings:
: "Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World
: Beyond," Marina Benjamin, Chatto and Windus. 2003
: "The Case for Mars," Robert Zubrin, Pocket Books. 1998
: "The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky technology, culture and
: deviance at NASA," Diane Vaughan, University of Chicago Press, 1997
: "Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival," Martin
: Rees FRS, Heinemann. 2003
: "2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future," Gerard K O'Neill,
: Jonathan Cape, 1981
: "The First Men in the Moon," H.G. Wells, Gollancz. (1895) 2001
: edition
: "High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space," Gerald K O'Neill
: (introduction by Freeman Dyson), Apogee Books. (1975) 2001 edition

: 15:00 – 15:10 Interval

: 15:10 – 16:10 CONCURRENT WORKSHOPS
: Drivers for Efficiencity
: On the 30th anniversary of the publication of EF Schumacher's 'Small
: is Beautiful', we ask whether cities are efficient or inefficient
: places to live and work. After all, cities use many times more
: resources and create much more waste per capita that non-urban
: areas. Is that a problem?

: It does seem to be a curious situation that we transport things long
: distances when we can produce similar goods locally? Would
: small-scale production and consumption cycles add something to the
: quality of city living, or is that more suited to patterns of
: village life?

: Should we save labour or save resources? Is reducing waste a waste
: of energy? Are cities and their transport systems really
: disorganised or do we overstate the problem? In terms of
: manufacture, transport and consumption, should 'efficiency' be
: encouraged, ignored or imposed; and what is meant by 'efficiency'
: anyway?

: Readings:
: "The Gaia Atlas of Cities: New Directions for Sustainable Urban
: Living," Herbert Girardet, Gaia Books. 1996
: "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things," William
: McDonough, Michael Braungart, Rodale Books. 2002
: "Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution,"Paul Hawken,
: Amory B. Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Earthscan. 2000
: "Cowardly Capitalism: The Myth of the Global Finance Casino," Daniel
: Ben-Ami, John Wiley and Sons, 2001

: or
: There is no such thing as society - only local solutions
: The government's first Urban Renaissance award, presented by John
: Prescott at the Urban Summit, didn't go to a scheme featuring loft
: living, street cafes and pedestrianised boulevards as might have
: been expected from the hype about development-led urban
: regeneration. Instead, the award for the project that best made
: 'towns and cities better places to live and work' went to an estate
: in Northampton that had evicted 'anti-social tenants', introduced
: neighbourhood wardens and pruned trees as an 'innovative approach…
: to reduce crime.'

: From New Urbanism to the new urban renaissance, regeneration seems
: to be centred on community participation and local solutions. Is
: this democratic empowerment for local people or an anti-democratic
: collapse of national solutions? Does it cohere - or fragment and
: isolate? Is localism the precursor to more universal worldview; or
: its antithesis? Is this the starting point of globalism; or a
: reversion to parochialism?

: Readings:
: "Making the Connections: Transport and Social Exclusion," Report by
: the Social Exclusion Unit, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. 2003
: "Park and Ride: Adventures in Suburbia," Miranda Sawyer, Abacus.
: 2001
: "The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators," Charles Landry,
: Earthscan. 2000
: "The Chosen City," Nicholas Schoon, Spon Press. 2001
: "Towards an Urban Renaissance: Final Report of the Urban Task
: Force," Urban Task Force, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. 1999
: "Art for who's sake," Pauline Hadaway, Architects' Journal, 24 July
: 2003. pp38-40

: 16:10 – 16: 30 Tea & Coffee Break

: 16:30 – 17:45 CLOSING PLENARY
: Tomorrow's World: Visions of the Future Where shall we live and how
: shall we travel? What are today's guiding principles that are
: shaping our future vision? What needs to be done to benefit future
: generations?

: This session will tie together many of the themes of the day.

: Readings:
: "Future Shock," Alvin Toffler, Pan. (1970) 1985 edition
: 'Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence,'
: Peter Schwartz, Free Press. 2003
: "Culture of Fear: Risk Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation,"
: Frank Furedi, Continuum. 2002
: "Free Flight Inventing the Future of Travel," James Fallows,
: PublicAffairs. 2002
: "City After the Automobile: Architect's Vision," Moshe Safdie, Wendy
: Kohn, Westview Press, 1998

: 18:00 – 19:30 WINE RECEPTION

Mark Reiff