The importance of "planning" your lessons...

There's a lot of unambitious geography around...
Noel Jenkins has never been guilty of that.
His geography has always pushed the boundaries, and developed critical and creative thinking in the students fortunate enough to have him as their teacher.

His latest project is a genius piece of guerilla geography and place-based geography, which re-invents the idea of  pupil participation in the planning process, and the idea of 'localism', as well as local geographies, urban geography and local map skills.

WELLINGTON PLANNING hosts information about some proposed planning decisions that Noel and students have developed.
They are proposed changes to buildings in Wellington, Somerset.

Here, for example, is the planning notice for Waitrose: this will be turned into an alternative usage...

The proposed changes have been developed with local knowledge very much in mind, and that adds an extra dimension to the project.
There have apparently been some "interesting responses" from people who have come across the notices.

Nice work Noel - provocative and inspirational as always !

Twitter for news...

I talked about the use of Twitter as a way of communicating, collecting information, crowdsourcing and other things at the NQT event...

There were 3 or 4 "urban-related" tweets in my overnight feed that I caught up with earlier 'today' while having my breakfast...
Part of my daily routine now is to look at what has happened while I slept, and e-mail any interesting tweets to my e-mail account, so that I have a record of the links, and can follow them up when I have a moment...

This weekend, there has been an urban theme to many of the updates. Several of them were from the excellent @urbanphoto_blog stream... You need to follow them if you don't already.

One led me to the Twisted Sifter blog, from which I got this remarkable image, which apparently shows the suburbs of Mexico City marching into the distance, irrespective of topography.

The images were from Pablo Lopez Luz

I haven't explored the site further, but it seems to have a range of interesting images and other content.
The second site, which was equally arresting is a description of the development of a new (or perhaps not so new it seems) 'city' stretching out into the Caspian Sea from Baku, and called Oily Rocks.

The Liquid Infrastructure blog has the story and more amazing pictures of this complex structure.

Next was the news of a fire in the Garib Nagar slum in Mumbai. One of the houses affected was the home of an actress who featured in the film "Slumdog Millionaire". Of course there were thousands of other people affected too...
This was followed up by another newspaper article on the slums of Mumbai, and plans to bulldoze Dharavi. One to extend into the idea of local politics and ownership of land...

This was followed by a tip-off from Bob Digby to an article on the increased threat that coastal settlements in the UK are likely to face
A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation relates to the idea of Social Justice, and looks at the impact on disadvantaged UK coastal communities.
Click HERE to download the report as a 1.4 Mb PDF file

The possible impacts on East Anglia (as featured in the report) are summarised below...

•  Weakening and collapse of cliffs due to desiccation as a result of higher summer temperatures and lower precipitation; also cliff destabilisation as a result of decreasing vegetation cover.
•  Weakening and collapse of cliffs due to increased precipitation in winter, which causes more water to penetrate into desiccated cracks.
•  Higher rates of coastal erosion from higher sea levels, more frequent storm surges and weakened cliffs.
•  High erosion will cause enhanced rates of longshore drift which may pose threats to the major ports of Great Yarmouth, Felixstowe and Harwich.

And finally, was an article by Rick Poynor on the book "Edgelands", which I am reading via Kindle app at the moment, along with some images of these peripheral areas.

So basically, Twitter - thanks to the Flipbook app - has replaced the need for me to buy a Sunday newspaper...

Urban Stories new on the GA website

Urban Earth is a project developed by Dan Raven Ellison.

I have blogged about it on numerous occasions before as a way for young people to re-present the urban spaces that they inhabit.

Ben Major has put together a great resource called URBAN STORIES on the GA website.

This suggests some additional ideas for using Dan's original URBAN EARTH walks and images....