Wednesday 30 July 2008

Spatial Planning - The New Rock and Roll?

Okay, the title is totally tongue in cheek because spatial planning is not exactly everyone's cup of tea (in fact, it's not a cup of tea at all). However, it is important even though most people haven't heard of it and many others who have don't know what it's all about. Over the past couple of years I've been involved in two projects relating to spatial planning, both of which were sponsored by the RTPI. One of them was recently published in full and in executive summary format - they can be accessed here. Believe it or not, this kind of work does have an influence and can help us better understand spatial processes and how they might impact on all kinds of areas and a variety of different activities. A couple of thumbnails showing the cover pages of the reports resulting from this work...

















July has been a busy month with conference, writing and visiting different places so hopefully there will be more activity here in August.

Wednesday 9 July 2008

Writings from Chicago

There hasn't been much blogging activity here lately but that's because I've been preparing for the ACSP-AESOP Joint Congress in Chicago. It's a big planning conference held every 4 or 5 years by the US and European planning organisations ACSP and AESOP respectively. I am now at the conference. There are over 1,000 delegates and so far it's been very interesting (currently it is Tuesday 8th July here and the conference runs to Friday).

I am giving my paper on Wedensday the 9th of July in the 8am session so hopefully lots of early birds there. I decided to screencast it and make it available online. I think this will be a useful tool for anyone who wants to revisit what I've said because it can often be quite a difficult thing to digest so many presentations at conferences. The paper is on geovisualisation and spatial structure using an example from UK migration data from the 2001 Census.

About to sign off for now, but I've added a photo on the left showing the view of downtown Chicago from my window.