The edited collection, Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street was published last week with UCL Press.

The main impetus for publishing this edited collection, was to bring together the core findings of seven years’ worth of research into London’s suburbs, funded by two UK Research Council grants: Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres and Adaptable Suburbs. In doing this, we sought out a comparative set of examples from outside of the UK, which were first presented at our closing conference last year. The intention of Suburban Urbanities is to consider the suburb as an aspect of urban spatial-social complexity, rather than subordinate part of the city. We argue that attempting to define an urban particularity entirely without reference to the suburban is almost certain to fail. Instead, using spatial analysis, historical and ethnographic perspectives the book counteracts the binary opposition between city and suburb and challenges…

A few weeks ago, this tweet of mine got a decent amount of attention and inspired a good conversation:

It’s an issue of interest for me for several reasons. First, I spent my summer working on a to-be-released report for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign about people who reverse-commute from New York City to the suburbs. Secondly, as someone who’s lived in several smaller cities, I’m quite conscious of the ways smaller cities struggle to employ their own residents–in other words, job sprawl tends to be worse (and therefore a bigger policy challenge) in smaller cities than larger ones. Finally, my partner is a reverse commuter, from downtown Albany out to near the airport, despite the availability of plenty of open office space and land in…

It’s an interesting issue. Do we sometimes get too defensive about established science? In our efforts to counter the propaganda of the naysayers do we paint an over-optimistic picture of scientific knowledge? Do we sometimes neglect to make a critical analysis of accepted science while at the same time demanding this of the claims made by anti-science critics?

Tracey Brown, director of Sense About Science

Important questions – and don’t tell me they haven’t sometimes caused you to have some uncertainty when defending scientific knowledge from detractors. Of course, you are not alone in this. Tracey Brown, Director of Sense in Science, tackled the subject head on in the annual Sense About Science lecture last week.

The ugly truth

This was the title of her lecture. Perhaps it is a timely warning. We should not be defensive about scientific knowledge – or the policy decisions that rely on that knowledge. We should…