Category: Uncategorized

A note on pile-ons

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The story about the Teen Dad in the Herald today caused one of the bigger blow ups on Twitter since the 2014 elections.

But guess who caused it? No it wasnt Twitter actually who were debating reasonably and (within their right for engaging with the 4th estate) critically amongst themselves.

The journalist who wrote the article inserted themselves into the debate between progressives without prompting. Okay that gets the others debating with the journalist as the journalist has entered into the debate they were not prompted into.

However, things went south when the journalist took offence to being critically critiqued by readers even though critique is part of the role the 4th estate is meant to foster.

It really when south when the Herald’s Nippert decided to stir the pot mouthing off to everyone else putting them down for daring to question the other Herald journalist who rage quit Twitter this morning.

If there is blame it lays solely with the Herald for a tone deaf article. That is nice they praise the teen dad who looks after the tot one day while the teen mum who is still at school still looks after the tot every other time.

Now if the Herald published the story on the mum the framing and commentary from its primary readers would have been of vilification. But for the one day a fortnight dad its praise.

Sure Herald whatever. Oh and if the Herald was trying to prod Social Media to get a story for tomorrow’s pages well….

Announcing the publication of ‘Suburban Urbanities’ with UCL Press

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The Metropolitan Centres as we know as in Auckland or Metropolitan Suburban Centres as this post and new book calls them.

What are the roles of these Centres and are we as both citizens and planners underestimating the potential of these Metropolitan Centres that have been there as long as the modern city has been?

(sub)urbanite's avatarTowards Successful Suburban Town Centres

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…

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