What's next?
Last night, while chatting with Greg Fisher of Pinnacle Global Strategy, our conversation turned (as usual) to complexity theory.  During the Modern era, much planning theory and practice was a result of the idea that everything about cities and the built environment could be known and understood, giving rise to the notion of planner as all-seeing, omnipotent technocrat.  The backlash to this came with the rise of postmodernism, as the pendulum swung the other way, and theorists told us we could know nothing and that power must be vested in the many, not the few:  This ties in with a notion of chaos in the built system.

Some sense on public space!
Boris Johnson's administration has just published a new strategy for public space, London's Great Outdoors (yeah, it's a cheesy name). It includes these obvious, but very welcome, sentences:   There is a growing trend towards the  private management of publicly accessible  space where this type of ‘corporatisation’  occurs, especially in the larger commercial  developments, Londoners can feel  themselves excluded from parts of their  own city. This need not be the case. At 

Santana Row
Just back from a trip to California, and I spent part of an afternoon in San Jose's Santana Row.  It's a perfect example of the place-maker's art...mixed-use development including a range of retail and entertainment, rental housing, even disguised big-box retail!, a boutique hotel, well-hidden parking lots, all at high density; shared pedestrian/car spaces, good plantings.... Here's the thing, though.  This is not a piece of real townscape.  If you've looked at the link above, you'll quickly realize it's a single-developer shopping mall, a very clever one which has won a few awards and is - according to

Sterling Stirling?
So, Richard Rogers' practice won the 2009 Stirling Prize for the Maggie's Centre in London.  It seems a good, but not great, building, and I am probably not the only, nor first person, to wonder exactly what motivated the jury.  There are two reasons that I ask: First - and not to denigrate the Maggie's Centres, which are a wonderful thing! - Charles Jencks, whose wife Maggie, who died of cancer, had the vision for the Maggie's Centres, has (quite rightly) commissioned several starchitects (Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Rogers are the most high-profile of the lot, which has also included Page & Park and Richard Murphy, with forthcoming designs from Daniel Libeski

The London Plan steps forward
The consultation draft of the new London Plan, the first revision under Boris Johnson's administration, was published yesterday (Monday, October 12 2009).  I attended the de facto launch last night, at an RTPI event at which Sir Simon Milton, deputy mayor and chief of staff, set out the primary points of the new draft. Having led the creation of the evidence base for climate change-related policies in the Further Alterations to the original London Plan several years ago, in which climate change became a central theme for the first time in such a major policy document, I was eager to see wha