Blog

The balancing act

Three complex dilemmas have emerged with greater force. They are the balance of power between the city and state; the evolving balance between the virtual and the real and the balance between focusing on risk aversion or on promoting creativity. … Read More

Networks are all the rage

Yet can they fulfil their promise. We know we need to connect to keep in touch and know what is going on, to create opportunity or to learn from the best. The manifesto of 20 international cultural networks launched by … Read More

Urbanity & the Nomadic World

I want to recapture ‘being civic’ as something urgent, interesting and compelling, and indeed to help start a movement where it becomes the new common sense. To kick things off I am writing a larger new book scheduled to be … Read More

Between Blandness & beauty

The cultural dimension is the invisible hand of city-making, the core through which ultimately all of our decision-making flows. If a city’s culture is open-minded, potential grows. If it’s closed-minded, it shrinks or nothing happens. But culture is mostly not … Read More

The connector

Successful places have many connectors, who might be organizations or individuals. These connectors and facilitators stand above the nitty gritty of the day to day, important as this is, and look at ‘what really matters’ and where opportunities lie. By … Read More

The digitized city

How will we experience, navigate and understand the digitized, sensorized city whose deeper impacts are yet to unfold as the power of big data emerges with greater force. Disruptive user-driven business models supplying a constant cascade of information have changed … Read More