owen-hatherley-ruins-great-britain

So, in China I couldn't read or post on Facebook, Twitter or Blogger, nor could 'salacious' images of any kind be contemplated - but I could entirely freely read Guardian and Wikpedia articles that were fiercely critical of Chinese censorship, all of which suggests either/both that the Firewall is less bothered about what Anglophones read or that it is actually an anti-procrastination service. However, it turned out I picked a very good time to be on the other side of the globe - details on the frankly terrifying Comprehensive Spending Review and its likely consequences at K-Punk, Fantastic Journal and Rejectamentalist Manifesto. Meanwhile, there are many, many thoughts I might end up posting up here about Shanghai, and most of them will be about expressways, lighting, and the precipitous aesthetic of combined and uneven development you find out there (and the question of whether or not it is undergoing the longest and most intense imaginable version of Lenin's New Economic Policy - cf Zizek); but until then, here's a post with the usual mix of things written elsewhere and self-promotion.

A long piece for Mute on Zaha Hadid, Parametricism and Neoliberalism. As long-term readers will know, I am unexpectedly soft on Zaha, so this piece sees me attempt to justify this, while being quite clear about what it is she represents.

A short synopsis/summation of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain for the Guardian, where the URL is amusing; there's also a very nice review by Andy Beckett. Further reasons to go out and buy it this minute can be found in this review by Patrick Wright for Architecture Today, which also attributes a line to me on Calatrava which is much better than the lines I actually wrote. Further inducements at the Sunday Times, the Scotsman and the Daily Worker; and an interview at the Oxonian Review of Books, by Alex Niven.

Meanwhile, anyone who has read it, or is in any way sympathetic to its arguments, should go forthwith to World Communal Heritage, a group dedicated to preserving the public spaces of Modernist planning, from Yugoslavia to the Elephant and Castle. Like Proles for Modernism, some might think I'm making this up, but I'm not, in neither case...Extract from the World Communal Heritage Manifesto:

There are no safeguards or fences enclosing the public space! You can gather together without paying a fortune for a certain lifestyle promoted in the privatized and gentrified inner-city! The openness, porosity and communicability of Modernist social architecture and landscaping takes shape in a wealth of free space, pedestrian pathways, bridges, passages, niches, little woods and bushes, offering liberty of action to a high degree.

Not online, yet, but in All Good Newsagents: a bad-tempered review of a book on Walter Benjamin and Architecture in Radical Philosophy, and a less bad-tempered review of Ben Myers' Richard in New Humanist. An earlier review for the latter of Herve Juvin's The Coming of the Body is now online.

Finally, being born in the 80s and all, I have little to contribute to, but am avidly reading, ...And What Will Be Left Of Them?, a group blog on the 1970s set up by the Impostume's Carl Neville...whose Classless, now in (some) shops, is a spectacularly good book, perhaps the best Zero have put out - distilling a lifetime's anger into a precise evisceration of recent British film, and more unusually, an attempt to find the films which provide an alternative (Morvern Callar, the severely overlooked Orphans). Also, and irrelevantly to the book's superlative quality, the cover photo of a Cinema turned Evangelical Church in Woolwich was taken by me.