Impacts of AirBnB regulation in New York
New York has long been a money spinner for AirBnB. In January 2023 there were 38,500 listings. As…
Planning a Refugee Camp
In 2010 the Commonwealth Association of Planners held its first Student Essay competition. The winners were Jeremiah Atho…
Kes Revisited – The welfare state and community in the late 1960s
Ken Loach’s film, Kes, was released in 1969. What does it tell us about life in a coalfield…
Place Identity, Participation and Planning
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Regional and Local Economic Development
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Cliff is a freelance consultant, researcher, author and trainer. He was the Chair of the Cockburn Association 2016 – 2023.
He is Professor Emeritus of Planning and Spatial Development at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
He is a Past President of the Royal Town Planning Institute, and of the Commonwealth Association of Planners.
He is a past Chair of Built Environment Forum Scotland.
He was awarded the O.B.E. in the 2016 Birthday Honours.
Books
Some articles fromall categories:
NOlympics or GlOlympics
This blog was first posted in December 2015. Klaus Kunzmann proposes a novel approach to staging the Olympic Games after Hamburg and Boston say “No”. Last week, in a referendum, the citizens of Hamburg voted against hosting the Olympics in 2024. To the surprise of the media and a very respected and supportive social democrat…
Stores no more? How shops are changing to meet challenges from e-retailing
As e-shopping eats into the markets previously dominated by traditional shops and stores, what will the retail store of the future look like? Are the malls and the arcades a relic of the last century? What does it mean for our towns and cities? A new article on a specialist retailing website suggests that in the USA…
Levelling Up
What is ‘levelling up’, what are the barriers and how do you overcome them? On 15 July 2021, UK Prime Minister Johnson gave what was intended to be a major statement on ‘levelling up’ the country. It received a tepid reception, with a general consensus in the UK press that it was vague and repackaged past promises…
Seeing Europe through Young Eyes
This blog was first posted in August 2016. Today, it is the young people who most strongly uphold the ideal of Europe as a shared space, where people from different countries lie and work together. The Young Eyes project, that has involved teenagers from Poland, Latvia and Sweden and young professionals from Scotland, shows how…
Climate change and its impacts on a small island state: Tuvalu
Tuvalu from the air (photo courtesy of Dr.Julia Edwards) This blog provides a front line report from Tuvalu, a small island state in the Pacific. Tuvalu is going through urbanization on a scale it has never experienced before, and is also struggling to adapt to the impacts of climate change. This remote and tiny place,…
Force Majeure movie review: Explosions in a landscape
The film Force Majeure focuses on the tensions within a marriage, but it also depicts the tensions between people and the natural environment. The original Swedish title of Ruben Östlund’s internationally acclaimed film Force Majeure is Turist, which is “Tourist”. The pivotal drama in the film is the moment early on when an avalanche of snow threatens to bury the winter…
Resilience of cities in the Global South
Resilience of cities is the theme of the latest issue of the French publication of Villes en Développement edited by my old friend Marcel Belliot. As the preface notes, resilience is now central to “approaches and strategies of governments partnering urban development and of funders.” It brings a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to understanding and managing urban development.…
Local food networks – how what you eat can drive local developmentv
Local food networks are attracting increasing attention. This week I picked up Issue 1 of Nourish Scotland Magazine, which is produced by Scotland’s sustainable food network. Pete Richie, Director of Nourish Scotland, sums up the organisation’s basic vision. It is to “reimagine farming as a service: and a service which is increasingly co-produced by farmers and…
Elites treat the poor as disposable citizens – CV19 in India
Dispatch from Delhi on the CV19 crisis in India’s cities. “The COVID-19 pandemic is deepening the existing ruthless and exclusionary practices in India’s big cities, where elites treat the poor as ‘disposable citizens’ clearly evident when we see thousands of poor migrants being stranded in the middle of nowhere, whereas the upper-class people continue to…
Western Balkans Realities
In the early 1990s Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, triggering a series of vicious wars as ethnic groups contested territories. I have been doing some work looking at current development in the countries of the Western Balkans. Although conditions have certainly improved over the past decade, and the World Bank now rates them as “upper middle…