Compost city: underground music, collapsoscapes and urban regeneration

This paper looks at the recent history of Hulme, Manchester, which during the 1980s was home to many of the most successful bands of the post-punk era. This flourishing of underground music was not planned, however. It emerged, through a complex network of urban forces, some physical, some social. The paper develops the concept of the ‘compost city’ a laissez-faire approach to the management of urban culture, which is oppositional to the current vogue for more hands-on cultural industries management.

Temporal and Urban Peripheries in Systems Thinking

The “Temporal and Urban Peripheries” is the fall project of the final year of the Architecture program of Izmir University of Economics in Turkey. With a critical and contextual look at the built environment, the studio focuses on the significance of the incorporation of history, urban design, and parametrics in architectural design. This short article presents the thrust of the studio, basic concepts, the process, and outcomes.

Space and Place: Lessons from National School Buildings in the North of Ireland

Forms of integrated schooling are currently promoted in post-conflict Northern Ireland, but an earlier attempt to establish secular education in Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the Irish National Schools system – is often forgotten. A preliminary archaeological study of former National Schools indicated differences in size, placement and external appearance between rural and urban buildings, possibly linked to the expression of divergent cultural and religious traditions in conflict with the reforming principles of the national system. This paper uses archaeological and anthropological perspectives to examine the social and cultural significance of such schools, including the first recorded excavation of an Irish National School, in relation to their past and current significance for education, identity, landscape, place and kinship.

Adaptive utilitarianism, social enterprises and urban regeneration

Social enterprises have been placed at the centre of Big Society politics and an emphasis on the local as a site for experimentation and service delivery. Nationally, this has been supported by legislation in community transfer and procurement, social finance and new intermediaries to strengthen skills and loan readiness. This paper examines the role of social enterprises involved in urban development in Northern Ireland and highlights the multiple ethics, legitimation strategies and modalities that are necessary for sustainable forms of progressive regeneration. The paper concludes by stressing the possibilities of a more independent and reformist social economy and how this offers some practical alternatives to the enthusiasm for neoliberal policies in the local state.

Precarious spaces and urban change in post-conflict Belfast

The Northern Ireland conflict is shaped by an ethno-national contest between a minority Catholic/Nationalist/Republican population who broadly want to see the reunification of Ireland; and a majority Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist one, who mainly wish to maintain the sovereign connection with Britain. After nearly three decades of violence, which intensified segregation in schooling, labour markets and especially housing, a Peace Agreement was signed on Good Friday 1998. This paper is concerned with the peace process after the Agreement, not so much for the ambiguous political compromise, but for the way in which the city is constitutive of transformation and how Belfast in particular, is now embedded with a range of social instabilities and spatial contradictions. The Agreement encouraged rapid economic expansion, inward investment, especially in knowledge–intensive sectors and a short-lived optimism that markets and the neo-liberal fix would drive the post-conflict, post-industrial and post-political city. Capital would trump ethnicity and the economic uplift would bind citizens to a new expression of hope based on property speculation, tourism and global corporate investment.

Occupy Differently: Space, Community and Urban Counter-Conduct

This article demonstrates how the concept of counter-conducts helps us understand Occupy by directing attention to the correlation between the way advanced liberalism works to control urban spaces and the way that control is countered through Occupy’s tactics. The first section outlines the term counter-conducts by looking to Foucault’s short and undeveloped theorisation. The second examines how advanced liberalism conducts conduct through the use of urban space, concentrating on London which comes to form a space of and for the mobility and circulation of goods, people and ideas. Occupy’s tactics directly confront and counter such movement while engaging in its own forms of counter-circulation and (im)mobility. The third section examines how advanced liberal techniques have increasingly come to use a particular, heavily instrumentalised understanding of community in order to divide and control urban populations. Occupy’s tactics embody versions of community which confront and oppose such instrumentalisation, ultimately both engaging with that control and partially reproducing it. Through these counter-conducts we can come to a view of Occupy as inevitably succeeding in its failure as a movement and failing in its success, while opening to an (im)possible
futurity of occupying urban space differently.

Integrated Optimal Power Flow for Distribution Networks in Local and Urban Scales

This paper develops an integrated optimal power flow (OPF) tool for distribution networks in two spatial scales. In the local scale, the distribution network, the natural gas network, and the heat system are coordinated as a microgrid. In the urban scale, the impact of natural gas network is considered as constraints for the distribution network operation. The proposed approach incorporates unbalance three-phase electrical systems, natural gas systems, and combined cooling, heating, and power systems. The interactions among the above three energy systems are described by energy hub model combined with components capacity constraints. In order to efficiently accommodate the nonlinear constraint optimization problem, particle swarm optimization algorithm is employed to set the control variables in the OPF problem. Numerical studies indicate that by using the OPF method, the distribution network can be economically operated. Also, the tie-line power can be effectively managed.