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Mark Tewdwr-Jones | Lunch Hour Lecture with UCL East

22 November 2020

Urban rooms: How stories of place unlock engagement and research

Prof Mark Tewdwr-Jones Lunch Hour Lecture with UCL East

You can now watch Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones giving his UCL Lunch Hour Lecture (with UCL East) on YouTube.

Urban rooms carry lessons for imagining how universities, governments, and community groups may come together to critically and creatively forge future propositions for the urban condition.

Genuine engagement about how best to achieve liveable urban futures should be part of planning’s raison-d’etre but it has a chequered history of delivery. Exhibitions harnessing the communicative power of mixed media and linked to a progressive and responsive programme of focused discussion and debate remain relevant to community consultation and civic engagement.

Terry Farrell’s concept of the ‘urban room’ to involve citizens in engaging with the past, present, and future of towns and cities offers a contemporary refreshment of the approach propounded by Patrick Geddes from the early 1900s. 

Through this guise, Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones, Professor of Cities and Regions at Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL, will explore the possibilities of creating novel and compelling opportunities for civic discourse through the Newcastle City Futures pop-up exhibition and events held in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK in 2014.

UCL Urban Laboratory and Culture Lab are working to bring an Urban Room and Memory Workshop to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park as part of the first phase of the UCL East development. Find out more about the facility on our website.

Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones

Professor of Cities and Regions at Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL

Mark is UCL Bartlett Professor of Cities and Regions at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. The author of 20 books, his specialist fields are urban and regional planning, future cities, public engagement and local democracy, digital planning, and urban history. He is a former UK government advisor on planning and housing issues and has been a visiting professor at Berkeley, Sydney, Guadalajara, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Pretoria, Dublin, and Nijmegen.

More about Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones