Urban Practitioners Lecture Series - Double Bill: Ben Campkin & Michael Hebbert

In conjunction with the Bartlett School of Architecture's MArch Urban Design course's introductory work on London, a series of guest lecturers with an intimate knowledge of the city have been invited to speak about its history, development, characteristics and the strategies which will shape it. These lectures are open to all.

Friday 8 November 2013 | Double Bill: Ben Campkin / Michael Hebbert

Dr Ben Campkin: Regeneration and Sink Spectacle

This talk will consider contemporary regeneration in London historically and through the evidence of cultural artefacts produced and mobilised within urban change. How has the metaphor of regeneration changed over time? How do ideas of urban degradation propel renewal? Looking across a range of sources - journalism and photojournalism, architectural design, cinema and fine art - similar questions arise around the ethics and aesthetics of representing poverty and material degradation ('sink'), and in the tensions between projections of change produced by regeneration professionals and other agents.

Ben Campkin is Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory and Senior Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory, Bartlett School of Architecture. He is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture(London: I. B. Tauris, 2013) and co-editor of Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (IB Tauris, 2007, paperback 2012), and his work has recently appeared in journals such as Architectural Theory Review(2013), The Journal of Architecture (2007) and Architectural Design (2010).

Professor Michael Hebbert: London - 'Unique City'?

First published in 1934, Stein Eileer Rasmussen's London: The Unique City is still in print and picking up 'likes' and five star ratings in the blogosphere for its lucid exposition of the city's history and physical distinctiveness. Eighty years on we can revisit that analysis of what made London unique and ask if Rasmussen might reach a different verdict today. 

Michael Hebbert is author of London - More by Fortune than Design (1998), a book which updated Rasmussen and now itself needs updating, demonstrating that a city's history never stands still. Professor of Town Planning at UCL and Professor Emeritus of the University of Manchester, Michael read history at Oxford and edits the leading international journal for the history of town planning, Planning Perspectives. His recent work has looked at the role of climatic factors in urban design.