A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain
What happens when ruination overtakes regeneration? Following on from A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley investigates the fate of British cities in the desolate new world of savage public-sector cuts, when government funds are withdrawn and the Welfare State abdicates. He explores the urban consequences of what Conservatives privately call the "progressive nonsense" of the Big Society and "the localism agenda," the putative replacement of the state with charity and voluntarism; and he casts an eye over the last great Blairite schemes limping to completion, from London's Shard to the site of the 2012 Olympics. Crisscrossing Britain from Aberdeen to Plymouth, from Croydon to Belfast, A New Kind of Bleak finds a landscape left to rot- and discovers strange and potentially radical things growing in the wasteland.
Hardback, 288 pages
ISBN: 9781844678570
July 2012
$29.95 / £20.00 / $37.50CAN
Blog
Verso's guide to political walking
Inspired by Patrick Keiller's The Robinson Institute, currently on show at the Tate Britain, we present Verso's guide to political walking. We also draw influence from Will Self's Guardian article in which he pronounces that "walking is political" and suggests that the "contemporary flâneur" can be one "who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control."
1. Wanderlust - Rebecca Solnit
The first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit's book finds a profound relationship between walking and thinking, walking and culture, and argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in an ever more automobile-dependent and accelerated world.
2. Savage Messiah - Laura Oldfield Ford
Savage Messiah collects Laura Oldfield Ford's black and white, cut 'n' paste, punk fanzines that document her drift through London's margins. Illustrated with haunting line drawings of forgotten people and places, Oldfield Ford records the beauty and anger at the city's edges.
Metropolitan resistance: David Harvey reviewed
Despite their divergent starting points, Owen Hatherley, writing for the Guardian, and Edwin Heathcote, architecture editor for the Financial Times, find common ground in their appreciation of David Harvey's new book on the politics of the urban environment, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.
Upcoming Events
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June 07, 2012
Architecture Foundation
SHIFTS: Owen Hatherley - A New Kind of Bleak
Owen Hatherley discusses 'A New Kind of Bleak' at the Architecture Foundation -
July 13, 2012
British Library
Journeys through Urban Britain
With Owen Hatherley, Owen Jones and Laura Oldfield Ford
Discussions
Begin a discussionOther books by Owen Hatherley
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A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain
A darkly humorous architectural guide to the decrepit new Britain that neoliberalism built.