The Era of Radical Concrete meets Twitter

Back in 2008, when I moved into my office at the University of Sheffield, there were three mashed up boxes sitting under the desk. My curiosity got the better of me and I spent the next few hours looking through thousands of slides in hanging folders. This turned out to be the image archive of Jimmy James, the first Professor of Planning in our Department and former Chief Planner in England.

In the summer of 2013, after securing funding from the University of Sheffield Alumni Fund, I was able to hire Joe Carr and Philip Brown (recent graduates) to digitise the entire collection and upload it to our dedicated JR James Archive Flickr site. After more than 2 million views and a year online, the BBC magazine did a piece on the archive, called 'The era of radical concrete' which created huge interest and led to a follow up from residents of the places featured in the images. But one image in particular puzzled us... It was simply labelled 'Housing Scotland' (see below for the original slide and the online scanned image)  and we just couldn't fine an exact location for it, but we thought it was in the New Town of Cumbernauld, 15 miles or so from Glasgow.

Note the 'MAY 67' date stamp

Are you the boy? Let us know!

These images were used in teaching planners and urbanists for many years but some of them were not in the right place when we found the slides. We did well to track down the location of most images since between me, Philip and Joe we have a pretty good knowledge of most of the UK and we had thought the one above was of Cumbernauld, because that's where it appeared in the archive.

The New Towns section of the original archive

However, our interest was piqued when a commenter on Flickr said it definitely wasn't Cumbernauld. We tried a few times on Twitter, but to no avail. Even @MunicipalDreams couldn't help us. So, I tried one last time yesterday on Twitter and after 17 retweets we had suggestions that it was definitley NOT South Africa (!), but it might be 'somewhere in Cumbernauld', Falkirk, Dyce, Cwmbran, Killingworth, Peterlee or Saltcoats - among other places. I spent half the night looking round Craigavon, Crawley and Harlow, just to be sure. Nothing.

But this is where Twitter and the power of the crowd came to the fore. Actually, I should say this is when the determination of Michael Coates came to the fore, because ... wait for it ... he found where the photo was taken. It is in fact Abbots View in Haddington, East Lothian - as you can see from the embedded Street View image below. I've shown the 2008 Street View here as it is a better match for location and light but this is definitely it. The perspective of the Google cameras is a little different from Jimmy's original lens but it's a clear match so I declare Michael Coates winner of the Internet today and forever, though the Visual Resources Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University also deserve credit for joining the hunt.

So, that's one mystery solved. But what about the other mystery? Who is the boy on the bike?

By my estimation he'd be about 50 now and if anyone tracks him down we'll really be impressed. In the meantime, if you haven't already looked at the JR James Acrhive, what are you waiting for?

Mapping Blight in the Motor City

In my preparations for the launch of our MSc in Applied GIS, I've been putting together lots of case studies of GIS in action. Luckily for me, this has coincided with the launch of the Motor City Mapping project in Detroit; part of a wider attempt by the city to understand and prevent urban blight. One part of this project has produced an amazing survey dataset covering nearly 380,000 land parcels in the city. An overview of this is provided by Motor City Mapping in the following graphic.

Source: www.motorcitymapping.org

This data was generated by survey staff over a short period of time during winter 2013/4 and is probably the most detailed, parcel-level city survey carried out in recent times. For more about the project, take a look at the short video below. One great feature - in addition to all the rest - is that the final dataset contains a link to the photo taken of each land parcel by the survey staff (residents of Detroit surveyed their own neighbourhoods). The entire dataset is pretty big - close to 1GB - but it can be downloaded via this page and used in your GIS. This direct link worked for me.

The image below shows you what it looks like when you map the data using the land use category. 

Link to bigger version

Finally, since they very cleverly included a photo url for each land parcel in a separate column, I decided to extract a small area and put it in a web map using CartoDB so that you can click each land parcel and see what it looks like, in addition to some of the characteristics of the parcel. I extracted the data for Grand Boulevard since it's an important street in Detroit's history, with important locations such as Lee Plaza, Motown Records and Henry Ford Hospital. Click on the image below to go to the full size version. You'll see that I've coloured the map by building condition - mostly good on Grand Boulevard - and when you click on a land parcel you'll see an image of what's on it plus details about condition, occupancy and use. I also included a date of when the survey was carried out.

Full screen version

This is all part of a wider city planning project called 'Time to End Blight', and you can read more about it on their web pages. The report is a great piece of work in a really difficult time in Detroit's history so it's great to see so many people coming together for this. If you have any interest in cities, urban blight, regeneration or revitalisation then I suggest you take a closer look at the report and its recommendations in particular.

Journal Paper (by former undergraduate!)

I've been guilty of plugging my own academic work on here from time to time, which I suppose is fair enough because this is my blog, but today I thought I'd blog on someone else's work. Hannah Wright, a recent graduate from my Department (Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield) published a shorter version of her third year extended essay in Local Environment, an international peer-reviewed journal. Hannah now works for Arup in London but the paper below was written entirely during her time as an undergraduate at the University of Sheffield. 

I'm aware of undergraduates publishing work in scientific journals as part of larger teams, but I've never heard of a sole-authored publication in a peer-reviewed journal by a social science undergraduate. 

Hannah's work was obviously exceptional, and it is rather unsettling in some ways to see an undergraduate's work in print (!) but ultimately it is just very exciting to see this happen. I could claim that it's all down to the brilliance of the teaching here at TRP or that it's all down to my expert tutoring but I think it's fairer to say that we just provided the right environment for this kind of work. I'm not expecting this to happen again any time soon (though we do have lots of bright sparks on the UG programme) so that's why I thought it blog-worthy.

What does the paper say? Well, it's about green infrastructure and the contested meanings attached to it in English planning policy.

P.S. I'm happy to report that the original essay did receive a First Class mark!

Deprivation in Sheffield

This summer I was asked to write a report about deprivation in Sheffield. I finished this in September and the reaction since then has been quite positive (i.e. people have actually been reading it!). So, I thought I'd link to it directly here and also pull out a few of the main findings from it. Click on the image below to see the pdf - or just click here.

In the report I look at how patterns of deprivation in Sheffield compare to 13 other cities in England. Sheffield is not as deprived as many other cities (e.g. Liverpool, Manchester) but the geography of deprivation in the city means that it is one of the most divided - spatially at least. In one sense this might have something to do with the boundaries of local authorities and how wide an area they cover but, ultimately, it is at the local government level that issues associated with deprivation are most acutely felt so the boundary issue is only part of the problem.

I also look at the differences between areas that seem to be similar in terms of how deprived they are. In doing so I draw upon some previous work I did with colleagues at the University of Manchester. The bottom line here is that there there is a need to think more deeply about the different roles and contexts of areas and how they differ from each other - particularly in relation to how policies are formulated.

There is also a need to think about issue of social and spatial inequality more widely rather than simply focusing on the 'most deprived' locations, though of course this will remain a policy priority in many cities. 

Comparing Deprivation in the English Core Cities

The eight English core cities outside London often work together on issues that affect them. One thing I've been looking at recently on some work in Sheffield is how the core cities compare in terms of patterns of deprivation. So, I've mapped and compared them below. Red areas are amongst the 10% most deprived in England and the darkest blue areas are amongst the 10% least deprived in England. The maps are at different scales but the point here is just to provide a quick visual comparison of cities in this map matrix view.

Sheffield Deprivation

I've been experimenting with deprivation data (again) and google maps (again). This time I've overlaid deprivation data for Sheffield on to google maps. I did this by using a fairly simple technique, which includes making sure the geographic projection is correct. I've described this before too.

You can pan/zoom on the embedded map below, but to see the full thing you'll need to click on 'View Larger Map'. Once you've done that you can see further information on the left hand side. You can turn layers on and off using the little tick boxes on the left and you can query the map by clicking it.

Not much else to say apart from take a look at the map below.


View Larger Map

Sheffield Demolition

Quiet on the blogging front recently, but yesterday I had the chance to see a Sheffield Building toppled. The old Osborne Mushets on Penistone road (in street view below), was demolished to make way for new development. More changes to Sheffield's old industrial landscape.


View Larger Map

I took some photos and a video of the event...

Regeneration 2000-2009

Much has been written about regeneration in the UK over the past decade. A couple of days ago I saw a piece in the Guardian about 'regeneration in the noughties'. Interesting stuff - basically, it says that a decade of regeneration has resulted in nice looking city centres but not a lot else. In particular, it looks at the experience in Sheffield. (For Sheffield, the Sheffield blog is also quite interesting.)

I wrote a blog post about this general topic ages ago but it's useful to reflect on the past decade since the new one looks like it will be all about public spending cuts and not much shiny new regeneration.

Old Industrial Landscapes

A short post today, on the topic of old industrial landscapes. Specifically, pictures of Kelham Island in Sheffield. I showed some German professors around this area during the summer as part of a short walking tour. I find the area fascinating so here are some photos I took.

Click the slideshow below to see the full size version.