Apologies for cross-posting........this may be of interest to
some....
jo twist
CUT
Newcastle Uni
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 14:54:48 +0100 (BST)
From: "S.J. Marvin" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask],
ACADEMICS NEWDEPT <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CUT PHD STUDENTSHIP - NEW TECHNOLOGY/NEW URBANISM
Reply-to: "S.J. Marvin" <[log in to unmask]>
Dear Colleague
We are looking for applicants (Deadline June 20th) for an ESRC
collaborative PhD studentship with BT. Full details are attached below.
Please feel free to circulate.
Apologies for cross posting.
Simon Marvin and Steve Graham
______________________________________________________________
New Technology/New Urbanism:
Making Places Through Information
Technologies
Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin
ESRC/BT PhD Award
0. ESRC Collaborative Studentship
The Centre for Urban Technology and British Telecom
invite applications for a fully-funded three year
collaborative PhD studentship at Newcastle University.
1. Introduction
We are bombarded almost daily with rhetoric and
hyperbole about the Information Society,
cyberspace and the information super highway.
Instantaneous flows of money, capital, services, labour
power, information and media products, flitting around
the planet, are seen to be driving social and economic
change within and between spaces. Much of this
excited commentary from the media, technology
industries, and futurists is based on the endless
recycling of a series of received wisdoms.
* Our economy, society and culture is
simultaneously becoming global and
migrating into the on-line realm of vast
networks of interconnected computers and
digital media appliances.
* As a result, anything can now be done
anywhere and at any time, via wires or
satellites strung our across the globe.
* The whole notion of the high density city is
becoming problematic, as workers start to
decentralise to idyllic electronic cottages
where they can maintain intimate contact with
work, family, friends, and services remotely.
2. Dilemmas for Urban Planning in the
Information Society
Of course any planner would already know instinctively
that the information society rhetoric suggesting the
end of geography or the death of cities is both
profoundly misleading and dangerously simplistic. For
one thing, the familiar life of towns and cities does not
somehow die just because IT capabilities are growing.
A lot more holds towns and cities together and
sustains urban growth than just their ability to support
concentrated, face-to-face communication. In fact,
nationally, the urban dominance of the economy,
society and culture shows few signs of waning. More
widely, the age of mega-cities shows that global
urban dominance is actually growing rapidly. All that is
changing is that cities are becoming more and more
bound up with the widespread shift to mediation by IT
networks in all aspects of urban life.
All this means that the classic planning issues that stem
from concentrated living in urban areas - congestion,
pollution, environmental conflict, social and cultural
divisions and inequities, physical development - will
not go away and will continue to fill planners in trays.
Transport demands at all scales are rising in parallel
with exploding use of telecommunications, rather than
simply being replaced by it. Both feed off each other in
complex ways and the shift is towards a highly mobile
and communications-intensive society.
The links between interaction in urban places and IT
are complex, subtle, and sometimes counter-intuitive.
For example, the growing use of IT can actually make
urban development more concentrated, as well as
allowing dispersal from high cost to low costs
locations. In the City of London, for example, highly
concentrated growth continues, fuelled by the need for
more face-to-face contact to interpret the exploding
flows of information on global IT networks. In fact, in
a highly volatile and competitive context, major
global cities are becoming global anchor points with
the social milieus and assets most suited to high-level
corporate and decision making functions and
continuous innovation. Cities like London help global
firms and institutions minimise risks, strategically
control their interests over long distances, access many
complementary services and infrastructures, and, above
all, maintain highly skilled work forces whos on-going,
face-to-face work can support continuous innovation,
so keeping ahead of the competition.
3. Key Questions
IT networks and services are closely bound up in the
manifold production of all types of new urban space
and the restructuring of old urban space. Whilst town
and cities are maintaining - some would say increasing
- their importance in the Information Society urban
planners still confront many uneasy dilemmas. For
example:
* What becomes of urban and regional
planning, of policies aimed at particular pieces
of territory, when flows and interconnection
across boundaries and between places are
growing so rapidly ?
* How can the often fairly arbitrary partitions
of space that planners are responsible for
relate coherently to this burgeoning world of
connections and flows of power via electronic
networks that work instantaneously and in
real time ?
* How can strategies be developed that
position individual places favourably within
the Information Society when few planners
have any knowledge of, or power over,
information infrastructures and the complex
social processes through which they are
applied and used ?
* And how can planners best understand the
new urban dynamics surrounding the invisible
infrastructures of telecommunications, and
the seemingly unimaginable flows which
move over them ?
In short, is there a place for strategic and local planners
to get involved in this arcane and mysterious new world
? After all, such flows seem particularly problematic
from the point of view of the traditional planners mind
set of land use parcels, externalities, and hard, visible
infrastructures. If there is, how best can this happen?
4. Towards Recombinant Urban Planning
So, difficult questions, tumultuous times. But planners
are not standing still in the face of these challenges. In
fact, many local agencies are now beginning to
experiment with information infrastructures for the first
time, as planning tools for directly helping to shape
new types of urban places. These we call, for want of
a better term, recombinant urban planning
initiatives. This we defines as the combined planning
of information and physical infrastructures within new
urban places. A wide range of recombinant urban
strategies and plans are rapidly emerging, designed to
propel places as sites for investment and creativity in
the new media and communication landscape. Not
surprisingly, given the relevance of communications
and IT to all built environment and development
professions, the role of formally-trained planners in
these initiatives - as opposed to transport agencies,
architects, property firms, media and telecoms
companies, urban regeneration agencies, and the like -
varies markedly.
It is increasingly clear that, almost unnoticed in the
planning literature, a whole new set of geographical
landscapes and planning practices are quickly
emerging, driven by the economic, social, cultural and
technological dynamics of urban development in this
globalising age. Recombinant urban planning
initiatives demonstrate forcefully that new technology
means neither some simple end to the importance of
space, place, nor the collapse of face-to-face contacts
in towns and cities, or the transport demands that
derive from them. Rather, cities are co-evolving with
new communications networks and applications, as
they did with the telegraph, telephone, cinema and
newsprint before them.
In fact, the specific assets and characteristics of
individual spaces and places are becoming more
important . This is because powerful organisations,
especially Transnational firms, are now able to
scrutinise what each place offers much more intimately
within the myriad of location options available, within a
context of increasingly free-flowing capital, finance,
goods, technology, services and information. As giant
global networks linking places together become the
norm, places need to fight relentlessly to make sure,
first, that their territories are represented on them
(rather than being off line, excluded and
marginalised), and, second, that they are represented in
ways that bring the greatest possible developmental
benefits and spinoffs, within complex international
divisions of labour.
All this needs to work in an era of spiralling inter-urban
competition at local, regional, national, even global
scales. The shift to a globally-interconnected network
society thus requires particular urban places within
which the intense face-to-face demands of innovation
and work, of cultural, leisure and social activities, can
work most productively and creatively to complement
the network interconnections and infrastructures
between places. Cities - by which I mean extended
urban regions rather then monocentric urban cores - are
therefore the key anchor points in todays volatile,
highly mobile, and fragmented economy and society.
In this context we would argue that the above types of
tele planning initiatives are beginning to constitute
nothing less than a new type of urban planning. This
attempts to establish the institutional frameworks
through which new urban places can be produced. Such
places must subtly combine the hard infrastructure
(both information and traditional) and the built
environments most suited for information-intensive
industries and activities, along with the IT applications
and soft assets required to tempt in media
conglomerates and/or nurture local talent. Included
here are high quality environments, highly-skilled
personnel, business support and training, links with
universities and scarce knowledge resources, marketing
and image making, tax and regulatory incentives, and
the intangible specifics of place necessary to make face-
to-face technological innovation work.
5. Emerging Styles of Recombinant Planning
This project will focus on three emerging types of
recombinant planning:
1. Smart Communities and Televillages
In California, new urban TeleVillage or smart
community initiatives are rapidly emerging. These
attempt to insert optic fibre grids and advanced
information services into the fabric of the master-
planned, liveable and relatively high density
communities of the new urbanism movement. In LA,
urban TeleVillages are being positioned near rapid
transit stations within ambitious, integrated plans to
manage transport and teleworking together in whole
urban corridors, in a sophisticated effort to reduce
automobile use.
2. Digital Cultural Districts
But cultural industries are being digitised too. In the
centres of older industrial cities like Manchester, New
York and Dublin, so-called information districts are
emerging, usually spontaneously. In these, small and
micro digital media firms - the sort currently thriving
based on the fusion of Digital design, Internet services,
advertising, music and art - concentrate into gentrifying
inner urban neighbourhoods. Such places are attractive
as they can support the sort of ambient street life which
attracts new entrepreneurs and supports the sort of
intense, on-going, face-to-face contact necessary to
design highly creative products for the Internet and
cultural industries. Increasingly, such concentrations
are being backed up by local strategies for
environmental improvement, skills training, tax breaks,
and the construction of specially-provided Internet-
ready real estate, equipped with optic fibre to the
desk. In short, urban cultural strategies are catching up
with the new media .
3. Intelligent Corridors
Giant among the emerging generation of urban tele
planning initiatives is the Multimedia Supercorridor in
Malaysia. Here, in effect, at the heart of the
burgeoning miracle economies of the ASEAN block
in South East Asia - Malaysia itself is growing at 8%
per annum - a whole national development strategy has
effectively been condensed into a single, grandiose
urban plan for a vast new urban corridor. The aim of
the MSC is nothing less than to replace Malaysias
manufacturing -dominated economy by a booming
constellation of services, IT , media and
communications industries by turning a vast stretch of
rain forest and rubber plantations into "Asias
technology hub" by the year 2020. The MSC starts
the centre of the capital, Kuala Lumpur - itself a
booming city symbolised by the new Petronas twin
towers, momentarily at least, the worlds tallest
buildings. It ends 30 miles south at an immense new
international airport strategically placed on the routes
to Singapore.
6. The Project
The aims of this project are to:
1. Place the emergence of recombinant
planning into the wider context of theoretical
debates about cities, urbanisation, and
technology.
2. Construct a review of the emerging strands
of recombinant planning by doing a content
analysis of web pages, secondary material
and other available information, addressing
the following questions:
* Who are the dominant interests shaping the
emerging strategies and through what
planning styles are they operating ?
* What rationales and rhetoric are associated
with the strategies ?
* What types of assumptions are built into the
initiatives about social inclusion,
environmental sustainability, local versus
global economic interests, local democracy
versus global corporate power etc?
3. Produce, using the theoretical and analytical
framework developed in the above sections,
a thesis examining the scope, practice, and
potential of recombinant planning, as a new
and important style of urban planning
practice.
7. Research Training and Programme
A full, seven module, assessed research training
package in social sciences research will be offered by
Newcastle University. Three modules will be offered in
the first term. One will address PhD management
(approaching and starting the PhD, establishing peer
support networks, managing relationships with
Supervisor), thesis management and legal and ethical
issues. A second will give an overall introduction to IT
skills, including Word Processing, e-mail and the
Internet. The third will introduce advanced library
search skills. The second term will offer modules on the
nature of enquiry and explanation in the social sciences,
the use of quantitative research methods, an
introduction to qualitative methods, and, finally,
research relationships and research management.
Following the Faculty Programme, Departmental and
Centre support will be given in the form of regular
supervision meetings, annual PhD seminar series, and
annual Faculty PhD conferences organised by students
8. Practical Details
Assessment Criteria: All applicants should have, or
expect to obtain, a First or Upper Second Class
honours degree in a relevant discipline and must satisfy
the ESRC residential eligibility requirements.
Length of Project : 3 calendar years from the end of
September 1998
Amount of Award: The studentship attracts a #2800
personal allowance from BT, which is in addition to the
standard ESRC studentship payment of #5295. If the
successful candidate is over 26 years of age a further
#1430 will be added.
The closing date for applications in respect of both of
these studentships is 20th June 1998.
9. The Project Supervision
The Centre for Urban Technology is the leading UK
research centre on the relations between infrastructure
networks and urban development. As well as
supporting a PhD Programme with 8 students, it has
undertaken major research projects for the ESRC,
EPSRC, and EU. Simon Marvin and Stephen Graham
(authors of Telecommunications and the City
Routledge 1996) will jointly supervise the PhD. The
collaborative supervisor will be selected from the BT
staff at Martlesham Heath research laboratory.
10. The Application
For an application form, please contact:
Siobhan O'Regan,
Graduate Admissions Secretary,
Department of Town and Country Planning,
Newcastle University,
Newcastle
NE1 7RU,
UNITED KINGDOM
(E-mail : [log in to unmask]; tel:
0191 22267802; fax 0191-2228811).
All application forms, including the name and
contact details of an academic referees, should be
sent to the above address by 20th June. Selection
of candidate will be by 31st July 1998.
For further information, please contact Simon
Marvin (tel: 0191 2227282 within UK; +44 191
2227282 outside UK) email
[log in to unmask] More information
on CUT can be found on the Web at
http://www.ncl.ac.uk:80/~ncut/.
Simon Marvin, Centre for Urban Technology (CUT),
Department of Town and Country Planning,
University of Newcastle,
Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom.
CUT on the WWW "http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~ncut"
Tel: +44 91 222 7282 Fax: +44 91 222 8811
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