Thinking Through Making

Our Thinking Through Making week took place from 1 to 5 February.  An annual event, this is a week-long ‘festival’ focussed on thinking, making and materials, with workshops and talks focussed on material practice.

From casting concrete to creating self-ordering biological systems, the variety of workshops and talks are a fantastic opportunity for students to engage with architects, artists, engineers, designers, thinkers and makers.

Thinking Through Making

We want to challenge students, open them up to new ways of thinking, inspire them and increase their understanding of working with materials.

We had a number of external participants who contributed and out students set up their own blog for the festival which you can read on the website thinkingthroughmaking.org.

Working together for better planning

The School hosted a day workshop on 15 January, organised by Dr Dave Webb, focusing on how planning academics and practitioners can work together to respond to the crisis currently facing planning in England.  In this excerpt post he reflects upon discussions that took place.  The full version is available at Planners’ Network UK.

On 15th January 2016, Newcastle University played host to an energetic day of debate, centring on Michael Harris from the RTPI‘s provocations about the current state of academic research on planning and the areas where more work is needed. The essence of Michael’s argument is that planning research has become too closely aligned with qualitative sociological inquiry to the extent that very few scholars would now identify as economists. This was a point he made in July 2015 at the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) conference; one that led to a question being asked of the 200 or so academics who attended the AESOP AGM. Of those, less than a handful admitted to having a full training in economics. This has not always been the case, however, with many planning schools up until the 1970s offering a more balanced range of social and economic training. The question which was raised was therefore about whether we should we restore this balance.

Alex Lord and Simin Davoudi both presented passionate answers to this question. For Alex, one way to challenge those versions of economics which depend on a view of individuals as rational, calculative and self-interested actors is to demonstrate the contribution of alternatives such as behavioural economics (Lord et al, 2015). Simin, however, emphasised the narrowness of all economistic framings, their tendency to privilege axiomatic and reductionist conclusions and the fact that, all too often, government tends to seek instrumental, quantitative evidence once key policy decisions have already been made. Perhaps, then, it is more important that research challenges the values and ideological assumptions which underpin political decisions rather than being confined to a debate about which economic “answer” is the correct one.

I found myself being convinced by all three speakers, perhaps because there can be no clear-cut solution to this question. At the heart of these debates is a judgement about strategy in a context where, as Michael so rightly points out, academic research has been largely ejected from political decision making about planning issues. The idea of trying to re-enter decision making circles by acceding to economic framings of research is tempting for two reasons. The first is the suggestion that, by failing to do so, academics only offer one half of the possible response to neoliberal research and policy: by only challenging these at the level of their discursive construction and social effect we may fail to persuade those who are not amenable to qualitative arguments. Secondly, the issues raised by qualitative accounts may simply be seen as inescapable by those who believe there is no alternative to neoliberal economics. But these compelling arguments for more economic research in planning can be set against a reading of the changing nature of universities which warns of privatisation and of increasing pressure on academic research to be instrumental to the needs, and often the framings, of policy makers. By challenging policy makers “on their own turf” there is a risk of giving up the hard-fought institutional ground on which academic research agendas have traditionally been set….

[Read the rest of this post at Planners Network UK]

Using Theatre to Engage Communities in Planning

(Left to right: Dr Paul Cowie, and Brad McCormick (Artist Director) and Katy Vanden (Producer) of Cap-a-Pie)

Left to right: Dr Paul Cowie, and Brad McCormick (Artist Director) and Katy Vanden (Producer) of Cap-a-Pie

This is an excerpt of a blog first posted on the HASS Research Impact Blog.

Dr Paul Cowie is a Research Assistant in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. Paul’s research focuses on community planning and community representation in the planning process. Cap-a-Pie bring together professional theatre makers and communities to co-create theatre and foster learning and thinking through a democratic creative process.

How can you get 30 people to spend three hours on a Monday night discussing community involvement in planning? The answer may be through theatre.

It is well accepted by both academics and practitioners that there is a limit to how much consultation a community can take. The dreaded ‘consultation fatigue’ is now a common feature of both research fieldwork and planning engagement efforts. Dr Paul Cowie and theatre company, Cap-a-Pie, have produced a new piece of theatre, The Town Meeting, which has shown that taking an alternative approach can re-engage communities in research in a way that traditional forms of engagement do not. The Town Meeting has generated a rich resource of research material as well as engaging a network of co-researchers who have signed up to be involved in the project in the future.

The play was performed in 6 communities in the spring of 2015, and toured again this month visiting Leeds and Sheffield. The venues ranged from traditional and community based theatres to community centres and village halls. Over 160 people have now been to see the play, including HRH Princess Eugenie of York who enjoyed an excerpt of the play when she recently visited the University. The play will also tour again in April 2016, visiting Keswick, Doncaster and Washington.

The project has recently won the Sir Peter Hall Award for Wider Engagement in the RTPI Awards for Research Excellence.

The story of how the play was developed is available via Cap-a-Pie’s Town Hall podcast.

[You can read the full blog post on the HASS Research Impact Blog.]
The Town Meeting
The Town Meeting