Time: 4:30 - 6:00pm Venue: School of Geography, Mile End campus
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This lecture will provide stretch and challenge to A Level students and give them a flavour of attending a university lecture.
Free refreshments available from 4.30-5pm with the chance to meet and chat to university staff and students. Lecture from 5-6pm.
Life in cities inherently demands sharing space with others: streets, sidewalks, parks, plazas, transport and more. When this goes well a baseline sense of fairness and trust prevails. The city is recognized as a common good, a source of pleasure and possibility. At other times urban life is marked by conflict, inequality and injustice. The rules, routines and rights involved in sharing space become the focus of contestation and intervention. A key concept for understanding these issues is the idea of urban public space.
This lecture will detail how and why urban public space has been such a key concern in geography and urban studies. It will outline some of the fundamental concerns around exclusion and the so-called decline of public space, and provide a series of resources for thinking about how different kinds of public spaces are put together.
The session will also point to some possibilities for teachers and students to engage with the public spaces in their local area to think about how more democratic and generally better ways of sharing space might be realised.