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Posts by AFFINITY

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Blueprint of the city as our home | Meanderers Guided walk, philosophical discussion and creative Cyanotype workshop exploring the idea of the Third Space and the city as a home

A creative walkshop exploring ideas of home and public space!

Tue 28/4/26 - 5.30 - 7.30
The Carousel Hockley

Led by our philosophers Alice Monypenny and Olley Fairey with artist Amelia Daiz.

Deets: tinyurl.com/45uahaps

Sponsored by Royal Institute of Philosophy.

#philosophy #home #nottingham

13 hours ago 2 1 0 0
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Mayor allocates ÂŁ30m for a youth club in every London borough The mayor says the late-night clubs would offer activities, mental health support, mentorship and food.

NEW: Today I’m announcing plans to deliver at least one new late-night youth club in every London borough - the biggest investment in youth clubs ever made by a Mayor.

We’re bringing youth clubs back.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

1 week ago 444 100 12 34
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Campaign to curb cars in Berlin sparks uproar ahead of election Conservatives and far right are opposing a citizens’ initiative to restrict traffic in the German capital

German car debates never fail to remind me of Charles Taylor's "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?"

2 weeks ago 10 1 1 0
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Thinking the City: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Place This conference aims to establish a sustained and systematic philosophical engagement with the city as an object of inquiry within analytic philosophy. While cities profoundly structure our social, mo...

CFP for grad students & early career researchers on phil of place! It will be at the University of Cambridge at the end of May, with a dedicated day to early career talks & discussion w invited speakers, and a second day w invited talks (I will be presenting on care-washing & urban policy)

2 weeks ago 3 3 1 0
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Pilar Lopez-Cantero, Affective injustice - PhilPapers Oppression, marginalization, and other forms of disadvantage often come with emotional burdens, such as feelings of insecurity or stress. At the same time, some features of oppression are emotional in...

Just accepted: my Phil Compass article on affective injustice! It synthesizes the debate into an overarching definition ('the unjust interference w people’s affective lives, w regard to their own affective practices or through those of others') & brings out many connections between existing views/1

2 weeks ago 49 13 4 0
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Opinion | The American Elevator Explains Why Housing Costs Have Skyrocketed (Published 2024)

Through a conversation, I'm now convinced that the elevator is one of the most important public transit infrastructures.

All good urbanist NUMTOT transit nerds should care deeply about it.

www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/o...

1 month ago 7 2 1 0

For more info on Pride in Parades:

Part I. The State of Neighbourhood Social Infrastructure. www.neighbourhoodscommission.org.uk/report/pride...
Part II. Strategies for Renewing Neighbourhood Social Infrastructure www.neighbourhoodscommission.org.uk/report/pride...

1 month ago 0 0 0 0
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Row of shops with colourful patterns printed at the fronts, sourced from community members providing with culturally significant patterns. This is a project of regeneration of local parades in Aberfeldy Street, in Poplar. Picture sourced from Meanwhile Space, the social enterprise involved in the project: https://meanwhilespace.com/aberfeldy-street/

Row of shops with colourful patterns printed at the fronts, sourced from community members providing with culturally significant patterns. This is a project of regeneration of local parades in Aberfeldy Street, in Poplar. Picture sourced from Meanwhile Space, the social enterprise involved in the project: https://meanwhilespace.com/aberfeldy-street/

It was fascinating to hear about two community-led regeneration stories in Poplar and Wolverton. One my my favourite applications of community consultation was that they asked locals to bring fabrics and patterns of cultural importance for them, and printed these on the shop fronts/4

1 month ago 0 0 1 0

The kind of infrastructure also matters. In deprived neighbourhoods, parades have mostly formal social infrastructure (community centres), but lack vital informal social infrastructure (pubs, cafes). Often communities actively lead the reinvigoration of parades way before the govt intervenes/3

1 month ago 0 0 1 0

One of my main takeaways, as stated by one of the report authors, is that parades should be assessed not simply as retail, or its closures as a merely economic problem: they have an invaluable role as social infrastructure. I will never stop insisting: you simply can't create place without retail/2

1 month ago 0 0 1 0

The Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods @iconeighbours.bsky.social has recently published two reports on the state and value of local parades (rows of local shops) as social infrastructure. Today they ran a super interesting webinar on the main findings and two successful case studies/1

1 month ago 0 0 1 0
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Reyes Gallegos: "Necesitamos más ojos femeninos y feministas en el diseño y la planificación de las ciudades" La arquitecta y directora sevillana firma

◾️ Reyes Gallegos: "Necesitamos más ojos femeninos y feministas en el diseño y la planificación de las ciudades"

Lee la entrevista completa, vía @diariodesevilla.bsky.social ⬇

1 month ago 0 1 0 0

A couple of questions:

1) Can anyone recommend any (critical, early) reviews of Pride in Place that I might not have found?

2) Is anyone familiar with examples of Pride in Place boards talking about or engaging with space for play? I have found a few but guess there are more.

Thank you!

1 month ago 8 7 3 1
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'In Defence of Walkability as a Crime Prevention Strategy'.
New preprint with @ianloader.bsky.social
We challenge the consensus that walkable neighbourhoods are more criminogenic.
We highlight two flaws in the literature: i) overreliance on police statistics; and ii) neglect of motoring offences.

1 month ago 26 16 2 1
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Place is not passive—Memory is not settled
We work across cognitive science, social science & the arts to examine how people find their way. In contested pasts & rapidly changing environments, understanding place and memory underpins how we locate ourselves—intellectually, socially and historically

1 month ago 23 6 0 0

Fantastic news! It is also really good that this will be for pedestrians exclusively, with separate plans for new bike lanes. These do need to be protected and safe, but (although not all urbanists agree) it is super important to have pedestrian only zones, particularly for children and the elderly

1 month ago 2 0 0 0
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The mental aspects of urban justice

Read here for a summary of the project published in the EPIC project blog ⬇️

1 month ago 3 2 0 0

So much potential influence of int. law on the affective lives of urban dwellers. Some of them are related to human rights (which is Prof Schmid’s focus) but others can be more narrow moral rights, or special obligations of urban authorities, like fostering caring relations. New lit to explore!/2

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Just attended Prof Evelyne Schmid’s talk, hosted by Antwerp’s Urban Studies Institute. Very interesting talk on how local actors engage with international law, the mismatches between urban life and treatises conceived to improve it, and the role of “legal intermediarians”/1

1 month ago 0 0 1 0
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Great workshop today at Antwerp on Moral Psychology & The City! Elisabetta Gobbo talked about affect & gentrification; Jamie Draper presented his expressive theory of spatial inequality; Marian Counihan gave a super useful taxonomy of urban diversity & I shared my wip on affective rights to the city

2 months ago 3 2 0 0

This is probably already obvious to all the urban planning nerds, but I don't feel like it has broken through to normies like myself. Among many reasons why street parking is bad is that—especially with giant cars nowadays—it's bad for pedestrian visibility at intersections!

2 months ago 4 1 1 0
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Very happy about this— I’ve learned a lot from Bennett School’s (and its predecessor institute’s) research on place and identity over the years, and it’s directly influenced how I conceived my project on emotion and urban justice. Excited to be part of it and to expand the phil of urban policy!

2 months ago 6 2 0 0

Back to reading about litter and waste in anticipation for this talk:

2 months ago 0 0 0 0
Photo by Kaique Rocha for Pexels.

Photo by Kaique Rocha for Pexels.

Does living near a #park reduce your risk of chronic disease?

Join Georgia Tech's School of #Architecture for Episode 50 of Redesigning #Cities hosted by Ellen Dunham-Jones & feat. Dr. Larry Frank — renowned #urban scholar behind the term #walkability

Feb 13 | 3:30 PM ET

Register: bit.ly/4kvs6ko

2 months ago 3 1 0 0
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Events SPRING 2026

The NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program is thrilled to be hosting an event on how cities can manage human-wildlife conflict! Join us for a preview of our upcoming report and discussion with Colin Jerolmack and Adalene Minelli.

Feb 23, 4pm ET, followed by a reception.

sites.google.com/nyu.edu/wild...

2 months ago 2 2 0 0

Brilliant and exhaustive thread on the 15-minute city and the latest astonishing disinformation about the concept, this time applied to a proposed restriction of road use *to cars* in Oxford.

2 months ago 1 0 0 0

An “overhaul of England’s planning policy” that does not tackle simply what people can *do* in the built environment, but also how people *feel*, is doomed and dead on arrival—particularly if those who are the most affectively powerless, like women, are ignored/& 4

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In turn, policy makers can be traced as the main responsible party for what philosophers like David Spurrett and others call “hostile scaffolding”, in this case the design of spaces that are directly and clearly damaging for women cognitive and affective processing/3

2 months ago 0 0 1 0

Women and girls cannot shaped and be shaped by life in cities if they do not feel safe, and they cannot feel safe if policy makers don’t remedy the increase danger women face in cities in virtue of being women. Krueger calls this “affective powerlessness”/2

2 months ago 0 0 1 0

This is a depressing but very accurate example of what philosopher Joel Krueger calls “ecological affective injustice”—ways in which the environment can disrupt emotional well-being and spatial agency, built on & building upon oppressive and unequal social relationships/1

2 months ago 2 1 1 0