Open Space aims to facilitate dialogue between advanced PhD students, early career researchers and academic staff across the School of Environment, Education and Development and the Faculty of Humanities more broadly. The initiative emerged from a dialogue and an initial workshop co-organied by a group of PhD students in 2011, and is facilitated and coordinated by Professor of Human Geography, Maria Kaika. It is funded through the support of cities@manchester.
This event features two speakers:
Daniel Slade (Geography & Planning, University of Liverpool): "Interrogating the reform of planning practice, and the practice of planning reform, in central government"
To date, there has been strangely little work examining the significance of contemporary planning practice in English central government. This is despite the discipline's growing awareness of the need to study processes of urban governance from the perspective of everyday practice, the English system's highly centralised structure, and recent key planning reforms aiming to reconfigure this level. In response, this study aims to go inside 'the black box' of planning practice in central government and: “...explore the key characteristics of planning and ‘planning practice’ in English central government, and examine the forces shaping and shaped by these, in the context of recent waves of reforms and the longer term process of restructuring these reforms relate to.” To this end the study deploys a mixture of genealogical/narrative, case study and interview-based methods, within an overarching 'phronetic' methodology. The Coalition Government's Planning Practice Guidance Review 2012-2014 comprises the case study.
Creighton Connolly (Geography, Univesity of Manchester): "Malaysia’s Swift(let) housing boom: A landscape political ecology of urban ‘swiftlet farming’ in Malaysian cities"
Along with increasing levels of urbanization and the deepening of globalization processes often comes intense social conflicts sparked by the clash between ‘traditional’ natural resource based production and new forms of economic and agricultural production, where competing ideas of ‘appropriate’ landscape aesthetics and the use of urban space clash. This presentation examines one case of such conflict in Malaysian cities and towns, which are now being transformed by the relatively new practice of urban birds’ nest farming in order to meet surging global demand for this lucrative commodity. Traditionally, these nests were harvested in the caves of Malaysian Borneo and other similar environments across Southeast Asia, but a variety of factors lead to the widespread shift towards urban ‘swiftlet farming’ throughout Peninsular Malaysia. I will draw on material from recent multi-sited, ethnographic research, in tracing the material and discursive effects stemming from this industry, and their impacts on the urban landscape in the Malaysian context. In doing so, I utilize a ‘landscape political ecology’ approach, which considers how both ‘glocal’ political-economic as well as socio-ecological changes have colluded in shaping the physical and discursive landscape in my case study areas.
Open to all postgraduate students.
Refreshments will be provided.
