Yr13 - Inner Cities

Housing issues on Tuesday - the Prezi is here and this is the article from The Guardian that I gave you copies of. We also had a look at Val Vannet's writing about the Dundee tenements that she passed regularly on her way to work, and how the area has changed.

For the next time I see you, on Tuesday 31st March, your groups need to be ready with presentations on UDCs, City Challenge, and the 21st century inner city initiatives such as "sustainable communities".

There are lots of links on Geography Pages that might be of use to you, particularly in the GCSE Settlement section.

Also:

Urban Development Corporations
City Challenge Partnerships Evaluation
The Sustainable Communities Plan

Yr13 - Bradford Regeneration Part 2

Some of the photos from the Bradford trip still need titles/detail adding, but they're here if you want to look at the ones we didn't see on Tuesday. A couple of videos taken with my new Flip video camera here though...

This is Centenary Square, in front of City Hall - and this will be the site of the "Park at the Heart":

Centenary Square in Bradford from victoria ellis on Vimeo.

I have to say that, having been there this morning, the park idea doesn't seem quite so far-fetched, and it wasn't so hard to imagine a hot summer's afternoon with music playing and people sitting outside various bars and cafes.... who knows?!

I didn't feel quite so positive about the proposed Westfield development, however:


Westfield Bradford from victoria ellis on Vimeo.

More about Westfield and the vision for Bradford, complete with a "flythrough" of what the centre will look like here.

Yr13 - Bradford Regeneration Part 1

Following on from the work you've been doing looking at possibilities for regeneration in Bradford, we spent Thursday's lesson finding out more about the actual plans...

The video we looked at with Will Alsop's Masterplan is here:


And the "streetsweeper one" (which I understand better now, thanks to Joel!) is here:


Should you not have heard enough of Linda Barker the other day, you can also watch the Building Britain programme, which looked at plans for the regeneration of Bradford, and compared them with how Leeds has developed in recent years, on YouTube...

"Northern cities beyond revival"

That's according to a "think tank" called Policy Exchange. Apparently, the regeration that is going on in cities such as Bradford (which I have posted about on Geogtastic before) and Liverpool is not working, and there should be a mass migration of poor northerners to southern cities such as London, Cambridge and Oxford...

Doesn't seem to me like the most sensible solution... Have a read of the article from the BBC here and see what you think!