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Five lockdown paintings
Ever since the UK government imposed a nationwide lockdown on 23 March, I’ve been using the time to do more painting, something which I’ve only practised very intermittently since 2004. It’s...
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Adventure playgrounds
A structure made by children in an adventure playground in Ås municipality near Oslo. Photograph by Svane Frode, 1973. Copenhagen is home to the world’s first, and oldest surviving, children’s junk...
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Shanty Mega-structures
Olalekan Jeyifous, Shanty Mega-structures Today, around 30% of people living in cities across the world are housed in informal settlements – self-built cities made out of breeze-blocks, crude brick,...
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Extinction Rebellion: remaking the city
The pink boat moored in Oxford Circus, 19 April 2019 With the alarming warning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in late-2018 that we have only 12 years in which to act to avoid...
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Street Farm: architecture and eco-anarchism
Seeding high-rises and ploughing the city’s streets: a collage from Street Farmer 2 (1972) The early 1970s witnessed the first widespread stirrings of unease about the ecological consequences of...
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La ZAD: defending the commons
Farmers’ tractors surround structures in the ZAD to protect them from the police In the first week of April 2018, over 2,500 armed French riot police, together with armoured vehicles and demolition...
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Buster Keaton: slapstick anarchism
Slapstick cinema of the 1920s and 1930s created, through its absurdist set pieces, a veritable feast of anarchic architectures and ways of inhabiting cities. Laurel and Hardy’s enormous repertoire of...
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The Open City: building as poetry
Hanging Lodge, The Open City, 2006 The Open City of Amereida occupies 670 acres of dune fields, wetlands and pine forests along the Pacific coast immediately south of Ritoque, a small seaside town in...
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Lammas: hobbit homes for all
Community hub building at Lammas, built in 2009 Lammas is a low impact, off-grid eco-village at Tir-y-Gafel in Pembrokeshire in southwest Wales. Consisting of 15 smallholdings on 76 acres of land, the...
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Freetown Christiania: city-in-the-city
With over half a million visitors every year, Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen is the city’s third largest tourist attraction. A self-governed community of around 900 residents – the largest and...
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Scaffolding: parasitic architecture
As buildings rise, so does a temporary form of architecture – scaffolding. As old as the Egyptian pyramids, scaffolding is a parasitic form of architecture, enveloping a building as it rises or is...
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Landmatters: permaculture in practice
During the 1990s in Britain, a new kind of grassroots environmental awareness developed, leading to the promotion of Low Impact Development in the countryside. Manifest most vividly in the makeshift...
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The Segal method: anarchy in the suburbs
No. 5 Walters Way, including a treehouse built by its current residents Walter Segal (1907-85) was an architect who developed a system of self-build housing that was revolutionary in allowing users to...
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Loose-fit city: the Holzmarkt, Berlin
The Holzmarkt development, fronting the river Spree near Berlin’s Ostabahnhof station, is an unprecedented experiment in anarchic urban planning, and which was opened in May 2017. During the 1990s, the...
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Grow Heathrow: radical DIY urbanism
Grow Heathrow is an off-grid community and protest site that has, for 8 years, occupied a few acres of vacant land in the village of Sipson, just north of London’s Heathrow Airport. Established in 2010...
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Anarchitecture
Lebbeus Woods, Quake City, 1995 This month, I’ve started a new 2-year research project exploring self-built structures of all kinds. Like the architect and theorist Lebbeus Woods, I’m calling this...
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Magic portals into dreaming: Manchester’s public libraries
Stockport central library, funded by Andrew Carnegie, built from 1913-14 and designed by Bolton-based architects Bradshaw, Gass & Hope Of the numerous public libraries in Greater Manchester, no...
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The hills have eyes
There is arguably no better way of appreciating the extent of the Greater Manchester conurbation than from one of the hills that surround it on its northern and eastern edges, and which contribute the...
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Rainy city stories
From Northenden to Partington, it’s rain From Altrincham to Chadderton, it’s rain From Cheetham Hill to Wythenshawe, it’s rain Gorton, Salford, Sale, pretty much the same What makes Britain great...
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If rocks could talk
The northern Rhinogs, Snowdonia There was a word inside a stone. I tried to ply it clear, mallet and chisel, pick and gad, until the stone was dropping blood, but still I could not hear the word the...
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