Colin Lorne

MapLocal: Use of Smartphones for Crowdsourced Planning

This paper discusses the development of a smartphone app, MapLocal, which seeks to empower residents to gather spatial data about their neighbourhood. Responding to the new Neighbourhood Planning powers offered within the Localism Act, 2011, a pilot scheme was undertaken with 50 participants across two neighbourhoods in Birmingham, UK. The app allows the crowdsourcing of knowledge from individuals to report on different characteristics of their neighbourhood and to undertake visioning exercises developing possible schemes to improve it. We argue that the app enables wider engagement with the early phases of a planning process, partially mitigating the post-political challenge to planning, which seeks to marginalize dissenting voices in order to promote the interests of the powerful.

Health and social care devolution: the Greater Manchester experiment

Although we know that the aims of devolution are to improve health and reduce health inequalities, it is less clear how this will be achieved. Kieran Walshe and colleagues examine how it might work and the likely problems

Spatial agency and practising architecture beyond buildings

Abstract This paper provides new direction for geographic scholarship on architecture by focusing upon architectural projects that go well beyond designing and producing material objects. Recent work on practising architectures by social and cultural geographers has examined the multiple processes of human and non-human actors that cohere and congeal to produce buildings. Responding to concerns that geographers are failing to work closely with architects, I introduce ideas of spatial agency to examine the practices of architects working beyond buildings. Arguing that the profession has always been under threat, I outline why socially progressive architects are rejecting claims as expert technical problem-solvers or artistic form-givers by instead initiating and contributing towards explicitly spatial projects prioritizing social and economic objectives. By calling for creative engagement with such projects, I set forth an agenda for a politically progressive geography of architecture.

Illusions of Utopia: When Prison Architects (Reluctantly) Play Tetris

Although prisons are increasingly built away from cities, prison architects are imagining prisons as cities. Such an urban metaphor is perhaps unsurprising; both the prison and the city are often assumed to be relatively bounded places, prisons arguably resembling self-sufficient cities with facilities such as accommodation, classrooms, workshops, laundries, health clinics and gardens contained within their walls. The vocabulary of the city is also pervasive when justifying prison architecture. In this chapter we consider why prison architects use the metaphor of the city to describe the prisons they design, using terminology such as ‘walled bungalows’, ‘penitentiary houses’, ‘vertical prisons’ and ‘cell apartments’, and we examine the significance of this rather dystopian urban imaginary in allowing architects to retain some agency within a design process which minimises their creative and political input.

Using technology to help communities shout louder

This contribution from an inter-disciplinary team of academics offers an attempt to support communities in ‘shouting a little louder’ within policy-making. It models its own aspiration in reflecting the importance of bringing together different forms of expertise: in planning, interface design, engaging communities. The contribution focuses on the development of an app, MapLocal, which aims to draw in the local knowledge of people who may not usually get involved in neighbourhood planning. The app provides a tool for mapping community assets and contributing to planning by tapping into the fine-grained understanding of a place, which comes from living there, but also providing a way of generating and harnessing community creativity and imagination. MapLocal is an example of the potential of such spatial and visualisation tools to shift the parameters, power and potentialities of policy by enhancing the engagement and interaction of communities for local problem-solving.