Keith Lilley

Pacemaking the modern city: the urban politics of speed and slowness

Many theorists of urban modernity have suggested that modernisation accelerates the pace of life, resulting in faster and more frenetic cities. In this paper we argue that this tells only part of the story, as where there is speed there is also slowness. The mid-20th-century redevelopment of Coventry in the United Kingdom serves to illustrate this: the technocentric conceptions of timespace that became dominant in this period bequeathed a city that sped up for some, but slowed down for others. These differential mobilities indicate the speed politics underpinning the redevelopment of Coventry in the postwar era, with the city centre increasingly moving to the rhythms imposed by a bureaucratic elite. Noting these rhythms were nonetheless subject to interruptions that undermined this spatial and temporal order, we conclude that geographers must be attentive to the uneven production of both space and time to grasp fully the ambivalence of modernity.

Mapping the medieval city: plan analysis and urban history

This paper aims to provide a transferable methodology suitable for mapping the spatial development of medieval urban landscapes. Using the technique of ‘plan analysis’ the paper discusses some new evidence relating to the origins and development of Coventry, one of medieval Englands more important provincial centres which rose to prominence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The case study provides an opportunity to show how the plan analysis technique works and how it is of benefit to urban historians, as well as archaeologists and geographers.

Plans, planners and city images: place promotion and civic boosterism in British reconstruction planning

This article reviews an unusual and subtle form of place promotion, that contained in the series of British post-war reconstruction plans produced up to c . 1952. These were not explicitly designed as place-promotional literature, and we suggest that they should be seen as subverse promotion of towns and cities, as well as vehicles for civic boosterism. Evidence of this is discussed with respect to the production of these plans, for example in the commissioning of eminent and expensive consultants; in the texts of plans; and in the often striking and colourful imagery used.

Urban life in the Middle Ages, 1000-1450

Preface Introduction Urban Legacies Institutional Urbanism Geographies of Urban Law Lordship and Urbanisation Urban Landscapes Urban Property and Landholding Townspeople and Townscapes Conclusion Glossary References Index

Contesting the modern city: reconstruction and everyday life in post-war coventry

Recently, views have begun to shift on whether the immediate post-war period in Britain really was characterized by a consensus of public opinion in favour of comprehensive redevelopment planning. This paper explores this issue in the context of Coventry, a city that was extensively bombed during World War II, but redeveloped according to Modernist-inspired planning principles in the post-war years, resulting in an urban landscape celebrating the perceived virtues of speed, efficiency and order. Examining the reconstruction of Coventry’s city centre in the 1940s and 1950s, this paper suggests that the popular consensus in favour of its comprehensive redevelopment was, in fact, more illusory than real. To these ends, the paper brings into dialogue people’s memories of living in Coventry in this era with existing published and unpublished accounts of the city’s redevelopment. This exposes contradictions and conflicts between the planners’ vision of the future city and the appropriation and use of the resulting urban landscape by the citys inhabitants. The paper accordingly concludes that processes of modernization provoke constant contradictions between representation and experience, and suggests that it is by exploring these contradictions that we might develop fuller, richer and more contextual planning histories.

Mapping Cosmopolis: Moral Topographies of the Medieval City:

Cosmopolis is a concept that has a long history in many cultures around the globe. It is a mirroring of the ‘social’ and ‘natural’ worlds, such that in one is seen the order and the structures of the other—a mutual ‘mapping’. In this paper I examine how the presence of cosmopolis—a Christianised cosmopolis of the European Middle Ages—was made evident in the representation and formation of cities at that time. I reveal a dualism between the social and spatial ordering of both city and cosmos which defined and reinforced social and spatial boundaries in urban landscapes, evident for example in the 11th and 12th centuries. Recently, Toulmin (1992) has taken the idea of cosmopolis to argue that it has been a persistent presence in Western-Enlightenment science, philosophy, and religion—a ‘hidden agenda of modernity’. I contend that, as an idea, cosmopolis has a much earlier circulation in European thinking, not least in the Middle Ages. Locating cosmopolis in the medieval and the modern periods then begs a question of what is it that really makes the two distinct and separate? All too often human geographers have emphasised discontinuities between the ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ age, locating the ‘rise of modernity’ some time in the Enlightenment period. However, what ‘mapping’ cosmopolis reveals are continuities, binding time and space together, which when looked at begin to help query the modernity concept itself.

Urban planning and the design of towns in the Middle Ages: the Earls of Devon and their ‘new towns’

This paper examines what processes might have been involved in the design and planning of new urban landscapes in the High Middle Ages. It does so by looking in detail at the morphology of a group of late twelfth century ‘new towns’ established by one particular aristocratic family in southern England. The paper seeks to encourage a move away from orthodox interpretations of medieval urban forms, and challenges the view that irregularities in plan-form signify a lack of planning.

Mapping the Realm: A New Look at the Gough Map of Britain (c.1360)

The mid‐fourteenth century map of Britain known as the ‘Gough’ map is the earliest extant depiction of the island in geographically recognizable form. Hitherto, however, interest in the road or route patterns marked on the map has meant that the maps extraordinarily rich settlement geography has not received the attention it merits and that, consequently, the point of the map may have been missed. The availability of a digital scan of the map coupled with the use of Geographical Information System (GIS) software provides the opportunity for a new look at the Gough map and the questions it poses. Attention in this article is directed to the settlement geography it shows, and in particular to the maps 654 cities, towns, villages, castles and monasteries. Their geographical positions as given on the manuscript are compared with their modern equivalents to shed light on some of the basic questions—the maps place of origin, the purpose or purposes for which it was made and the circumstances of its production—that have posed such a challenge for scholars. Our preliminary conclusion is that the key to understanding the original primary role of the Gough map lies in its accurate but selective depiction of the settlement geography of fourteenth‐century Britain.

Memorials to Modernity? Public art in the 'city of the future'

This paper examines the role of public art in urban redevelopment, focusing on the reconstruction of Coventry (UK) in the post-war years. Overseen by the citys Chief Architect, Donald Gibson, this redevelopment has often been described as resulting in a placeless and artless urban landscape indistinguishable from other redeveloped city centres in post-war Britain. To the contrary, here it is suggested that public art was an important feature of Coventrys new urban landscape, with the attempt to create a new civic identity manifest in a series of highly symbolic and distinctive public artworks. Analysing both the official symbolism of these artworks and their reception in the public sphere, it is concluded that, although just one aspect of the urban landscape, the production and consumption of public art encapsulated the tensions that existed between different visions of the city.

Urban landscapes and the cultural politics of territorial control in Anglo‐Norman England

Abstract It is examined how urban landscapes were physically shaped to meet the changing needs and desires of aristocratic elites during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Using case studies within the context of Anglo‐Norman England, it is argued that newly‐created towns were designed to help aristocratic lords establish and retain their political control along the frontier of the Norman kingdom, and that the forms of these towns embody the cultural processes of this territorial expansion. The first part of the paper places Norman England in the context of an expanding high medieval Europe and considers the idea of an ‘urban renaissance’ as part of this expansion. Following this, some of the problems in representing, or mapping, medieval urban landscapes are discussed. The rest of the paper is devoted to morphological studies of three Norman ‘new towns’, Alnwick, Bridgnorth and Ludlow, in order to show how the production of these urban landscapes was related to wider socio‐political changes effected und...