photographer, writer, sustainability campaigner
Articles from before August 2020 are available on Martin’s archive site…
Sometimes a chance experience draws you in to exploring an idea. This happened to me on my first visit to my elder daughter’s new home in Edinburgh. I thought I knew the city well, I lived there briefly in the early 1970s, but she has a wee flat in one of Edinburgh’s ‘colonies’, a distinctive …
It is a strange feeling being at the centre of a national and international ‘culture war’ storm. And even stranger that that storm is about a planning theory. But that has been how it has been for the past 10 months living on a fairly unprepossessing street off a somewhat down-at-heel main road, Cowley Road, …
The programme for this musical which has transferred from Sheffield Crucible Theatre to the National Theatre (NT) in London, has a powerful and informative introductory essay by Sheffield urban planner Gordon Dabinett. Not an everyday occurance in NT programmes. But Standing at the sky’s edge is no everyday performance. The setting for the musical is …
Back in the 1990s when I first became a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute I opened my first copy of its The Planner magazine with great interest. One thing I still remember from that edition was a letter lamenting the fact that architects got all the glory in Hollywood movies and that planners …
There were many striking images that emerged from the G7 Summit in Cornwall in June – but let’s not dwell on Boris Johnson’s early morning made-for-TV dip in the sea. Another was world leaders standing at the top of aircraft steps shading their eyes or waving to the assembled media, having just flown in from …
The Dasgupta Report on biodiversity (1) was published at the beginning of February. It is an important document on a par with Nicholas Stern’s The Economics of Climate Change published in 2006. Not least because it has been commissioned and published by HM Treasury rather than by an environment ministry. Its timing is significant coming …
The concept of the ‘Good Ancestor’ isn’t exactly new. As Roman Krznaric acknowledges in his book (1) the term was coined by Jonas Salk, the man who developed the polio vaccine sixty years ago. He quotes him: ‘Will future generations speak of the wisdom of their ancestors as we are inclined to speak of ours? …