During Celebration Week here at Aldgate guest professor Mark Brearley shared the news that the Cass Cities initiative is now live.
Date: 20 April 2014
It’s happening because we have decided to embrace a golden opportunity that goes like this:
As London rushes onwards, growing and optimistic, and we all start to experience all the tussles and down-sides, it just so happens that here we all are, at The Cass, a lucky coincidence of people with a flair for shaping cities. Those people are just what’s needed to make an incisive contribution, engaging with the process of urbanchange in London, and beyond. They are just what’s needed to get stuck in, initiate, challenge and observe, using a shared talent for making good things happen. Add into the mix a brilliant and ever evolving collection of students, who bundle together enthusiasm, intelligence, creativity and skill, and we really can do something remarkable.
That is why we are starting to roll a snowball called Cass Cities, headed by Mark Brearley, helped by a group who already gather in his 4th floor room over-looking Whitechapel High Street, and steered by our convictions, our knowledge and our judgement. Cass Cities incorporates the already well established MA in Spatial Planning and Urban Design, and the new option of taking forward an MA by Projectwith Cass Cities. We are already planning a Cass Cities Summer School in Brussels, and will be taking a walk right across London to indicate how we mean to proceed.
Our ambitions are not small. We are busy already with such things as: Starting an urbanism collection and sharing it with the world; Close looking at Rainham,Tottenham, Kilburn, Walthamstow, and more; Making the case for industry in London, and as part of that celebrating the totality of manufacturing across our city; Putting the argument for embracing high streets, and thereby modestly overturning a century of planning practice and city shaper dreams, saying loudly that now is the time to abandon tired neighbourhood planning ideas.
