The last two decades have marked the emergence and proliferation in the UK of research and policy agendas emphasising creativity as a powerful new 'motive force' for economic regeneration, planning and design. In particular, the 'creative city' has acted as an influential template and narrative for efforts at stimulating growth and rejuvenating urban communities. Policy-makers and planners have eagerly commissioned and adopted an array of creative city strategies to reap perceived employment and income-enhancing effects, ranging from attempts at nurturing art districts to efforts at 'incubating' clusters of creative industries. They have also sought to encourage a critical infrastructure of intellectual resources, social diversity and cultural intermediaries; not only as a way of improving cities' economic vitality and competitiveness, but increasingly as a means of addressing issues of social cohesion and transforming notions of civic identity. At the level of everyday life the creative industries of architecture, design and software have reshaped the way business is transacted and public services are consumed. The establishment in 1999 of a governmental urban design advisor, CABE, can be seen as the specific product of this growing public and private interest in culturally upgrading or culturally engaging with urban spaces.\n\nThe credit crunch and accompanying global economic crisis which came to the fore in September 2008 poses significant tests for this creative economic agenda. Arguably the creative city notion has flourished within the context of a long credit-fuelled boom in financial services and real estate. Policy-makers and cultural practitioners have often benefited from, relied on and targeted new forms of upmarket consumption, corporate sponsorship and property-led urban regeneration. The dramatic collapse in the UK's financial sector and property market slump over the last 18 months therefore presents significant challenges for the dominant creative agenda of the last 20 years. \n\nThis new research network will offer an important forum to reassess the place of creativity in urban economic growth. It will draw on critical academic perspectives largely sidelined by policy-makers during the long boom of the last two decades. At the same time it will identify gaps of emphasis within existing research and practice, often stemming from a failure to connect across distinct yet related disciplinary conversations. \n\nThe network sets out to address the following four key questions:\n\ni) Why is the relationship between culture, knowledge and cities central to understanding the transforming economic structure of the UK?\nii) What role have artists, architects and other creative practitioners, institutions and networks played in augmenting and contesting economic policy and speculative agendas in recent decades?\niii) How has the urban renaissance and the changing design of the UK's buildings and cities manifested new divisions of labour, class structures and patterns of uneven growth?\niv) What future democratic role can culture, technology and cities play in issues of sustainability and social justice?\n\nThe network will be co-ordinated by UCL Urban Laboratory and CABE, and will be organised around four workshops to be held in London, Salford and Plymouth between November 2010 and May 2011. These will bring together UK and overseas academics, artists, planners, architects and other key stakeholders, and will be further discussed through an online forum and a public event to be held at Tate Britain in 2011. The material and findings produced by the network will be assembled to create a policy report and an edited collection of academic essays. These will provide not only a geographical and historically nuanced critique of the existing creative city model, but act as an important means of reshaping the policy and conceptual frameworks necessary to stimulate new creative urban futures.

Today the street is synonymous with anxiety, worry, anti-social behaviour: nothing of this is new. The opposite is also true however, as urban renewal, major infrastructure and monumental architectural projects are all invested by planners and policy-makers with the expectation that they will redeem depressed areas and renew the social and physical fabric of neighbourhoods and communities: again, this also applies to the past. Though firmly based in the context and experience of Early Modern Europe, this project seeks to view the process of urban change as witnessed along streets, with a comparative perspective offered by contemporary practice and experience. In relation to the public space of streets, we will consider these major themes: the relation between ephemeral performances and permanent urban change; the performative siting of violence, punishment and protest; surveillance, policing and control; gossip and the circulation of news; street sounds. The network aims at an historical understanding of contemporary problems concerning street culture, by addressing issues that could also help reframe current issues, thus feeding into public policy. This objective will also be advanced by the network's varied constituencies and the involvement of our project partners, CABE (Commission for Architecture and Built Environment). \n\nThe network is led by Fabrizio Nevola, whose previous work on Early Modern Siena (Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, New Haven and London 2007 and co-author of the exhibition catalogue of the National Gallery's recent Renaissance Siena: Art for a City) is characterised by an interdisciplinary approach to the urban environment. He is currently engaged in a new comparative research project that considers the interaction between commerce, urbanism and palace architecture in Early Modern Italy, in which streets are a key factor. It is planned that the network will create a vibrant research community that will look at new methodologies by bringing together historians, art historians, architectural historians, cultural anthropologists, social geographers, architects, urban planners, performers and artists, to discuss the social and physical environment of the street in a cross-disciplinary manner and across a broad chronological sweep.\n\nThe Street life and street culture network will meet eight times over a two year period. The place and form of the meetings will vary. The first will be in Oxford, where the team will invite a number of speakers and respondents from cultural anthropology, the professions of architecture and planning, and local community services. It will include an on-site visit/seminar based around the Cowley Road. The objective will be to explore shared interests and agendas that inform our historical study with contemporary debates on 'street culture'. Subsequently there will be three workshops/symposia, again with outside speakers, that address specific themes of the project / the temporary and ephemeral use of urban space, violence/conflict/control, and gossip/information/sound. The network team will hold an overseas meeting in Siena which is scheduled to coincide with the Palio, an event where the city's physical and social fabric interact in a way that is both traditional and contemporary. This will include a seminar with cultural anthropologists and local administrators. We also plan to hold a sponsored session at the annual conference of the American Society of Architectural Historians. The final conference in London will present our findings with a broad range of speakers and respondents

Today the street is synonymous with anxiety, worry, anti-social behaviour: nothing of this is new. The opposite is also true however, as urban renewal, major infrastructure and monumental architectural projects are all invested by planners and policy-makers with the expectation that they will redeem depressed areas and renew the social and physical fabric of neighbourhoods and communities: again, this also applies to the past. Though firmly based in the context and experience of Early Modern Europe, this project seeks to view the process of urban change as witnessed along streets, with a comparative perspective offered by contemporary practice and experience. In relation to the public space of streets, we will consider these major themes: the relation between ephemeral performances and permanent urban change; the performative siting of violence, punishment and protest; surveillance, policing and control; gossip and the circulation of news; street sounds. The network aims at an historical understanding of contemporary problems concerning street culture, by addressing issues that could also help reframe current issues, thus feeding into public policy. This objective will also be advanced by the network's varied constituencies and the involvement of our project partners, CABE (Commission for Architecture and Built Environment). \n\nThe network is led by Fabrizio Nevola, whose previous work on Early Modern Siena (Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, New Haven and London 2007 and co-author of the exhibition catalogue of the National Gallery's recent Renaissance Siena: Art for a City) is characterised by an interdisciplinary approach to the urban environment. He is currently engaged in a new comparative research project that considers the interaction between commerce, urbanism and palace architecture in Early Modern Italy, in which streets are a key factor. It is planned that the network will create a vibrant research community that will look at new methodologies by bringing together historians, art historians, architectural historians, cultural anthropologists, social geographers, architects, urban planners, performers and artists, to discuss the social and physical environment of the street in a cross-disciplinary manner and across a broad chronological sweep.\n\nThe Street life and street culture network will meet eight times over a two year period. The place and form of the meetings will vary. The first will be in Oxford, where the team will invite a number of speakers and respondents from cultural anthropology, the professions of architecture and planning, and local community services. It will include an on-site visit/seminar based around the Cowley Road. The objective will be to explore shared interests and agendas that inform our historical study with contemporary debates on 'street culture'. Subsequently there will be three workshops/symposia, again with outside speakers, that address specific themes of the project / the temporary and ephemeral use of urban space, violence/conflict/control, and gossip/information/sound. The network team will hold an overseas meeting in Siena which is scheduled to coincide with the Palio, an event where the city's physical and social fabric interact in a way that is both traditional and contemporary. This will include a seminar with cultural anthropologists and local administrators. We also plan to hold a sponsored session at the annual conference of the American Society of Architectural Historians. The final conference in London will present our findings with a broad range of speakers and respondents

This project brings together University College London, the University of Nottingham, which also hosts the HORIZON Digital Economy Hub, the London Borough of Waltham Forest, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) and Leytonstone Business Improvement District (e11bid) to investigate how the urban experience mediated through connected large screens can be designed to augment real world interactions, support communities, and promote and develop culture so as to maximise the quality of the public experience within the urban realm.This project is inherently cross-disciplinary bringing together methods from Architecture and Computer Science. We will work in 'action research' mode engaging research organisations with the end user communities and Waltham Forest council. We will also engage at a national level through the involvement of CABE and Mike Gibbons, Head of Live Sites (a network of permanent large-scale digital screens across the UK). Through an iterative prototyping methodology we will integrate the content development, placement, local interactivity and distributed connectivity of four re-locatable screen nodes connecting Nottingham with London. This set-up will allow us to explore remote connectivity by comparing two with three and four networked nodes, creating situations and experiences that differ in their urban settings and the types of populations they support through different seasons. The screen content will be compared across different locations, allowing us to identify outcomes that are site-specific and ones that can be generalised across different sites. We will develop the screen content (such as applications and experience) and evaluate mediated public interactions around these screens by engaging with the London Borough of Waltham Forest, the local communities around all four nodes locations, and commissioned artists in definition of the research challenges as well as in the programme of research itself. These creative experiments will, however, be carefully designed to contribute to our research understanding of the dimensions of possibility and acceptance by the community. We will document design, management and public meetings and, as research results are generated, feed research findings back into local and policy debate, and feed forward into the design of the experience and interactions mediated through connected screen technologies. Our research takes a targeted and longitudinal approach in order to understand a complex range of social, technical and interactional issues.

This project is a study of how small-scale centres of social and economic activity are shaped by the way in which physical and social networks change their form through time. Due to their frequently being below the policy radar, there is a clear gap in knowledge about how smaller centres form part of the large-scale spatial/social network. This subject area requires an interdisciplinary approach; both to provide the tools to handle large data sets on street-level activity within and around town centres, as well as by providing the knowledge and understanding to interpret the spatially related social/economic data in a meaningful way. Due to our collective expertise, we are in a position to test a novel proposition about how centres of socio-economic activity emerge through time, for which existing theoretical models of centre-periphery or fringe-belt do not seem adequate. We will address the question of how local self-organisation, design interventions and functional changes have an impact on large-scale network of connections. The need for a specific policy on suburbs to realise their untapped potential is essential to improve the quality of cities today. Our research will provide the evidence for targeted funding in the UK suburbs that Kochan and others have maintained are required for preventative action to halt further decline in the suburbs and to avoid the need for major expenditure in the future . It is clear that the city as a whole is inextricably linked and no centre can succeed in isolation from the others (as outlined in the London Mayor's report on 'Planning for a Better London', July 2008). At a time of great social and economic flux characterised by new communications technologies and radically changing patterns of work, living and consumption (such as flexible working and the current economic downturn), suburban centres are critical to an urgently needed re-evaluation of how to plan for the future growth of our older cities.These theoretical gaps are mirrored in the design and policy worlds, which find it hard to apply general principles to particular cases; taking one example, a policy demand for 'densification' implemented nationally comes up against an inability to understand its implications in particular, local contexts. It is vital to understand the spatial configuration and social/economic significance of smaller centres at the peri-urban edge. An informed understanding of how to shape these smaller centres is necessary to prevent current solutions creating their own problems in the future. This proposal comes at a critical juncture in policy and place-making. We have been told by policy-makers that there is an urgent need to address the future sustainability of urban and sub-urban environments by tapping into their potential for densification, reuse and adaptation. An understanding of how smaller centres work within their immediate and regional networks of larger centres is critical to the future economic, social and environmental sustainability of complex mega-cities such as London. One of the major problems with current conceptualisations of these three domains is that they are not viewed in an integrated and holistic way. Preliminary evidence suggests that diversity of activity helps create the vitality in local centres that provides the customers, employees and employers of the local economy; the economic and social aspects are dependent in turn on environmental sustainability: we need to understand the potential of an aging infrastructure to reduce resource consumption.