Category Archives: cities

Carbon budgets and footprints: a guide

Greater Manchester Climate Network, with Green Drinks, organised a session called “Carbon Jargon Buster Workshop”. It was addressed by Joe Blakey from the University of Manchester. Joe has specialised in understanding the various methods and tools of carbon accounting, with … Continue reading

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The Future is 20 minutes away? 20-minute neighbourhoods

The Future is 20 minutes away? 20-minute neighbourhoods. By Carolyn Kagan pdf version As we move towards a future in urban areas where people travel less, buy locally and live more convivial lives, we need vital and liveable neighbourhoods. This … Continue reading

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How Green is My City? A Response to Manchester City Council leader’s blog post.

Response to Manchester City Council leader’s blog post: How Green is My City Mark Burton (Submitted as a comment on Manchester City Council website and annotated here with links.  Comments appear to be disabled on the Leader’s blog, although the … Continue reading

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Fearless Cities: could we have the new municipalism in Greater Manchester?

Fearless Cities: the new municipalism. NEW!  January, 2019.  English edition of the book now available from (click->) New Internationalist.  Today it is easy enough to think that people are not interested in politics, or even that they don’t value democracy. … Continue reading

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Policies, policies, but are they any good?

Earlier this year we published our paper: Policies for the City Region. How does what we are proposing differ from what others are saying? Where do we agree with others proposing alternative approaches to the ones that have dominated our … Continue reading

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Greater Manchester: Towards a retrofit Garden City?

Greater Manchester: Towards a retrofit Garden City? We have been critical of recent plans in Greater Manchester1 but what might a better approach look like? At our latest conversation event we considered the idea of making the city region more … Continue reading

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What kind of a city and region do we want?

Success as building frenzy: the Manchester model Someone once told me that for Sir Howard Bernstein, the retiring Chief Executive of Manchester City Council, his measure of success was the number of cranes visible on the city’s skyline. True or … Continue reading

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Greater Manchester Garden City – a viable alternative?

Conversation event:  Greater Manchester Garden City – a viable alternative? Thursday 2 March, 6.30pm, Methodist Central Hall, Oldham Street, Manchester.   Book via EventBrite We’ll be showing Tom Bliss’s film that reviewed the Garden City concept and suggested applying it retrospectively … Continue reading

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