Fifteen years ago the British urban historian Asa Briggs wrote a short but stimulating essay on Melbourne in the Victorian era in his Victorian Cities. In thirty pages he not only challenged the conventional assumptions of Australian historiography of that time (specifically deploring the lack of systematic study of the Australian city) but also threw out various ideas about how to approach Austra ... (read more)
Leonie Sandercock
Leonie Sandercock is a scholar of urban planning and screenwriter, who currently teaches in the School of Community & Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia. Leonie was Professor and Head of Graduate Urban Studies at Macquarie University (1981–86), before moving to Los Angeles where she wrote screenplays and taught in the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA.
Central to this collection of essays by Ted Wheelwright is the argument that orthodox economics is a positive hindrance to any real understanding of the problems of the last quarter of the twentieth century. A rebirth of the political economy is necessary to remove the stench (from the corpse of orthodox economics) that is polluting the social sciences.
Now, it is certainly true that orthodox eco ... (read more)