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An interview with Dr Bob Jarvis.
Dr. Bob Jarvis was educated as one of the last of the gentlemen planners at Newcastle University, but later took classes in poetry and contemporary dance.
He is perhaps the only qualified planner to have an MA in Creative Writing. He undertook a two year research programme of zen-like isolation and intensity in urban design before urban design was re-invented. His research and writing has focussed on town planning as an art and urban design as choreography, developing the argument that urban design is the core of town planning and that its ‘real subject’ is everyday life, no different from some modern choreographies.
Teaching programmes at London South Bank University
In a series of imaginative and creative course ‘units’ he has developed and applied the idea that town planning is an art and that planners need to develop their creative and imaginative skills and look beyond their conventional professional langue and parole. The Arts of Town Planning is a first year urban design unit that has variously included choreographic workshops, reflective journeys to familiar places as well as the more conventional Townscape work; Contemporary Urbanism introduced studies in the urban imagery of film, popular music and poetry to planning, Culture Place and Creativity and more recently Place Performance and Social Usage are final year units where the conventional academic essay is forbidden and students are expected to engage with the flow and rhythms of the life of a place – students have produced a three minute punk single, a performance of Trafalgar Square and a vision of the LSBU campus at midnight (its near the Ministry of Sound)
Papers and publications :
These teaching projects are paralleled with papers and publications offering a theoretical perspective on this work
1983
Readers, Travellers, Visitors, Inhabitants and Storytellers- Notes for an Existential Urban Design, GLOSCAT Papers in Local and Rural Planning, 18
1985
Truth is only Known to Guttersnipes, in Gold and Burgess, Geography the Media and Popular Culture.
1987
The Next Best Thing to Being There ,in: Landscape Research
1994
Transitory Topographies, in Gold and Ward, Place Promotion Wiley, Chichester
1995
The Arts of Town Planning in Planning Practice and Research Vol 10. No 2 pp 111- 119
1996,
Mind/body, Space/Time, Things/Events in Urban Design Studies, 2,University of Greenwich
1997
Being There, Creative Environments Symposium, University of West England, Bristol,
From users to Consumers, The Future of Urban Design Education Conference,
2001
Education in place and performance (with Struan Leslie), Urban Design Quarterly,
Just passin’ thru , European City in Transition Conference, Bauhaus University, Weimar
2002
What’s normal then? (The work of David L Thomas) (with Jim Stewart) UDQ April
This conversation is the basis for Beatrice's current explorations of MK, exploring the city as studio.
http://www.miltonkeynesartscentre.org/groundwork/
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