The Radical City

Coinciding with Farrell Centre’s opening weekend in April 2023, we ran an event exploring what it means to be a radical city. Featuring Shankari Raj, Alex Niven, Simin Davoudi. Kate Denby and chaired by Farrell Centre director, Owen Hopkins, you can catch up on the event via the video below.

The Radical City emerges from the contention that the challenges facing us today – locally, regionally and globally – are so urgent and of such far-reaching and seismic scale and consequence that, after decades of responsive incrementalism, the time has come for truly radical action.

Cities (we contend) are where many of these challenges are most keenly felt, whether in the unaffordability of housing and broader economic uncertainties, underlying racial and social injustices, perpetual challenges of road traffic and air pollution, and the impacts of climate change on everything from food supply to extreme weather events. But at the same time, cities are where the radical action required to meet these challenges is mostly like to emanate from.

Featuring speakers Alex Niven, Kate Denby, Shankari Raj and Simin Davoudi, and chaired by Farrell Centre Director Owen Hopkins, the event will range across everything from economics and ecology, architecture, culture, urban planning to the fundamental structures of our democracy, we ask what does it mean to be a radical city? How do we get there? What’s standing in the way? What can we build on and where do we need to start again?

About the speakers

Alex Niven grew up in Northumberland and now lectures in English Literature at Newcastle University. He edited a first edition of the letters of the Newcastle modernist poet Basil Bunting (published last year by OUP), and among his most recent authored books are Newcastle, Endless, an original sonnet sequence inspired by the topography of the city (published in 2021 by Canalside Press), and The North Will Rise Again, a cultural history of modernism and revivalism in the North East and the wider North (published this year by Bloomsbury). He has written for the Guardian, the New York Times, Pitchfork, the New Statesman, and the Face, among other publications, and he currently lives in Newcastle.

Kate Denby has been Executive Director and joint CEO of Northern Stage in Newcastle since 2015, where she leads the strategic, financial and operational development of the company. Under her tenure the company increased audiences by 35% in four years, expanded acclaimed programmes of work with young people and independent theatre makers in the region, and established embedded partnerships in community settings. Kate’s background is in theatre producing and management. She was previously Executive Producer at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill and Producer/Head of Programming & Talent Development at Hull Truck Theatre. She has led theatre tours to Europe, the USA and Southern Africa, and was involved in developing and delivering Hull’s successful bid for UK City of Culture 2017.

Shankari Raj, architect and Founder of Nudge, wants to challenge traditional approaches to architecture head-on, focusing on community led, sustainable design processes. At Nudge she takes the approach of hiring people on a job by job basis as she believes each project needs to be embedded in place. She is a visiting lecturer and external examiner at Architecture schools across the country: Cardiff, Newcastle, Sheffield, and Bath University. She has been an ongoing judge for the RIBA, Architectural Journal and WAN awards. Her practice Nudge is a versatile architecture practice with a strong reputation for designing and delivering spaces that enable people to innovate, be bold, work, muse and reflect. Nudge is behind a growing portfolio of award-winning spaces in the UK and beyond. Recent projects include, The Architect bar, Design West offices, GreenWay project, OVO Energy headquarters, SS Great Britains Cafe, Engine Shed and Bristol Temple Studios.

Professor Simin Davoudi holds the Chair of Town Planning in the School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, and is Co-Director of the Newcastle University Centre for Researching Cities. She is former President of the Association of European Schools of Planning and Fellow of, the Royal Town Planning Institute, the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Society of Arts. She is a Trustee of the Town and Country Planning Association and a member of the ESRC Strategic Advisory Network. She has held visiting professorships at universities in the USA (Virginia Tech), the Netherlands (Amsterdam & Nijmegen), Sweden (BTH), Australia (RMIT) and Finland (Tampere). Simin has served as expert advisor for several UK government departments (DEFRA, DLUHC), EU directorate generals, research councils in the UK and European countries, planning schools and international research projects. Her research centres on governance processes and the intersection between power- knowledge and justice and democracy in relation to: cities, spatial planning, environmental policies, climate resilience, spatial imaginaries, and civil societies. Selected books include: Hope Under Neoliberal Austerity (2021 Policy Press), The Routledge Companion to Environmental Planning (2019), The Resilience Machine (2018, Routledge), Justice and Fairness in the City (2016 Policy Press), Reconsidering Localism (2015 Routledge) and Conceptions of Space and Place (2009 Routledge). Her most recent paper is: Prefigurative Planning: Performing concrete utopias in the here and now, European Planning Studies (forthcoming).

Image: Illustration from the Newcastle Central Development Plan, 1962