Last week was a bit hectic from my point of view.  While James was busy being buried in exam board duties up at Manchester, I found myself with a whole bunch of things to do.

On Monday Alex started a ten week work placement at the University as part of the EU's Leonardo programme for facilitating lifelong learning.  Alex is from Dresden and is looking for experience of practical applications for GIS.  So I've roped him in to doing some of the GIS work for Rescue Geography.  While he got to work calculating the areas of different types of road network within our study area I went along to a workshop on Reconstruction Heritage organised by Peter Larkham at Birmingham City University.

Peter is an old friend and postwar urban heritage is one of his great passions.  It was an interesting day of papers, with some representatives from English Heritage there - they're the guys who are responsible for organising the listing of historic buildings for preservation.  So there was plenty of time to chat about the virtues of preserving the Central Library building (which the City Council would very much like to knock down) and the way that people value the buildings created in that rush of urban planning in the quarter century after the war.

Rescue Geography got a brief airing as part of a paper jointly presented with Peter Larkham and Julian Lamb (who partly inspired RG in the first place) and seemed to get quite a good reception.  I should, however, mention a great quote someone dug up from Thomas Sharp - one of the key figures in post-war replanning - '...cities have personalities and characters as men have, and the planner must try to match the personality and character of the place he is formulating...' (1946, p9).  I love this idea of cities having personalities and the need to capture what these personalities are when thinking about replanning - it's rescue geography in a nutshell and someone was saying this over 60 years ago.

On Tuesday we had another MADE lunchtime event, which followed on from a lengthy planning meeting.  Dan has started taking some of the portraits of interviewees for the October laboratory, which is cool - real sense that this is starting to come together.  Lorraine Boothroyd from Turner Townsend (consultants who are deeply involved in Birmingham's Big Plan document) and Richard Trengrouse (from the Digbeth Business Association and one of our interviewees) came to the lunch.  We had a good discussion, particularly around James' idea of hotspots and contours of valency which, unfortunately, I've not been able to do any mapping of yet.  Nonetheless, I think I've been better able to explain James' ideas now that we've started doing the analysis and I can see in my own mind the kinds of maps that will result - so we should be able to produce something almost like clusters of meaning.

We also had quite an interesting discussion of Feng Shui and the possibilities of mapping a Feng Shui analysis of Digbeth against more conventional western models of planning.  Given the presence of two Chinese community centres within the area, this seemed like quite an interesting possibility to explore further.

Beyond this, Alex has done a whole load more noise mapping for us, which I'll get up onto the website relatively soon.  Trying to finish off a couple of academic things at the moment (grant applications and papers) now that, all of a sudden, I seem to have a proper amount of working time available.  Thank goodness for the summer break, when work really starts.