GCPH Seminar Series 16: Lecture 1 - Anna Minton
Big Capital - Who is the city for?
We were delighted to welcome Anna Minton as our first speaker of Seminar Series 16.
Anna is a writer, journalist and Reader in Architecture at the University of East London. Her most recent book Big Capital: Who is London for? explored the housing crisis in London while her earlier book Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the twenty-first century city focused on the polarisation and privatisation of cities and the effect and nature of public space. Published two weeks before the Grenfell Fire, Big Capital shows why spiralling inequalities contribute directly to the housing crisis with the wealth of those at the top ‘trickling down’ through cities and displacing communities.
In this lecture, Anna investigated the main themes of the book in the context of the UK as a whole and in the wider context of North American and European cities subject to similar pressures.
About the speaker
Anna Minton
Writer and journalist and Reader in Architecture, University of East London (UEL)
Anna spent a decade in journalism, which involved some fascinating experiences such as covering the Northern Ireland peace process during the 1990s. But she found being a journalist increasingly frustrating both as a result of partisan editorial lines and because of the intense pressure on time and resources which undermined proper investigations. She began to write more in-depth reports for think tanks and policy organisations, a series of which formed the basis for Ground Control, which was published in 2009. Between 2011-2014 she was the Royal Commission’s Fellow in the Built Environment and in 2013 she joined the University of East London (UEL) as Reader in Architecture, where she is Programme Leader of the MRes programme, ‘Reading the neoliberal city’.
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