The authors of this report argued that terrace housing had become 'obsolete' and 'unsuitable for modern living', especially for 'contemporary flexible service sector households' (I think that means the middle class). They also seemed to think that the neighbourhoods in which many of these dwellings are located are 'dysfunctional' becuse they have too many working class people and not enough middle class people - that sort of thing. Mr Nevin and his colleagues concluded from their research that these terrace houses - that are so 'obsolete', 'outdated', 'unwanted' and 'unsuitable for modern living' - need to be demolished and replaced with 'high value' products that 'contemporary' households wanted.

LIONEL: Do you know this area?
FRANCES: Yes.
LIONEL: It can be pretty punishing. I don't think anyone from the outside quite understands what the job is. Mostly it's just listening to the anger. One reason or another. Lately it's the change in the DSS rules. If you're young, setting up home, you can no longer get a loan for a stove, unless you can prove you'll be able to pay the money back. I've had three couples in the last week. They need somewhere to go to express their frustration. They're drawn to a priest. They're furious. At their lives. At the system. At where they find themselves. (Smiles.) And they come to the vicar because he's the one man who can never hit back.
(Frances is restless, not understanding.)
FRANCES: Yes, I'm sure but I mean ... you can fight in this case?
(He looks at her a moment, as if in a dream.)
LIONEL: I'm sorry?
FRANCES: You do still have the will? Don't you?

By no means runne in debt: take thine own measure.
Who cannot live on twentie pound a yeare,
Cannot on fourtie: he's a man of pleasure,
A kinde of thing that's for it self too deere.
   The curious unthrift makes his clothes too wide,
   And spares himself, but would his taylor chide.

The Naked City, a map by Debord, illustrates the Situationists' concern with the construction and perception of urban space. The map consists of 19 cut-out sections of a map of Paris, printed in black ink, which are connected with red arrows. With its invention of quarters, its shifting about of spatial relations, and its large white blanks of non-actualized space, The Naked City visualizes a fragmented city that is both the result of multiple restructuring of a capitalist society, and the very form of a radical critique of this society. [Tom McDonough]

The Naked City was by far the most famous image to come out of situationism, and perhaps deservedly so. Its arresting, matter-of-fact design simultaneously mourned the loss of old Paris, prepared for the city of the future, explored the city’s structures and uses, criticized traditional mapping, and investigated the relationship between language, narrative, and cognition. [Simon Sadler]

A three-month-old boy and a boy aged three have been found dead at a property in Greater Manchester. Officers discovered the bodies at an address in Kilmington Drive, Cheetham Hill, on Wednesday night. A Greater Manchester Police spokesman said that officers were alerted after reports of "concern for welfare" were made to them. A 21-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of murder and is in custody awaiting questioning. The police spokesman was unable to confirm or deny reports that the children had been stabbed to death. A neighbour, who did not want to be named, said the residents were in shock at the news of the deaths. "It's heart-breaking, just tragic - hard to believe," she said. [Source: BBC]

Antony categorically rejects [the notion that we are only visiting this planet]. "I think we get born out of the earth, this album is like, I was born out of this place, I'm made out of this place. If there is any possibility for paradise, this is it. I'm not dreaming about elsewhere. I'm made of this place."

Nick Papadimitriou points out that most of the psychogeographic fraternity (and, dispiritingly, we are a fraternity: middle-aged men in Gore-Tex, armed with notebooks and cameras, stamping our boots on suburban station platforms, politely requesting the operators of tea kiosks in mossy parks to fill our thermoses, querying the destinations of rural buses. Our prostates swell as we crunch over broken glass, behind the defunct brewery on the outskirts of town) are really only local historians with an attitude problem. Indeed, real, professional local historians view us as insufferably bogus and travelling - if anywhere at all - right up ourselves.

The social theorist David Harvey recently proposed that in this ‘era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically’ we each have a right to the city: 'The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.' Harvey is writing of the need to democratise the means by which our global cities are shaped. I suggest that whilst psychogeography is an imperfect political project, a maverick art form and an untidy melange of practices, nevertheless it has a valid and potentially influential contribution to make to the processes through which cities may be positively changed.

Since 1 January 2006, British artist Ellie Harrison has been maintaining the web-based project Tea Blog. Every time she drinks a cup of tea or another hot drink she notes down a snippet of what she is thinking about and uploads it to the blog. There are now well over 1,500 thoughts archived online, which chronicle the last three years of the artist's life via her tea-drinking habits. Tea Blog is now entering its final two months and is due to end at midnight on 31 December 2008.

Ellie Harrison is known for her large-scale durational projects for which she has collected data about different aspects of her everyday routine. For Eat 22 she photographed everything she ate for a year and for Gold Card Adventures she calculated the total distance she travelled on London Transport in a year (9,210km). In August 2006, however, she officially 'quit data collecting' - vowing never to start another project focused so intensely on her own life again. When Tea Blog finally concludes later this year, it will mark the end of this aspect of her practice forever.