Forgotten Plans for Heliports
Last week I went over to the University of Liverpool to give a seminar in the Department of Geography and Planning. It was a friendly event and I tried out a new talk on the historical geography of the helicopter and unrealised planning for city centre heliports in the 1950s. This is a fairly new strand of research coming out of the broader Mapping Manchester project and more directly from the successful Infra_MANC exhibition that I co-curated last spring.

If you're interested you can browse through the slides on 'Vertical Urbanism and the Forgotten Plans for Heliports'. The image above is an example of the kinds of unrealised plans for rooftop heliports that I am examining. This particular drawing, from the early 1950s, was for a helicopter station in the centre of Liverpool but was not actually built. (Image courtesy of Liverpool City Archives.)

I am giving an amended version of this heliport talk at a one-day workshop in Birmingham next week on Infrastructure and the Rebuilt Post-war City, where I will drop the Liverpool-specific examples and add in a little bit more on London and Birmingham. I plan to write this material up as a full paper in the next few months, but in the meantime you might want to read the 'helicopter dreaming' chapter in the print catalogue from our Infra_MANC exhibition - copies still available for just £10.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Managing Your Online Persona, Part I

by Brandon Giles (republished from his personal blog ) Why Care? It is becoming more important than ever to actively manage your persona on the internet, particularly if you operate in the fields of entrepreneurship, venture capital or marketing. In general, persona management is more crucial in industries where your value and success depends on personal human capital and others perception of that value. However, digital footprints have a material impact on everyone. Beginning back in 2007, an ExecuNet survey  found that 83% of recruiters already used internet searches to evaluate job candidates, with 43% of recruiters eliminating candidates because of what they found. “How-to” Guide As an aspiring entrepreneur I sought to learn more about the tools, platforms and best practices before busting out onto the Blogging scene. I heard from nearly every guest in my Launching Tech Ventures entrepreneurship course at the Harvard Business School (#hbsltv) that blogging was critical to estab...
Read more

Letting it Go

by Anthemos Georgiades There are various lessons I could have discussed here regarding the UX tests I ran for my startup Zumper. But, instead, I am going to focus on one challenge that these tests created for me: my ability – or lack thereof – to let my own opinions and intuitions drop. In the three lean tests that I ran, two of them confirmed something I had suspected. The third one however did not. In my ‘banner’ test, I tested (1) the price users thought a standard bed frame was worth, under three different themes of page banners and then (2) if the user could actually remember the site’s name after use. I found that what I considered to be the most ‘boring’ white and grey banner drove the highest price estimations from users and beat our other two banners hands-down on brand recollection. I had actually only included this ‘boring’ banner in the lean test as a control. My hypothesis had been that our green banner would drive the best engagement given that this was the predominan...
Read more

Creating the “Next Big Thing": How to Inspire Innovation

By Brad Bonnett  How do I apply all my learning’s about lean startups such as finding product market fit with a minimum viable product if I don’t have an initial problem that I am trying to solve?  I know that I want to build something that changes the world but I continue to struggle to find what product or service I want to build.  During our class with Fred Wilson he said that “If you have an idea that you can't get out of your head, do a startup. Otherwise join a startup.”  Although I appreciate the simplicity of this view and the experience that Fred brings to the table I am dismayed to think that unless I stumble upon an idea that really sticks with me I am going to be excluded from starting my own company.  Therefore I tried to put together a process that can help inspire innovation for those of us who are lacking an idea to create that “next big thing!” I tried to take the best practices that I have learned from my Managing Innovation class at HBS and ...
Read more