Dr. Alan Reeve
Programme Leader for Urban Design
Alan is the Savills Reader in Planning and Urban Design in the Joint Centre for Urban Design and the Department of Planning at Oxford Brookes University. His particular research and teaching interests lie in townscape analysis and evaluation, town centre management and conservation-led urban regeneration. He is currently involved in a number of research projects for the Heritage Lottery Fund and Transport for London. He is also part of a team from the Joint Centre for Urban Design engaged in delivering training in all aspects of urban design to both public and private sector clients.
His teaching and research interests include Urban design; conservation based urban regeneration; townscape evaluation; urban management; urban theory. Heritage led urban regeneration; quality of public space; management of public space; the philosophy of design.
Punch and Judy at the Beach and in the Mall
This article examines how the traditional English folk form of Punch and Judy is deployed in two very different contemporary public settings in the UK: the beach and the shopping mall. It explores how the nature of public settings alters profoundly the meaning of this highly specific cultural object and how its commodification as part of the spaces of everyday consumption transforms its original value and connection to its audience. Other examples of street performance in British urban contexts are also considered.
The article derives from recent ethnographic research into the contemporary significance of Punch and Judy, combined with theoretical accounts of spectacle in urban space. Its authors are from two quite different academic and research fields – puppetry and street performance, and urban design. The research demonstrates how these approaches and styles of conceptualizing public space can be creatively synthesized to yield fresh insights into the nature of spaces of performance – and on the notion of ‘tradition’ as it is experienced in the contemporary public realm.
Evaluating the THI: Measuring the effectiveness of the Townscape Heritage Initiatives in the United Kingdom
The Townscape Heritage Initiatives (THI) was launched in 1998 to assist places where heritage buildings predominated but were also experiencing social and economic distress. The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) not only set out to help such places but also to determine whether the aid was achieving the Fund's goals. In 1999, the HLF engaged Oxford Brookes University (OBU) to undertake a multi-year evaluation of the success of the THI programme. To date, the THI has provided over £170 million to 175 different locations throughout the United Kingdom. In 2004, an article outlining the methodology being used by the OBU team appeared in the academic literature. Seventeen representative sites had been selected and baseline reports prepared between 1999 and 2001. In 2007, the first series of follow-up studies were completed. This article addresses three questions: was it possible to gather the data that the researchers proposed when the evaluation was planned, was it possible to use that data to evaluate the degree to which the stated HLF goals for the programme were met and, finally, in what way is the research likely to be useful to the funding agency? The article presents findings from the research that relates economic, demographic, townscape and other characteristics of places to their potential to benefit from investment in heritage at the urban scale.