A few links to wake up BUU!

The blog has been pretty dormant recently. Everybody is presumably occupied with other projects at the moment. In the meantime, a few things have popped up that are relevant and interesting. A seminar entitled "Photography as Alternative Urbanism", happening in London on November 10th. looks like an event designed for BUU! Hopefully someone involved in this discussion will be able to attend.

My current neighbourhood, Woolloomooloo, Sydney, is an inner city neighbourhood with a rich, colourful and not always peaceful history. It was a site of conflict in the 1970's, when developers wanted to flatten the district to make way for more high rise buildings. Local residents and unions managed to prevent this happening, and the stories of these conflicts were recorded in a series of murals - a few of which still survive. There is a blog devoted to the murals, with some photographic documentation. Wikipedia also has a substantial section on murals, graffiti and street art in Sydney.

I continue my wanderings around the city, gradually moving out into less central areas. The last few days have been spent seeking out Ballardian urban landscapes around expressways, subways and gaps between concrete buildings. I've been trying to find out if there has been any "hardcore" psychogeographic activity around Sydney, but all I came up (via google) with was an example of the kind of "psychogeo light" that the media do periodically and some rather lacklustre academic papers.