Apparently it's not considered newsworthy beyond the local press, but a whole block of the Morningside Estate in Hackney Wick/Homerton, i.e. prime Olympic boom territory, has been without electricity for SIX days and counting.  The supplier (French state-controlled London Olympic bid sponsor EDF Energy) blames a water leak (Thames Water: acquired for £8 billion by Macquarie Bank of Sydney, 2006).  You couldn't ask for a better display of how financialized infrastructure works: resource rundown by two fragments of the former utility system converges neatly to make life impossible for guess which class demographic (sitting on guess which real estate...)

We Are Bad's invectives against sport as class-cleansing and social engineering have been appearing on and around the fence of the London Olympic site over the past couple of months. Mute presents the first in a series of specially commissioned posters, made available here in hi-res for home printing

The BBC's Live Sites 2012 program is set to roll out 60 big screens in urban centres around the UK by 2012. Considering the vague agenda currently guiding their use, Richard Wright asks whether these big screens will ever open themselves to creative use or simply remain giant TVs controlled by giants
 

'Walkabout' a poem submitted by Michael Hampton would have fitted excellently with the collection of verse published as part of our recent issue on credit, debt and financial crisis. As a late arrival it joins the site here and as part of our Ongoing accumulation of fiscal verse 

In an interesting intervention into the debate initiated by Claire Bishop [see http://www.metamute.org/en/exodus] on the social instrumentalisation of art, Building magazine has revealed plans for a dual (at least) purpose 'productivist' public sculpture to be sited at Stratford Station. Firmly in the tradition of the kind of useful monuments scattered across the east end (another good example is the sculpture adorned with CCTV in Weaver's Fields, Bethnal Green) it appears now that most public art must not only charm, but also serve (and police), its public through social function. Rest assured, whether the outcome turns out to be public sculpture or street furniture the core artistic and educational attributes of this commission 'as an anti-terrorist barrier to prevent cars driving into Station Plaza' will be fulfilled :

While bird flu panic made a return to the UK mainland last autumn, the promised pandemic failed to materialise. What does continue to evolve, however, are repressive forms of population management sustained by hypothetical threats of megadeath – writes C. L-Stavrides

Some US protests against sub-prime evictions in text and pictures

JAN/23/08 - Neighbors & supporters rallied in front of Melonie Griffiths-Evans Dorchester home to physically block an eviction by US Bank & Ocwen Financial. Like thousands in Boston and across the country she is facing foreclosure as a result of sub-prime predatory loans. The eviction was called off because of the protest leaving her and her three children in their house, but some 1500 local families still face a similar situation. The organization City Life/Vida Urbana plans to continue fighting evictions.

In the course of his life, Victor Gruen completed major urban interventions in the US and Western Europe that fundamentally altered the course of western urban development. Anette Baldauf describes how Gruen’s fame rests mostly on the insertion of commercial machines into the decentred US suburbs. These so-called ‘shopping towns’ were supposed to strengthen civic life and structure the amorphous, mono-functional agglomerations of suburban sprawl. Yet within a decade, Gruen’s designs had become the architectural extension of the policies of racial and gender segregation underlying the US postwar consumer utopia