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Matt Thompson

@mattthompson.bsky.social

• full-time urban geographer (UCL Bartlett) • spare-time cyclejographer (London mostly) • first-time author (*Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives* https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv153k6cx

109 Posts1783 Follower1767 Folgt
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 3w ago

Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/

flyingrodent@flyingrodent.bsky.social · 4w ago

This is because the great lesson of the 2010s was: politicians can mostly ignore the collapsing public realm they vandalised and stay in their important jobs, so long as everyone is willing to join in with whatever ludicrously inflammatory horseshit they are shouting into microphones this week.

George Eaton • @georgeeaton.bsky.s... • 3h If only the quiet collapse of our universities got as much attention as Jason Arday has. Here's @gsoh31.bsky.social's recent piece for Arguably on the "slow, grim dribbling away of one of Britain's great triumphs and economic advantages". . www.arguably.uk/p/ the-quiet-...
Dr. Jeroen W.P. Wijnendaele@drdragases.bsky.social · last mo.

No longer content with pillaging intellectual work and dismembering our environment (already critically weakened), AI companies are now hellbent on destroying books galore including rare editions. Shut down these nefarious enterprises already.

AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books

If you have retreated to physical books because the internet is too full of AI slop, bad news — now they’re shredding the books to feed their AI slop machines.

news.com.au

Caroline Ball@heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · last mo.

This article estimated global APC spend in 2023 to be around $2.5 billion, which was THREE TIMES the amount just four years earlier in 2019, at around $910 million.

Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023

This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. APCs are fees charged for publishing in some ...

arxiv.org

Tim White@timwhite100.bsky.social · last mo.

We now know a bit about what happens when the likes of private equity firms and REITs enter housing markets. But what about venture capitalists?  My recent paper ‘Hyperscaling housing’ has been published in the latest volume of IJURR (spoiler: it's not pretty):

HYPERSCALING HOUSING: Venture Capital, Real Estate Start‐Ups and the Race to Build a Global Residential Brand

What happens when venture capitalists try to reinvent housing in their own image? Synonymous with the rise of Big Tech, venture capitalists (VCs) are asset managers that invest in early-stage compani...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Matt Thompson@mattthompson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

How can Community Wealth Building and the Foundational Economy be combined in experimental ways to tackle problems of uneven development in peripheralised places? My chapter on alternative economic models in new book on the Evolution of UK Regional Policy: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

(PDF) Alternative Policy Models for Local Economic Regeneration: Combining Community Wealth Building with the Foundational Economy

PDF | In the absence of redistributive regional policy, yet with deepening uneven development, peripheralised places across the UK are left with little... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

researchgate.net

Matt Thompson@mattthompson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

How can Community Wealth Building and the Foundational Economy be combined in experimental ways to tackle problems of uneven development in peripheralised places? My chapter on alternative economic models in new book on the Evolution of UK Regional Policy: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

(PDF) Alternative Policy Models for Local Economic Regeneration: Combining Community Wealth Building with the Foundational Economy

PDF | In the absence of redistributive regional policy, yet with deepening uneven development, peripheralised places across the UK are left with little... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

researchgate.net

Jonn Elledge@jonnelledge.bsky.social · 2mo ago

so a friend on a mailing list I've been on forever said he couldn't understand why so many people had wanted Starmer to stand down when he was obviously so much better than those who came before. I did my best to explain

Starmer is not only incapable of making difficult decisions, he seems not to understand it's his job. I've had it from multiple sources that he gets angry when officials decline to say which course of action is better, even though sometimes it's not clear which is better, it's a trade off, or all options have risks. This is why there is no coherence to our immigration or tax policies. Starmer refuses to meet MPs unless it's absolutely unavoidable. He doesn't like ministers who promote their own ideas but doesn't seem to have any of his own. He has utterly failed to articulate how he wants to change the country or what he thinks his government is for. He has presided over policies that have taken rights from protestors, migrants, refugees and trans people. He has made speeches and pursued immigration reforms intended to impress the far right, who are never going to vote for him, while alienating his own voters. He has seemed entirely disinterested in the fact the higher education system - which is a competitive advantage, a major export industry and a huge plank of regional economies, all at once - is collapsing. And on multiple occasions when coked up racist thugs have been committing acts of violence and mass civil disorder on our streets, he has been, at best, reluctant to get in front of a camera and say these people are racist thugs who will be punished by the full force of the law. Pensioners who support the Palestinians, by contrast, he is happy to throw away the key. Oh, and there's the small matter of last month's election results which suggest that under his leadership Labour is genuinely on course for extinction as a party less than two years after winning a huge majority. Obviously this government's politics is much closer to mine than any of the Tory administrations since 2010, but measured in terms of ability to actually do many of the jobs that being prime minister involves - making decisions, managing his MPs, articulating a vision and then moving Britain towards it, running the fucking government - I think it is entirely possible to argue that Starmer is worse than any of his immediate predecessors except Truss. Andy Burnham is, to put it mildly, a deeply flawed politician. It's possible this gets us nowhere. But I find it extremely hard to envision how rolling the dice could make things worse.
Temporary Bat@saredra.bsky.social · 2mo ago

People being deeply confused as to why he's gone, getting a load of responses as to how he pissed them off, and remaining confused because, like, that reason only affects that person, so where were these blunders? Also, the cat may be PM now, not sure.

London Review of Books@lrb.co.uk · 2mo ago

‘Andy Burnham has turned that anger and helplessness, so liable to become a poisonous and reactionary nostalgia, in another direction. His campaign has made unabashed use of the word “hope”.’ Tom Crewe on the rebirth of municipal England, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

Tom Crewe | The Strange Rebirth of Municipal England

It has been a very large part of the failure of the Labour Party since 2010 that it has been unable to link the grave...

lrb.co.uk