Blog Article Index
Welcome to Uniform November's Article Index
#314 Recombination: The Missing Discipline in Architecture: Architecture is too important to be left to architects.
#313 Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan: What Post-War Cities Must Learn About Memory: Rebuilding After War: What Buildings Remember If you are planning the reconstruction of Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Syria (or any city emerging from war) there is a question that rarely appears in engineering briefs, donor frameworks, or architectural masterplans:
#312 The Scottish election question no party is answering: how do we build peace at home? This is the first article of mine published by The Times, and I’m reposting it here in full. It argues that Scotland’s biggest peace-related risks are not military, but social and political, and that as elections approach, the absence of any serious discussion about peacebuilding at home should concern us all. Peace, as John Buchan reminded us, is the absence of fear. By that standard, it deserves to be treated as national infrastructure, not an afterthought.......
#311 A Manifesto for Adaptive Reuse: We live among buildings that are older than our assumptions about them. Many were not designed for the lives we now ask them to host, yet they persist, materially, culturally, energetically. In an age of climate risk, social fragmentation, and accelerating development pressure, demolition has become the most reflexive response to architectural difficulty. This manifesto argues that such reflexes are no longer tenable.
#310 Trump the Orange: In Search of the Warrior Gene: Recent advances in behavioural genetics compel us to ask one of the great questions of our time: Does President Donald Trump possess the so-called “warrior gene”, or is he merely very loud?
#309 Rooting for the Survivor: What Epic Films Teach Us About War:
About halfway through Avatar: Fire and Ash, it occurred to me that I was rooting for someone I would never be. This is not a complaint about the film. It is doing precisely what epic stories have always done, and doing it very well. The unease lies elsewhere: in how instinctively we accept the perspective it offers. Entire villages burn. Creatures fall from the sky. Bodies accumulate in the background. Yet our emotional investment remains firmly fixed on the survival of the leader and his small circle. The hero lives. The rest provide context.
#308 Light, Warmth, and the Everyday Bravery of Ukrainian Culture: What Ukraine’s public art reveals about resilience once the celebrations are over
#307 Venezuela and the Comforting Illusion of Political Agency: Reports that the United States has conducted military strikes on Venezuela have triggered a familiar cycle of commentary: urgent analysis, heated debate, moral positioning and calls to action. Television panels fill airtime, social media polarises, and the same question is posed repeatedly: what does this mean, and what should we do next?
#306 A Note of Thanks: An acknowledgement of the everyday acts of care and courage that rarely make headlines.
#305 The Uncomfortable Ordinary: Evil, Responsibility, and the Banality of Systems: Last night, while watching Nuremberg (dir. James Vanderbilt), that discomfort returned with renewed force. The film centres on the uneasy relationship between Hermann Göring (played by Russell Crowe) and U.S. Army psychiatrist Lt. Colonel Douglas Kelley (played by Rami Malek). Kelley was tasked with assessing the mental fitness of the Nazi defendants held at Nuremberg Prison before they stood trial. Over roughly five months, he conducted hundreds of hours of interviews, searching for something (anything) that might explain the scale of the crimes these men had overseen. At one point in the film, Kelley articulates his driving question: “If we can psychologically define evil, we can make sure something like this never happens again.” It is a profoundly human hope, and one that history has repeatedly frustrated.
#304 When Fragility Comes Home: What the UK Can Learn from Conflict Zones: (Scotsman Article) Experiences in Ukraine, Iraq, and Indonesia show how social division, inequality, and weakened institutions can destabilise societies, and how social protection could prevent it.
#303 Architecture as Evidence: Why the Prisons Museum Matters: Across the world, ordinary buildings have been made to bear extraordinary violence, schools, factories, churches, hospitals repurposed as prisons, execution grounds, torture chambers. These places do not simply fade when the conflict ends; they remain as scars in the social landscape. The Prisons Museum seeks not only to document these sites, but to protect their testimony, to transform hidden trauma into public memory, to support justice, and to give survivors narrative agency. This short reflection explains why such work matters, and why acknowledging atrocity is a foundation, not an obstacle, to peace.
#302 Why Peacebuilding Needs Climate Thinking and Climate Action Needs Memory, Place, and Justice:
cross the UN and global policy landscape, the term “climate–conflict nexus” has become shorthand for the reality that environmental shocks and social instability are increasingly inseparable. But the nexus is often described in economic or technological terms, food security, water scarcity, critical infrastructure, adaptation finance, and “smart” responses. Yet missing from most of these discussions is something fundamentally human:How people inhabit place, remember trauma, negotiate belonging, and make meaning from their built environments.This neglected dimension, the architecture of memory and everyday life, is precisely where peace and climate imperatives meet...And this is where our work sits.
#301 Why Peace & Conflict Skills Matter in Everyday UK Life: For most of my working life, I have operated at the intersection of people, place, memory, and conflict. I have worked in cities rebuilding after war; in neighbourhoods negotiating tense identities; in institutions grappling with histories they found difficult to acknowledge; and in communities looking for ways to reconnect after years of silence or division. Through all of this, one insight has stayed with me: Conflict does not begin with violence, and peace does not begin with treaties.They begin in everyday places, organisations, and encounters.
#300 What the Walled Off Hotel Reveals About Our Liquid Times: In Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Zygmunt Bauman describes a world slipping from solid certainties into fluid insecurities, a world where social bonds thin, trust evaporates, and fear becomes a political resource more valuable than truth. We inhabit, he argues, an age shaped by negative globalisation: a system that grants radical freedom of movement to some while confining others behind walls, checkpoints, and bureaucratic cages.
#299 Are We Listening? Children Speak, Prisoners Whisper, Buildings Remember: I stepped into two very different exhibitions in Edinburgh. What I found were two worlds with threshold spaces full of meaning and intrigue, whose contrasts were electrifying: one filled with the imaginative power of children, the other with the fragile, urgent voices of political prisoners. Together they opened a space between hope and horror, between what children fiercely imagine and what adults can so violently destroy.
#298 Scotland’s Housing Crisis is a Crisis of Complacency : Scotland’s housing emergency is usually framed as a failure of funding, planning or political will. But the deeper crisis is cultural. In my new article for The Scotland on Sunday, I argue that we have drifted into a passive relationship with our built environment. We complain about rents and planning decisions, but rarely engage with the processes shaping them. Even strong frameworks like NPF4 can’t succeed without a public able, and willing, to participate. The solution? A civic awakening that makes “place” part of everyday conversation. Housing isn’t just a policy issue; it’s a democratic one.......