Wow at Google streetview

by Dr Rebecca Leach

Google streetview has just been extended! It now covers 95% of the UK. It is certainly impressive, but the implications are challenging. Such visibility. Anyhow, it now means you can contrast the urban sprawl of Stoke-on-Trent (which we will be thinking about a lot on our new MA in Urban Futures and Sustainable Communities with the leafy bucolic grandeur of Keele where you will be studying it and its picturesque village location.  Yes, we know the ironies are, um, ironic.  But of course the urban has always been discursively constructed in contrast to its rural counterpart: you can’t have one without the other.  And the archetypal English village (pan round to get the full Capability Brown effect from Keele church over the campus and farm) provides a contrasting cultural ideal that shapes our notions of what cities should be (along with the ultra-modernist notion of villages in the sky of course).  Come and have a look round.  Tell us what you think.