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Staff Profile

Dr David Webb

Senior Lecturer in Planning

  • Telephone: 0191 208 5413
  • Address: Room 7.18
    School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
    Newcastle University
    Henry Daysh Building
    Claremont Road
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
Background

David Webb is Senior Lecturer in Town Planning at SAPL, where his research contributions span three related interests: statutory planning and its reform, urban policy & politics and heterodox approaches to planning. 


He is an established contributor to the long running text book Town and Country Planning in the UK and has followed planning reform through a prior career in practice and fifteen years of teaching core planning modules. More recently, he has sought to understand these changes with the aid of Lacanian psychoanalysis and his work on The Levelling Up Fantasy will shortly be published by Routledge in a festschrift for Michael Gunder. He also has two collaborative texts in progress, one on Ludic Experiments in Growth and Innovation, which explores the potential of creative play to reshape planning, and another charting the Uses of the Preston Model. 


A recent ESRC application Early Experiments with Living in an Ecologically Changed World (£943,524) sought to partner with the Workers Educational Association to create a learning network spread across three locations and rooted in materialist experimentation with urban greening and tactical urbanism. This drew on nine years’ involvement as director and secretary of Greening Wingrove & Arthur’s Hill CIC. While not supported it has fed into a separate application to the AHRC’s thrive call. Influences are drawn from earlier action research exploring Tactical Urbanism in Newcastle’s west end through a new materialist lens. 


A related interest in heterodox approaches to heritage stems from a collaborative PhD with English Heritage, which explored the relationship between heritage and housing market renewal. Research conceptualising the intangible heritage of skateboarding in London received the AHRC Research in Film Award in 2016. This has also underpinned a more recent, Deleuzian theorisation of a reverberating Socialist politics on London’s South Bank and its implications for an understanding of Authenticity and Struggle. Dr Webb was on the steering group of the AHRC project Wastes and Strays, having problematised the future role of the urban commons through his volunteering work. 


Dr Webb is responsible for leading the postgraduate module Urban Policy: Origins and Alternatives and the core undergraduate module Planning Processes and was Director of Engagement at the school for nine years also holding roles including Senior Tutor, DPD and Acting Director of the Global Urban Research Unit.



 

 

Teaching

Module leader: 

TCP1014 Planning Processes

TCP1027 (skills element)

TCP8953 Politics of Urban Government

Additionally I teach across the planning programme on issues covering planning skills, theory and practice.

Publications