Changing Places

From Preston to Cape Town, Karachi to Bradford ? a host of international cities and their evolving skylines have been put under the spotlight in an acclaimed new architectural book.

Edited by Dr Tasleem Shakur, director at the International Centre for Development and Environmental Studies and senior lecturer in human geography at Edge Hill, 'Cities in Transition: Transforming the Global Built Environment? offers a snapshot of the dynamics and changing faces of many world cities.

"In Europe there are elements of the third world and in the third world there are elements of Europe," said Dr Shakur, 53, who also co-edited 'Picturing South Asian Culture in English: Textual and Visual Representations?. "The look of cosmopolitan cities is changing at a rapid rate and we can no longer pigeon-hole architectural styles based on location alone.

"For example, there are more mosques per square mile in Lancashire than in Pakistan, while aspects of cities such as Dubai and those in Kuwait are typically English."

The book will be introduced to the House of Lords by Lord Patel of Blackburn later this year and was recently launched at the world congress of the Union of International Architects in Istanbul and several universities in Bangladesh.

"Having lived in the area for many years, I have taken great interest in Britain?s multicultural built environment," added Dr Shakur, who moved over to the UK from Bangladesh in the 1970s. "Examples such as the Lancashire mosques illustrate how new styles of building are cropping up everywhere as a result of negotiations between locality and identity."

Alongside colleagues at Edge Hill, Dr Shakur also heads up the Global Built Environment Review ? an international online journal for architecture, planning, development and the environment.

'Cities in Transition? is printed by Open House Press and priced at £14.99.