James Heartfield

Writer and lecturer James Heartfield, (born James Hughes), writes and lectures on economic regeneration. He is also a director of Audacity.org, campaigning for the building of new homes.

Heartfield writes for The Times Higher Education Supplement, Spiked Online, and Blueprint. Heartfield has had articles published in the Guardian, the Telegraph,The Times, the Architects' Journal, the Review of Radical Political Economy, Rising East and Cultural Trends.

Heartfield has been critical of government policies on the creative industries, giving talks and writing articles, most recently on the subject of the Cox Review into the role design can play in promoting British business. In September 2005 he spoke at the Design Council on whether 'creativity could save the British economy', having published The Creativity Gap: Why Less Hype Is More Innovation In The Culture Sector in May. He also collaborated with Chris Powell at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts on a comment on the Cox Review Escape the creative ghetto.

He was the Manchester branch organiser of the now defunct Revolutionary Communist Party; in the early nineties, wrote for Living Marxism until it was closed by a libel action in 2000. He helped write the party's manifesto.

He was born in Leeds in 1961 and lives in north London with his wife Eve Kaye, who was the assistant producer of anti-environmentalism documentary Against Nature.

Heartfield helped read and comment on drafts of Abortion, Motherhood, and Mental Health, by fellow LM group member Ellie Lee. Lee thanks him on the book's acknowledgements page.

In 2006, following the death of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, Heartfield and Julia Svetlichnaja wrote up a series of interviews they had with Litvinenko before he was poisoned for the Telegraph,. "His stories were full of extravagant conspiracies, hardly surprising when he had lived in the middle of so many himself," they wrote. "... Eventually, one of those conspiracies caught up with him."

Publications

 * James Heartfield, Need and Desire in the Post-Material Economy, Perpetuity Press, 1998
 * James Heartfield, Great Expectations: The Creative Industries in the New Economy, Design Agenda, 2000
 * Ian Abley, James Heartfield, Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age, Wiley-Academy, 2001
 * James Heartfield, The Death of the Subject Explained, Booksurge, 2006
 * James Heartfield, The Creativity Gap: Why Less Hype Is More Innovation In The Culture Sector, Blueprint Broadside, May 15, 2005; quoted by Larry Elliott in the Guardian
 * James Heartfield, Let's Build! Why we need five million homes in the next 10 years, Audacity, 2006
 * James Heartfield and Julia Svetlichnaja, "Final interview of the poisoned former spy," Telegraph (UK), November 25, 2006.
 * James Heartfield Green Capitalism: manufacturing scarcity in an age of abundance (Openmute, 2008)

Recent papers

 * Town and Country All Planned Out: the Worldwide Impact of the TCPA, Building Centre, 19 May 2007
 * Interviewing Litvinenko Centre for the Study of Democracy, Westminster University, 30 January 2007
 * Sprawl,Democracy Club, 14 November 2006
 * Superbia, Kingston University Suburban Studies Dayschool, September 2006

Postings to mailing lists by or about James Heartfield

 * This Google search retrieves postings by or about James Heartfield to mailing lists archived at mail-archive.com: "james heartfield" site:mail-archive.com. Many of these postings are to the Marxism-Thaxis list.
 * This Google search retrieves postings made by James Heartfield using a defunct email address: "Jim@heartfield.demon.co.uk". Some of the postings pertain to the ITN-LM group libel case.

Blogsite

 * James Heartfield's home page mirror site