Tim Stonor

Blog

  • The art of modelling

    This film was a pleasure to make: sitting with Kayvan Karimi, chatting with Anna Rose and creating an ‘old-school’ #spacesyntax model by hand with pen, ruler and trace. 

    The film explores the pros and cons of digital versus analogue methods of analysis and design. The potentials of immersive digital experiences are enormous and, as I say in film, the capabilities of digital tools outstrip what we did previously without them.

    Nevertheless, concerns are often raised about the loss of hand skills in architecture (such as sketching and model-making) witthe implication being that the digital designprocess is less natural than the analogue. 

    Having worked in an ‘electronic environment’ for over 40 years, I no longer see the difference between drawing on paper, tablet or screen. But I prefer to work digitally for ease of creation, editing, storage and sharing. 

    I don’t see anything diminishing or dehumanising about the digital world. For me it’s akin to thinking and to dreaming: seeing images and places without tangible form. And then it adds something else: the ability to bring other people into those places, wherever they happen to be. 

    However, I know that many people over my age (58) have worked largely, if not entirely, in analogue. The digital world is less familiar and it’s possible to imagine why it can appear alien or inferior. 

    The same is not so true of people younger than me. And increasingly so. In the next decade, as the current generation of analogue leaders gives way to digital natives, the production, development and dissemination of design ideas will, I believe, be greatly enhanced. Each part of the design process will benefit from the digital input of, for example, an immersive projection or AI algorithm. 

    But whether it’s in sketching, engagement or critical review, the design process relies on human judgment – not least because the combined effects of cultures, climates and contexts mean that no two buildings and no two places are ever truly the same. 

    Will it take another decade for the machines to figure those out? We seem to be close with climate and context. Or will the unpredictability of cultural change be the elusive phenomenon that sustains the relevance of the imaginative brain and the creative hand?

  • The urban cortex

    The urban cortex

    A talk given at Lombardini22 architects in Milan on 13th May 2025.

    The idea I’d like to explore this evening is that cities serve a higher purpose than we typically credit them with, and this idea is that cities are natural extensions of the human brain. Far from being artificial, alien objects, cities work with us, their users, to help us solve the problems of our times. Cities are extensions of our brains and, just like our brains, cities are sophisticated computers.

    At least they are, if we design them well. 

    Great cities are not just beautiful to look at and stimulating to be in. They are also highly efficient human transactions machines: bringing people together to form relationships and generate outcomes. Cities are the outermost layer of our common existence. Hence the title of this talk: the ‘urban cortex’.  

    One challenge when discussing cities is that urban commentators often begin by describing cities as chaotic, that their street networks are ‘labyrinthine’. This is a lazy approach to urbanism – and not one that we share at Space Syntax. Instead, we’ve spent the last 50 years studying the apparent chaos of cities and discovering regularities within them – of spatial layout, of land use distribution, of density, mobility and the distribution of inequalities. 

    These discoveries help us both to understand cities and to better design them. 

    Cities are not chaotic. We don’t build them by chance. Within their apparently labyrinthine randomness there are structures that organise the ways we move through cities – and interact with each other within them.

    There are regularities that allow us to understand cities – not just as urban scientists might pick them apart but as every day users make sense of the places they’re in:

    • how they feel comfortable in them
    • feel like they want to visit and explore them
    • meet people in them
    • go to work in them
    • invest their time and their money 
    • have fun
    • feel excitement. 

    This is the ‘urban buzz’ that draws people to cities.  

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  • Space Syntax: selected papers by Bill Hillier

    Space Syntax: selected papers by Bill Hillier

    It is wonderful that a new book of Bill Hillier’s work on ‘space syntax’ has been published, including a FREE, downloadable .pdf:

    https://lnkd.in/eeQbrAkh

    Bill and his colleagues were so far ahead of the curve, writing in the 1970s about design coding, algorithms and generative design long before the technology existed to test their thinking for real.

    Yet, in paper after paper, what matters is not speculation for the sake of it but instead a strong sense of social purpose and community-focused design. It is this spirit that inspired the academic research group in all its pioneering work.

    Above all (and I would say this, wouldn’t I) the theme that this book keeps coming back to is the importance of professional design practice. Bill and colleagues had the practising architect in mind, not just the research selection committee. The objective of space syntax theory was always to be highly practical in helping architects and urban designers make design decisions. This is something that current space syntax researchers will be reminded of throughout the book.

    For those of us not/no longer steeped in academia, the book is also a great read. Although Bill’s writing can be hard going, it’s worth it. There isn’t an unnecessary word in there – just a lot of them!

    My recommendation is to start with Ricky Burdett‘s essay in Chapter 7, which introduces the 16-page article on space syntax published by the Architects’ Journal in 1983 (yes, 16 pages!).

    And then take it from there…

    Congratulations and thanks to co-editors Laura Vaughan, John Peponis & Ruth Conroy Dalton for making this possible.

  • The Debate: Should London bid for the 2040 Olympic Games?

    Published in CityAM on 30th April 2025

    No: Passing the baton to another UK city would be a more worthy legacy

    2012 was spectacular – indeed the Games were so positive for London that their transformational impacts are still being felt and will be for some time. The Olympics and Paralympics inspired people to be better and to do more, creating places that are clean and lush where once they were polluted and sterile. Who wouldn’t want more?

    Yet one of the key questions for a future London Games is whether there is another fissure like the Lea Valley that needs bridging with streets, parks, stadia and real estate development. Or that has existing, box-fresh transport infrastructure such as the likes of Stratford International handed to the designers of 2012.

    No, London doesn’t need another Olympics and Paralympics for some time to come. Certainly not before another UK city has received that honour. Instead, the lessons of 2012 need to be passed to one of the nation’s other great cities where, like London, there are inequalities between west and east, or north and south. Where development needs to be undertaken on a scale that only the Games can deliver. A New York to Los Angeles or a Sydney to Melbourne.

    But let’s not leave London out entirely. After all, this city remains the repository for much of the knowledge, passion and guile that delivered that summer of love. Let London’s contribution be in offering the people that made 2012 possible. A collective memory of Olympics wisdom resides here in the capital, with a tome of tips and tricks to make things happen faster, cheaper and better. Let’s offer a different kind of Games volunteers. That would be an extraordinary legacy. 

    Link to published article in CityAM

  • Design to prioritise well-being and sustainability

    Notes from a talk given at the Roca Gallery, Barcelona on 10th December 2024, organised by Noumena

    In this urban century, cities face unprecedented challenges. How can we design to prioritise well-being and sustainability? This was the question at the heart of yesterday’s Urban Futures discussion in Barcelona.

    In thinking about the future we need to address the great global challenges that define our age:

    First, the challenge of climate change. Indeed the emergency of carbon reduction. This is obviously an environmental challenge but equally it is a challenge that threatens our economies and therefore our societies.

    Second, the public health challenges of obesity and loneliness. The former a physical health challenge and the latter a mental health challenge. Of course they’re interconnected: one begets the other. And they’re exacerbated by car-dependence.

    Third, the socio-cultural, indeed existential challenge of shelter. The number of displaced people in the world is higher than it has ever been. The UN calculate that we need to build 96,000 homes a day to eliminate this indignity.

    These challenges are unprecedented and cities must play a central role in addressing them.

    But how? Iconic architecture is not the answer. It is a distraction. What cities need is not architects and engineers who can design buildings that are 2km tall but great streets that are 2km or even 20km long. Rethinking urban mobility is possibly the most difficult design challenge of the day.

    So, in rethinking cities, where do you begin? Here are some ideas…

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  • 15-minute cities or 15-minute ‘bubbles’?

    15-minute cities or 15-minute ‘bubbles’?

    The motion at today’s Cityscape conference in Riyadh was: The 15-Minute City model will improve quality of life for all communities and can be easily scaled globally. 

    Who would choose to argue against the principles of the 15-Minute City? Walkable. Sociable. Low carbon. 

    Who wouldn’t want any of that?

    But, if not the principles of the 15-Minute City, what we should be deeply concerned about is the experience of translating those principles into practice. 

    My colleague Katya and I are going to argue against the motion from our experience of what many developers and designers are naively promoting in the name of the 15-Minute City. 

    Because what we are seeing in cities all over the world are individualistic, inward-looking, over-localised, gated developments calling themselves 15-Minute Cities. 

    Why do their proponents claim that these are 15-Minute Cities? Well, because they are relatively small, they have a mix of land uses and there’s a varying degree of infrastructure for walking and cycling. 

    But there’s typically very little, if any, public transport and the connections to other so-called 15-Minute Cities usually require the pedestrian or cyclist to cross the major roads and even highways that separate them. So these would-be walkers and cyclists usually end up jumping in a car and driving. 

    We know a lot about this in the UK because the 15-Minute City concept was at the heart of disastrous 20th Century New Town planning, even if we didn’t call them 15-Minute Cities back then.

    Communities – especially women – found themselves unable to walk easily between neighbourhoods because they felt unsafe next to fast cars or having to move through the tunnels that had been built under the highways or up, over and down the bridges that are the visible symbols of civic failure. 

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  • Design buildings like sandwich boxes?

    Design buildings like sandwich boxes?

    This post is taken from my reply to Peter Madden’s LinkedIn thinkpiece: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/professor-peter-madden-obe-b5684020_futuresthinking-fridayfuturesinsight-activity-6900394364888322048-CIrf

    The silver lining of COVID is that it’s exposing the links between where we live and how we live, whether that’s the exercise we get/or don’t get from the ways we now travel to work or the windows we open once we get there. It’s making us think.

    So if we take notice of whether what we eat is grass fed or free range or plant based then why shouldn’t we equally be interested that the air in a theatre is fresh-filtered? Why shouldn’t we think what it would mean for building facades to be like bean tins or sandwich boxes? Carrying information on their environmental and health performances. Not simply ‘as designed’ but also ‘as used’.

    Perhaps not plastered across the windows and rooftops (like the Shandwick packet in my photo) but embedded in QR codes and augmented reality overlays. Or just tastefully (pun intended) done as in Peter Madden’s photo.

  • Streets first, buildings second

    Streets first, buildings second

    I’ve been invited to lecture to the Harvard GSD ‘Unterbau’ options studio this Thursday. They’ve been offered the concepts of the Continuous City (ie buildings aligned into street-fronting blocks) versus the Discontinuous City (ie modernist standalone architecture). This makes me think about a second pair of types: the Continuous Street Network (simple, linear, grid-like) and the Discontinuous Street Network (convoluted, labyrinth-like). 

    These two categorisations can be combined, I think positively, as:

    CC:CSN (the most traditional form of #urbanism, found for millennia)

    DC:CSN (street-based but ‘gappy’)

    or negatively as:

    CC:DSN (trying to be like a city but overly convoluted in layout – I see a lot of this in contemporary urbanism)

    DC:DSN (the worst of the worst – complex and incoherent).

    In other words, what matters most is the geometry of the street network, then the continuity/discontinuity of the buildings. Streets first, buildings second. Sometimes/often/always hard for architects to accept.

    I might weave this into my talk…

  • Form ⇝ Flow ⇝ Function

    Form ⇝ Flow ⇝ Function

    Many places work in ways not originally intended. The artist’s impression is often unrealised, with public spaces less well used than in the drawings, shops not getting the footfall shown in the CGIs, tracks worn into green spaces painted as pristine in the renderings.

    The actual function of places – as opposed to their intended function – follows the flows set up by the spatial form of those places, independent of their designers’ wishes otherwise.

    It’s risky to think that form follows function if you don’t first understand how the actual functioning of places is a consequence of the flows shaped by their physical forms.

    If you don’t understand how physical forms shape human flows and these flows then support functions (such as sitting, shopping, resting, feeling comfortable or feeling unsafe) then you risk designing the wrong physical forms and ending up with problematic functions.

    So, in the classroom it might be:

    “Form follows function”

    But in reality it’s the other way round:

    Function follows flow, and flow follows form.

    In other words:

    Function follows flow follows form.

    With software that forecasts flows by analysing physical forms, and with design principles shaped by decades of experience, my colleagues at Space Syntax and I have been able to de-risk the design process. We’ve analysed forms, predicted flows and been able to anticipate the functioning of schemes at the earliest stages of design, feeding back our recommended changes to the physical shape of design proposals in order to optimise flows and close the gap between intended and actual functions.

  • All ravens are crows but not all crows are ravens_Reflections on Transit Oriented Developments & Walkable Urban Centres

    All ravens are crows but not all crows are ravens_Reflections on Transit Oriented Developments & Walkable Urban Centres

    Sometimes confused for being the same thing, Transit Oriented Developments (TODs) and Walkable Urban Centres (WUCs) are two distinctly different urban creatures. TODs create efficiencies of urban movement, reducing car-dependency by providing proximity for residents and office workers to public transport infrastructure. WUCs sit at the heart of communities, providing mixed-use environments that foster social, economic and cultural productivity.

    In the same way that all ravens are crows but not all crows are ravens, so it is that all WUCs are TODs but not all TODs are WUCs. Why should this be?…

    (more…)
  • World Cities Summit: leveraging the science of cities

    World Cities Summit: leveraging the science of cities

    As an architect & urban planner my principal concern is to make cities work for people. This means understanding how their streets connect to either encourage low carbon transport such as walking and public transport. Or, if they’re disconnected, do they lock in car dependence and its carbon impacts?

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  • Choosing the office of the future: a time for quality, not quantity

    Choosing the office of the future: a time for quality, not quantity

    Released today, Deloitte Real Estate’s London Office Crane Survey reports a 50% reduction in the construction of new office space in central London in six months. Yet even such a significant reduction in supply may not be enough to offset a greater reduction in demand. As a result, there is likely to be an oversupply of office space in central London. 

    Mike Cracknell, director at Deloitte Real Estate, said, “By transforming outdated buildings into COVID-safe, high-quality workspaces, developers are looking to upgrade and futureproof their offices in a market where occupational demand is increasingly discerning.”

    Indeed, in a buyers’ market, what matters is quality not quantity. And not only the functional specification of office space in terms of health and safety – such as air quality, general environmental cleanliness and the presence or not of touchless interfaces – but also in terms of organisational performance: is this an office in which my organisation can thrive?

    When evaluating their needs, organisations must consider the fundamental purpose of an office. 

    It is no longer enough – if ever it were – to think of an office as a place that’s big enough to get most people together to give them a place to work from where they can occasionally gather in large rooms for group meetings. That can all be done, to some degree of success, on Zoom. Nor is it about having a desk where everyone can work from. For most, a kitchen table or home office may still be good enough. 

    No, what matters is everything that doesn’t get programmed into the working day: the incidental, the serendipitous. Sometimes thought only of in terms of ‘the social side of things’, the informal interactions that occur in offices are actually the hard currency of operational effectiveness. Offices that ‘buzz’ are places where ideas are born and shared. Where people not only want to work but want to stay working. And where outsiders want to visit, bringing with them their own ideas, their own colleagues and, in so doing, enhancing the melting pot of creativity.

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  • “7Ls” of urban planning & design

    “7Ls” of urban planning & design

    Location – where is the site and what’s around it

    Linkage – where are the principal ways into the site (can any new ones be established?)

    Layout – the pattern & hierarchy of streets

    Land use – more than housing?

    Landscape – the look and feel of the place (covers a lot eg materials, blue/green)

    Lining – how the buildings meet the street (active or blank frontages)

    Longevity – quality construction & operational expectations

  • How do we measure connectivity, walkability & car-dependence at Space Syntax?

    How do we measure connectivity, walkability & car-dependence at Space Syntax?

    SPATIAL LAYOUT ATTRACTION MODELLING
    ‘Spatial Layout Attraction Modelling’ is a computer modelling technique that calculates the relative importance of each street segment – each piece of street between two intersections – for people moving within towns and cities. 

    We begin by analysing road the geometry of the street network, using road centreline data.

    By finding the simplest routes from all street segment origins to all destinations – the shortest routes that involve the fewest twists and turns – an algorithm calculates how likely it is that movement will pass along any individual route.

    Segments that are part of straighter, more connected and more central streets tend to be used more frequently as part of journeys across the urban network. 

    Journey catchments
    However, the overall importance of any street segment may vary depending on the scale of the journey. Some segments are more likely to be used as part of longer journeys, some as part of shorter journeys, some at both scales and some at neither. 

    For this reason, Spatial Layout Attraction modelling is undertaken at two different scales: first, for a catchment of 10km, which typically identifies the movement hierarchy of people making longer journeys in vehicles and on bikes:

    (more…)

  • What are the physical & spatial characteristics of sustainable towns & cities?

    What are the physical & spatial characteristics of sustainable towns & cities?

    First, the ability to walk to the place you buy your food.

    Second, the ability to walk to see friends, go to school, visit a doctor or dentist or catch public transport.

    ‘Walkability’ requires fine-grained spatial connectivity: simple radial routes from edge to centre to get people to the shops from every direction and then orbitals to let friends get to other friends, to work, school, public transport and so on. Combine radials and orbitals and you get a latticework, or a grid. More regular grids, or less.

    To be economic, both food shopping & public transport require sufficient density.

    Combine 1) a fine-grained spatial latticework with 2) sufficient density and you have the building blocks of sustainable #urbanism.

    If you can only have one then start with the connectivity: the radials feeding a centre and the orbitals helping people move around. Then add the density over time, intensifying the grid with more closely spaced and taller buildings as well as an increasingly finer network of routes towards the centre, where there is more pedestrian activity and an increasingly coarser ‘grain’ towards the edge, where there is less.

    ‪Cycling & public transport follow on.

    This is how sustainable – ie walkable – towns and cities can grow.

  • Ten top tips for community campaigning

    Ten top tips for community campaigning

    1) expect it to be a long run

    2) celebrate small victories

    3) gather the opinions of local people (local people are local experts)

    4) gather the opinions of non-local experts

    5) don’t accept “no” as an answer (“no” is an excuse, not an answer)

    6) keep a record of everything (because people will come and go and they won’t otherwise know what has gone before)

    7) expect setbacks (because nothing is linear and you’ll go in circles from time to time)

    8) be patient with the naysayers since they can sometimes become your firmest advocates

    9) be active online to promote and rebut

    and…finally

    10) hang on to the fact that, however unlikely it may sometimes seem, common sense will prevail!

  • Good things take time…

    Good things take time…

    Urbanism is a long game. The kids grow up for a start.

    This morning I met with local town council members & county council officers to discuss a new pedestrian crossing in #Faversham. Only later did I realise this is on exactly the same location as the photo taken 12 years ago for an article by Katie Puckett for Building Magazine!

    Here’s the article:
    https://lnkd.in/dRfm9Cb

    “This junction has been designed for the benefit of cars. At 8.30am it is teeming with kids trying to get to school but there’s nowhere to cross the road.”

    This small but significant intervention would build on the recently approved 20mph speed limit in Faversham, something that’s been a long time in coming. Let’s see what happens in the next few months.

    We can’t wait another decade.

  • What will cities look like 30 years from now?

    What will cities look like 30 years from now?

    I joined a carbon reduction event yesterday where, by way of introducing ourselves, we were each asked to predict the future: what did we think we would see more of in 2050 – in terms of objects, experiences and services. A neat little ice-breaker if ever there was one.

    Here are my top-of-the-head responses:

    1. Object

    Green, shaded main streets

    ⁃ fronted by shops at ground level with people living above them

    ⁃ lined by trees that provide shade, lower air temperatures, disperse strong winds and encourage walking

    ⁃ forming the centres of local neighbourhoods that are built relatively densely but that are also intensely green (green walls, green roofs, green verges

    ⁃ connected into a secondary network of slow streets that people can walk, cycle and drive along.

    2. Experience

    Conviviality: the “Urban Buzz”

    – people standing, sitting, talking and generally being present with one another, forming local communities.

    3. Service

    Data-driven urban planning & design

    – harnessing machine learning and AI-driven algorithms to create future plans and predict their impacts.

    The first two will help address the Climate Emergency by reducing transport emissions. The third will threaten the established authority of the architectural and urban planning professions, which will need to adapt to survive by accelerating their uptake of digital tools.

  • Office or home – where’s the best place to work from in the New Normal?

    Office or home – where’s the best place to work from in the New Normal?

    Screenshot 2020-05-04 at 16.53.58

    The question about when we return to work is also a question about how we return to work. For many, remote working has been a revelation. Perhaps not ideal in every respect but certainly helpful in many: the convenience of not commuting, the realisation that Zoom, Teams, Miro, Skype, Whatsapp and other platforms mean it’s possible to stay in touch in ways we hadn’t realised.

    So there’s a fair amount of “unlock inertia” going around and a good set of very reasonable questions being asked:

    • will anyone want to work 9-5 anymore?
    • and on every day of the week?
    • can we carry on having those online meetings because they seem, at least for some purposes, to be more efficient than round-table events?
    • and how do we stop ourselves drifting back to the Old Normal?

    We’ve been discussing the future of work at Space Syntax, both for ourselves and for our clients who we help create workplaces that foster interaction, encourage serendipitous encounters and nurture creativity. I wrote recently about what the office of the future might look like, with no desks and board rooms – a little provocatively for some as it turned out, but deliberately done to stimulate our thinking about why we need offices. (more…)

  • Is physical distancing possible on city streets?

    Is physical distancing possible on city streets?

    Until a vaccine is found for COVID-19, and perhaps beyond, it will be important to practise physical distancing in towns and cities.

    Whether this is possible will come down to the “carrying capacity” of the urban infrastructure: in particular, the relationship between Pedestrian Supply in the form of sufficiently wide footways and Pedestrian Demand in terms of the need for people to walk, whether that is to work, home, school, the shops or for leisure and pleasure.

    Both supply and demand are calculable using tools from tape measures to multi-variable modelling algorithms.

    Screenshot 2020-04-28 at 17.40.49

    Much well-deserved attention has been paid to the Sidewalk Widths NYC project, a digital map that “is intended to give an impression of how sidewalk widths impact the ability of pedestrians to practice social distancing.” By measuring the available width of footways, the map indicates which footways may or may not be suitable for physical distancing.

    Sidewalk width provides an important piece of the “Pedestrian Supply” equation. However, it is not on its own capable of answering the central question: is physical distancing possible?

    First because it is a one-dimensional measure and physical distancing is at least two-dimensional: it may be possible to keep 6 feet to the side of someone else, but is it possible to keep 6 feet in front and 6 feet behind? Given the length of many streets in New York City it may seem apparent that there is plenty of space to go around but the generously wide sidewalks of Times Square demonstrate that, under normal circumstances it is possible for these to be swamped with human activity and, as a result unsuitable for physical distancing under the new normal. Furthermore, it may be possible to observe distancing while walking mid-block but what happens at street intersections? Is there space to queue? Are the street lights synchronised to let one “platoon” of users cross before the next arrives behind them? Is flow predominantly one-directional (which it may often, but not always, be in the rush hour) or two-directional (as it can be at lunchtime)? One-way flows may have less of the “ordered chaos”, the urban ballet of two-way flows and so one-way flows may be more efficient.  (more…)