Massive popular opposition to plans for a disfiguring roundabout leads to the City Council announcing this evening that it will go back to the drawing board. This is a positive development. A working group will now be established to look at alternative plans.
YouTube clip of Cllr Bell’s statement
There are two different schools of thought about how to accommodate urban growth. The first says that cities should build more road capacity to handle private vehicle traffic. The second says that less space should be provided for private vehicles and more investment should be made in public transport and “active travel” i.e. walking and cycling. The first approach is generally more costly than the second.
The old school of thought has prevailed for around a century. The new school is relatively more recent, responding to the frequent failure of the former, where more road space has created more road traffic, which has created more congestion.
Cities all over the world are now removing expensive car-oriented infrastructure and introducing space for walking, cycling and public transport. Ring roads and bypasses are being unpicked and cities are thriving as a result. Look at Copenhagen, Paris, London, Birmingham, Boston, Poynton or any number of places that have employed the new school approach.
On Poynton…”This was the busiest junction in Cheshire, with 25,000 vehicle movements per day and the fourth worst performing retail centre in Cheshire East. It now accommodates a similar volume of traffic, but since average speeds have fallen to below 20mph, drive times through the centre are significantly reduced. Anecdotally people feel safer crossing the carriageway and cars will stop for them, make eye-contact and usually elicit a wave of thanks from the pedestrian.” The Academy of Urbanism
Road speeds are being reduced, from 40 or 50mph to 20 or 30mph. Not only on residential streets but at the intersections of major roads too. Why? Because when you slow traffic down it flows more freely. Why? Because at lower speeds, more vehicles can fit into the same space. This isn’t rocket science. It’s simply a different school of thought.
When a city pursues “old school thinking” of road capacity increases and banned turns then not only is this going to generate more road traffic it is also going to make it ever harder for people to do anything other than drive. In these circumstances, walking and cycling become harder. “Walking and cycling facilities” might be put in but these are often token gestures because they are fitted in around the needs of traffic. Desire lines – the paths that people prefer to take – are severed and people are encouraged to walk or cycle on unnaturally twisted journeys. What happens as a result? They don’t use these “facilities” and they take risky alternatives, dashing across road lanes or cycling among fast-moving traffic.
Old school thinking is voracious – once started it is hard to stop. Nevertheless, evidence, analysis and creative thinking can help. If there is a willingness to listen.
I speak from the perspective of practice – of having observed the behaviour of people on foot, on bikes and in vehicles in a scientific manner for over 25 years. Of having presented evidence of fact to local authorities and of overturning poorly thought-through, old school proposals. Of having designed alternatives that don’t put anyone in particular first but instead balance the needs of all. This isn’t about being pro-bike and anti-car. It’s about being pro-place and pro-cities.
And let’s be clear, new school thinking is fundamentally about being pro-growth. But pro a form of growth that is smart and sustainable: growth that doesn’t sacrifice the profound benefits of local places for the expedience of cross-city commuting, but growth that promotes alternative ways of traveling and enhances the attractiveness of cities as places to live in and invest in.
Newcastle City Council’s plans for the Blue House Roundabout are appalling and unnecessary.
I know the junction and have walked and driven across it more times than I can remember. The last thing it needs is what is proposed and I intend to do what I can to help stop the scheme.
There is already a significant body of local opposition to the proposals, for example:
“At present, it’s a busy, but functioning, junction occupying a particularly striking location – the intersection of two broad avenues of lime trees, some 130 years old, which cross the historic open spaces known as Duke’s Moor, Little Moor and the Town Moor. These spaces belong to the hereditary Freemen of Newcastle upon Tyne, who have been exercising their right to graze cattle here for a thousand years or so. They form a green belt around the city centre and make its inner suburbs surprisingly pastoral.”
Facebook and Twitter are both active:
Yet the more weight that can be brought against these unnecessary, expensive and car-centric proposals, the better.
Don’t let this nonsense be foisted any further. Take Newcastle forwards not backwards.
PART ONE – THE ELEMENTS OF SUCCESSFUL URBAN PLACEMAKING
Location
How the site fits into its context, including complementary and competitive attractions; in other words, what else is nearby to which the design should respond? The success of any development, no matter how large, is a function of the wider setting.
Linkage
The specific points at which connections can be made into this context, including public transport connections; in other words the “gateways” into the design.
Layout
The spatial layout design of the project itself in terms of its streets and spaces, whether public/private or open/covered, and the importance of:
– first, encouraging through movement connections between gateways
– second, providing a simple, intelligible internal circulation network through a grid of streets and other connections.
This is the most important of the five elements since the spatial layout, once created, tends to be the most permanent part of the development. It is the most expensive to alter once constructed since it sets out the footprints of buildings and, importantly, since it carries the bulk of major services such as energy, water and data supply as well as waste handling.
Land use
The quantum of different land use attractions and the disposition of these within the spatial layout both in two and three dimensions; in other words where uses are and how they stack up, especially the land uses that occur at street level and any other principal pedestrian levels.
The location of land uses should follow the hierarchy of spatial connections created by the spatial layout design, with the most movement-sensitive land uses located on the most spatially important connections and so on. This alignment of land use attraction with spatial layout attraction is a fundamental property of both historic cities and successful modern places.
Landscape
How the spatial layout is “dressed” both in terms of the “green/blue” landscape of planting and water and the “architectural” landscape of building frontages at the principal pedestrian levels.
Here what matters is that the spatial layout is not overly fragmented or dispersed by planting and that the principal pedestrian levels are lined with open, active frontages.
PART TWO – THE DESIGN
The five elements of successful placemaking establish a framework for design practice. What matters next is the way in which these generic principles are translated into a specific design proposal. This is a creative step, which relies on a blend of imagination and craft, honed by experience.
The challenge for future urban practice is that the five elements are not commonly appreciated in the field of retail development, which has instead adopted principles of gravitational attraction that tend to create anchored, inward-facing, covered malls rather than open, street-based shopping streets, whether we call such streets “high streets” or “souqs”.
PART THREE – THE WAY FORWARD
It has been, and will continue to be, down to pioneering organisations to point out what is increasingly obvious to all but those who are too immersed in it: that anchored malls create sterile places; and then for these pioneers to deliver new places that work because they employ the timeless elements of successful placemaking.
Fortunately, this challenge is facilitated by the continued emergence of technology-based tools for analysing location, identifying points of linkage, testing different layout concepts and modelling the interaction of these with different land use and landscape treatments.
[Speaking notes for Tim Stonor’s opening presentation at the First Conference on Space Syntax in China, Beijing, 5th December 2015.]
Good morning. It is an honour to be speaking at this important conference alongside so many distinguished speakers and attendees.
My talk today will cover the past, present and future of Space Syntax Limited’s experience working on projects in London and around the world, including here in China.
As you heard from Professor Hillier, the relationship between academic research and practice is fundamental. Practice provides an opportunity to apply Space Syntax techniques – and it also provokes new research questions. (more…)
Notes from a response to questions from the Strelka Institute.
How would you describe the situation with the permeability and connectivity of city spaces today?
There is no single state of permeability and connectivity in the contemporary city. Instead we find two main types of urban layout: first, the finely grained, continuously connected street network in the historic city and second, the system of largely impermeable housing estates separated by fast-moving roads in the 20th century city.
In the historic city, space is well used. Most space use is movement and most movement is through movement. Movement supports commercial activities, which locate themselves on the principal streets where footfall is greatest. Movement brings people to places of opportunity – to buy, sell, exchange and interact. Effective exchange and interaction drives urban economies, social networks, cultures and innovations.
In the 20th century city, the large, impermeable blocks of the housing estates do not encourage through movement. People move around the estates rather than through them. As a result, commercial activity is undermined, with its market divided between people moving locally inside the estate and those moving globally around it. Commercial activities are more likely to fail, especially inside estates where the marketplace is too weak. Instead, shops form at the entrances to the estates and on the surrounding roads. Since these roads have often been designed to favour the car, the shops are likely to be car-based, with large parking lots that further separate local people from them.
A further, social consequence of this is that local people do not see people from outside the estate on the regular basis that people in traditional streets take for granted. The effect of this is to create social isolation and fear of strangers in estates.
The irony is that the inward-looking urban block was created purposefully to foster a stronger community spirit. Traditional streets were considered to be noisy, dirty and dangerous. 20th century town planning’s idea was that, if life could be created away from streets then people would be cleaner, happier and safer.
It is the greatest tragedy of 20th century international planning that its well-intended model of urban living has failed. Indeed it has done the opposite: creating highly negative social and economic outcomes for all people with perhaps the exception of the super rich for whom social and economic relations are formed in different spatial contexts.
Connectivity is closely connected with the structure of property ownership, how will it change in the next 5 years? Will it shift towards privatisation of public spaces? And what will be the case 20 years from now?
Undoubtedly the next decade will see more private spaces set within gated communities. Such forms of urbanism are still favoured by developers and aspirational residents for whom the idea of living in a cleaner and supposedly safer environment is expected to make them happier. The history of 20th century failure may not be considered to be relevant, perhaps because of a belief that it happened somewhere else, or in a different socio-political era, or because new digital communications technologies can effectively span the spatial divide between such places and their urban settings.
At the same time, the resurgence of traditional street design will see more places created that look more like the continuously connected form of the historic city. This trend can be seen in cities as diverse as Beijing, London and Dubai, where permeable street networks have been created by commercial property developers as well as public municipalities precisely because they are seen to deliver places that are popular with people. The social and economic benefits of a street-based approach have been witnessed with a combination of satisfaction and surprise.
Perhaps the most significant impact on the form of urbanism in the future city will come from the digital technologies that will record and analyse the outcomes of both approaches – the gated community and the open street network – and demonstrate with evidence how each performs.
My clear view is that the continuously connected street network will outperform the gated community in terms of Urban GVA, making a greater contribution to the overall social and economic value of the city. The emerging Science of Cities, in which my company Space Syntax has been a pioneer, is one of the key areas of future urban practice that will cut through the inaccurate claims that have been made about the benefits of estates – claims that have been promoted by architects and urban planners throughout the 20th century, based on the passion of their beliefs rather than on the evidence of facts. Urban analytics will transform urban practice over the next 20 years, shaping a new, evidence-rich approach to architecture and town planning and, crucially, returning a highly effective, street-based form of urbanism to the position it had held for centuries before professionalised town planning imagined it could do better.
During our work for the classification of Moscow streets we highlighted three different zones of the city: centre (inside the Garden Ring), middle zone (between the Garden and the Third Transport Rings), and periphery (outside the Third Ring). The pattern is completely different in these zones. Could you comment on the implication of global trends of connectivity in the city on different zones in Moscow?
No city is the same from its centre to its edge. Or, more precisely, from its centres to the edges of those centres because cities are formed of multiple centres that create a system of connected urban quarters. The quality of the connections between centres is a fundamental determinant of overall urban performance, having a strong bearing on whether people are more likely to walk and cycle between neighbourhoods and whether those links will be effective places for social and economic activity. When centres are continuously connected to each other through a set of connections with a regular grain then it is likely that many, if not all of these will be suitable for walking and cycling as well as driving along.
Cities like London and Paris are composed of multiple centres that have distinct centres of differing characters yet are continuously connected to each other. Indeed it is the magic of such cities that it is possible to move from one centre to the other in such a subtle way that you are uncertain exactly when you have left one centre and entered another. The connective “tissue” between centres is typically comprised of residential streets, which therefore link to – and carry movement belonging to – multiple centres. People may identify more with one centre than others but they are provided with a choice of more than one. And,min doing so, they interface with people from more than one centre. The benefits of this arrangement are simultaneously social and economic.
Such choice is denied by the 20th century city of separated estates. People living in one estate have limited, if any direct access to the centres of other estates. Increasingly, the roads that connect between estates are hostile to pedestrians and cyclists. Social and economic life is suppressed.
All cities are systems of linked centres that each work in individualistic, local ways but that also form an overall city system. Within this city system, the centres have a hierarchy with more central centres typically supporting greater economic activity than centres at the edge. This is not only because more central centres are larger but also because these centres are surrounded by a larger number of other centres than are peripheral centres.
In the case of Moscow, Space Syntax analysis would be used to examine the hierarchy of centres, the quality of the connections between them and the degree to which spatial connectivity is directly related to social and economic performance. Data on economic performance – such as land value, property transactions, commercial performance, retail sales – would be correlated with measures of spatial connectivity – such as spatial centrality (choice) and betweenness (integration) at a range of spatial scales. These Big Data sets would be interrogated in order to form a diagnosis of the current spatial conditions. On the basis of this diagnosis, a set of spatial planning principles would be created that would lead to the production of a spatial vision for the city. We anticipate that this form of data-rich, evidence-informed planning will become normal in the next 20 years.
While improving and redeveloping city streetscape how should trends in the connectivity and permeability of city space be taken into account?
Space Syntax analysis shows how patterns of spatial connectivity have profound influences on the social and economic performance of all cities. The hierarchy of spatial connections influences:
movement patterns of cars, cycles and pedestrians
– public transit demand
– land use performance
– land value
– transport emissions.
Future urban plans should therefore be created with a special emphasis on the design of the spatial layout of the city. Opportunities should be identified to strengthen the network of streets and open spaces, pursuing an overall objective to create a city of continuously connected centres. Constraints should equally be identified so that reasonable plans can be made.
“Spatial geometry” standards should be set for the number and frequency of connections as well as for the geometrical means by which centres can be most effectively connected ie first, a small set of longer, more direct connections (the “foreground grid” of boulevards and high streets) that will carry larger volumes of people and therefore be suitable for commercial uses and second, a large set of smaller, less direct connections (the “background grid” of local streets) that will carry smaller volumes of principally residential movement.
Once these spatial geometry standards have been established then further standards of urban design quality should be set – but not before. High quality urban design in the form of green landscape, seating, signage me surface treatment will not create high quality urban performance if the spatial layout geometry is weak.
The living city is built on human interaction. Without this, the city is dead. Human interaction relies on effective movement corridors and effective places of human transaction. Effective street connectivity is a critical determinant of the living city.
Cargo bikes are an urban game-changer. The combination of online retail and out-of-town mega-distribution centres means that town centre retail must transform. Shops don’t need so much storage space because goods can be sent straight from depot to home. That storage space can be repurposed as retail or office space, bringing new life back to town centres.
Trucks can interchange with cargo-bikes at the edge of town.
Town centres don’t need large swept curves at traffic junctions, making it easier for pedestrians and cyclists to move.
Towns can be designed for slow but effective movement, with all the opportunities for socially and economically beneficial interaction that slow movement supports.
Notes for the UK-China Sustainable Urbanisation Conference in Chengdu, China on 24th September 2015
My job as an architect and urban planner is to design new towns and cities – as well as new parts of existing urban settlements. This means designing the multiple systems that make up a city. We often think about towns and cities in terms of their physical stuff: their buildings. Perhaps also in terms of their roads and rails. But for me the success of any city can be seen and measured in terms of its flows, the flows of:
and, most important of all, the flows of:
Each of these flows is impacted by urban development: how much of which land uses are placed where, and how they are then connected to each other. Flows impact on other flows.
Sometimes these impacts are positive, sometimes negative. They have enormous social and economic implications.
Urban planning is as much about designing flows as it is designing buildings.
We live in an age of unprecedented computing power – this gives us the ability to better predict the nature of these impacts.
This is especially important to avoid the unwanted effects of urban development: congestion, air pollution, social isolation and unsustainable stresses on natural resources.
And computing can help create the positive impacts that are needed to support the essential purpose of cities: to be:
The last decade has seen the emergence of Integrated Urban Modelling. My company, Space Syntax, is a leader in the field: one of the UK companies referred to by the Chancellor as contributing to China’s growth and development. Working, for example, with the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design across China in Suzhou and Beijing.
Integrated Urban Models link the data generated by the multiple flows and reveal the interactions that help architects and urban planners create sustainable plans. Space Syntax has identified the essential role of spatial layout as the principal influence on urban performance. Spatial analytics are at the heart of our approach to Integrated Urban Modelling and we have made our discovery open source and openly available so that others can benefit too.
The Space Syntax Online Training Platform is a freely available, web-based resource through which urban practitioners, policymakers and local residents can equip themselves with information and skills to create more sustainable urban futures.
I’m pleased to announce that this platform is currently being translated into Chinese so that the Space Syntax’s discoveries and experiences can be more readily disseminated here in China.
_____________
Integration, balance, glue, pivot: space
In many ways, urban planning is the integration and balancing of multiple flows. Integration needs glue and balance needs a pivot. Spatial layout provides both.
Notes for the Connected Cities Conference, London, 15th September 2015.
How long has Space Syntax been going?
Space Syntax was established as a consulting company in 1989.
Why did you set it up?
Space Syntax was set up to exploit academic research at University College London: computer-based methods of analysing space in buildings and cities and predicting human behaviour. I joined the company to practise a new kind of architecture: one more attuned to human needs and one powered by new analytic capabilities that de-risk an otherwise data-light and judgment-heavy spatial planning process, one which has a history of social and economic failure. (more…)
Address to the Faversham Creek Trust event on board SB Repertor – speaking notes
Tim Stonor
2nd September 2015
Good evening. It is an honour to have been asked to speak this evening and I’m grateful to Lady Sondes, Sir David Melville and Chris Wright for their invitation. As I prepared for this evening I wondered if I had ever given a talk on the water. I thought I hadn’t and then I remembered I once spoke at a conference on board a cruise ship between Genoa and Marseille. I’m pleased to say I’d trade the crystal waters of the Côte D’Azur for the muds of the Côte de North Kent any day.
We are lucky to be here and lucky to be part of Faversham. Simon Foster mentioned the work I’m involved in that’s looking at the UK 50 years from now. This may seem like a long time but it’s a drop in the ocean/Creek for Faversham. Here we have at least 9,000 years of continuous human habitation. There aren’t many other places in the UK that can claim this. In fact we don’t yet know of any that can.
And why did people first come here and then stick around for so long? It’s the Creek. First for the hunting: its game, its fish and its fowl. Then for its waterborne trade. We are one tide from London, where merchants could poise offshore, like greyhounds in the trap, waiting for fire signals from London to tell them their stock prices were high enough to catch the next tide in.
This place is important. This water is important. Many of us feel this viscerally. Others still need persuading. How can we do that?
I have seven thoughts. (more…)
Designing Resilient Cities – notes from Day 1
A note from the Vice-Mayor for Infrastructure to the Mayor
cc
Vice-Mayor for Sustainability
Vice-Mayor for Engagement
Vice-Mayor for Disruption
The Public
Avalon faces the risk of functional failure. The only way forward is to change.
Our infrastructure is inefficient. It needs to become efficient. This is not just a question of maintenance. There won’t be enough money to run the transport network, supply water, remove waste, provide broadband. Unless the city either shrinks to a size its current economic structures can afford; or grows to create a larger tax base – so long as the city can retain control over how that tax is spent.
The view of the infrastructure team is that Avalon should grow. But not off the back of its existing industries. These are running out of steam. The industrial infrastructure of the city needs to expand and to reinvigorate. Creative industries will be central to this.
A new population will come to Avalon. A younger population, joining the older, wiser and more experienced population that built the city’s wealth in the 20th century. Joining young people who, having grown up in Avalon have chosen to stay there rather than take the increasingly well-trodden path elsewhere. The city has seen too much of this. Its infrastructure of talent must be rebuilt.
And these people will need somewhere to live. Houses that are affordable. We need to build.
But this does not mean ever further sprawl into our precious countryside – which is too beautiful and too productive to become a building site. No, it means building on our existing urban footprint. We need to find space within the city, not outside. Some of our redundant industrial sites will provide excellent places for new housing: close to transport infrastructure, with excellent, ready-made supplies of water and power. We need to look hard at the vast city parks that were built many years ago and have simply not worked as they were intended – they have harboured crime rather than nurtured culture.
And culture is central to what we must do. Avalon needs to recapture the spirit in which it was first built: a pioneering spirit where anything was possible. Music, art, sculpture, performance: song and dance – we were good at it when we tried. The future memories of Avalon will be built on the strength of the cultural infrastructure that we put in place in the next few years.
And to achieve all of this we need to change the way that we make decisions in the city. No more top down dictats. We need a governance infrastructure that involves everyone: participatory planning, budgeting and decision-taking. An elected mayor for a start.
_____________
Components of infrastructure
Demographics
Life satisfaction.
Transportation
– on ground
– above ground
– below ground.
Health
Not just
– physical buildings
but also
– insurance.
Security
– police
– building protection
– wellbeing.
Equality
Utilities
– water
– gas
– waste
– digital.
Green environment
Culture
– facilities.
Place
– connections.
Diagnosis
Avalon is…
Set in its ways.
Boring.
No desire to change.
Reliant on the public sector.
Declining core industry.
Few common places.
Weak cultural identity.
Car-reliant.
Running out of time.
Risks
Functional failure
– not enough revenue to run the city.
Fragmentation
– in governance, leading to rivalry and underperformance.
Disenchantment
– no sense of belonging.
Disconnection
– of people from planning
– reinforced by physical remoteness of outlying centres.
Civic unrest
– class distinctions, unintegrated, breeding distrust.
Poverty
– when older population retire.
Complacency
Cultural sterility
– no fun
– no stimulation
– no sense of belonging.
Industrial stagnation
– no innovation.
Objectives
Governance
– committees to reflect areas
– directly elected mayor
– participatory planning
– devolved management of infrastructure.
Identity
– common vision
– campaign
– slogan.
Industry
– built around the creative industries
– attracting people from outside, not only serving existing population
– business development area
– enhance links to surrounding agriculture.
Public realm
– enhanced
Consumption
– reduce
– reuse
– recycle
– multiple uses of each infrastructure asset e.g. reservoir is boating lake.
Housing
– more affordable.
Density
– intensify existing urban footprint rather than further sprawl.
Connectivity
– revitalise the centre.
Transport
– integrate existing modes.
_____________
Designing City Resilience is a two-day summit at the RIBA, 17-18th June 2015. Avalon is one of four imaginary cities being looked at during the event in a creative approach that breaks the mould of typical, presentation-only conference agendas. By engaging in a rapid prototyping exercise, delegates immediately test the ideas they have heard in the keynote presentations and on-stage discussions. They also bring to the event their own international experiences.
The result is a two-way, creative conversation that produces a richer outcome: a set of designs for the transformation of the physical, spatial, environmental, industrial, educational, healthcare and governmental structures of the four cities.
In looking forwards it is important to learn the lessons of history.
Look at Pompei. A city built for efficient mobility.
A model of the 1st century with lessons for the 21st century.
The grid – no cul de sacs. Built for mobility. Built for commerce.
More or less rectilinear – not labyrinthine. A layout that brains like. Easy to wayfind. Hard to get lost in.
A Main Street with shops – no inward-looking shopping malls. Active frontages. About as much surface for pedestrians as for vehicles – the right balance for then. Perhaps also for now?
And shopkeepers of great wealth! It was not a compromise to open onto a Main Street. It was a sound commercial investment. Who would turn their back on the flow of the street?
Pedestrian crossings! The deep kerbs channel water when it rains, flushing the dirt from the road and keeping it clean. Integrated infrastructure.
Pedestrian crossings that are aligned with pedestrian desire lines – not following the convenience of traffic engineers’ vehicle turning arrangements. Pedestrians first because its the pedestrians that carried the money, not the vehicles.
A small, pedestrian only zone in the very heart of the city. No bigger than it needs to be…
…unambiguously signed that this is where you have to get out of your chariot and onto your feet.
Pompei: a city of great streets – great street sense.
But in recent times we lost our street-sense.
Look at Birmingham then…
And now. What happened to our street sense?
And Birmingham was not alone.
Look at US cities:
What they were…only 60 years ago – recognisably like Pompei: simple, rectilinear grids.
Then what they became…
We became entrapped by traffic models.
And a love-affair with the car.
We need to regain our street-sense.
Fortunately this is happening.
Trafalgar Square,
Nottingham.
At the Elephant & Castle, this design puts the pedestrian crossings on the pedestrian desire lines – just like those crossings in Pompei. We’ve talen pedestrians out of subways and given them their proper place at street level, next to the shopfronts. We’ve made the humble crossing an object of beauty, spending many different budgets (landscape, planting, pedestrian, cycling, highways) on one project so that each budget gets more than if it had been spent separately.
This new approach – a rediscovery of street sense – has been made possible through advances in science that have made us see the errors of previous ways.
The more we look into this the more we find of value: for example, how connected street grids create higher property values in the long run.
And Birmingham has pioneered this science:
Brindley Place – the bridge on the straight east-west route – a lesson from Pompeii! It may seem obvious today – because it’s a natural solution – but it wasn’t obvious to some people at the time, who wanted the bridge to be hidden round the corner because, they said, there would be a greater sense of surprise and delight! What nonsense. We had to model the alternatives and show just how powerful the straight alignment was.
We still have to do so today. Many urban designers and transport planners have been slow on the uptake. The average pedestrian gets it immediately. What does that say for our professions?
Now cities all over the world are recovering their street sense, creating plans for their expansion that are street-based, not mall-based.
In time to accommodate a new, two-wheeled chariot: the bicycle.
SkyCycle – a new approach to urban mobility. Creating space for over half a billion cycle journeys every year. Constructed above the tracks, allowing smooth, predictable, junction-free movement between edge and centre. Developed by a consortium of Exterior Architecture, Foster + Partners and Space Syntax.
Adding to cycling at street level – not taking it away.
Recently, at the Birmingham Health City workshop,a discussion about the location of healthcare facilities quickly became one focused less on hospitals and wards and more on streets and public spaces. On “free”, preventative public health rather than expensive, clinical curative care. Free in that it comes as the byproduct of good urban development.
Rob Morrison’s drawing of the Birmingham Boulevard…
…an idea to turn the Inner Ring Road into an active street.
And to achieve this there are clear principles to follow:
1. Connected street layouts.
2. Mixed mode movement – not separated by tunnels and walkways.
3. Active streets ie lined with street shops not mall shops.
4. Pedestrian crossings on desire lines, not where it’s most convenient for traffic turnings.
5. Limited pedestrianisation of the most important civic areas.
A thought – yes Pompeii was a city of commerce but the houses of the city are filled with references to literature, poetry, music: the arts.
Huge cultural value.
After all, this is the important, aspirational aspect of living in cities that comes with the efficient mobility that results from pragmatic planning: the grid, mixed modes, active frontages on main streets and special, limited, high intensity, pedestrian only places.
When we get this right we have time to truly enjoy ourselves in the arts and sciences. In culture. That is truly great urbanism.
Too often the Garden City is visualised as a place of huge green spaces enfolding small pockets of grey streets. The green and the grey.
But why should streets be grey? What about avenues? Boulevards? Rows of trees? Grass verges? Street planting at various scales.
And don’t those huge green parks just separate the urbanism? Don’t Green Parks create barriers between people and opportunities? Between homes and jobs and places of leisure?
The city of the future should be a city of green streets as well as green parks? And, if we wish to call it a Garden City then we should remember to include the Garden Streets as well as the Garden Parks?
After all, they were always part of the mix.
Tim Stonor speaks at the Building Research Establishment about his experience using data in the planning and design of buildings and urban settlements.
Notes for today’s talk at the NLA’s conference on “How do we build a smarter London”
The London context:
– more people (growing population)
– more data (sensors everywhere)
– more sophisticated computing.
Strategic problem: how to handle it all.
Space Syntax’s experience: address the problem via “the questions of reality”.
The commercial application of Space Syntax research was catalysed by approaches from London residents in the early/mid 1980s eg Limehouse Basin, South Bank, King’s Cross: citizens groups opposing property developments they saw as being alien to London life. Today we work for those developers as well as community groups. Developers have learned to “get it”.
Data and computing create an art of the possible (sometimes the seemingly impossible too eg the wonderful Pigeon Sim). Pass the art of the possible through the filter of reality/market demand. Then it’s possible to make sense of it all – to know what to do.
The questions asked by our clients are the necessary filter.
Then evolve the technology according to new and difficult questions.
This is what we had to do to understand Trafalgar Square – we’d never studied such a complex open space before.
Technology by necessity.
Good morning. It is a pleasure and an honour to have been invited to give this presentation today at the Nikkei Smart City Week conference. The subject of my talk is architecture – not only the architecture of buildings but, also, the architecture of public space: the space that we move through and live our lives in; the glue that binds us together.
In the first part of my presentation I will address three key questions:
First, what is a Smart City?
Second, how can a Smart City be planned & governed?
Third, where is the place for technology in the Smart City?
And I will relate each of these questions to the architecture of space.
In the second part of my presentation I will describe the very significant effort that the UK is making to plan for its urban future, embracing the opportunities that new technologies provide.
In the third part of my presentation I will describe the use of computer modelling techniques in the creation of the London 2012 urban masterplanning process. (more…)
A talk given to the Leaders and Chief Executives of the Key Cities, Brighton, 24th October 2014.
We hear a lot about smart cities as the solution to the needs of urban places. But although technology allows us to live remotely and speak to each other from deep forests and mountaintops, humanity as a species has become more and more urban. The more that we could be apart, the more we have actually come together.
Perhaps we need to understand that smart cities is not a new concept: cities were always smart – if they weren’t smart we wouldn’t have them. (more…)
Notes of Bill Hilliers opening talk about the NLA Smarter London exhibition, 8th October 2014.
Congratulations to the NLA and CASA for the exhibition.
It’s evidence that London is the original smart city – nowhere such a collection of top class practices, imaginative authorities and academic departments developing new ways of doing things, and new technologies –and talking to each other !
But I think London is a smart city also in another sense – the city itself and how it’s put together.
When I was young London was regarded as an unplanned mess, in need of being tidied up into a system of well-defined neighbourhood units separated by main roads – a bit like Milton Keynes.
I’ve been asked to say something about one of the technologies on show – space syntax.
When we apply space syntax analysis to London it suggests it’s not mess at all
That under the apparent disorder, there is a pretty smart city. (more…)
“Cul de sac layouts may be the opium of the unwary – seemingly an analgesic against high-density urbanism – but beware the risks of over-indulgence”.
Steve Morgan, founder of housebuilder Redrow, attacks high-density urbanism in today’s Building Design. He says:
“Build cul de sacs because that’s how people want to live”.
This reminds me of some other things I’ve heard:
“Give them salty food because they enjoy the taste.”
“Let them smoke ciggies because it keeps them calm.”
(more…)
Tim Stonor 