Loeb Fellowship – Tim Stonor

AoU Landscape Urbanism notes & questions

These notes accompany a PowerPoint presentation Fragmented urbanism: the rise of Landscape Urbanism & the threat it poses to the continuously connected city

TS intro
This is a crucial moment for urbanism. In the UK, The Portas Review, highlighting the UK’s threatened high streets. Around the world, cities are growing faster than ever. But cities – as we knew them – are under threat.

First, from the car. Car-dependent urbanism is the principal form of urbanism on the planet. our cities have become so fragmented by road systems in the last century that it is now almost impossible not to be far dependent – not without a major demolition and reconnection programme.

Second, from designers, accepting of the car and intellectualising around this complicity.

The aim of this talk
I have been forming my own views about Landscape Urbanism and am looking to raise a discussion within the Academy of Urbanism and beyond. Do people agree with me? If so, how do we respond? If not, why not?

Summary of the Landscape Urbanism aesthetic
Parcels of grey wrapped by ribbons of green

Landscape Urbanism as anti-ecological
“If you have a culture that is fundamentally automobile-based, then an urban model that is anti-automobile is counterintuitive at best. There’s a strange precept these days that asserts that people will abandon their cars if we simply build cities that don’t accommodate them”.
Charles Waldheim

Notes
Island bio-geography.

Scale – JW.

Water.

Interim uses eg temporary food production. How can this be coded?

Layouts need to be walkable and workable.

Working with the grain of nature.

GRABS – green and blue spaces.

“It was good to find out about a new academic threat to good sense, and I very much agree with your doubts about the universal value of green space.

December 15, 2011

Anna Rose presents “CityScans” at the Harvard GSD

View and download Anna Rose’s presentation

On Tuesday, 5th April, Space Syntax director Anna Rose gave a talk at the Harvard GSD on the use of Space Syntax in planning and urban design. She began by describing Berlin’s spatial transformation during the 20th century, showing graphically how the connected heart of pre-war Berlin was then divided by the Wall and later reconnected with Reunification.

Anna then offered some thoughts on how the Potsdamerplatz development, including the Kulturforum, could be spatially replanned to better connect these important cultural and economic assets into the movement network of the wider city.

Finally, she showed how Space Syntax techniques work at the smaller scale of urban design, with the case of Old Market Square in Nottingham, where the design concept emerged from a spatial analysis of the site and its urban setting.
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Tuesday, 5th April 2011 at 1pm
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Portico Room 121
48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Anna Rose is a German architect and urban planner and has led Space Syntax’s recent masterplanning work in Jeddah, Munich and Londonderry. She teaches with Colin Fournier in the MArch studio at the Bartlett, University College London.

Anna’s work is featured in the recent issue of Arch+.

She recently gave a presentation of the Berlin CityScans project at the Berlin Kulturforum.

April 4, 2011

Space Syntax & the future of urban planning software

Notes from a lecture given at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
23^rd March 2011

View a summary of the presentation on YouTube

Opening comments

Good afternoon. I am delighted to have this opportunity to report on my progress as this year’s Lincoln Loeb Fellow. My brief today is in two parts: first, to describe my work as an architect and urban planner at the strategic consulting company, Space Syntax Limited; second, to say something about where I think my practice, and the field generally, is heading.

In doing so, I want to make special reference to new technologies and new methods of communication that have emerged in recent years.

A plan to transform an established business
“Space Syntax” is an evidence-based approach to planning and design, with a focus on the role of spatial networks in shaping patterns of social and economic transaction. First developed at University College London, it explains, scientifically, why the continuously connected city is a good thing and it exposes the risks that come from sprawl and disconnection. It has much to say about the benefits of density and the hazards of urban fragmentation. It gets us away from simplistic banners like “New Urbanism” or “Landscape Urbanism” by providing a detailed, forensic description of the city.

Space Syntax is best known in the UK but, over the last fifteen years, we have established a network of Space Syntax consulting companies to take the approach into a growing number of countries. Although not immune to the ebbs and flows of the market, we have a commercially successful operation.

Yet, in collaboration with UCL, we now plan to make it available at low or no cost, to as many people as are willing to take it up. More than that, we are about to open up the “source code” of the software to anyone who wants to get their hands on it. We are, in other words, about to publish the recipe for our secret sauce.

In my talk today I will argue that this can only be a good thing. (more…)

April 3, 2011

From landscapes of extraction to creative industries of organic matter & waste

Monday, 14th February 2011 at 6pm
Stubbins Room, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Participants
Pablo Rey, Basurama
Manolo Mansylla, Trashpatch
Robin Nagle, anthropologist of material culture (waste)
Scientist doing research in biomaterials (Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering/ Materials Research Science and Engineering Center – School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)

Moderator
Richard Forman

Abstract
Technology has no limits. Science has no limits. Human creativity and imagination have no limits. The limits are imposed by matter. Raw materials are being extracted from the remotest of geographies and we are beginning to exhaust the last reservoirs of available minerals in order to perpetuate a production system based on disposability and the consumption of wholes, not parts; of large, not small; of new, not old; of multiple, not the one that is needed. In order to extract such minerals, we often deplete forests, along with the cultures that inhabit them, or contaminate river basins. Science and technology can produce brilliant responses to our environmental problems, but unless they take into account the source of the materials they consume, the counter landscapes of extraction, those of waste and slums (people get displaced as we render their land useless through monoculture or extraction), will continue to grow; setting off our good intentions to move towards a more sustainable future. (more…)

January 14, 2011

Category: Loeb Fellowship

AoU Landscape Urbanism notes & questions

Anna Rose presents “CityScans” at the Harvard GSD

Space Syntax & the future of urban planning software

From landscapes of extraction to creative industries of organic matter & waste