Tim Stonor

Category: Performance

  • 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.  

    (more…)
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    (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…)

  • Intense relationships: measuring urban intensity

    Enriching design practice by the mapping of human behaviour patterns could transform urban space

    An article published in the Architectural Review on 30th April 2018.

    There’s much debate about how to measure density – dwellings per hectare, bedrooms per hectare or people per hectare; including or excluding major highways, parks and open spaces; the permanent population only or the transient one too? 

    While this gives urban planners something to disagree about, it risks missing the point: great urban places are not created by density; they’re created by intensity. The difference matters. When people describe the buzz of a market they don’t say, ‘Wow – it was so dense’. They’re much more likely to say how intense it was. Density is a word used by planners. Intensity is a word that real people use, and perhaps because it describes the outcomes that people experience rather than the inputs that have gone into creating them. It’s the outcomes that are ultimately more important.

    But planning professionals like density. Even though density doesn’t capture the essence of what it feels like to be somewhere, the term appeals to professional instincts. It describes the raw ingredients that planners have to handle and, once you choose which version of the formula to use, density is easy to measure. It involves a simple calculation of straightforward urban quantities such as the number of people, of houses or of bedrooms, all divided by the geographic area over which those ingredients occur. Easy.

    By contrast, intensity seems more difficult to pin down, not least because it appears to have a subjectively emotional dimension; it speaks of feelings, responses, stimuli; raising problems about how it can be measured. But intensity is also a response to context, to place and above all to people – and here we find clues to its measurement.

    (more…)
  • We don’t guess the structural performance of individual buildings so why do we guess the human performance of entire cities?

    We don’t guess the structural performance of individual buildings so why do we guess the human performance of entire cities?

    The structural steelwork of a large and complex building would not be designed without running engineering calculations. Even the smallest of buildings is subject to objective structural analysis. No client and professional team would rely on guesswork, no matter how famous or experienced the architect or engineer.

    So why do we leave the human performance of places to the whim of architects who run no calculations and rely only on their instinct and ego? Why is the science of human behaviour so poorly developed? Why is chronic failure still tolerated?

    In the early sixteenth century, William Harvey challenged the medical profession to take a more objective, more observation-driven approach to the understanding of the circulation of blood. At the time, medical thinking was largely based on the beliefs of Galen of Pergamon, who had set these out in the second century. Harvey challenged a medical mindset that hadn’t changed in one and a half millennia. And he encouraged his peers to embrace advances in science that allowed new forms of investigation.

    We can see a similar state of affairs in the prevalence of, and institutional inertia around, twentieth century planning. Based on belief, not observation-based science, a doctrinal approach to urban planning and design pervades the professions. This is the case, whether the specific approach is Modernism, the Garden City movement or (and especially) Landscape Urbanism. Each is to some degree unscientific.

    These approaches propose different kinds of urban outcomes but what unites them is a belief that the future should look fundamentally different to the form of continuously connected, dense and mixed-use urbanism found in cities for as long as there have been cities – the kind of urbanism that architects and town planners visit on their holidays.

    The kind of urbanism – and here’s the irony – that Galen would have recognised. If only architecture and town planning were stuck in a fifteen hundred-year-old mindset. We would still have vehicles on the road but we wouldn’t have vehicle dominance. We wouldn’t have land use zoning that generates long-distance commuting, traffic congestion and negative health impacts. We wouldn’t be encroaching on the rural landscape with semi-detached, density-fearing dwellings.

    Fundamental change in our professions is needed and science has an important part to play. In the spirit of Harvey’s observation-based approach, we need to embrace the new capabilities offered by sensing, analytics and modelling. We need to understand how cities truly work before we then form ideas about how to change them. We must move beyond the beliefs of twentieth century practice. The evidence is there to demonstrate that practice based on belief hasn’t delivered great places with the consistency required either by the investors in them or the users of them.

    We can learn from Harvey, even if our end goal is the urbanism of Galen.

  • Sustainability & resilience – a SMART approach

    Sustainability & resilience – a SMART approach

    1. Aspects of sustainability/resilience: SMART outcomes
    Social – improvements in formation & retention of social connections

    Environmental – increases in renewable energy production and reductions in energy demand

    Economic – increases in land value creation

    Health – improvements in public health outcomes

    Education – improvements in achievements/qualifications

    Safety – reductions in offending & reoffending.

    Environmental
    Urban carbon footprint is made up of:
    1. Building carbon.
    2. Transport carbon.

    Urban carbon reduction can be achieved by:
    1. Building carbon reduction – intelligent building services: heating/cooling, lighting.
    2. Transport carbon reduction – walking, cycling, public transport & less private vehicle use.

    2. Process specification: SMART inputs
    1. Integrated Urban Modelling of existing building performance and transport performance.
    2. Predictive Urban Modelling of expected development impacts.

    3. Asset requirements for SMART approach
    1. Pervasive data sensing
    2. Data mapping – centrally coordinated & then distributed eg open platform distribution
    3. Data analysis – undertaken by city, academia & industry then shared
    4. Planning & design response – use of data to create development proposals
    5. Development proposal testing – using the Integrated Urban Model.

  • Permeability & connectivity: a tale of two cities

    Permeability & connectivity: a tale of two cities

    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.

  • Designing Resilient Cities – creating a future Avalon

    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.

  • Technology by necessity

    Technology by necessity

    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.

  • Building a Smart City modelling team

    Integrated Urban Model

    .

    Cities planning their future are increasingly turning to the production of Integrated Urban Models. These are tools that bring together various datasets on different asoects of urban performance, from the behaviour of people to the flows of energy, water and other utilities. The aim is to better predict the future of cities by better understanding how they are currently working.

    This is a nascent but rapidly developing field in which knowledge is emerging and evolving at a pace. Given the complexity of cities it is a good idea to involve many specialists in different subjects, led by an Urban Modelling Advisory Panel (UrbanMAP).   (more…)

  • From cities of movement to places of transaction

    Summary of Tim Stonor’s talk at the World Cities Summit, Singapore, 3rd June 2014

    From cities of movement to places of transaction – a new mobility focus for city leaders, planners and everyday users

    Key responsibilities for cities
    1. Imagining the future of cities and mobility.

    2. Designing integrated, people-focused planning to sustain cities.

    3. Measuring the social, economic and environmental value created by the movement, interaction and transaction of people.

    The fundamental purpose of cities
    Cities are for transaction: economic and social transaction. People come to cities to trade. It is why we have cities – they are intensifications of opportunities to trade. The public realm of the city – its network of streets and spaces – is where much of this trade occurs: a “transaction machine” which, like any machine, is more or less efficient depending on how it is engineered. (more…)

  • Digital urbanism – a sketch of a structure

    Digital Urbanism has two key components:

    1.  Computing
    That organisations and individuals are involved in the creation, collection, visualisation and analysis of data, leading to the creation, through computing, of modelling tools and predictive analytics. This kind of activity is now central to the operations of public and private organisations. It is no longer peripheral.

    2.  Human behaviour
    That people now think about places online as well as places on land; that cyberspace is as real as physical space; that networked computing means we have moved beyond the single chatroom and into the interconnected “place-web”.

    These, I believe, are the twin aspects of Digital Urbanism and, of the two, the second is the primus inter pares because human behaviour patterns should drive computing activities.

  • Centres and Cities

    I’m sure you’re right about the link between street morphology and attractiveness to business. Centres seem to do one of three things through time. They either:

    1. consolidate and grow (London, Paris)

    2. move (Jeddah)

    3. implode (Sunderland).

    Oh, and some places:

    4. never have a functioning centre (Skelmersdale, UK New Towns) because they were designed in ignorance of the importance of a) grid continuity and b) multi-scale centrality – properties measured by Space Syntax models

    or

    5. divide and reunite (Berlin) but we can’t blame the architects for that!

    Email to Paul Swinney at the Centre for Cities

  • New blog for Faversham Yellow Lines campaign

    Information on the campaign against the painting of yellow lines across Faversham town centre has moved to a new blog.

    Thank you for all the support so far!

  • Move, interact, transact – the human dimension of Smart Cities

    http://youtu.be/U63hMTIQW8I

    Speaking at the invitation of the organisers of the British Business Summit, Istanbul, Turkey. (more…)

  • Spatial Layout as Critical Infrastructure

    Stub…notes for an upcoming conference talk

    Key issue to be addressed:

    – Urban-Rural development

    – Urban Regeneration

    – Smart Cities.

    When a network of streets is laid out, planners and designers build in an enormous amount of “embedded potential”:

    • the pattern of movement
    • land use potential
    • safety
    • land value
    • social interaction
    • public health
    • carbon emissions.

    The design of the street network has a fundamental and measurable influence on each of the above.

    Later changes – to land use pattern or to the local design of streets (eg road widening or narrowing, adding cycle lanes or public transport) – can enhance or even diminish these potentials, but such later changes always occur around a benchmark that is set by spatial configuration decisions.

    Buildings come and go – are built and demolished – but the spatial network, once laid out, is harder to adjust.

    Exceptional new connections – such as bridges – can be built to connect disconnected networks but grids are resilient to change. Therefore, putting the wrong grid into an urban development can be a pathological move, setting the socio-economic potential of places for generations to come.

    How do we know this?

    The evidence-base: post-war housing estates; UK New Towns. Places that go wrong within a generation, if that – sometimes within a few years. Car-dominant transport planning. Land use zoning.

    Risk of failed UK models.

    In finding a balance between the tension of urban and rural development, Chinese towns and cities should learn from China first:

    – mixed use planning: marginal separation by linear integration.

    – mixed mode planning: roads, streets, lanes, canals: Jiading.

    – mixed character planning.

    What are the Spatial Layout requirements?

    The historic Chinese grid: rectilinear hierarchy.

    Pervasive centrality.

    A smart street-grid.

    To be developed…

  • Space Syntax_Integrated Urban Model

    Space Syntax_Integrated Urban Model

  • How should the Transport industry change?

    First, by seeing the purpose of Transport as the facilitation of human transaction and not only as the movement of people/goods and the construction of roads, rails and runways.

    Second, that the economic benefits of transport investments are measured not as savings in time but as the creation of opportunities.

    Third, that when you say transport, people think walk and cycle as well as drive and ride.

    Fourth, that digital transportation if considered alongside physical transportation by the same people working within the same teams/departments.

    Fifth, that the accuracy of transport forecasts is improved – too many initiatives don’t work the way they were meant to and, of these, many create unintended negative consequences such as traffic congestion, illness and social isolation.