Tim Stonor

Category: Resilience

  • 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…)
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Street

    Street

    The place where we learn the most valuable lessons of our lives.

    She’s very “street” – streetwise.

    She’s very “library” doesn’t sound the same.

  • 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.