Tim Stonor

Tag: Sustainability

  • Design to prioritise well-being and sustainability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • 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.

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