Archive

Design

Using technology to make cities better for people

2021/10/08
Analysis, Design

Smart city has become a loaded term – earlier Smart City projects were often expensive, didn’t fully deliver and embedded top-down models of centralised control in city operation.

However, the term is still widely used as shorthand to talk about the use of technology in cities.

In the time since the first projects emerged there have been developments in technology, but also changes to the wider social, political, environmental and economic context.

2020 lead to a re-evaluation of many accepted norms, making now a good time to consider how we respond and simultaneously think about what we want our long-term future to be.

Technology will play a key role in supporting this future, leading to the question of what is a smart city?

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///what.place.words

2021/10/06
Analysis, Art, Design

This is a set of images that explore the theme of place in digital art works, referencing the unseen devices and processes that affect our daily lives, and the connections these create to the wider world.

Pieces are produced using randomised and generative processes influenced by a physical location.

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How should the cities of the future be designed?

2017/08/17
Design, Space Syntax

Centrelines

These are some notes from a talk I gave at Space Syntax’s last Urban Imperative: Improve, Extend, Create series of events in July. It looks at how to think about designing a city from scratch. The focus of this post is to look at exactly which components of a masterplan to design and why.

This shows some work that is slightly experimental. At the moment it’s about testing ideas through a process, and at the moment it’s only a process. It started as a real project to look at ideas about how to develop a city from scratch but then some further research work was done.

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Spatial Networks, Urban Tech and Digital Urbanism

2017/04/28
Analysis, Design, Space Syntax

uk_model.png

This is the combination of a couple of talks I’ve given in the last few months to the ULI Urban Tech Committee and the Academy of Urbanism Digital Urbanism groups.

Urban Tech is something that has developed a lot in the last 10 years and which now seems to have a lot of interest and attention. There are a lot of terms – Future Cities, Smart Cities, Prop Tech, Urban Tech, etc – which are all slightly related but not quite connected in the way they could be.

One way of trying to understand how they fit together is by tracing what has changed in this time and what this means for the way we interact with cities.

While its interesting to see how things have changed, what is possibly more important, as professionals who work with, and in the context of cities, is to ask the more difficult “so what” questions of why things should change?

Here’s an outline of the reasons Why that will be explained in more detail below:

  • Better outcomes for cities and people
  • Creating benefits between public and private sectors in the short and long terms
  • More transparent and inclusive decision-making
  • Crossing siloes between planning and service delivery for more effective and efficient spending

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Developing a spatial framework and geometry

2016/11/05
Analysis, Design
1 Comment

Earlier posts looked at why (master) planning hasn’t worked as intended, reaching one conclusion that the design outcomes weren’t flexible enough. The response was to aim to design the fewest fixed components and allow the city to grow more organically on a plot by plot basis within this framework. Changes in the economic or social context would be reflected by variations in density, land use, massing and speed of growth.

An early outline of fixed components includes solids (blocks, plots) and voids (street, infrastructure, and utility networks). Of course there are a secondary set of requirements that must be provided, but which there is some flexibility in terms of location or exact configuration – these include social infrastructure etc.

This post starts to set out how to develop this spatial framework. Building on Bill Hillier’s idea of the Movement Economy (1) – the configuration of space affects the distribution of people who affects the distributions of land uses and values – the starting point is the spatial network. Space is very difficult to change, with far-reaching impacts, while buildings can be replaced, and land can be bought and sold.

In turn this post becomes an examination into the geometry of spatial networks and urban blocks.

As always these are developing thoughts.

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