How can we best collaborate to improve personal mobility?

2017/07/07
Analysis, Space Syntax

SSx_Digital_Transport_Exchange

These are the notes from the session I was part of at Friday’s Digital Transport Exchange.

 

How can we best collaborate to improve personal mobility?

There are two issues behind this question:

Firstly, that personal mobility isn’t as good as it should be. This is one of the big issues that’s raised a lot at the moment all around the world. Especially how the combined costs of mobility and housing is pushing people further out of cities and/or detrimentally affecting their daily lives.

This is not just an issue about how to provide mobility services, but it’s a wider issue around a planning and design.

Secondly, collaboration is not as good as it should be. This includes sophisticated disciplines working in parallel, differences between public and private sectors, short- and long-term decision makers, and divisions within large organisations. The result of this is that the outcomes of design, planning and service strategies optimise individual systems rather than creating combined outcomes that benefit the wider city.

By using urban analytics that are strategic in nature, precisely link people to space, and focus on outcomes not systems, we can start to address these issues.

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CREATech 2017

2017/06/15
Analysis, Space Syntax
1 Comment

photo

Notes from a Smart Cities panel I was part of at CREATech 2017

What is a Smart City?

Theres a one line answer which is probably very obvious: smart cities use data and technology to make cities better. The important part though is that they make cities better for people – that is happier, healthier and wealthier.

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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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Health, Urban Form and Modelling

2016/10/18
Analysis, Space Syntax

Foresight_Obesity_Map.png

This post is a summary of a presentation I gave at the BRE Cities Regeneration Conference.

What does health mean?
At the moment there’s a lot of press attention on obesity, but health is much more complex including: communicable and non-communicable illness (Non-communicable  include Obesity, Diabetes, Cardio Vascular, Respiratory and Mental Illnesses), causation and correlation, “hard” and “soft” urban systems and complicated versus complex.

The key question for urban design and planning is: (How) does urban form impact on health outcomes?

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Learning from informality

2016/10/13
Design
1 Comment

sherafiyah

These are some developing thoughts about how to plan and grow cities.

Growing, as opposed to planning or building, is important as the cities we think of as successful today weren’t designed in one attempt, or built in a few phases, but grew over many years.

There’s a lot of criticism of the way cities currently respond in a physical way to their wider economic and social context. It is arguable that planning in its current form has not and does not achieve the objectives it sets out to. Many cities are fragmented by infrastructure, set out in low density single use zones, suffer poor health, are difficult to grow, irresponsive to market conditions, irresponsive to their residents, or uncoordinated in outcome.

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