urban design Archives

Suburban Urbanities

Suburban space has traditionally been understood as a formless remnant of physical city expansion, without a dynamic or logic of its own. Suburban Urbanities challenges this view by defining the suburb as a temporally evolving feature of urban growth.

Anchored in the architectural research discipline of space syntax, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of urban change, touching on the history of the suburb as well as its current development challenges, with a particular focus on suburban centres. Studies of the high street as a centre for social, economic and cultural exchange provide evidence for its critical role in sustaining local centres over time. Contributors from the architecture, urban design, geography, history and anthropology disciplines examine cases spanning Europe and around the Mediterranean.

By linking large-scale city mapping, urban design scale expositions of high street activity and local-scale ethnographies, the book underscores the need to consider suburban space on its own terms as a specific and complex field of social practice.

Urban Design Governance

Urban Design Governance takes a deep dive into the governance of urban design around Europe. It examines interventions in the means and processes of designing the built environment as devised by public authorities and other stakeholders across the continent. In particular, the focus is on the use of soft powers and allied financial mechanisms to influence design quality in the public interest. In doing so, the book traces the scope, use and effectiveness of the range of informal (non-regulatory) urban design governance tools that governments, municipalities and others have at their disposal.
Developed from the Urban Maestro project, a joint initiative of the United Nations Human Settlement programme (UN-Habitat), UCL and the Brussels Bouwmeester Maître Architecte (BMA), Urban Design Governance offers the first panorama of informal urban design governance tools from across Europe, and places the tools within a theoretical and analytical framework with the potential to be applied locally and internationally. Last, the book discusses and reveals the essential pre-requisites for the effective governance of urban design.

Governments everywhere are increasingly seeing these sorts of tools as part of a necessary investment in delivering the high-quality built environments that their residents, businesses and investors demand. This book shows how.

Praise for Urban Design Governance

‘Illustrating the Urban Maestro method, many case studies report on both the formal and informal tools. going beyond the traditional ways to explore the topics with schemes, photographs, innovative aspects and relevant bibliography, and of interest to all who work in urban design policy-making and governance.’
Urban Design Journal

‘this book digs into the study of urban design governance in the European continent to prove that governance is essential in enhancing place-making for a better built environment.’
Urban Studies Journal

Post-war Architecture between Italy and the UK

Italy and the UK experienced a radical re-organisation of urban space following the devastation of many towns and cities in the Second World War. The need to rebuild led to an intellectual and cultural exchange between a wave of talented architects, urbanists and architectural historians in the two countries. Post-war Architecture between Italy and the UK studies this exchange, exploring how the connections and mutual influences contributed to the formation of a distinctive stance towards Internationalism, notwithstanding the countries’ contrasting geographic and climatic conditions, levels of economic and industrial development, and social structures.

Topics discussed in the volume include the influence of Italian historic town centres on British modernist and Brutalist architectural approaches to the design of housing and university campuses as public spaces; post-war planning concepts such as the precinct; the tensions between British critics and Italian architects that paved the way for British postmodernism; and the role of architectural education as a melting pot of mutual influence. It draws on a wealth of archival and original materials to present insights into the personal relationships, publications, exhibitions and events that provided the crucible for the dissemination of ideas and typologies across cultural borders.

Offering new insights into the transcultural aspects of European architectural history in the post-war years, and its legacy, this volume is vital reading for architectural and urban historians, planners and students, as well as social historians of the European post-war period.

Praise for Post-war Architecture between Italy and the UK

‘The detailed contributions to the book are a valuable addition to knowledge’
Planning Perspectives

Space Syntax

Professor Bill Hillier spent most of his career at The Bartlett, University College London, where he founded and developed, with a team of colleagues, an original research programme that set the study of architecture on a firm scientific basis. His transformational way of thinking about buildings and cities influenced generations of scholars, researchers and practitioners within the built environment disciplines and way beyond – in fields ranging from archaeology and biology to physics and zoology.

Space Syntax: Selected papers by Bill Hillier provides a canon of works that reflects the progression of Hillier’s ideas from the early publications of the 1970s to his most recent work, published before his death in 2019. This selection of influential works ranges from his papers on architecture as a professional and research discipline, through to his later papers that present a theory of the spatial structure of the city and its social functions. By bringing together writing from across his career-span of half a century, with specially commissioned introductions by a wide range of international experts in the field, we are able to contextualise and show the range and evolution of Hillier’s key ideas.

Musical Cities

Musical Cities represents an innovative approach to scholarly research and dissemination. A digital and interactive ‘book’, it explores the rhythms of our cities, and the role they play in our everyday urban lives, through the use of sound and music.

Sara Adhitya first discusses why we should listen to urban rhythms in order to design more liveable and sustainable cities, before demonstrating how we can do so through various acoustic communication techniques. Using audio-visual examples, Musical Cities takes the ‘listener’ on an interactive journey, revealing how sound and music can be used to represent, compose, perform and interact with the city. Through case studies of urban projects developed in Paris, Perth, Venice and London, Adhitya demonstrates how the power of music, and the practice of listening, can help us to compose more accessible, inclusive, engaging, enjoyable, and ultimately more sustainable cities.

Co-designing Infrastructures

Co-designing Infrastructures tells the story of a research programme designed to bring the power of engineering and technology into the hands of grassroots community groups, to create bottom-up solutions to global crises. Four projects in London are described in detail, exemplifying community collaboration with engineers, designers and scientists to enact urban change. The projects co-designed solutions to air pollution, housing, the water-energy-food nexus, and water management. Rich case-study accounts are underpinned by theories of participation, environmental politics and socio-technical systems. The projects at the heart of the book are grounded in specific settings facing challenges familiar to urban communities throughout the world. This place-based approach to infrastructure is of international relevance as a foundation for urban resilience and sustainability. The authors document the tools used to deliver this work, providing guidance for others who are working to deliver local technical solutions to complex social and environmental problems around the world.

This is a book for engineers, designers, community organisers and researchers. Co-authored by researchers, it includes voices of community collaborators, their experiences, frustrations and aspirations. It explores useful theories about infrastructure, engineering and resilience from international academic research, and situates them in community-based co-design experience, to explain why bottom-up approaches are needed and how they might succeed.

Praise for Co-Designing Infrastructures
‘Co-designing Infrastructures is a useful provocation for museum professionals seeking to evolve their exhibition co-production models. The book, which is co-written by five authors, is targeted at community organisers, engineers, designers and researchers, but its themes will chime with creative producers of collaborative projects.’
Museums Journal

Blog Archives

Urban Design Governance

Post-war Architecture between Italy and the UK

Musical Cities

Co-designing Infrastructures

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