urban planning Archives

Planning Public Space in the Vertical City

Planning Public Space in the Vertical City asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when public life is stacked inside private buildings? Bringing together 11 original case studies from London, Zurich, Munich, Brussels, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Toronto, São Paulo, Tokyo, Seoul and Adelaide, it traces how schools, daycares, homeless shelters, clinics, parks, bus terminals and community hubs are woven into high-value mixed-use projects through the co-location of public floorspace in mixed development, known as ‘vertical allocation’.

Moving from theory to practice, the book unpacks the political economy behind these projects: value capture tools, density bonuses, long-term ground leases, negotiated obligations and creative public–private–non-profit partnerships. It looks closely at ownership and management arrangements, conflicts over access and costs and the shifting ‘publicness’ of spaces that function as urban commons. Rather than celebrating verticality uncritically, the volume foregrounds questions of equity, exclusion and asks who really benefits when public services are interwoven with private development. For planners, urban designers, lawyers, policymakers and scholars, it offers a rare comparative framework, conceptual language and concrete design and governance lessons for making vertically mixed cities more just, legible and accessible.

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.

Architecture as a Way of Seeing and Learning

At the beginning of 2020, 66 long-term refugee camps existed along the East African Rift. Millions of young children have been born at the camps and have grown up there, yet it is unknown how their surrounding built environments affect their learning and development.

Architecture as a Way of Seeing and Learning presents an architect’s take on questions many academics and humanitarians ask. Is it relevant to look at camps through an urban lens and focus on their built environment? Which analytical benefits can architectural and design tools provide to refugee assistance and specifically to young children’s learning? And which advantages can assemblage thinking and situated knowledges bring about in analysing, understanding and transforming long-term refugee camps?

Responding to the extreme lack of information about East African camps, Nerea Amorós Elorduy has built contextualised knowledge – nuanced, situated and participatory – to describe, study and transform the East African long-term camps, and uncover hidden agencies in refugee assistance. She uses architecture as a means to create new knowledge collectively, include more local voices and speculate on how to improve the educational landscape for young children.

With this book, Amorós Elorduy brings nuance, contextualisation and empathy to the study and management of long-term refugee camps in East Africa. It is empathy, she argues, that will help change mindsets, decolonise humanitarian refugee assistance and its study. Crossing architecture, humanitarian aid and early career development, this book offers many practical learnings.

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.

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.

Rethinking Urban Risk and Resettlement in the Global South

Environmental changes have significant impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods, particularly the urban poor and those living in informal settlements. In an effort to reduce urban residents’ exposure to climate change and hazards such as natural disasters, resettlement programmes are becoming widespread across the Global South. While resettlement may reduce a region’s future climate-related disaster risk, it often increases poverty and vulnerability, and can be used as a reason to evict people from areas undergoing redevelopment.

A collaboration between the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at UCL, the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and the Latin American Social Science Faculty, Rethinking Urban Risk and Resettlement in the Global South collates the findings from ‘Reducing Relocation Risks’, a research project that studied urban areas across India, Uganda, Peru, Colombia and Mexico. The findings are augmented with chapters by researchers with many years of insight into resettlement, property rights and evictions, who offer cases from Monserrat, Cambodia, Philippines and elsewhere.

The contributors collectively argue that the processes for making and implementing decisions play a large part in determining whether outcomes are socially just, and examine various value systems and strategies adopted by individuals versus authorities. Considering perceptions of risk, the volume offers a unique way to think about economic assessments in the context of resettlement and draws parallels between different country contexts to compare fully urbanised areas with those experiencing urban growth. It also provides an opportunity to re-think how disaster risk management can better address the accumulation of urban risks through urban planning.

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.

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.

Major Infrastructure Planning and Delivery

Major Infrastructure Planning and Delivery introduces the system for planning and consenting Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) in England (which has also applied for some schemes in Wales). These are the major projects involving power stations and large renewable energy schemes, motorways, railways and a range of other high profile, high impact and sometimes controversial development schemes, including some closely linked to the UK’s transition to net zero.

The book explains where this separate system for governing major infrastructure came from and how it operates in practice, with a particular focus on the relationship between planning, consent and delivery of these infrastructure projects. Detailed case studies of the A14 highway, Thames Tideway super sewer, Galloper offshore windfarm and Progress Power station, drawing on research by the authors, illustrate issues of the often overlooked continuing role of local government, the engagement of local communities and stakeholders, and the modification of schemes between consent and construction.

At a time of ongoing government planning reform, increased concern about climate change, and still unresolved consequences of Brexit, as well as timeless debates such as over national need versus local impact, this timely book offers rich detail on the particular approach to major infrastructure planning in England, but also speaks to wider issues around the governance of development and implementation of government policy under late capitalism.

Invisible Reconstruction

What does it really mean to reconstruct a city after a natural, biological or man-made disaster? Is the repair and reinstatement of buildings and infrastructure sufficient without the mending of social fabric? The authors of this volume believe that the true measure of success should be societal. After all, a city without people is no city at all.
Invisible Reconstruction takes the view that effective disaster mitigation and recovery require interdisciplinary tactics. Historian Lucia Patrizio Gunning and urbanist Paola Rizzi expand beyond the confines of individual disciplines or disaster studies to bring together academics and practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines, comparing strategies and outcomes in different scenarios and cultures from South America, Europe and Asia.

From cultural heritage and public space to education and participation, contributors reflect on the interconnection of people, culture and environment and on constructive approaches to strengthening the intangible ties to increase resilience and reduce vulnerability.

By bringing practical examples of how communities and individuals have reacted to or prepared for disaster, the publication proposes a shift in public policy to ensure that essential physical reinforcement and rebuilding are matched by attention to societal needs. Invisible Reconstruction is essential reading for policymakers, academics and practitioners working to reduce the impact of natural, biological and man-made disaster or to improve post-disaster recovery.

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