Main news
New Jobs: London, Manchester, Bristol, Surrey, Southampton, Oxford, Abingdon.
A specification for the ideal development guide?
National Urban Design Conference 3 weeks to go
Underground Urbanism Event Report – planning system lacks depth
Lack of garden access for young children linked to obesity
Sedentary lifestyle and overweight weaken arterial health already in childhood
Humans tune their style of walking to minimise energy use
Sub-Aqua Cities Celebrated – a list of some of the cities that risk inundation / from the Urban Design Group
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The National Conference on Urban Design 2015 - Bristol 8-9-10 October
Development, Design and Profit in C21
Supported by
RICS - RTPI - RIBA
RSA - LI–AoU - ULI
3 weeks to go!
50 speakers
2 book launches
2 travelling exhibitions
1 report launch
4 recent books featured
Exceptional Networking and Learning Opportunity
Book now for the conference / “the most beautiful, interesting and distinguished city in England“ John Betjeman, 1961
“Best City to Live in 2014”– Sunday Times Most Liveable City in UK - 2013
NB Bristol is a popular venue. Please book your accommodation early.
George Ferguson, Mayor of Bristol, Stephen Hodder, RIBA Immediate Past President, Noel Farrar, President Landscape Institute
Chris Sharpe, Holistic City Software; David Swallow; Debbie Sorkin, Leadership Centre; George Grace, TownCentred; John Buxton, Cambrian Transport Ltd; Julian Dobson, Urban Pollinators; Julian Hart, Lancefield consulting; Johnathan Shifferes, RSA; John Worthington; Mike Roberts, HAB; Rob Cowan, Urban Design Skills; Robin Hambleton, UWE, Roger Evans, Studio | Real; Richard Hayward & Louise Thomas; Yolande Barnes, Savills, Dan Black and many more
Sessions on Governance and Planning; Energy; Health and Design; Infrastructure; Profit and Funding, Data and Smart Cities
Main sponsors
Gregg Latchams Solicitors
Broadway Malyan
Urban Design Awards
– Developer Award
– Public Sector Award
Do you know any developers or public bodies who you think should enter the 2016 awards?
if so
pleaselet them know and please encourage them to enter!
Full details of how to apply:
Developer Award
- Deadline 30 October 2015
Student Award
£600 Francis Tibbalds Prize
Deadline 9 November 2015
Shortlisting of practice awards is currently underway
Urban Design Current Edition
The City as Master Developer
Available to UDG Members by Subscription / The ideal development design guide?
6 Cs workshop produces specification
The 6 C’s are six councils (Derbyshire, Derby City, Leicestershire, Leicester city, Nottinghamshire and Nottingham City Councils) who several years ago came together to produce a residential development guide. Since first published the world has moved on and the consortium is keen to update the document, and David Locke Associates, Integrated Transport Planning Ltd, and Phil Jones Associates have been commissioned to undertake the work. Last week, a workshop of experts and stakeholders was tasked with developing a consensus as to what the revised guidance should do and what it should cover.
The discussion provided a valuable insight into how developers engineers, planners and designers view street design guidance, and the business of steering a development through the planning and highway adoption process.
Suggestions included
- Street design guidance should sit firmly within higher level policies, including council corporate strategies, sustainable community strategies and reflecting current concerns such as obesity, active lifestyles, and combatting loneliness through encouraging social contact.
- Building for Life should be used to provide the framework for Street Design Guides
- Planning and highways departments should act on concert. This is a challenge where the planning authority and the highway authority sit in different councils. Here it was suggested that a joint letter could be issued by both highway and planning authorities at the end of pre-application discussions providing advice. It damages the reputation of local authorities when departments are unable to “get their act together”.
- Provide developers with certainty by raising highway adoption issues early on. (such as commuted sums required for street trees. (£1500 is standard in some areas))
- Make buildability, serviceability, maintainability key objectives
Underground Urbanism event shows up planning system’s lack of depth
What happens below ground may not be everyone’s favourite topic, but Wednesday night’s UDG event showed that it is one that needs to be addressed by all urban design practitioners. Liz Reynolds of URBENprovided an overview of the many different functions the underworld performs, from the obvious such as Boston’s Big Dig; Crossrail, and mega basements; to the more subtle, such as underground parks (New York’s Low Line), underground agriculture, and the repurposing of underground spaces to create restraints, bike stores and even fountains.
Stephanie Bricker of the British Geological Society reminded the audience of the importance of the geology, providing a platform to build on (not always solid rock, but sometimes shrinkable clay, running sands, or soluble rocks prone to alarming sinkholes); the provision of water supplies and handling of waste water, heat, andbuilding stone. The BGS has a number of initiatives in hand to support the mapping of underground assets, such as in Glasgow where the sewer and water supply pipe network is being mapped to identify areas where leaks might lead to a risk of contamination.
Jerry Tate, of Harmer provided a case study of the Thames Tunnel Sinking shaft, and the challenges of inclusive, and obtaining official consents from 11 different department in various agencies and authorities. The plans are to create a usable space that will accommodate over 100 people theatre style, giving this ground-breaking (in both senses of the word) piece of civil engineering a dignified and visible future.
Underground waste management facilities were discussed in comparison with the medieval practices of dumping domestic and commercial waste in the street where creates an eyesore, obstructs the footway and creates hazards for blind and partially sighted people. We were fortunate to have David Bonnett, one of the UK’s leading experts on inclusive design, in the audience.
We use the underground world for all manner of functions that are essential for the successful operation of an urban area. Even though the technology exists to precisely map and record underground assets, including GPS, BIM, laser measurement and ground penetrating radar, there is very little organisation or coordination in how underground development proceeds. The time may come when a new metro project is blocked by someone’s mega basement. The planning system produces reams of or ambiguous text and relatively imprecise two dimensional plans, itreaches afrenzy when it comes to following procedure, and yet abandons to anarchy and chaos the essential subject of the planning of the underworld. It is surely a situation that needs to change. Planning and design should be firmly 3 dimensional, and both surface and subsurface.
Other events
The number of events is on the wane as we approach the holiday period, but there are still events to go to for those that seek them…
Academy of Urbanism
18 September
Event / East England – a regional urbanism
September 24 @ 3:30 pm-6:30 pm
Learning from Europe
November 5 6:30 pm-9:00 pm
The Urbanism Awards Ceremony
November 6 12:00 pm-5:00 pm
BOBMK Events
Next events autumn
Landscape Institute
Rethinking the Urban Landscape Exhibition
At the National Urban Design Conference
8-10 October
MADE
Rights of Light and Party Walls 1/10
Masterplans Frameworks and Briefs 6/10
Museum of Walking
Thursday24 September6.00pm-8.00pmAldwych Lost with Tom Bolton,
author of Vanished City and Lost Rivers of London
PTRC
An Introduction to Highway Design & Construction
The Principles of Traffic and Transport 20-Week Evening Lecture Series, London and Bristol
Urban Design London
Events coming up – extensive programme some free, some charged/£175+VAT (Free for subscribers)Cycling Infrastructure Skills: Visiting and Learning from Proposed and Completed Schemes - 2nd October
Challenging Practice: Evolving Suburbs
6th October
Design South East / Kent Design
Event Calendar
Garden City II Eastgate,
Springhead Park
28 October
Designing Kent's Infrastructure
Maidstone
19 November
Other
Silk Cities Exchange Workshop
Free one day event
29/10 UCL
The importance of the Linear Forest
A day devoted to the possibility of creating a tree-lined roadscape against the conservatism of highway design and road safety audit.
25th November Kew
/ LatestLectures
on UrbanNous
New
Weather in the City – How Design Shapes the Urban Climate
SandaLenzholzer
All urban designers, architects planners, and highway engineers should have a knowledge of this subject.
Urbanism: Improving quality and value
The importance of product, land and money
Yolande Barnes - Savills
Garden Cities Past and Present.
Potential morphologies explored.
Dominic Papa S333 Architecture and Urbanism
Garden Cities: Is there a Business Case?
Jim Coleman, BuroHappold
Health and Urban Design
Lucy Saunders, GLA, TFL
UrbanNous Catalogue available on-line
Highlights include Christopher Alexander, George Ferguson, Hans Monderman and scores of others.
Jobs
Urban Designer - West Waddy
Abingdon, Oxfordshire
Funded PhD - Bioregional and University of Westminster
Director/Associate Director, Urban Design or Landscape Architecture - WYG– Manchester
Associate Director -WYG - London
Urban Design Graduate - Hamilton-Baillie Associates - Bristol
VIA Consultant/ Senior Consultant, Turley - London
Urban Design and Conservation Officer (Job No. 000712) Oxford City Council
Opportunities for creative Urban Designers - Savills Urban Design - Southampton - Oxford
Urban Designer - SLR Consulting - Bristol
Architecture and Design Scotland
ESpace to Succeed – 24th
Landor
Parking World – Car in the City - Space and Place
11 November
Place Alliance
The Big Meet
27 October
CIRIA
Valuing urban ecology and city resilience
3 November 2015, London
/
PROJECT OF THE WEEK
Serp and Molot
LDA Design
Many cities, like Moscow, have contaminated and degraded urban land and the masterplan’s concept aims for a simple but adventurous outcome – how to turn grim industrial wastelands into beautiful new city places.
Serp and Molot (Hammer and Sickle) is once of central Moscow’s best known sites - it contains a former iron and steel fabrication plant. The 58Ha (143 acre) site is now largely derelict and abandoned, and it was announced at the end of 2013 that it would be the subject of an international design competition run jointly run by Moscow City Government and by Donstroy Invest, the developers and owners of the site.
The masterplan, due for completion by 2021, will create over 1.8 million square metres of prime mixed-use space with an estimated investment of 180 billion Roubles (over €3.76 billion). The design competition attracted 52 applications made up of 157 companies from 17 countries.
Our masterplan gives a new urban vision for Moscow where the city is looking to redirect attention and investment to a number of large former industrial sites located within the city boundary, switching from a concentric pattern of growth to a polycentric model that makes greater use of brownfield land and places greater emphasis on the existing public transport network.
Ricardo Mateu, Director of UHA LONDON, said:
“Serp and MolotcontinuesUHALONDON’s track record of successful collaborations with LDA Design – marrying a strong masterplan and landscape design narrative with innovative and futuristic architecture – Serp and Molot will be a game changer for the Moscow real estate market and become a lifestyle choice for Muscovites.”
Read more
Urban Design around the World
China
One Chinese City's Struggle With Water ScarcityItaly
Excavations reveal a bigger 6th Century RomeNew Zealand
New design for Freyberg Place misses the markUSA
Let’s build a neighbourhood among downtown condo towersUrban Design Critic John King on the Structures That Define San Francisco
UK
Keeping monster homes in check in LondonLondon is sleepwalking towards ‘incipient urban disaster’
Campaigners hit out at council "lack of transparency" over development of one of Glasgow's most prestigious addresses
Sunday Times - British Home Awards
London’s Tube Map – geographically correct
Best and worst office views in the UK
Energy and Climate Change
World’s largest artificial wave tank created in Netherlands to research coastal defences against rising sea levelsSub-Aqua Cities Celebrated – a list of some of the cities that risk inundation
Movement
George Ferguson defies 9000 signature petition to scrap 20mph limits in BristolThis is a significant number of signatures, but against this the population of Bristol is 450,000.
The newspaper discussion misquotes a study on air pollution – which actually hints at reductions in air pollution from the introduction of 20mph limits.
Killing Us Softly with Bike Lanes
“A plan by CDOT to eliminate 54 parking spaces along Highway 160, between 6th Street and 3rd Street — precisely within the commercial core — with no plan to replace that lost parking.”
The author clearly does not realise that lost parking is being replaced by bike lanes that are expected to be used by people who currently use their cars.
Humans tune their style of walking to minimise energy use
Self-driving cars: from 2020 you will become a permanent backseat driver
Politics Philosophy Economics
Margins Matter – can performance be transformed by making many small improvements?/
Latest Research, Policy and Practice
Built Environment
Only bottom up development can end the housing crisis and regenerate our citiesA Before-and-After Photo Archive of the World's Best Street Designs
New towns and garden cities lessons for tomorrow
Stage 2: Lessons for Delivering a New Generation of Garden Cities
TCPA
Environment
As wildland-urban interface grows, so does risk to people and habitatsSmall rural owl fearlessly colonizes the city
Closer look reveals true cost of coal
Ban on microbeads offers best chance to protect oceans, aquatic species
World loses trillions of dollars worth of nature's benefits each year due to land degradation
Robots help to map England's only deep-water Marine Conservation Zone
Translating research intoaction
Data driven green design
Humans Health Society
The Grandmother Hypothesis – population modelling points to role of grandmothers in evolution of increased lifespanGrandmothers so the modelling suggests have played a vital role in helping to feed their daughter’s children. A shift to grandmothering was the foundation for several important steps in human evolution, including longer adult life spans, increased brain size, empathy, cooperation and pair bonding.
And it is notable that architecture and design pays very little heed to anything other than nuclear families.
Sedentary lifestyle and overweight weaken arterial health already in childhood
Fruit and vegetables aren't only good for a healthy body -- they protect your mind too
Study from England shows no garden access for young children linked to childhood obesity later in childhood
'Our chairs are killing us,' say researchers
Additional time spent outdoors by children results in decreased rate of nearsightedness
High consumption of sugar sweetened beverages linked to overall poor diet
Surgeon General's prescription for health: walkable communities
Variation in life expectancy across the UK compared with other countries – South East England heads the list.
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