HS2 – urban connectivity is key to maximising economic impact

This morning’s announcement by the UK government about the preferred route of the proposed ‘High Speed 2’ rail line north of Birmingham raises, quite rightly, the issue of economic impact and its geographic spread. Will the line draw commerce north, or make it even easier to pull southwards towards London’s greater critical mass?

One way in to the problem is to ask: who will take these trains, or rather: where will they have come from when they get on and where will they be going once they get off? In other words, to consider the total passenger journey.

History tells us through the footprint of human settlement worldwide that economic production is greatest in urban centres. The planet’s continued growth towards cities, despite all recent developments in mobile and online communications, suggests the trend is here to stay. HS2 should bear this urban imperative in mind.

Are streets the answer – yes, but…

Yesterday’s launch by think tank Policy Exchange of a report calling for the removal of inner-city high rise estates and their replacement with streets is a welcome contribution to discussions about the design of future cities. The report, authored by Create Streets, concludes that high rise estates are unsafe, antisocial and economically substandard. By proposing to replace estates with streets, the authors claim they are responding to residents’ concerns. They also say that well designed streets can provide just as much housing as sprawling estates.

The argument for street-based living appears to be straightforward: people like streets and they deliver economically. Yet it isn’t as simple as this and the report quite rightly references research by Savills, Space Syntax and the Brookings Institute that shows the importance of street layout. There are better, well-connected, well used streets and less good, disconnected, poorly used streets.

Old Street – putting the genie back in the bottle?

Old Street Roundabout is a heady intersection of urban movement flows: on foot, on cycles and in vehicles, including the Tube. But it is currently a mess, out of place within the surrounding network of generally convivial streets. In order to appreciate the severely negative condition of the place you only have to walk to Old Street Roundabout from a few hundred metres in any direction to witness the sudden, dramatic degradation of public space, the increase in traffic speeds and the disappearance of pedestrians into subways.

Yet, as a nexus of movement, the Old Street junction has the urban design foundations – the DNA of urbanism – to be a great public space, serving the local area as well as acting as a global emblem of Tech City. Not a valley, glen or vale but a truly urban object: a forum, a plaza, a piazza, a market place a square: Old Street Square. Or even, in keeping with the open source/open access aspirations of many in the technology community: Old Street Commons. For this to happen, the public realm of the Old Street junction needs to be overhauled. Radically.

Vince Cable visits Space Syntax

Yesterday, UK Secretary of State for Business, Vince Cable, visited the Space Syntax London studio.

Here’s a summary of the visit on Storify.

Smart Cities World Expo – speaking notes

Spatial layout influences
Human behaviour:

1. Movement

2. Awareness

3. Interaction

4. Transaction.

Spatial layout benefits
1. Economy
- productivity
- innovation
- building & campus performance

2. Health
- active travel
- access to healthcare
- building & campus performance

3. Social cohesion
- the spatial network creates the social network

4. Safety
- property theft
- personal attack

5. Environmental performance

6. Educational achievement
- access to education
- building & campus performance

7. Cultural identity

Spatial layout
Is defined by:

1. Location

2. Linkage

3. Layout

4. Land use

5. Landscape

These are each measurable commodities/parameters. They are the building blocks of human behaviour and, ultimately, cultural identity.

Our proposal
To put spatial analysis at the heart of city systems integration. As the common ground. As the core code of the urban operating system.

A smart city
Is one which:

1. recognises the fundamental role of Spatial Layout Design

2. embraces a technology-driven approach to Spatial Layout Analysis

3. embeds Spatial Layout Analysis in the Planning and Management of the city

4. evaluates investment decisions using Spatial Layout Analysis.

UBM Future Cities

My piece in full

Water works

From “Slate“
“The abstract-seeming images here are not the result of some wacky Photoshopping. Jay Mark Johnson’s photos are actually incredibly precise. The reason they look like this is because he uses a slit camera that emphasizes time over space. Whatever remains still is smeared into stripes, while the motion of crashing waves, cars and a Tai Chi master’s hands are registered moment by moment, as they pass his camera by.  Like an EKG showing successive heartbeats, the width of an object corresponds not to distance or size, but the rate of movement. Viewing the left side of the picture is not looking leftward in space but backward in time.”

This is a beautiful application of technology, which more than anything reminds me of David Hockney’s Paper Pools and Polaroid paintings…analogue antecedents that suggest Hockney paints in time as well as space!