Runyu in her blog discusses the importance  Urban Green Spaces can have on our lives. Using Newcastle as an example she discusses the multiple different ways in which these greenspaces positively affect our lives from; stress relief, to health benefits, to education. Following on from Runyu’s blog I’d like to briefly discuss a similar topic…
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In this piece Yilan again discusses a very important topic of urban design in street furniture. Having read her blog and agreeing with all her points it lead me to think about some of the work I carried out while with Sunderland City Council regarding the decluttering of streets and creating of way-finding techniques. While…
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Within her piece Yilan discusses the success story that is Amsterdam’s world-renowned cycle network and exactly what the city planners have developed and created within legislation and policy to achieve such a well working functional system. However, having been to Amsterdam a number of times now, the first being with my undergraduate urban planning course,…
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Within Richard’s blog he brings up the very interesting topic of Autonomous Vehicles and highlights how this is going to affect the lives of people, the city designers and the city itself. Having read Richard’s blog it got me thinking of a concept being developed by a branch of German company BMW that aims to…
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In February 2018 as part of our Cities and Culture module of our Urban Design course we embarked on a trip to the one of the most design orientated cities in the world Milan, Italy. During our time there we were to, within groups of 4, regenerate a relatively small plot of land that was…
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In this blog I aim to discuss my first experience of a public co-design workshop and an exercise we put forward for the event. The overall goal for this workshop was to gather information from a group of demographically variant future residents of a co-housing scheme about their personal preferences for our own Housing Alternatives…
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  In this blog I will look at a recent regeneration project in the heart of Sunderland that promotes creativity, activity and education on the Cities rich heritage. As part of the Councils Minster Quarter Masterplan, the north-western most part of the city centre has been selected as the Music, Arts and Culture (MAC) Quarter…
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Having recently started a module on alternative housing schemes we have be looking closely at the Building For Life 12 document that assesses the effectiveness of housing schemes using a 3 tier traffic system to highlight where schemes have succeeded or not.   As part of the module we have been asked to look at…
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Being the first time, I have ever written a blog I can admit I was relatively nervous about putting my work on to the internet for anyone to see. It always baffled me how people were able to freely write about a topic over the internet with such confidence, and after writing my first strict…
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Smart technologies are becoming more a part of our lives every single day. From smart phones to smart TVs the idea is becoming the norm for influencing how we live our day to day lives. So much so that in many parts of the world we’re even trying to make our cities ‘smart’. The concept…
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