People are suffering from the heavy traffic and the air pollution, especially in big cities. During the past years, people paid more attention on building modern cities but ignore the environment problems. Nowadays, transport becomes a serious and difficult factor when designing the urban areas. The limited spaces which result from the number of cars…
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  Public spaces are crucial to our urban well-being, and are an increasingly important topic of academic research and practical policy-making. Georgiana Varna presented the star model of public space, a tool providing understanding of characteristics and qualities of publicness that make ‘public space’ public.   Public space plays an important role in sustaining the…
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  The UK as it stands is currently going through a major housing crisis especially within the capital. One outstanding reasons for this is the knock on effects caused by foreign investment in to the current housing market.   Roger Burrows a lecturer at Newcastle University and expert in the topic gave a talk on…
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Voca highlights the importance of considering dementia-friendly design, which will likely only become more prominent within our cities and neighbourhoods, given rise to an ageing population and increased urbanisation (Fitzgerald & Caro, 2014). Voca questions what could we do to improve the life quality for those suffering with dementia. I would like to further explore…
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Urban design principally focuses on people. Therefore, we look after the mental, physical and social well-being of individuals. The physical environment looks at both, the space and place quality. These in turn, impact our social behaviour and interaction with others (Barton et al, 2010). Inspired by ‘Urban Design Health, Wellbeing, Flourishing’ by Timothy Townshend. I…
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Sustainability has become one of the significant factors in urban planning. It can be said the same thing in Tokyo as well and city government has tried to make city greenery. However, there are already lots of buildings lined up and no space for green in the city center. Originally Ebenezer Howard states the idea…
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Olga’s post has brought into discussion one of the issues of contemporary urbanism that has had more relevance in recent years. In her post, she highlighted some of the most important features about the Urban Villages, which have been popular developments in the UK since the second part of the last century. This movement have…
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Hello, Tom. Your blog entry touches interesting and certainly one of the most important topics in urban design. Yes, unfortunately, our cities are built for and around cars. Human scale was completely neglected in the urban design in the 20th century. And now we have what we have-physical and social fragmentation of cities, isolation and separation…
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As we all know, China has the largest population in the world. And because of the development of economy, the demand of urban space is growing quickly. More and more people want to move to urban areas. Figure1: China’s urbanization 1949-2013 Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China (2014) The rapid urban population growth in…
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What is the difference between an immaculate, well thought out master plan and a real, successful, working bit of Urban Design? Well as Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential Campaign once put it: “The economy, stupid” or rather, as outlined in the lecture we received from economics consultant Aiden Oswell, an effective economic strategy. In this blog I…
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