Better Design - Better Places PDF (517KB)
Word of the week comes from The Dictionary of Urbanism, courtesy of Rob Cowan.
Naked Street: One without (or with minimal) signs and road markings. Advocates for naked streets argue that they tend to make places safer by encouraging street users to keep a careful eye on other users. This radical idea provoked from the Sun a rare editorial on highway engineering. ‘Have you ever, in your whole life, heard of anything more stupid?’ the Sun asked. ‘Apparently the idea was conceived in Holland, where everyone is on drugs and drives slowly anyway.’
Artist Spencer Tunick has been documenting the live nude figure in public, with photography and video, since 1992. Since 1994 he has organized over 75 temporary site-specific installations in the United States and abroad. Tunick's installations encompass dozens, hundreds or thousands of volunteers; and his photographs are records of these events.
Legibility: The quality of a place being welcoming, understood easily by its users, easy for visitors to orient themselves in, and presenting a clear image to the wider world.
Legible London is a scheme to provide better information throughout the capital for people who want to walk. A study conducted two years ago drew attention to the ineffectiveness of the present multitude of pedestrian sign systems in central London, and the consequent over-reliance on the tube map to help people navigate above ground.
Home Zone: A small, highly traffic-calmed, residential area, often with road and pavement integrated into a single surface, where pedestrians and cyclists have priority over cars.
In 2005 the UK's largest new-build Home Zone was completed, supported by the Department of Transport’s first experimental homezone scheme. The Staiths South Bank development is the outcome of a mainstream housing developer’s response to designer Wayne Hemingway’s provocative criticism of the ‘Wimpeyfication’ of Britain by volume housebuilders.
Design and Build: An arrangement whereby a single contractor designs and builds a development, rather than a contractor building it to the design of an independent architect. Design and build generally produces buildings that are relatively cheap and easy to build, using the methods with which the builder is most familiar. Standards of design are often low.
2007 Turner Prize nominee Nathan Coley is known for his low tech representations of buildings, including 'The Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship, Edinburgh 2004', in which Coley created four foot high cardboard versions of all the places of worship listed in the Edinburgh and region Yellow Pages.
Environmental Determinism: The belief that the environment influences behaviour, and hence that undesirable behaviour can be prevented by changing the environment.
In 2007, LA based artist Fritz Haeg was commissioned to transform an unloved triangle of communal garden in Southwark into an Edible Estate as part of Tate Modern's Global Cities exhibition. Haeg's primary concern is ‘People and their relationship to each other and to their environment'. Carole Wright, who manages the Edible Estate for Bankside Open Spaces Trust says, 'People who have not spoken for five years are suddenly chatting again, discussing what they've grown'.
Electrosmog: Unwanted electromagnetic emissions from structures such as overhead electricity cables and mobile phone masts. The extent to which such pollution is a danger to health is a matter of controversy.
In 2004, Richard Box, artist-in-residence at Bristol University’s physics department installed 1301 fluorescent tubes underneath power lines in a field near the M4 motorway. Each evening the bulbs picked up the waste emissions from the power cables and flickered into life across the hillside.
Download document (1.06MB)October 2008
Northern Architecture has published a major document that presents a 10-point action plan on sustainability in the North East; the plan is the collective view of a substantial cross-section of people in the North East as their response to the major challenges of creating sustainable developments in the region.
The views were gathered at an event held at Newcastle College in March 2008. This event was the culmination of a series of five events held between November 2007 and March 2008 under the title ‘Designing for Life’ at which a range of professionals, experts and members of the public gave their response to the frightening fact that 50% of all the UK’s carbon emissions are produced by the built environment, and that the industry creates a third of all waste. These events were held in Newcastle, Durham, Sunderland and Middlesbrough and were attended by over 400 people.
The final event presented the key issues to come out of the preceding events, which had focused on the challenges of sustainability in relation to the four themes of communities, cities, buildings and resources. This new document presents ten key messages that were seen as key action points by the 65 people who attended the final event. It discusses these in the context of regional, national and global priorities, and of the key contributions made by speakers and delegates in the series as a whole.
Both documents were prepared by Northern Architecture with the substantial assistance of Victoria Eynon.
DOWNLOAD PDF (250kb)Building on the 63 local areas that are already receiving funding, a further 89 local authorities will receive play capital and revenue funding of at least £1million from April 2009. Of these, 10 new Pathfinders will receive on average £2.5million, with which to create and improve play sites and also build a new state of the art staffed adventure playground.
The strategy follows consultation with over 9,000 children and young people as well as parents, stakeholders and local professionals, all of whom asked for better play opportunities resulting in the following five key areas for Government action:
Download the National Play StrategyBridging the Gap is a regeneration awareness programme for schools, which aims to give children and young people an exciting and creative introduction to architecture and show their teachers how they can use the local built environment across the whole curriculum.
Over 1400 Newham pupils took part in the pilot phase of this programme which is ready to roll out across the rest of the borough's schools.
The published report of the pilot programme, which was funded by Newham's 2012 Unit, is available to download here (PDF).
