This presentation introduces "Space Syntax," a scientific approach to analyzing urban space that demonstrates how spatial layout significantly influences human behavior, economic activity, and environmental outcomes. It argues that urban space is a valuable asset that, when understood and managed through evidence-based design, can generate wealth and improve city life.
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well good afternoon everyone thank you
for coming to today's Brown Bag
presentation we are delighted to have
you here at
ncpc um just a few housekeeping matters
first of all I believe this presentation
is going to be videotaped so we just
wanted to let you uh know that but also
we will post post this presentation on
ncpc's website uh within the next few
weeks if you have other folks that would
like to see this uh I know that many of
you are planners who deal with the
public realm uh with the city's Open
Spaces Parks streets um and I think we
all have a a tremendous job ahead of us
in terms of how to design or maintain
these uh public open spaces which are
very important to the residents of this
city uh to our nation as a whole uh
because they are in fact a lot of them
are ceremonial spaces um and how do you
also adapt these spaces for uh 21st
century needs and I think those are all
important questions that uh many of us
deal with on our day-to-day lives U
through our work and through our
interest uh in cities and uh in this in
this case the city of Washington DC so
today we have a uh incredible guest uh
who's going to present to us today on um
what his work has been in terms of
public open space and the analysis of
that space and how we put um these tools
to use in terms of uh planning public
spaces and uh in our public streets we
have with us Tim Stoner who's the
managing director of the London based
company called space syntax limited it's
a strategic uh consulting company
specializing in evidence-based planning
and design so it's kind of like CSI the
TV show uh for planning um he's an
architect and town planner uh Tim
established space syntax Limited in 1996
with the aim of uh Building Bridges
between professional practice and
academic research at University College
London Tim is the director and founding
member of the Academy of urbanism and
for the last 5 years has served on the
national design review panel of the UK
Commission of architecture and the built
environment between 1996 and 2001 Tim
led the team that advised architect
Norman Foster on the redesign of a
troger square in London transforming the
Square from a card dominated uh
environment to a public Focus Place uh
this project set a new standard for
public space design in the UK that space
inex had helped maintain in projects
including the Regeneration of ninghan
Old Market Square in newcastle's Hay
Market uh in recent years he's also
participated in a number of other
projects including work for the city of
jedah and Saudi Arabia and also in
Beijing CBD over the past year uh Tim
was awarded a l fellowship at Harvard's
Graduate School of Design and he also
was appointed a fellow at at the Lincoln
Institute of land policy in Cambridge so
we are very pleased today uh to have Tim
join us and uh I'd like you to join me
and welcome him to [Applause]
ncpc well thank you Marcel and good
afternoon everyone uh it's a pleasure to
be here and uh an honor uh this is only
my second visit to the capital I was
here with my family a couple of months
ago and did didn't make it much out of
the uh Air and Space Museum so it's nice
to see a few streets and public spaces
uh on this opportunity um if we could
have the first slide up please uh the
uh the aim of my talk today is to share
with you um some experience that Marcel
described in his
introduction uh which comes from its
origins in London uh but
uh is
increasingly uh a worldwide application
and this is uh an approach to the
planning and design of places known as space
space
syntax and space
syntax um measures the efficiency of
spatial layouts which gives me the title
for my talk today
um when it does that it's addressing
some of the key outcome factors that we
are aiming to achieve uh in in our
actions which are social and economic and
and
environmental um and although much of
our work may be about discussions of of
design and materials and historical
Evolution um for me ultimately the
practice of planning and and design uh
is about its impacts its outcomes uh and
how the social and the economic
and the
environmental um are created now I was
trained as an architect I'll I'll admit
that and you can judge me for it uh but
I have also qualified as a town planner
and when I do we have any Architects
here today okay I will I will be
appropriately respectful um because I'm
sure you're not like the rest of them um
when when I when I did my training I'm
joking of course um when I did my
training uh very little of it was about
people very little of it was about the
outcome it was mostly um architecture to
get things built and then look lovingly
at them and ideally take photographs and
have them published so that others can
love look lovingly at them um and that's
something which which disappointed me
and led me in the direction of space
syntax because when I came across Bill
hiler the professor at University
College London who had uh create ated
this new approach this scientific
approach to architecture um he he was
speaking about its social and economic
impacts and more recently its
environmental impacts and that really
excited me so let's see if I can excite
lunchtime and there we go so um what I
want to do is take you through a
discussion of
space and address this question
Urban space so what and uh from
there argue that Urban space is more
than just invisible fluffy stuff that
Urban designers like to color in Black
uh by way of highlighting it and saying
it uh it's more important than the
buildings I want to talk about Urban
space as being a hard noosed currency uh
something which is an asset to the city
that deserves to be invested in and
managed because it is a generator of
wealth and to do that I will show you a
little bit of
science um a few case studies and I want
to end with some speculations which I've
not made either in public or private
before but they were just something that
that came to me as I was putting this
um space syntax is all about modeling
cities and uh showing how the spatial
layout exerts powerful influences on
human behavior how the connectivity of
places in itself influences human
behavior and that means uh behavior in
terms of movement how we flow through
the city but it's more than movement
it's how we come across other people and
interact with
them uh how we're aware of them in space
and ultimately how we
transact how we
transact and do the essential thing that
cities are here to do which is to create
social and economic relations that's why
we are in cities I would argue it's to
transact and and cities are transaction
engines some do it better than
others and uh if they don't do it well
then they're missing out on a huge
amount of value if the connection is
poor the value is being
lost um so what can space do well as
well as organizing movement um I want to
show you how space distributes land use
naturally and I know planners distribute
land use but space is our guide to doing so
so
um space influences crime and safety uh
some of the people who understand space
best are the
criminals uh they make it their business
to exploit the
mistakes that are made when we design
space and leave it available to uh to
Crime uh space affects the urban carbon
footprint and um ultimately it space
determines land value and land value is
what property Developers and home buyers
are concerned about when they make their
their decisions it's the bottom
line um but it's not just me standing at
a Podium saying this um where what the
reason that I can I can say this so so
strongly um is as a result of a program
of research which as I said earlier
began at University College London about
40 years ago and uh has investigated
methodically scientifically
uh the sorts of relationships I've just
described and the way we organize
ourselves um is between the space intax
laboratory at University College London
at the top there and a company called
space intax limited uh which is at the
bottom there and space syntax limited
provides consultancy using the
technology that comes out of the
research team in return space syntax
limited identifies problems questions
that are then taken back to the
researchers for
investigation and the company in the
laboratory uh exists about four blocks
apart in London and there's a continuous
flow of people and technology and that
creates Innovation between the two uh
this diagram has
been uh replicated throughout the world
there's um there's over 200 universities
globally using space intax in their
research uh several thousands of
researchers and and we we're organized
well now here's here's the here's the
only challenging bit of mathematics of
the presentation so sit up straight and concentrate
concentrate
um to understand space scientifically
we've learned that um it's best to keep
things simple so actually it's not going
to be that that challenging um take a
very simple pair of rooms in a building
room A and B and create two versions of
a layout in which on the left uh A and B
each have a doorway to the outside let's
call the outside
C and you can see there's a ring of
circulation that you could walk if those
doorways were open there's the Ring of
circulation drawn in a slightly
different way it's a mathematical graph
any graph mathematicians in the
room few because I I know really really
basic graph mathematics and that means
there I hope not going to be very
difficult graph mathematics questions
please ask other questions but um by
contrast on the right B doesn't have the
door and has to go through a to get to
the outside which we called C so look at
the graph B goes through a to get to
C what do the numbers mean well the
numbers represent a really important
property called depth graph depth what
they say is if you take B on the right
it has a value of three against it and
what that means is the world is three
steps away from
B uh space a is one step away space c is
two steps away so space from there from
B A is one away C is 2 away 1 + 2 = 3
whereas from space a b is 1 away C is
one step away so the world from a is at
a depth of
two and like wise for C the world is
three steps away from
C in the layout on the left which is has
this equivalence the world is two steps
away from all of those spaces because
each space is one step away from each of the
the
others um is everybody with me here
here
um I won't ask if anybody isn't because
if you aren't you'd have told me
um let's just go a little a little bit
more complicated and perhaps a little
bit more realistic uh in this case we've
got the same spatial
layout uh on the left and on the right
is the spatial layout as seen from two
different spaces so on the left we're
we're looking at the world from this
room here where it has four rooms which
are one step away because they've got
doorways that connect directly to it
there's a couple of three spaces that
are two steps away you have to go
through rooms to get to them from the
gray space and there's a couple of rooms
that are three steps
away whereas on the right um You have to
go through that room to get to any other
rooms from this
space and at the bottom are the graphs
the mathematical graphs that say all of
that in graph mathematics terms and the
reason I I want to suggest this is
useful is that when you measure the
total depth from the space on the left
it's 16 and the total depth from the
space on the right is 30 in other words
the world is different from different
rooms in the same
building uh imagine having a party in
this building
um that is the kind of space that people
might keep coming back into as they
circulate around the house party uh
perhaps that's where they all end up
sitting by the end of the evening
because uh that's the natural Gathering
Point um this is the most cutof space
who knows what might happen there in a
party um but it's the place where just
least likely to have um circulation in
it if all the beer is there then maybe
that's where they end up at the end of
the party you can start to pull through
land use attraction the effect of
configuration but I'll come on to that
in a bit um a really uh helpful way
we've found of representing this graph
of math mathematics is to use color and
to represent those numbers by colors
where using a heat scale uh where the
red rooms are the ones that are closest
to the rest of the system and the blue
rooms are the ones where the system is
furthest away red orange yellow green
blue a rainbow scale we can represent
spacial depth through a
color and what we have here is a pattern
of spatial accessibility for this particular
particular
layout now so what well I've indicated
with my party analogy that perhaps
there's something in this um well let me
show you a real instance
of um a real building
which is the Tate Gallery of Art in uh
London it's our uh uh it houses many
important works of art on the right
sorry on the left let's go left first on
the left is an interesting analysis that
we did where the main entrance to this
Gallery is here and we followed a 100
people walking into the gallery for 10
minutes and their traces are in yellow
and we followed them by doing probably
what what you would imagine we just
walked slowly behind them at a discrete
distance um and tracked where they were
going and converted that into a composite
composite
image on the
right is a computer
analysis that has none of that
information fed into it no information
about where people are flowing instead
it's doing graph mathematics on the
layout it's taking each room breaking it
into little tiles of space if you can
see it's pixelated each of those bits of
spaces about 2 or 3T by 2 or 3 ft and
the computer is analyzing each tile in
the same way it analyzed the rooms in
the previous analysis and it's saying
how many tiles do I connect to how many
can I see at step one and then how many
do they connect to and how many do they
connect to and measuring the graph depth
and representing it as a color and
what's remarkable I hope you can now see
by comparing one with the other is that
the computer analysis on the right almost
almost
exactly uh mirrors predicts the passage
of people on the left now we have found
this to be an absolutely consistent
result in buildings and cities
worldwide that when people are flowing
freely it's different it's not the same
as going down to a train through a
railway station where your movement is
directed by signage um but where you're
freely flowing as you are generally in a
City or in a building like a gallery or
a shopping
center then space
will guide govern influence about 70 to
80% of the movement that occurs in there
it's not the paintings it's the space in
fact some of the most famous paintings
in this building are not being seen
because they're spatially relatively
segregated over in this Wing
architectural mistake uh to have put
them there there because people simply
aren't seeing the nation's
Treasures so okay let's get outside and
do the same thing to that nice figure
ground image that we had of it's Munich
actually Munich in Germany in case you
wondered let's break the pattern of
Munich into a set of spaces long linear
spaces in fact these are the lines of
sight that pass through all the public
space of central
Munich so we've we've done this by uh
putting a ruler on a map or
computer screen and drawing the longest
and fewest spaces that pass through all
the public space of the city and some of
them are more connected some are less
connected when you analyze their graph
some are more accessible and some are
less accessible so this is again the
same analysis graph mathematics
measuring the depth of each space
relative to all the
others and what we can pick out is the
natural spatial hierarchy of the city so
what well when you observe pedestrian
movement and when you observe vehicle
movement and then when you correlate
pedestrian and vehicle movement
pedestrian at the top vehicle at the
bottom with the spatial accessibility
pattern there's a remarkable
correlation it's not perfect if it were
perfect all those red dots which are
streets where we've been able to observe
flow and measure spatial accessibility
they would all line up on in a straight
line but there's a there's a general I'm
sorry there's a general
Trend and this magic number here says
60% of The Pedestrian movement pattern
is explained by differences in the
spatial accessibility pattern for
pedestrians for vehicles 70% of the
vehicle flow in this city is explained
by spatial accessibility this city here
is London um despite all of London's
traffic engineering people are reading
the grid spatially uh this is a very
simple very quick traffic model with one
variable and if there are any traffic
modelers in here that can get a 70%
correlation with a one variable traffic
model you'll know just how uh valuable
that is so movement is the life blood of
the city and if you can explain it you
can start to plan and design it um
because all of the value that's being
generated in cities um much of it is
coming from the passage of people pass C
shops into shops doing deals I mean I
love this Photograph because there's so
much going on there that's about
trade and uh okay second key Discovery
land use that pattern of spatial
accessibility if I flick London's land
use pattern uh retail in red against
spatial accessibility in red then what
this slide is saying is 80% of London's
retail is located on the 20% most accessible
accessible
streets how has that happened well the
retailers haven't done a space syntax
analysis um I wish they all would but
they haven't uh historically the grid of
the city has organized the flow of
people the retailers have identified the
hotspots and gone to them uh some of
them have speculated like Selfridge on
Oxford Street who was the first major
developer of selfes uh department store
on Oxford Street but he was picking up
on the fact that Oxford Street was becoming
becoming
as London evolved the single most
important spatial Connection in the city
it didn't used to be but the space of
the city was being transformed
historically and the retail went with
it um we find exactly the same
relationship between land use and space
in recent cities that have grown up
without the intervention of planners um
I realize I'm sort of in the Lion's Den
here um we find it much less in planned
cities that haven't had time to
historically evolve I'm not thinking of
this one by the way before anybody goes
there this is a slum this is a slum in
jeda Saudi Arabia there's a almost
direct correspondence between the retail
in red on the left and the spatial
access pattern on the right the Traders
know how to read space to locate their
shops and in cities that have been
planned but had time to evolve
historically like Brazilia is a great
example uh shopkeepers in Brazilia
knocked out the back of their shops to
trade from when they realized that's
where the pedestrians were they weren't
on the streets in front of the shops
where the plan had put them had put the
shop fronts um because the planning had
got The Pedestrian movement pattern
wrong people speak with their feet and
the shopkeepers knocked out as I
mentioned earlier criminals exploit
space uh this is an analysis of house
break-ins in Australia and um it's a
it's a long and involved and actually
very complicated aspect of of our work
but there are very direct correlations
between spatial
accessibility uh the orientation of
buildings the degree to which houses can
see other houses from their front doors
and the pattern of crime consistently
not just in Australia not just in the UK
but in the other places where we've
looked at this and so we um work with
authorities to try and prevent that
um and my penultimate key Discovery uh
space organizes the carbon footprint of
the city I mean take this kind of very typical
typical
Suburban uh layout it's not just
American it's all over the world uh uh
makes it incredibly inefficient in terms
of movement you have to drive everywhere
or you have to walk very long distances
uh chances are you drive so um we're
trying to prevent this in in our work
and retrofit it where it happens but
finally the really really important one
is to connect all of this to money uh
which is what this slide's saying and
again times against us but um over the
last few years in London we've been
participating in a study working with
Property Consultants local authorities
to look at house value uh the quality of
Street the the total income of town
centers in London total retail income
and finding and crime patterns and
finding consistent correlations between
where people are spending the money how
much they're spending how much houses
are being bought and sold for where the
crimes occurring and this layout of
space uh space is is this fundamental
piece of infrastructure in the city it
costs a lot of money to provide a new
spatial connection and it will have a
functional impact the key thing for
planners is to make sure that when we
provide this new infrastructure we get
the right
impact um unfortunately we've got too
much of the wrong impact on the right
this form of Highway fast Street on the
right this is again jeda Saudi Arabia
pervades the urban record globally it's
one of the most unfortunate exports of
the uh
UK um and US transport planning
professions uh it's divided our cities
it's severed communities and it's
diminished Real Estate Value so however
you want to look at it it's bad news for
cities um I've been pretty shocked in my
time here in the state seeing degree to
which cities have been SE severed by
highways um I hadn't quite realized that
it's been very sobering um but I've seen
it in other places and it's still
happening it's still the default of um
of the professional
um uh Global Consulting companies it's a
world away from the shaniz on the left
where you have high traffic flow High
pedestrian flow uh pretty decent
landscape value uh great real estate
value and great cultural value and those
are the sorts of streets that I think
are are more in the future of cities
than the ones on the right which are
really about uh the the death of the
city um let me turn to some projects and
show you how we take these principles
this learning This research the science
and act in practice at a whole series of
different scales to intervene with the
city because um about the only thing I
think that you can guarantee in cities
is that they change cities are
continuously changing they're never
sealed um however historic however and
I'll show you travala square first off
the The most significant historic space
in the United Kingdom and I want to go
through the scale from public spaces
through Bridges uh to look at Urban grid
blocks and areas up to the scale of the
entire city and treat each one as a as a
intervention um before you do that it's worth
worth
recognizing uh that every city has its
own unique spatial
signature uh its own unique spatial DNA
this is the look before you leap moment
that all of those principles I've laid
out have to be taken um according to the
flavor of each City you've got to you
got to take the Pulse of each City
analytically before you before you act
uh right at the end I'm going to show an
image of of Washington DC highly
speculative but um just so you know it's
coming I'll just mention that now
um here's London uh uh quick definition
of London uh great
radials um I'll say no more but London
you've got great great radials uh Legacy
of the Roman uh uh engineering program
connecting the capital to uh the empire
in each Direction Roman
Empire and pervading London's becoming
London's High streets
today uh Beijing you've got great
orbitals great
ring circulation uh weak radials strong
orbitals London strong radials weak
orbitals Tokyo strong radials strong
orbitals um so what well London is
really concentrated in its economic
activity on the center the West End and
the city of London that's where all the
principal productive economic energy of
the city is um Tokyo and and those
radials really make it hard for anywhere
but the center to be important
relatively Tokyo has strong radials but
it keeps looping the radials together
with orbitals and that distributes the
heat of the city in a completely
different way and if anybody here knows
Tokyo Tokyo is a poly focal City it has
many important centers not just one and
a different sort of social economic
uh uh profile as a
result and somewhere like s Paulo well I
I don't have a a glib def for it in
terms of um radials and orbitals not
least because it's growing so quickly
and what's what the center one decade
may not be the big Center the next
decade because the city has moved and
this is a real challenge in developing
cities uh worldwide for the real estate
Community to anticipate where's going to
be the next hotspot and these sorts of
models are being used as I'll show you
in jeda in a moment to do exactly that
um we can have fun with space um we can
we can speculate before we commit we can
sketch in space and say well let's just
take this former Railway yard site in
central London uh which is now uh mostly
redundant and leaving a big empty hole
in the fabric of the city and say well
what if what if we added a grid in
where's the heat of the city going to be
or where's the heat of that development
going to be where should we put the
shops are they going be some quiet
streets because we want somewhere the
kids can play um is there going to be
enough heat that we can put all the land
use in that's going to create the
development value that we need to get
the return on our
investment well let's test it um oh no
uh actually uh this development has no
heat why because although it's an
efficient grid locally it's not creating
connectivity globally it doesn't have
Edge to Center connections that will
bring people to and through it it won't
bring the essential passing trade that
makes centers work in
cities so let's go back to the drawing
board before we build it and try another
one and grow a design by teasing
together the lines of movement that go
towards the site and I'm thinking
pedestrian cycling vehicle movement I'm
thinking all modes when I say this um
let's try it wow that's different that's
a lot of heat that's maybe too much heat
um that's competing with other
established Centers do we want that
maybe we do maybe we don't but let's
have a planning discussion according to
the nature of the brief that we've set
for ourselves and if this is too much
let's go back a little bit let's break
up those connections let's dislocate the
grid a little bit lose one or two of
them or move them around that's design
that's Urban Design that's the point
where you can have a intelligent
conversation with the design team and
say we want you to move this a little
bit because of x y and Zed functional
outcomes and this is what we did at
travala Square in London um as Marcel
mentioned this was a competition that um
Was Won by Norman Foster and we assisted
and trala square um is is the principal
public space in London and therefore in
the United Kingdom or let's let's leave
it at England and um uh before it was
redesigned it looked like this um
although you and me originally as
tourists may have wandered around draaga
Square the reality was in 1996
most of that square was empty most of
the time um the National Gallery of Art
is in the background the square is in
the foreground there's a three there's
probably about a four uh
12T grade separation between uh the
upper and lower parts that's really
important because if you know trafala
Square now there's a huge staircase here
which is the punch line of this
presentation I want to show you why that
staircase was put there um at the
competition stage this was the really
key trigger to the design it was the
main piece of our
presentation uh it was an analysis of
how people were using the square before
and we were the only team to have done
this to have taken the care to study how
the place was working before we leapt in
and proposed changing it and we followed
300 people wearing business suits
because there were no suits in traga
square there were no londoners and there
was a perception among the client that
this was was wrong really good
perception the client was the national
and the uh local governance as well as
lots of key stakeholders this a really
tough place to you know move anything an
inch uh everybody's looking at it and we
also looked at pedestrians crossing the
road not using The Pedestrian Crossings
those are the green lines uh we looked
at them all getting onto this traffic
Island and not all getting off
and and speculated where did they end up
well many of them turn around um and
what we found was they were doing that
as tourists to get their MacBooks out
and their cameras out and photographed
down the radial connections that
uniquely intersect at that part of the
square wow we hadn't noticed that that
was something new that the brief hadn't
set out and so we proposed that we we
might do something with that perhaps we
should pedestrianized this bit as well
as the brief had set out pedestrianized
that part take the traffic out of the
gyratory that was one way in the Square
at the time we said well maybe but we
definitely think we should do something
about that and that was a provocation
back to the client that I think got the
client interested in us as a team and we
found two of those suits walk the square
and that really helped to define the
problem um when we built a computer
model of the
square uh spatial graph computer model
no input of The Pedestrian movement but
a really close proxy to those observed
patterns we were able to diagnose that
what the London suits are doing is find
the simplest the path of least
resistance around the edge of the square
the spatial track of least of least
depth uh around the square by contrast
these the the staircases that were there
in the corner of the square were
convoluted you had to dog leg your way
to go down them and that gave us a
design uh provocation it said let's
change those staircases and we we
proposed making diagonal staircases here
and the historic preservation people
said absolutely no way said okay um well
what about a new staircase and That Was
Then the the proposal to say well let's
go away from the situation on the left
let's create the situation on the right
draw people down a new staircase through
the middle of the square and create this
crisscross through the heart of the
square that would bring people in we
modeled that and demonstrated all that
the early design pre-planning stage uh
the benefits of doing so we worked with
the computer graphics people to put the
right number of kids with balloons into
the image based on The Pedestrian
forecasts that we that we' done and uh
and the other thing that you could just
maybe pick out there is we said we think
people are going to sit on these steps
because they'll be a natural Gathering
Place and then planning took an awful
long time this is grade one listed
highest level of historic preservation
of um of any site um so should take a
long time get it right and then we
opened on day one it looked like this
and thank goodness it was working people
were coming down the stairs uh no kids
with balloons sorry um but people
sitting people flowing on day one week
one month one and ever since and this
has been a great result in terms of
making a very significant multi-million
pound uh change to public space and and
actually it working which is not always
what happens and those spaces have
become those stairs have become a
natural Gathering point uh four people
and there are 13 times the number of
londoners using Trafalga Square as there
were before because we did the metrics
we counted before and we counted after
and that that was a the authorities that
commissioned this were then able to
justify their Investments and their
investment planning decisions against
that which then gave them leverage for
future decisions so this process is one
of observing explaining forecasting and
delivering um I'll make this
presentation available I'm conscious of
time so I'm going to keep cycling
through um and you can go back to it at
your at your leisure that's the mayor of
London this is a different project um he
was smiling because the local community
had voted 80% in favor of a fairly
radical um change to its local area um
and that change had come about through
the same sort of process of observing
and explaining I think I've got some
slides of it in a moment and building a
design on the basis of of of science um
this is the bridge that W if you if
anybody knows the Millennium bridge in
London famously wobbled um I'm very
pleased to say we put the wobble in the
bridge uh This was um only going to
happen if it was used by pedestrians it
was the volume of use which created the
oscillations um and we were able to
identify this location as being optimal
for a bridge before Norman Foster won
the competition uh to build it we we
were not working with Foster we were
working with the new take gallery that
was really concerned that this new
bridge would not work and um they
commissioned us and we found actually
yes it's a superb location it was
glowing orange on the map and we were
able by looking at other Bridges uh in
this process to to take to do
observations at all of the London
bridges in the Central Area found this
embarrassingly good correlation between
their spatial accessibility and their
levels of pedestrian use when the
numbers are that high it's a bit
embarrassing because you want them to be
slightly lower otherwise it looks like a
fix it wasn't people are reading space
as they cross Bridges in London and then
we said well let's measure the new
location uh came out with a level of 5.5
let's put it onto the regression line
and project its pedestrian movement flow
and if you go from 1,400 people per hour
at lunchtime up to annual you get
something like 4.4 million people so we
were able to say we think this bridge is
going to deliver at least 4.4 million
people um that was surprising people
thought 1 million people would use the
Bridge a year I don't know where they
got that number from but they said a
million in fact uh between 7 and 8
million people a year are now using that
bridge um at least 4.4 was our advice
building a great Art Gallery at one end
creates addition additional movement but
any development 4.4 million would be uh
the figure and um again a great result
different kind of bridge which I've put
in um just at the last minute because
I've been looking for pedestrian
Crossings in this city and not always
finding them where I wanted them to be
so I've done a lot of jaywalking and I
have I been illegal in DC is it illegal to
to
jwalk technically okay well I was with
lots of other people I was with lots of other
other
jaywalkers um and
um pedestrian Bridges at surface level
across roads is a big part of the the
work that we're doing and trying to find
beauty in the humble pedestrian Crossing
trying to make them object of landscape
design this is a perfect equilateral
triangle but that just happen to come
out as being the ideal um pedestrian
Crossings for this particular location
and trying to give them as much love as
um other bits of landscape design that
are often given more this actually sits
within this larger master plan as I go
up a scale um a a new system of streets
and spaces that the mayor was smiling
about earlier uh which had been built on
the basis of our analysis but also I
want to make sure everybody
appreciates speculative sketching uh the
intuition the emotion The Poetry the
subjective all of the other bits of the
design and planning process which are
non-scientific there's room for both uh
you work between a Sketchbook and a
laptop in my experience um for what it's
worth this is my sketch so I like to
work like this and I like to work with
all the colored lines as well and craft
the solution uh between the two check
out the sketch you begin to Intuit it
when you've done it for as long as I
have and then commissioned the the fancy
graphics on the basis of um what is
coming out of the initial con uh spatial
analysis ending up with some really
hard-nosed pedestrian flow forecasts
that we then sat down with the
commercial operators the retail
operators and said are these are the
sorts of pedestrian flows that you need
to let a shop in this location so that
we had both a uh an environmental as
well as a commercial strategy for the
development um I think this is my last
project before I I get to DC which is um
jeda looking at the whole of a city this
is a commission from the mayor of the
city uh to fix the sprawl the Decay and
the pollution of the city of jeda the
Gateway City to the two holy cities of
Mecca in the East and Medina in the
north jeda incredibly important Gateway
City uh for trade and and for
pilgrimage and um very long story short
um the plan is based on slowing down
those Urban motorways I showed at the
beginning to create boulevards uh we
were concerned about Pro proposing a
western idiom uh but it was welcomed uh
as being uh in keeping with the historic
character of the city uh we found by
working with the historic analysis that
the sus of the city were linear like
high streets and that the growth of the
Suk into the High Street Boulevard was
it was a natural thing to be proposing
that was working with uh um local
experts as well um this is a piece of
landscape urbanism if you want to call
it that which I normally wouldn't
because there's a great Green Park
through the middle of this and um it's
all based on reconnecting and slowing
down a city that had become severed and
underneath all of these connections is
the hard infrastructure of sewage and
freshwater uh delivery which is going in
at the same time as the greenery above
um taking the city from where it is on
the left not taking the city in the
direction that the former local plan
would have taken it which is great
tracts of blue segregated development to
the North and South you may be aware
it's still uncommon for women to drive
in jeda um it's um it's generally not
tolerated apparently it's legal but not
tolerated for women to drive so imagine
living in a specially segregated piece
of the city fragmented from the rest of
your Society community and economy um
we're trying to avoid that by creating
conditions where first of all the city
connects globally but it also as it is
on the right that heat is if you like
the healthy movement the slow speed
movement um but it also connected The
Pedestrian scale and absolutely critical
to everything I've been talking about in
terms of spatial and water
infrastructure is the green
infrastructure to create the canopy of
trees to create the shade to lower the
street temperature to create a lar
larger walking opportunity during the
year and um although we hadn't expected
it this image here was very provocative
um because a lot of the uh people that
we showed it
to um wondered if it was a historic
image um or or we recreated it from a
historic image and uh we said No it's
it's a Google Google SketchUp based on
the master plan and we just blurred it a
bit to give it a bit of character um
that's interesting they said because um
I remember when Jedi used to look like
this my grandfather we had so many
stories of my grandfather took me around
the m market and I held his hand and we
and it was a generational thing that um
probably in 10 or 20 years time people
would not be able to remember so um I
think the time frame for many of these
interventions is very short in very in
many historic cities that have been
ruined by Transportation insensitive
Transportation because uh often what's
needed as a trigger a memory of
familiarity of an alternative and and
when kids have been growing their whole
lives living in cars without the
alternative it's very hard for them then
to make decisions for the alternative
it's a huge
risk um okay to finish I I I put this
together and make of it what you will um
uh it's an idea which is
that uh on reflection most of the briefs
that I'm given by my clients are about
increasing the spatial layout efficiency
of their of their domains whether it's a
public space or the whole of a city and
um so I've put a graph together where
spatial layout efficiency is on the
horizontal axis low medium
high and the age of the settlement in
years is on a probably an exponential
scale one year 100 years or a thousand
years um which city is only a year old
well actually there's lots of slums that
are just over a couple of years old
there's lots of refugee camps which are
less than a year old so there's room
down there which I'll try and fill later on
on
uh and just a thought that if you take a
city like
London um and perhaps we can think about
Washington as well in a moment um I
think cities move oscillate in terms of
their spatial efficiency according to
their growth their history and it's
always this dilemma between the city
growing industrially as London did so
take London in the 16th century um it
had a very tight compact grid I've given
it high spatial efficiency this isn't
BAS B on any rigorous research it's
based on me sitting down for a couple of
hours last night okay so everything I
said earlier about rigorous academic
forget for this bit pardon and forgive
me um the industrial overcrowding um as
London became industrial industrialized
created great social and economic
problems the Jos the slums of London
that were then cleared out and replaced
by development especially public
transportation to improve the spatial
efficiency by adding public transport
that made the glob added a global
connectivity to the local then after the
second world war London spatial
efficiency was reduced by the massive
growth and massive failure of its public
housing program most public housing
built in London after the second world
war failed um it's a story which is not
particularly Well published but the fact
that those housing Estates have been
systematically demolished and replaced
and continue to do so and sometimes more
than once uh it shows just what a
problem we we have had in the past
creating public housing and in recent
years as as London's got older uh the
growth of public space projects like
trala square and the cycling uh system
which I'm sure you're familiar with uh
London's cycle uh Boris bikes I think
they're called I've been away in the
last year since it's really opened but
when I have gone back it's phenomenal
how many people are now cycling in
London that they already were in large
numbers but they're now in much larger
numbers um so cities are always trying
to get over to the right as they go up
to the top as they get
older um where would we place the world
cities right now um let me start with
slums I I I know there are different
kinds of slums some have very high
spatial efficiency and should not be
demolished because they're just
wonderful they just need to be improved
in terms of their built Fabric and
sometimes connected to the outside in
slum condition too some of them are
worthy of Demolition and replacement but
to categorize a slum as um uh should
only be demolished is is wrong and a lot
of our work is about getting our clients
to recognize that the United Kingdom
built a lot of new towns between one and
100 years ago um all almost all but one
uh operate below the national average of
economic performance massive failure of
town planning post second world war
again not popularly discussed uh where
would you put Detroit Sydney Washington
on this scale I'm not just trying to be
nice to you I genuinely believe this
this city on a global scale is acting at
the top end of the game and although you
were all trying to push it further um
this is a hugely impressive City I'm
very pleased to say um tell me I'm wrong
because I don't know all the details you
do but my impression is pretty good uh
there's geda that's it's a city that's
um well over a thousand years old um but
it's really been pushed back and its
graph would have shown it going like
that rather than London sort of
oscillating around because early mid
20th century traffic engineering kicked
in and it just went straight down the
scale um that's Bucharest the influence
of communist planning uh severing the
city Bucharest is moving probably uh in
this direction as it's reorganizing it's
public transport and pedestrian movement
Beijing Paris London I'm speculating
again um I think that's it I'd love to
take some questions and hopefully I've
provoked some thoughts on on your behalf
um oh yes uh where's The Pedestrian
Crossing um because there's obviously a
demand for it um I I'm really sorry I'm
just getting to the to the punch lines
here um here's this wonderful City and
um this is a friend of mine who wrote
his PhD thesis about 15 years ago and I
found this in the archive it's a spatial
analysis of of the capital and um I know
from all the work of all the students
I've ever taught that it's full of
mistakes um and Mark would admit that
himself but um I'll leave it up there
perhaps during the discussion because
I'm very open to uh any thoughts you
have as to whether this is telling any
kind of story about the city but um
please let's let's have some general
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