Figure-ground: history and practice of a planning technique

Figure-ground plans show the footprints of buildings and the pattern of unbuilt voids in urban space. Compared historically they reveal the erosion of the public realm over time and provide an analytical basis for tissue repair. The paper traces the communicative power of figure-ground technique to its roots in gestalt psychology, and follows its revival from Colin Rowe’s studio at Cornell through to controversies in post-reunification Berlin. The impact of computerisation is discussed and the paper ends with illustrations drawn from current practice in the representation of urban past, present and future

Crossrail: the slow route to London's regional express railway

The Crossrail project was inaugurated in 2010 and is due for completion in 2018, allowing regional trains to run through rail tunnels deep under London and out the other side instead of terminating their journeys at one of the city's nineteenth-century termini. The long-established S-Bahn systems of German cities and the Parisian regional express network, RER, have proved the value of regional urban express networks as infrastructures that facilitate compact, polycentric metropolitan development. London is a very late comer to the RER concept, yet the potential for joining up its radial routes was recognized more than a century ago. Many different combinations have been promoted, but none until now has left the drawing-board. The paper explores the long, unsuccessful history of cross-London rail planning, highlighting the significance of comparison with Paris, and drawing lessons for the contribution of rail to ‘save the city’

Anatomy of The Street - The Thomas Sharp lecture 2016

Seventy years from the publication of Thomas Sharp’s classic Anatomy of a Village, Michael Hebbert considers the importance attached by Sharp to the shaping of street-space through built form, whether in rural or urban settings. The lecture applies an anatomical approach to the street canyon, showing how its component elements of facade, frontage, pavement, furniture, lighting, planting, carriageway and microclimate have fared in intervening decades

Climatology for city planning in historical perspective

The paper offers a historical perspective on the application of urban climatology in city planning. Correcting the apparent misunderstanding that urban climate science is an ‘infant’ and untried discipline, its evolution since the mid twentieth century is described, with particular attention to the history of dialogue with planning and urban design. The narrative describes an initial phase of optimism in networks for international cooperation, followed by disappointment at their limited impacts upon planning practice. Several institutional factors are discussed, as well as the suggested paradox that scientific progress from place to process studies may have inhibited communication in the short term, though in the long run it was to lay the technical basis for a much wider application of climate knowledge in planning. The use of GIS-based maps is seen to offer a potentially useful means of mediation between atmospheric analysis and land use recommendations. The northern European origin of ‘Klimaatlas’ technique is explained as well as its diffusion to diverse climatic and institutional settings. The paper concludes by underlining the relevance of this history to contemporary urban response to global climate change