Design practice, town-builder, think tank. Master-planning, design codes, research, co-creating popular, beautiful, durable Gentle Density. @CreateStreetsFN
London
Joined December 2012
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Forgetting how to permit private firms to fund infrastructure through urban intensification is one of the many structural failures of the British state over the last 80 years.
Great patterns adapt. From triumph to church to trains. From pagan to Christian. From old world to new. (Orange, 🇫🇷, Rome & Rimini, 🇮🇹, Washington DC, 🇺🇸)
The point about beautiful places and buildings is never that they MUST be classical or vernacular or Gothic or Art Deco but that patterns of harmonious ornament, coherent complexity, colour, detail, biomorphic (i.e. natural) forms etc are consistently more popular with more people
createstreets retweeted
Heartening stuff. @michael_diamant is performing an important public service documenting these victories for beauty, a courteous public realm & Gentle Density
🇵🇱FINE GRAINED URBANISM: The most interesting and dynamic cities are undoubtedly those that offer a more fine grained urbanism. Economy of scale is of course important to keep prices down, but we must not forget to build "commercially uninteresting plots" in central locations. What I mean with the latter is of course building with smaller or odd premises that are not interesting for chain stores.🧵
This is new.
We should create places which are not as cheap as possible but as good as we can afford. The utilitarian approach to city-making is failing us. Throw-away places ith throw-away meaning are bad for us and bad for the planet. The new streets in Clamart near Paris are ....
... read more in @boys_nicholas essay about it here which was also reported in @BDonline & @thetimes: createstreets.com/projects/c…
An intuitive but nevertheless important finding. Almshouses provide many of the features which wider evidence clearly demonstrates is good for people: greenery, neighbourhood, community, walkability, beauty. A rational polity would be encouraging them everywhere in every village, neighbourhood or town.
In a 2023 study, naturally not very large, it was found that elderly who moved from other forms of housing into traditional almshouses lived on average up to 2.5 years longer than their peers in other forms of housing. The effect was especially pronounced with elderly from the lowest one fifth of socio-economic status, who
lived as long as other elderly from the second highest fifth.
There is no telling how much is cause or correlation but the effect is real, measurable and easily observed. The theory is that companionship, meaning, belonging and so on, is what causes the jump in longevity. The effect is similar taking up regular exercise and quitting smoking.
And almshouses are far more cost effective than other forms of housing for elderly. We should build more of them.
Left or right?
🤖 Made with AI
Here are two railway stations in Cambridgeshire. March Railway Station (on the right) was Victorian, first opened in 1847. Waterbeach (on the left) is due to open in 2028. This is not progress or enhanced prosperity. The collapse in design quality is clearly profound and goes far beyond aesthetics to issues of civic pride, place-attraction and corporate duty. No one involved in the design of Waterbeach Station should be allowed anywhere near the design of any public building or place.
Here are two railway stations in Cambridgeshire. March Railway Station (on the right) was Victorian, first opened in 1847. Waterbeach (on the left) is due to open in 2028. This is not progress or enhanced prosperity. The collapse in design quality is clearly profound and goes far beyond aesthetics to issues of civic pride, place-attraction and corporate duty. No one involved in the design of Waterbeach Station should be allowed anywhere near the design of any public building or place.
"Flagship"
Work starts on flagship bit of civic architecture for Waterbeach new town.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ck9q…
createstreets retweeted
I have just properly discovered the interior of Washington Union Station and it is sublime. Late classicism meets moon base.
Good news. Good news.
South Tottenham is a neighbourhood of North London, whose inhabitants have been campaigning for years for the right to extend their houses upwards, subject to a strict design code.
A small part of South Tottenham (in Haringey) won this right some years ago, and its residents have been merrily building upwards ever since. As you can see, it has been done very intelligently: once the transition is finished, the neighbourhood will just look as though it was designed with 3.5 storeys in the nineteenth century.
The good news is that another big area of South Tottenham (in Hackney) has recently won similar rights. This is a precedent that much of urban England could follow. Congratulations to the local community, whose extreme perseverance has made this possible!
