Spatial Complexity in Urban Design Research

This book offers state-of-the-art ‘tools for thinking’ for urban designers, planners and decision-makers.

Thematically it focuses on the contexts of problems in urban design and places community spaces at the heart of urban design research. The book provides practicable tools for network modelling and visualization in urban design research. Step-by-step examples take readers through methods for tracing the evolution of road networks, and their impacts on contemporary community spaces. Easy-to-follow guides to programming show how to process and plot community data sets as network graphs. They reveal how these can help to observe and represent the different ways in which community spaces are inter-connected. This book places these technological methods in the context of current theories of community formations. It considers how these cutting-edge tools for thinking in urban design research – comprising both theories and methods – could transform our understanding of community spaces as being complex, inter-dependent and socially meaningful assets.

This book is pioneering in its analysis of the urban contexts to community formations, and in its argument for professional integration between urban and knowledge practitioners. Academics and professionals within the fields of design research, urban studies, spatial analysis, urban geography and sociology will benefit from reading this book.

Jamie O’Brien is a design research specialist at URBED, working with spatial data analysis and visualization. He was a Research Fellow at Salford University’s School of the Built Environment, and Senior Research Associate at the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London (UCL). He holds a EPSRC doctorate in design from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and is Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, member of the Design Research Society, and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

This book explores the role of dialogue in urban community formations, specifically focusing on the need for civic dialogue within urban spaces. It examines the relationships between people and place, analyzing how local narratives are constructed by community members and, in a contrasting manner, by professional practitioners. Drawing on theory and method, as well as three city case studies in Liverpool (UK), Medellin (Colombia) and Berlin (Germany), this book analyzes patterns within the city that affect community-members' engagements with spaces, and the politics of inclusion and segregation. Each of the case study cities has experienced a major historical change, and sought to reconstruct its own narrative in relation to this change through major civic projects. Two major themes are considered: modes of information capture and transformation through dialogue, and the interfaces and learning of information, to explore the means by which knowledge is encountered and re-conceptualized through dialogue. The final section of the book considers the need for reflexivity in professional practice, arguing for an integrated approach between urban and knowledge professionals.

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