RUDI is creating a series of urban design and placemaking multimedia resources.
In this section we also provide a gateway to other related multimedia resources available on the web.
The videos are supported by drawings, images, text and graphics – just like you are used to seeing in conference presentations or on TV documentaries. They are best viewed using broadband, but several viewing options are available to suit your PC and internet set-up.
A range of multimedia resources, including interviews, profiles and interactive presentations, will be available online via RUDI's multimedia section.
Over the next year we will be building up our library and we welcome your input and suggestions. If you know of a project that you think would make an interesting multimedia subject please contact RUDI.
If the video content does not display immediately, please check your software requirements.
Joost Beunderman, Demos associate and project manager at Urhahn Urban Design, questioned planner’s current fixation with maximizing housing density in new development and was concerned that ‘ghost’ and ‘clone’ towns were being created. He suggested that new developments should seek to repair local social capital rather than increase segregation.
Simon Davis, director of Urban Delivery, emphasized the importance of property values being considered as an integral part of masterplans. He urged that masterplans should not just include design and planning concepts but should take in implementation issues. All parts of the public sector needed to be engaged in preparing masterplans and subsequent delivery following an agreed timetable.
Urban designer Jerry Spencer suggested that it was important to repair and make better use of poor public spaces and reestablish their functionality. Major projects to redevelop public spaces were in danger of harming local communities, he warned.
Liz Kessler, the former public space coordinator at EC1 New Deal for Communities highlighted the need for detailed work at a neighbourhood level to make parks and streets attractive. They are the front doors to homes, shops, schools and work
Jon Harris, technical director of smarter choices, Mouchel, suggested that transport issues should be subservient to lifestyle choices and should be considered early in the planning process and part of the planning application.
Professor of City Leadership at the University of the West of England, Robin Hambleton described major changes at local government level, which affected the urban environment. He pointed to new relationships that were evolving between councilors and officers and local communities.
Karl Friedhelm Fisher from the University of Kassel School of Architecture raised the question about the extent to which lost buildings and neighbourhoods should be reconstructed in their original form. He warned against creating ‘disneylands’ which might please the tourists but was artificial.
Land Securities senior development manager Stephen Neal used the analogy of a simple vanilla ice cream and ice cream sundaes to contrast the traditional operation of developers taking on individual schemes and the enhanced role, which his company and others were now playing in creating places.
The director of C20 futureplanners, highlighted the ‘messiness’ of modern living and the radical political, social and economic changes required to take account of climate change and the need to achieve zero carbon emissions. He set out a radical, perhaps utopian, process to change society, which would be led by a government of national unity.
Richard Rees, urbanism director at BDP
taking his theme as sustainability, emphasized the importance of urban design reconnecting the individual with society and nature. “The worst cities remind us of our overcrowded population and our insulation from both nature and society.” He said that we needed to accept nature and insist that it is part of the city. Nature should also be an emphatic part of the dwelling.
