Research Seminar – Urban Form Research and Urban Designing

Research Seminar

Topic:
Urban Form Research and Urban Designing

Speaker:
Mr. Alain Chiaradia

Associate Professor
Department of Urban Planning and Design
The University of Hong Kong

Schedule:
Date: 23 November 2016 (Wednesday)
Time: 13:00-14:00
Venue: Room 820, 8/F, Knowles Building, HKU

Abstract:
‘‘…everything around [us] is designed and that design decisions impact on nearly every part of our lives…’’ (Design Council 2006)
Since over 50% of the world’s population is living in urban environments, urban design – the intentional shaping of urban configuration and forms – has potentially major human impact. Research into urban form can affect urban design when research findings are incorporated into design decision-making.
Does this happen? Is urban form research “usable” for urban designing?
While a lot of urban form research can inform urban planning policy, which provide general rules on what development is allowed, it does not follow that it can also inform urban design, whose central activity is a much more specific activity of shape-making.
My work is driven by the aim to ‘make urban form research relevant for designing’, and my research reflects this theme. Since those research results, or evidence, that are most usefully fed into design decision-making need to tell designers how their design proposal may impact urban lives, reasoning backwards, suitable urban form research needs to tell us whether, and how, design impacts on urban life. Three questions underpin all approaches to this sort of research: How to evidence ‘design’? How to evidence ‘design impacts’? How to control for intervening confounding factors in the relationship between ‘designed form’ and ‘their impacts’?
Of the three questions, the one that has been least addressed, until recently, is how to evidence ‘design’. In the last twenty years, however, urban form metrics have been operationalised to do this in research domains such as health, transport, real estate and urban design.
Using examples of urban form research using context sensitive measures, geometric measures and behavioural measures, this seminar will be about the challenges of incorporating urban form research into urban designing.

About the Speaker:
Alain is Associate Professor, Programme director Master of Urban Design at HKU. He was previously at Cardiff University, where he led the development of spatial design network analysis software (sDNA, www.cardiff.ac.uk./sdna/).
Prior to that he was Senior Research Fellow at University College London and Executive/Board Director at UCL’s spin off design consultancy Space Syntax Ltd, working on research impact, operational research and knowledge transfer. He has directed major action-research projects on spatial policy analysis, urban design policy and evidence-based spatial design for municipal governments in cities such as Paris, London, Boston and Shanghai. He has advised leading international design practices such as ARUP, Atelier Jean Nouvel, Farrell & Partners, Foster + Partners, Gehry Partners, Herzog and de Meuron, Hopkins, Martha Schwarz & Partners, Make, and WSP | PB. Alain has taught architecture studio at the AA, and visiting studio at MIT, The Berlage, Columbia GSAP and urban design studio at LSE, Tongji CAUP and Cardiff University.
Alain’s research is in how urban design relates to economic, social and environmental values, the values of urban design. He uses spatial network design analysis and value approach to understand strategic design properties of activity spaces and activity location systems of large conurbations.

~~ ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME ~~
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Enquiries: 3917 2721
CENTRE OF URBAN STUDIES AND URBAN PLANNING
THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG