built environment

Streets surround us, but, at first glance, there is no systematic data on what they look like. There are records of property transactions, land use and buildings protected due to architectural or historic significance (listed buildings and conservation areas), although none of these directly capture areas’ appearance. Buildings appearance is though part of planning decisions about the built environment. There is also greater recognition of the importance of areas having a sense of place, but it is not always clear what this means and how to measure it....

The Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, the London Garden Bridge. The recent demise of the proposed Garden Bridge across the Thames raises the question of when public support for radical buildings should occur. Unique buildings, by their nature, are hard to evaluate based on experience and their construction can turn out to be unexpectedly expensive. However, they have also resulted in some of the world’s most popular and distinctive buildings – central to many cities’ identity and tourism....

Street Art in Shoreditch, photograph John Davies It begins: an area near the city centre is less developed, artists and independent businesses move in, culture and creativity thrive increasing the area’s visibility and desirability. At which point a less fashionable (but richer) crowd arrives, rents and prices rise and the artists/independents, and original inhabitants, get forced out. Many of us intuitively feel there’s something troubling about this, and it has been a focus of much debate in London in particular, but our reasons for caring about it are often not entirely clear - which isn’t to say we shouldn’t care....

Geotagged Flickr photography in and around Hyde Park in London. Sights with visibly high levels of activity include the Serpentine, the museums in Exhibition Road. Image John Davies Into the city In the past, people walked the streets and left no trace. This is no longer true. We are creating large amounts of data about the places around us: how we move through them, and how they move us. One source of this data has been the growth in smart phone and social media use....

Locations of geo-tagged photographs taken in central and inner London The new tracks Cities are carpeted with pictures, but these pictures are not public art or the work of a subversive street artist. They are the geo-tagged photos continuously being uploaded to sites like Flickr and Twitter. This is creating a new world to explore. A world which could change how we think about the built environment and its heritage....

In the 1970s, London’s Docklands area stretched empty and derelict east of the city centre. The wharves that had provided employment for tens of thousands standing deserted for mile upon mile along the Thames. The shift to containers for shipping had made the docks too small and put them out of business. To fill this vacuum came what was then the largest regeneration scheme in Europe. The redevelopment of the docks, heavily underpinned by government tax breaks, was mainly focused on financial services, pre-digital media i....