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© RIBA Publishing, 2020 Commissioning Editor: Alex White
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Published by RIBA Publishing, 66 Portland Place, London, W1B 1AD Production: Jane Rogers
ISBN 9781859469262 Designed and typeset by Kalina Norton, Studio Kalinka
Printed and bound by Short Run Press, Exeter
The rights of Ombretta Romice, Sergio Porta and Alessandra Feliciotti to be Cover illustration: Masterplan for Drumchapel by Rabail Akhtar, John Dufy
identifed as the Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with and Nour Kouwatli; MSc in Urban Design 2017-2018
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 sections 77 and 78.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements v
Foreword: plan less to plan better vi
Preface: towards masterplanning for change vii
About the authors ix
PART I
TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF URBAN FORM
1 Design and change:
reconciling the paradox 3
1.1 Urbanisation, anthropocene and the great acceleration 5
1.2 About connectedness and complexity: the way change occurs 7
1.3 How complex systems change: adaptive cycles,
panarchy & resilience 9
1.3.1 Adaptive cycle and panarchy 10
1.3.2 Bouncing back and bouncing forward: the concept of resilience
across disciplines 13
1.3.3 Neither back nor forward: evolutionary resilience 14
1.4 Implementing resilience in urban design 15
2 From system ecology to urban morphology 19
2.1 System ecology & urban morphology: not so diferent after all 20
2.2 Introducing urban morphology 21
2.2.1 How urban form changes: the urban form adaptive cycle 22
2.2.2 Between inertia and change: panarchy in urban form 26
2.3 Design and change: the paradox reconciled 30
PART 2
MASTERPLANNING FOR CHANGE: THE DESIGN APPROACH
3 Towards a design agenda 35
3.1. Designing the city as a complex system 36
3.1.1 Sustainability, resilience and ‘shepherded self-organization’ 36
3.1.2 Advancing the place-making tradition 38
3.2 The fve attributes of resilient cities 40
3.2.1 Defning the attributes 40
3.2.2 The attributes at-scale: a component-specifc description 48
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4 Masterplanning for change:
the design approach 55
4.1 Analysis 57
WP. 1: Drawing the City 57
WP. 2: History 60
WP. 3: Stories 63
WP. 4: Planning and Policy Framework 65
WP. 5: Community Potential 69
WP. 6: Density and Urban Intensity 73
WP. 7: Comparing Places 75
WP. 8: Mental Map 81
WP. 9: Fear Map 85
WP. 10: Street Centrality 88
WP. 11: Street Hierarchy 93
WP. 12: Transportation Network 97
WP. 13: Street Front Quality 100
WP. 14: Ecological Network 105
4.2 Strategy 109
WP.15: Vision 110
WP.16: Strategic Plan and Brief 114
WP. 17: Concept Plan 117
4.3 Framework and coding 130
WP. 18: Local Urban Code 130
WP. 19: Foundation Masterplan 140
4.4 Masterplan 147
WP. 20: Masterplan Design 147
WP. 21: Regulatory Plan 160
5 Towards the resilient city 171
References 175
Image credits 180
Index 182
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
If cities are the most complex human artefact of all, it is only ftting that the group of people
who have helped us to study, explore and understand them along the way is also diverse. This
book, and the ideas behind it, owe much to all of them, and in more than one way.
We would like to acknowledge the day-to-day practice and research on urban spaces of
colleagues such as Robert Adam, Chris and Maggie Alexander, Alessandro Balducci, Peter
Bosselmann, Narendra Dengle, Hank Dittmar, Or Ettlinger, Hildebrand Frey, Munishwar
Ganju, Mark Greaves, Henry Hanson, David Hořák, Allan Jacobs, Vito Latora, Michael Mehafy,
Peter Newman, Mark Pagel, Yodan Rofé, David Rudlin, Nikos Salingaros, Nicholas Boys-Smith,
Wolfgang Sonne, Susie Stirling, Emanuele Strano and Kevin Thwaites. Their work on places
that support life has been, for us, truly inspirational. It is on their insights that we can hope
to build a more conscious, inclusive, resilient and sustainable approach to urban design and
place-making. We wish to acknowledge the Ax:son Johnson Foundation in Sweden, Glasgow
City Council, the Wheatley Group in Glasgow and Strelka KB in Moscow for supporting
diferent parts of our research, education and practice, and, particularly, Peter Elmlund, Paola
Pasino, Gordon Barbour and Alexey Muratov.
We are especially grateful to the many cohorts of Master’s students in architecture and urban
design who helped us refne our approach to Masterplanning for Change (MfC) over the
years, embracing it fully and turning it into a smooth, operative and practical design frame-
work. This also takes into account many PhD students and researchers who have studied key
aspects of MfC, urban morphometrics and urban morphology, including Jacob Dibble, Martin
Fleischmann, Alex Maxwell, Adel Remali and Maddalena Iovene. To all these colleagues and
students, and the many more that we could not name here, go our warmest gratitude. This
work is theirs as much as ours.
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FOREWORD: PLAN LESS TO PLAN BETTER
Who would be a planner? Do your job well and you will be criticised by some. Do it badly and
you will be criticised by everyone. Your successes will quickly be taken for granted. Your failures
will not. They do not pass out of memory like a bad meal or a poorly run meeting. They stick
around on street corners or the walk to the shops – though if you are lucky the architect, devel-
oper or politician will get the blame. Indeed, your job is inherently impossible. You must know
the future and reconcile the irresolute. ‘We know what we are but know not what we may be.’
Who would do it?
Except that it matters now more than ever. Where we live has a measurable and increasingly
predictable efect on our physical and mental health: on how much we walk, on how many
neighbours we know or on how tense we feel on the quotidian journey to work or school. Design
afects us from the air that we breathe to our ultimate sense of purpose and wellbeing. The
presence of such heterogeneous variables as street trees, clear block patterns, a legible street
network and façades that most people fnd attractive with colour, some level of symmetry,
complexity and composure can all be associated with more walking and less crime, with better
health and more support for development. It is also a question of social justice. Rich people ex-
perience more beauty than poorer people. In short, planning may be impossible to do perfectly
but it matters ineluctably. We can run away from it but we cannot escape it.
Yet the polling, pricing and focus group data consistently show that the sorts of places we have
been making for the last seventy years are normally less popular and less valuable than most of
our historic towns. A toxic cocktail of technology (we can build huge, ugly sheds very cheaply),
confusion about the role of the motor car in the city (for three generations we thought town
centres were places for cars – they are not), increasing labour costs (making detail and ornament
expensive) and modernist fashion (eradicating the past and the human scale rather than work-
ing with it) have all combined to ruin old places and build new ones that most people reject if
they can aford to do so. Mapping selection efects in cities does not make pretty reading for fans
of suburban cul-de-sacs or modernist anti-street planning.
Hopefully we are now at an infection point and it is possible to do something about this. More
and more of us want development that will not cost the earth. How do we put it right? This im-
portant and passionately argued book helps point the way. As the authors show, we should ‘plan
better’ by ‘planning less’. Do not try to second-guess every decision. Do not engage in lengthy
and protracted disputes over future uses. Set clear, democratically popular codes for what is
and what is not possible. Enforce what rules you do have properly. Be predictable and consistent
but allow rules to evolve over time. Set the DNA for fnely grained cities with a plethora of plots
and lots which can bend and fex with the future rather than being stuck in yesterday’s utopia.
Cities are not just bricks and tarmac, they are living systems. Treat them as such; not as simple
processes with single aims. Set the rules for the game much as complex ecosystems evolve
around simple patterns of seasonality and light. Plan better by planning less. Plan for resilience.
Set the simple framework for diversity rather than the complex framework that can only work
for monolithic huge investors.
It is impossible to be all-seeing. We should not try.
Nicholas Boys Smith, Director of Create Streets , Interim chair of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, UK
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
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PREFACE: TOWARDS MASTERPLANNING FOR CHANGE
We know what you are thinking: another book on cities. A good introduction, with yet another
catastrophic overview on the state of the planet, strong on statements but not so practical, let
alone ground-breaking. You are both right and wrong. This is indeed a book on cities that tries to
understand how they have managed through centuries and even millennia to treasure, hand down
and build upon unique meanings, values, practices and forms, and why today we feel that this –
more often than not – is no longer the case. Undeniably, most of us live in places we have no real
control over: our power in making, changing and transforming the spaces of our everyday life is
very limited. We use what we are given while it works, then we move on to something better if we
are lucky and make do if we have no other choice. We are cutting ties with place when all evidence
shows how important these ties are for us as individuals, communities and society. In this sense,
this book is also rediscovering and reclaiming our role in the gradual, ordinary but absolutely
crucial process of shaping our places and, ultimately, our cities. It asks and tries to provide an
answer to one question: how do we design cities and places that work and will continue to do so
for future generations, whatever their needs will be?
We got to this question, and answer, through the journey of the Urban Design Studies Unit
(UDSU) at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, founded by Hildebrand Frey in 1988. After
Frey’s retirement in 2006, Ombretta combined the unit’s achievements in the design of the city at
urban and neighbourhood scales with specialisms in community engagement and environment-
behaviours studies. In 2009 Sergio joined Ombretta, bringing along quantitative research in urban
networks and spatial analysis, as well as a passion for urban morphology, self-organisation and
evolution. We put our heads together and with colleagues from the UK, Italy, Australia and the US
refected on the state of urban design right when our discipline was once again seen as central to
the renaissance of British cities and beyond.i
The fnancial crisis hit in 2008 right when the global urban population was about to exceed the
rural population for the frst time in historyii and the climate crisis made itself felt in our everyday
experience, giving us all a sense of urgency and a stronger focus on cities, on how they afect the
environment, the economy and society at large. It also reminded us of what cities mean to us and
the wider society. We agreed that they are the cumulative efort of millions of actions in time,
owned by none and belonging to all, afording unique possibilities under certain conditions and
causing inequality and alienation under others.
We asked ourselves why cities are so diferent in their forms and so similar nevertheless? And
why do some work better than others? To answer these questions we focused on masterplans, these
being one of the most important tools of urban designers, and noticed that despite all the criticism
against their rigidity, most of the best places in the world had been, at least in part, at one point
or another, masterplanned.iii Our question then became: how did such masterplans deliver places
that managed, over time, to fourish in endless and yet harmonious diversity, and remain vital and
viable along the way, while others succumbed to the next hardship, never to recover?
We were guided by two important principles, expressed in the book Urban Sustainability Through
Environmental Design, published in 2007:iv time and change. We felt that both, in some way, are
key to the success of places. Our idea was genuinely simple: if something has ever worked – and
indeed a lot clearly did and still does – it would be a waste not to learn from it. We soon realised
an important fact: those parts of our cities that worked well over time and still do, did not do so
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because they went according to plan but precisely because they did not. They were planned, to
some degree, and indeed we could see clear signs of that, but they then also accommodated an
enormous amount of completely unplanned modifcations over time. This emergent quality – this
powerful manifestation of life and beautyv that works for business, people and the environmentvi –
was of the greatest interest to us. It was change and persistence, evolution over design.
That realisation marked our commitment to the study of cities in evolutionary terms, and the role
of design in encouraging and somehow even driving it over time. We built evidence and theory,
which we termed, as others also did, ‘plot-based urbanism’.vii Around that we shaped a design
method, bringing in essential lessons from urban morphology and addressing all scales, from the
strategic (i.e. city scale) down to the plot and building. All of this we tested along the way in our
Urban Design post-graduate programme at Strathclyde. The focus on change allowed us to teach
students the responsibilities of urban designers towards the future; we tested research ideas and
methods through live commissions by the city of Glasgow. We saw design no longer as an act of
fnal form-creation but one setting the spatial framework for independent activities to emerge
after designers have left: masterplanning with and for change, rather than against it. That was key.
In 2013 Alessandra joined UDSU as a PhD student after experiencing the Masterplanning for
Change process herself when she attended the Urban Design Studio, and has been with us ever
since. With her arrival we explored system ecology, urban morphology and resilience more
systematically.viii This allowed us to see urban change in an inherently diferent way: we learned
to read urban space from a complex system perspective, to understand the role of major historical
turns in the evolution of cities in a new light,ix to identify basic principles in the production and
transformation of urban form and we eventually started to grasp how diferent urban structures
could display remarkably diferent degrees of resilience across a variety of parameters.x All these
ideas have since been embedded in our approach to masterplanning.
Importantly, our work in UDSU has always been about keeping together two parallel but
interdependent streams of work:xi the descriptive and normative knowledge of cities,xii their
understanding and their design. With the continuing involvement and contribution of PhD
students we are now able to research urban form and spatial patterns of urbanisation on a
much greater sample of case studies, employing advanced techniques of GIS analysis, machine
learning and pattern recognition,xiii pushing the boundaries closer to a very old dream of
ours: the systematic, comprehensive, rigorous taxonomy of urban form at large scale, in fact
potentially global.
We hope we are doing our bit towards the foundations of urban design:xiv time, resilience and the
consequent focus on urban evolution and distributed control. It may well be a long way still, and
yet we feel we have never been so close. We can see that the fundamental contradiction between
design and change has now found its own pathway to a solution, which we present in this book
both in conceptual form and in that of a practical set of steps and instructions for masterplanning
the adaptive, resilient and sustainable city of the future.
Oddly enough, the output of this method, the masterplans themselves, look all but radically
new. They are considerate of history and what happened in more recent times when, for various
reasons, including – crucially – the emergence of professional planning theories, they departed
from that line of evolution. In all honesty, the last thing we were concerned with is whether our
masterplans looked new. Instead, we asked ourselves whether they were good, in what sense and
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for whom. In spite of the continuous calls to think and design ‘out of the box’, the box itself – with
its endless and yet composed diversity and its mesmerising beauty – has always struck our heart.
The aim of this book is to ofer a rigorous, experimental and provocative approach to the
generation of masterplans that in their simplicity and seemingly reassuring appearance set the
conditions for the ‘genius’ of cities to emerge and keep unfolding in time, which goes together
with redefning how we designers can help them doing so.
Part I of the book presents in detail the theoretical principles which we defned with the
help of cognate disciplines, and how we brought them together into urban design under an
evolutionary perspective, which we argue should be used to read, assess and design cities. Part II
is a practical manual, to help readers learn and apply the Masterplanning for Change approach,
step-by-step. Enjoy.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dr Ombretta Romice
Dr Ombretta Romice is Senior Lecturer in Urban Design and co-director of the Urban Design
Studies Unit (UDSU) at the Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Associate Member of the Royal Town Planning
Institute, Ombretta is past President of IAPS, the International Association for People-
Environment Studies, author of several international publications and co-author four books.
She holds a PhD in Urban Design from the University of Strathclyde, and a Post Doctorate on
neighbourhood regeneration sponsored by the EU. She has been invited speaker in Brazil,
South Korea, China, and many European Countries.
Prof Sergio Porta
Prof Sergio Porta, architect and PhD in Urban Planning, is Professor of Urban Design and
Director of the Urban Design Studies Unit (UDSU) and has been Course Director of the MScUD
at the Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde in Glasgow since 2009. His
research is on masterplanning for adaptive urbanism, urban form change and analytics, and
radical architecture education. He published over ffty papers on international peer-reviewed
journals and two monographs. He sits in editorial boards of leading journals in urban science
and design and has been invited speaker at international conferences including recently at
UN-Habitat in Geneva, Barcelona and Kuala Lumpur.
Dr Alessandra Feliciotti
Dr Alessandra Feliciotti, is research fellow at the Urban Design Studies Unit (UDSU) in
Glasgow and free-lance architect and urban designer. She holds a PhD in Architecture and
Urban Design at the University of Strathclyde and a Master degree in Architecture at the IUAV
University of Venice. She was shortlisted for the Archiprix Italia 2013 and has won the frst
prize at the UrbanPromo Giovani international competition. She also worked with the Prince’s
Foundation for Building Communities as well as other international Architecture and Urban
Design practices.
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