SMART URBANISM

Smart urbanism is our working methodology for enabling change and delivering complexity in our towns and cities. It is how our ‘thinking’ and ‘tools’ can be applied to fix the ‘broken’. It could be termed ‘emergent’ urbanism or ‘open source’ urbanism or even ‘sustainable’ or ‘collaborative’ urbanism and certainly has the qualities of all.

Smart Urbanism has its roots in the belief that uniqueness of place is reflected against the backdrop of a clearly defined urban order. This order, in turn, provides the necessary framework for urban variety and provides the palette for the “city of a thousand designers”. While the underlying strategy is to extend and elaborate the structure and intensity of the city, there is a recognition of its implicit unpredictability.

Smart Urbanism has seven drivers to foster emergence. All are overlapping and self-reinforcing. All are essential:

• COMPACTNESS:
  Places that capitalise on the collective and collateral benefits of closeness, contiguity and concentration.
• COMPLEXITY: Places that offer the rich, varied and cumulative benefits of evolved mixed use development.
• CONNECTEDNESS: Places that offer a choice of movement modes that are a consequence of coherent networks.
• COLLABORATIVE: Places that foster civicness, sense of community, cohesiveness and build social capital.
• CO:EFFICIENT: Places that factor in local environmental capital in all aspects of daily life.
• CO-PRODUCTIVE: Places that are open to emergence and change by facilitating individual and collective actions.
• COOLNESS: Places that are comfortable, creative, confident that have a strong sense of identity, ethics and values.