Articles in "Showcases"

As demand for quality environments in our cities continues to increase, more attention is being paid to the opportunity presented by urban revitalisation as a sustainable alternative to broad scale urban renewal. Around the world urban revitalisation is being catalysed by housing, cultural, retail, infrastructure and city centre projects that spur on infill development, adaptive re-use and other local investment.

In 2009 we had an idea, to bring together a group of global cities to share their challenges with the international technology community. Our hypothesis was that a solution to any challenge is out there already, and that by finding it we can learn and avoid re-inventing the wheel. Since then, the Living Labs Global Award has become the world’s most significant call for solutions, in its current edition 21 global cities call for technologies to improve the lives of 110 Million citizens.

Every place tells a story.  But, most don’t do it coherently or intentionally.  The tricky thing about stories is that even if a city or a downtown doesn’t want to be telling one, it matters not, because they are telling a story anyway.  So, how do you quantify a place’s story, and what can you do with it?

Carl Steinitz, professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University, first described how the GeoDesign Framework worked by posing it as a series of six questions relevant to landscape change.  The first three questions describe the world as it is and assess its condition (the assessment process). The last three questions describe the world as it could be, evaluating proposed design alternatives and their impacts (the intervention process).