This is something of an experiment. As part of our ongoing work at Vinnova funding and collaborating on new research and innovation projects around streets, we are also collating existing research. …

In a recent piece on adapting Holger Blom’s landscaping principles from 1940s parks to today’s streets, I suggested we might think about a blurred, shifting continuum of park-like conditions—biodiverse and culturally diverse activities and environments—moving from streets to gardens to parks. …

In my piece unpacking Brian Eno’s design principles for for our Swedish street mission, I suggested, as an aside, that “it feels like landscape architecture, having been unfairly downplayed for decades, perhaps for obvious if unfortunate reasons, may increasingly be the most important strand of architecture moving forward, for those…

Planning, designing, and managing cities in Sweden can be a largely joyless, technocratic affair, dominated by efficiency-oriented engineering, economic and managerial sensibilities. Although the Swedish state continues to fund arts and culture at a level that would make many other countries green with envy, it tends to keep those practices…

Admittedly, it’s drawing a long bow to see anything in common between the megacity sprawled along the Honshu coastline and a tiny island at the outer edge of the Stockholm archipelago. …

Unusually for me, this is a post with little in the way of context. Rather, it is simple, recorded observation. As part of an endless enquiry into what makes good streets tick, over four short visits to Tokyo in 2018 and 2019—during The Days In Which We Flew—I started cataloguing…

ArkDes are quietly building one of the Sweden’s more interesting spaces out of one of Sweden’s least interesting spaces

Sitting outside one of Stockholm’s primary cultural complexes, the space known as Exercisplan has previous lives that would have been defined by display, ritual and ceremony. It was once a parade ground, when the island of Skeppsholmen was largely allocated to military use. …

Ed. This is a re-cut of one of my early Dezeen columns, originally published there on 18 October 2013, but I thought I’d dig it out and re-publish a modified version here, given the current debates about education and learning environments, spaces and technologies in the context of Covid-19, and…