Co-opting a loose word—the Swedish concept of ‘lagom’—and redeploying it for our streets and neighbourhoods
Working on numerous urban mobility-related initiatives here in Sweden, and running design workshops with stakeholders from municipalities, regional and national government, transport agencies, Volvo, MoveByBike, Voi and many others, I started stringing together a phrase, ‘lagom mobilitet’ to describe how we might better calibrate our mobility to our spaces, looking…
Help build this collection of shared, open research about some of the multiple and diverse forms of value that retrofitting our streets might produce
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. …
A recent thought on blurring streets and parks in Stockholm echoes an older thought on spatially shaping connectivity and informational intensity on Barangaroo, Sydney
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. …
Adapting Holger Blom’s 1946 principles for Stockholm’s park programme to inform today’s street systems
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…
Bringing a cultural voice into an urban planning conversation that has become narrowly technical, and diversifying the thinking around what streets are about, and what cities are for
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…
How a picturesque island setting for a small Swedish follow-up to Small Vehicles of Tokyo is an unlikely contender for a 15-minute city case study. And yet …
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. …
A slim cataloguing of the rich diversity of small vehicles that help shape street life in the world’s largest city
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…
Utomhusverket 2021 by Studio Ossidiana for ArkDes; a conference centre for the birds, ‘al masha’, and the beauty, dignity and utility of shared things in everyday life
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. …
Why the ‘jug-and-mug’ model of education is not the future, but well past its sell-by date, and why we might want to use the potential of digital learning tools in order to create more physical studio spaces on campus
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…
Does anyone have information about this Fiat advert from the early nineteen-seventies? I found it reproduced in the extraordinary 1974 book Human Space Utopia (Penguin) by the great English anarchist writer Colin Ward (also author of the stone-cold classic The Child in the City—and read Shumi Bose on that.)
