A presentation and Q&A for Urban AI, on designing for technology and the city, and a discussion about on tech, cities, public value, capitalism and design practice for Brave UX podcast — Not long after I returned to Australia, back in May 2022, I gave a late-night (for me) presentation to the Emerging Leaders programme at Urban AI, followed by a Q&A with students. Urban AI frame the programme thus:

A radio interview on the Australian city, suburbs and centres—as seen in 1970, 2007, and 2021 — A quick note to point to a radio discussion with me and Jonathan Green of ABC Radio National’s Blueprint for Living, which was just broadcast this weekend in Australia. We discuss the possibility of the suburbs and centres within Australian cities, and beyond. We reflect on the relatively few moments…

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…