Seven years after Tahrir Square became the focal point of the Egyptian Revolution, towering metal gates now control access.
Ahmed Abd El-Fatah/Wikimedia
Today’s urban public spaces tend to represent governments and cities rather than people and citizens. Architects and urban designers should contribute to shaping spaces for freedom and interaction.
Street in Hangzhou, China, with trees separating a cycle track from road traffic and from the sidewalk.
Xu Wen
Many US cities are investing in bike infrastructure and shade trees. Properly located, these additions can make streets cooler, cleaner and safer for all users – even those who drive.
In poorer communities, shared spaces tend to be poorly maintained and utilitarian.
from shutterstock.com
We wear our surroundings like a cloak. Lower-income communities often live in environments that discourage healthy, outdoor activities. This perpetuates their poorer health and traps them in poverty.
Many cities have used spikes on ledges and other spaces to prevent (usually homeless) people from sleeping or sitting on them.
from shutterstock.com
Design principles, known as ‘crime prevention through environmental design’, are used all over the world to make cities safer. But some of these principles can be discriminatory and hostile.
The same things tend to make people happy - such as nature and colour. (Jardin des Curiosités, Lyon, France)
Léonard Cotte/Unsplash
We searched Instagram for city images people associated with happiness. And they consistently included similar features, such as water, nature and heritage buildings.
Eurydice Dixon was murdered in a busy Melbourne park - how can we make these spaces safer for women?
DAVID CROSLING/AAP Image
Australia has guidelines for designing safe parks, but the stories of many women show these are not enough. We must involve women in co-designing these shared public spaces.
When cars, trucks, bikes and pedestrians come together at an intersection, design makes the difference between collisions and safety.
pxhere
Paul Salmon, University of the Sunshine Coast and Gemma Read, University of the Sunshine Coast
Collisions at intersections between motor vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians cause many deaths and injuries. Design that considers how each group approaches intersections improves everyone’s safety.
Planning and design for healthy, liveable communities in the Australian tropics can involve quite different considerations from those that apply down south.
Silvia Tavares
There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all plan for sustainable, healthy urban living. Urban diaries help identify what works – and doesn’t work – for tropical cities like Cairns or Townsville.
The first worldwide skateboarding conference, Pushing Boarders, showed how skateboarding is evolving to include people of all genders, ethnicities and sexualities.
A public barbecue in Lyndhurst, New South Wales, does the job but could be so much better.
Mattinbgn/Wikimedia
The need for public cooking facilities has long been recognised, but why has the basic public barbecue failed to evolve along with Australians, their lifestyles and the foods they eat?
Parliament House is a citadel — the practices and representations of democracy have been segregated from the community.
Kim Dovey
Why not turn the moat of parkland enclosing Parliament House into a new inner-city?
Originating in the Netherlands, the concept of ‘woonerfs’, areas designed to invite walking, playing, socialising and cycling while curbing motor vehicles, has spread to cities in other countries, including Berlin.
Eric Sehr/Flickr
All around us, the places we inhabit send us physical and visual cues that influence our behaviour. Good design can tilt the balance so our surroundings help us act in ways that fulfil our needs.
Torre Glòries in Barcelona is an obvious example of statement architecture, but much of the gender bias built into cities is more insidious and pervasive.
Wikimedia Commons
Women encounter many difficulties in cities that are products of male design and planning. We need to move past the practice of one group shaping our world on behalf of everyone else.
‘Soft fall’ surfaces are widely used in play areas where children might fall, but can also get very hot in the sun, which undermines this safety benefit.
Brisbane City Council/Flickr
Commonly used surfaces in play areas, such as “soft fall” materials and Astroturf, can heat up to 80-100°C in the sun. This makes them a hazardous design choice, especially as the climate gets hotter.
People stroll along Moshoeshoe Street in Emfuleni.
Darya Maslova
By expanding our understanding of streets and enhancing their design, every street corner could become a space to socialise, to exercise, to play, or to trade.
The plantings of New York’s High Line Park were inspired by plants that had naturally colonised the disused railway viaduct.
Beyond my Ken/Wikipedia
If the nature we desire is, in fact, its expression as untamed wildness, then we should turn to the creativity of artists as well as urban designers when building our cities.
Marvellous Melbourne, a city full of life, has been revived over several decades. This is Swanston Street in 2017.
Andrew Curtis/City of Melbourne
The vitality that defines central Melbourne today did not emerge overnight. Rather than being born of one grand vision, it’s the result of many astute, incremental changes that revitalised the city.
It’s impossible to put a price on the value of Federation Square as a gathering place for the citizens of Melbourne.
fabcom/flickr
It took Melbourne a very long time to create a civic square that served the citizens rather than commerce. Now an Apple store is to be built there, unless parliament supports a disallowance motion.
European ideas of the campus as a place apart shaped Australia’s “sandstone” universities. Now universities are adopting urban regeneration strategies, bringing the city to the campus and vice versa.