ULI Design Principle Training: Public Space Driven Urban Design

ULI Design Principle Training: Public Space Driven Urban Design

April 3, 2020

by Annie Yao (YLG Member）

On 20th Mar, ULI China Mainland hosted another Webinar focusing on design and best practice sharing. Mr. SHU Dongdong, AECOM’s Associate for Innovative Design and Strategy & Development, shared multiple urban development improving strategies from public space perspective. Mr. ZHOU Yunpeng, Assist General Manager of business development of Keppel Land China, served as the host of this meeting. He guided the attendees to actively interact with speaker and further discussed on this topic.

Highlights of this seminar:

Understanding cities and urban development issues
We believe that cities are functioning as services and infrastructure is a service system that meets users’ need for public quality and reflects the relationship between citizens and the city. The public service is the core element of the city, the publicity of city service is a city’s core quality, public spaces are cities’ core content, and the infrastructure is an important system of a city.
Understanding public space
There are eight common characteristics of public spaces, including: connectivity, safety, identity, accessibility, adaptability, mobility, density and ownership.
Urban design strategies prioritizing quality of publicity
The design of the city needs to consider different aspects including function, economy, environment, etc. The aesthetics of urban design is focusing on relationships between space users and public environment.The design of the urban planning is the process of creating solutions to serve the relationship between different subjects. Among them: the scale of space depends on the scale of citizens’ activities. The urban plan should serve the behavior of citizens and create universal values. And the design itself is a product that could be used as a management tool for the city.Urban design can optimize the urban economic benefits, user experience and the humanity through practical resource optimization, public interest management, and culture engagement.

10 attempts for high-quality public space
Public services and public spaces together have founded the service quality of the city. High-quality public spaces show features including integration, authenticity, multi-dimension, shared economy, adaptability, boundaryless, eco-productive, digitization, asset value, and humanity. 
Q: What aspects should urban designers focus on?
Even at the earliest stage of design, an urban planner should take operations into the design, so that to ensure the design’s feasibility.
Q: Does COVID-19 breakout bring any changes to urban planning?
The COVID-19 breakout forced us to recognize the importance of the safety and adaptability of public space. Living in a technology era, we should explore how to use technology to help improve city service and handle emergencies. For example, emergency prevention plan could be polished after crisis simulation, and public facilities could be quickly mobilized through the Internet of Things.
Q: What impact does technology have on public space design?
Public space design will be influenced by technology. Big data will lead to the decentralization of cities, which results to the transformation of demand from large public spaces into fragmented, mixed or mobile spaces. At the same time, technology makes individual as the center of service, making the personalized and customized functions of public spaces more important.
Q: Is flexible/tailor-made public space possible?
At present, the main way of flexible space is to make building/space modules, that is, the space can be constructed and recombined with building/space modules according to different usage needs.
Q: How does Big Data improve public space design?
The information visualization technology supported by big data can not only simulate the design effect, thereby helping the designer to review the design quality, but also provide the operator with data support such as user behaviors and facility performance.
Q: Can you recommend some cases with public space renovation?
I think King’s Cross Station in London is a good example. Through creation of a high-quality urban environment, preserving distinctive historical buildings, and protecting urban public landscapes, the City of London has turned a previously impoverished and messy area into a vibrant neighborhood. In this case, approximately 40% of the area of this project is designed as the public space covered with green, which created a great social effect.

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