Tessy Britton, Founder of Participatory City, London delivers the third lecture in this Seminar Series. Tessy describes the work of Participatory City and shares the research and analysis which has led to the development of a large scale Demonstration Neighbourhood in London. Participatory City is creating new structures designed to scale up practical participation, building collaborative activity into the fabric of everyday life and changing how we work together to achieve a more equal society. We all believe that people doing more things together will make our own and each other’s lives better. However, participation in neighbourhood projects is low. Wide spread participation in neighbourhoods is difficult to achieve and remains small and fragmented. While we stay attached to the notion of top down and bottom up we won’t be able to change the situation. Unless we redesign how participation works and invest in it properly we won’t be able to fully realise its potential as a key building block for building sustainable cities of the future. Realising the vision we have of vibrant places, made by everyone, for everyone, will require fundamentally changing the structures through which we work together.

This lecture examined the effects of urban design on health, placing it in the larger context of planning and public health, and proposed solutions that combine public health and urban planning strategies relevant for the 21st century. Dr Frumkin spoke of public health lying at the heart of urban planning in the early 20th century, but since then, the growth of cities has occurred in relatively unplanned ways. Urban sprawl - the expansion of cities into rural areas, heavy reliance on automobiles, low-density, low-mix land use patterns - represents one extreme, especially in North America and Australia, but increasingly in Europe as well. At the other extreme we have high density, overcrowded, creaking infrastructure. Frumkin described how urban planning and design may affect health in a variety of ways: threatening air quality, impeding physical activity, increasing injury risks, and eroding social capital are but a few examples.

Talking Cities - The Micropolitics of Urban Space From Kevin Macleod to Prince Charles, it seems everyone is talking cities. What makes an eco-town or city? What is sustainable design? Architecture and happiness? Perhaps more importantly, what does inclusiveness, equality and diversity mean in the built environment? Place-making, the new term on the block, is generally agreed to be central to social inclusion, cultural well-being and identity. But what makes a good space? People experience their environment in different ways depending upon their social, cultural and economic circumstances. Policies can enable good spaces but they can also be exclusive. If all citizens are to be comfortable in and identify with the spaces and places they inhabit, then the full diversity of this experience has to be considered. It means adopting a human-centred design approach. In this lecture Stuart MacDonald will look at the effect of an inhospitable built environment - the impact of bad design - as a way of looking at inclusion. Because the impact of the designed environment upon us huge, he will suggest that everyone should be talking cities as a fundamental part of democracy.