Katharina Borsi

Drawing the region: Hermann Jansen's vision of Greater Berlin in 1910

The Greater Berlin Competition of 1910 signals a key transformation in the conception of the city. For the first time, the city was no longer drawn as a continuous bounded urban fabric, but as a set of linked and dispersed urban components distributed across the region. The competition drawings show the beginnings of a set of principles that architectural history usually attributes to modernism: a shared programme to plan the city as a linked but differentiated system of social, technical and biological functions. This paper traces lines of continuity between the urban vision of Hermann Jansen, one of the two joint competition winners, and subsequent planning thought, in particular the ‘Zehlendorfer Plan’ of 1947. It argues that Jansen can be understood as having initiated the concept of the strategic urban plan—his ‘skeleton’ of urban growth—that can adapt and change according to need, and in negotiation with a range of disciplines and stakeholders. Jansen saw the residential quarter as a distinct component of this growth, which could be resolved at a different moment in time, by a different set of expertise. The ‘Zehlendorfer Plan’ exemplified this flexible adaptable form of planning in which the drawing serves as an instrument of negotiation.

Universities and the City: from islands of knowledge to districts of innovation

We are witnessing a new trend in the design of university buildings and other ‘knowledge typologies’, that is, buildings in which knowledge is produced or disseminated, such as research laboratories or libraries. Increasingly, their design inverts the image of the closed ‘ivory tower’ through a layered intersection of inside and outside spaces, seeking to draw the life of the city and the life of the institution closely together. Using London’s ‘Knowledge Quarter’ centred in Bloomsbury, Euston and King’s Cross as a focus, this article traces a trajectory of typological evolution of university buildings which includes Adams, Holden and Pearson’s ‘ivory tower’ project for a new headquarters of the University of London (1932), of which only Senate House was built; Leslie Martin’s and Trevor Dannatt’s radical restructuring of the Georgian urban structure through the Development Plan of the University of London (1959); Denys Lasdun’s evolution and typological reworking of this plan through the Institute of Education (1970–1976); and Stanton Williams’ Central St Martins (2008–2011). In this trajectory, we see Martin’s and Dannatt’s Development plan for the University of London as an important pivot in the shift from the ivory tower of academia to the current urban landscape of learning and innovation. This paper argues that the contribution of typology to this urban transformation exceeds the representation of institutional missions and the generic descriptors of place. Instead, it posits that the typological development contributes to a broader urban ecology of change and transformation, one in which the respective urban agency of each project reimagines how urban vitalities, synergies and intensities might be instigated and maintained.

Conversations on type, architecture and urbanism: (from the ‘Architectural Type and the Discourse of Urbanism’ Symposium, Royal College of Art, London, 14th December, 2015)

Conversations on type, architecture and urbanism (from the ‘Architectural Type and the Discourse of Urbanism’ Symposium, Royal College of Art, London, 14th December, 2015).

Architectural type and the discourse of urbanism

Architecture’s relationship to the city is one of the key tropes in both architectural and urban theory and practice. This relationship bears upon questions of architecture’s disciplinary autonomy,...

Place-making and its implications for social value: a comparison study of two urban squares in London

This article aims to investigate the impact of place-making on the social value attached to two recently developed public squares in London. Empire and Bermondsey developments were developed with the explicit intention to have a public open space that is available for its residents and the surrounding community. Place-making supports the concept of generating places that improve the relationship between users and space, by increasing a sense of place. In this respect, social value is an intangible benefit that can be captured from places that shape community attitude and might often cater to necessary activities but is essential to everyday functions. Based on an extensive review of the literature and empirical work, this article will explore the similarities and differences between these two squares to deliver a better understanding of the reasons behind the urban design as a place-making tool in generating social values attached to physical spaces. These two squares are comparable in size, physical setting and geographical and social context providing unique contexts for socio-spatial analysis. This study follows a casestudy approach. For both case studies, there are 100 surveys and 33 semi-structured interviews in total conducted with participants at the squares. Also, many site observations for this study have been taken, in both cases, at different times of the day tracking human movement, activities, spatial qualities, social interactions and spatial interrelations. The data gathered facilitate explicit connections between the behavioural, perceptual and social dimensions. These relationships are essential to understanding the role of urban design in adding social value. This study demonstrates the complex nature of the generation of social value in urban spaces through place-making.

Regenerating Liverpool Pier Head waterfront: the role of urban design

This paper investigates the processes by which the regeneration of the historical Pier Head waterfront in Liverpool took place during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The research focuses on three key regeneration projects at Pier Head Waterfront, namely the Fourth Grace, the New Museum of Liverpool and Mann Island Development. Each of these projects has undergone a relatively different process and, hence, faced different challenges and produced different outcomes. This study is based on a series of lengthy interviews with key stakeholders closely linked with the regeneration of the waterfront, a review of project related documents including urban design policy and guidance, a substantial review of relevant news articles that were written throughout the period of the recent transformation of the waterfront, and numerous site visits. By understanding the peculiarities of the global forces that drive large scale developments and the local context in which they occurred at Pier Head, several insights regarding the process of regeneration emerge. Findings foreground the role of urban design in urban waterfront regeneration, illustrating that despite the complexity of managing change, urban design has the capacity to mediate between the local and global forces and the needs/desires of investors and local communities. Urban design is also imperative for challenging the negative impact of globalisation on the urban landscape