The Economist when selecting the most liveable cities excluded cities like Paris, London and NYC. Their metrics were many but they focused on measuring what lead to a better quality of life. The Globe and Mail does much the same.
Calgary...lots of green space, river, good transportation etc high in both...and is always in the Top ten.
Lets look to Calgary and how that city is managed.
I’m always a bit wary of the metric based city rankings, even if they’re still interesting. They all have a bias in the ranking with how house prices or affordability or crime rate gets counted against other more feeling based qualities.
Personally, I’m really not a fan of Calgary, very car centric, sprawling single family home suburbs, a pretty sad downtown … though lots of work going on to make it more than office monoculture.
Quality of life is quite a subjective thing, and that’s good. Having spent a lot of time working in Calgary, and enjoying it, I know I wouldn’t want to live there.
But you’re right, for places that have space to their advantage, there’s things to learn from Calgary, and Edmonton actually. Both are building in density well for the North American context.
Oh, mate; I can so agree! And as an urbanist with an architecture degree I can relate; we as a group would gain more if we were a bit less serious and technical to achieve our vision. Like politicians, we need to speak with the "people" -community representatives (not just the big stakeholders, mind you); stop taking ourselves so seriously and listen to their needs and concerns, so we can deliver a message and guide them to achieve a better quality of life. So yeah, thank you!
As someone with an architecture degree who went into marketing, and now works for a non-profit to share these ideas... YES. I remember the days of explaining an architecture or planning project to my parents. The glazed look on their faces... I just felt silly afterward. That's when I, too, realized this communication problem needed to be addressed. Thanks for writing this.
Nice article and some great points. The pop at Birmingham at the end seemed a bit odd, yes there's a lot to be done to undo the 20th century planning but there are plenty of examples of bold and innovative design and planning in the city with many more exciting plans in progress.
Maybe there are, but the lack of the ability to communicate or tell the story is perhaps part of the point. Reputations are hard to shift right? So you’ve got to do something different to change the narrative, locally, nationally and internationally.
Urbanism doesn’t just have a design problem, it has a translation problem. As long as we explain cities in policy-speak and diagrams, we lose most residents. People want to feel what a new street or neighbourhood means in daily life. Many planners think in images, not essays, that’s where visual storytelling matters : one strong, immersive scene can replace a thousand words and finally get everyone looking at the same future.
Amen. Rory Sutherland and many other marketers have been some of my best urbanism mentors.
The Economist when selecting the most liveable cities excluded cities like Paris, London and NYC. Their metrics were many but they focused on measuring what lead to a better quality of life. The Globe and Mail does much the same.
Calgary...lots of green space, river, good transportation etc high in both...and is always in the Top ten.
Lets look to Calgary and how that city is managed.
I’m always a bit wary of the metric based city rankings, even if they’re still interesting. They all have a bias in the ranking with how house prices or affordability or crime rate gets counted against other more feeling based qualities.
Personally, I’m really not a fan of Calgary, very car centric, sprawling single family home suburbs, a pretty sad downtown … though lots of work going on to make it more than office monoculture.
Quality of life is quite a subjective thing, and that’s good. Having spent a lot of time working in Calgary, and enjoying it, I know I wouldn’t want to live there.
But you’re right, for places that have space to their advantage, there’s things to learn from Calgary, and Edmonton actually. Both are building in density well for the North American context.
Oh, mate; I can so agree! And as an urbanist with an architecture degree I can relate; we as a group would gain more if we were a bit less serious and technical to achieve our vision. Like politicians, we need to speak with the "people" -community representatives (not just the big stakeholders, mind you); stop taking ourselves so seriously and listen to their needs and concerns, so we can deliver a message and guide them to achieve a better quality of life. So yeah, thank you!
As someone with an architecture degree who went into marketing, and now works for a non-profit to share these ideas... YES. I remember the days of explaining an architecture or planning project to my parents. The glazed look on their faces... I just felt silly afterward. That's when I, too, realized this communication problem needed to be addressed. Thanks for writing this.
Renderings. People need to see the vision.
"Why not back home" is the million dollar question.
Nice article and some great points. The pop at Birmingham at the end seemed a bit odd, yes there's a lot to be done to undo the 20th century planning but there are plenty of examples of bold and innovative design and planning in the city with many more exciting plans in progress.
Agreed - there’s some really interesting new and built planning projects in Birmingham which are having a huge difference.
Maybe there are, but the lack of the ability to communicate or tell the story is perhaps part of the point. Reputations are hard to shift right? So you’ve got to do something different to change the narrative, locally, nationally and internationally.
Urbanism doesn’t just have a design problem, it has a translation problem. As long as we explain cities in policy-speak and diagrams, we lose most residents. People want to feel what a new street or neighbourhood means in daily life. Many planners think in images, not essays, that’s where visual storytelling matters : one strong, immersive scene can replace a thousand words and finally get everyone looking at the same future.
Like minds. Just wrote a similar piece about the messaging behind mass transit (spoiler: it’s bad)
https://open.substack.com/pub/selfbrandstudio/p/move-me?r=das2f&utm_medium=ios
A lecture on the need to stop lecturing.
Cheers mate.
Urbanism is not coherent theory. That's worth discussing, if not with the general public, but amongst ourselves.