The Considerate Urbanist Podcast

Considerate urbanism is a human-kind approach to urbanism that invites us to go beyond the 3D physicality of space, to consider how we experience, feel and connect in urban space and cities. It is sensitive to the spectrum of different lived experiences and needs in cities and recognises the complexity of everyday life and urban behaviours. This focus on the human dimension of cities is badly needed. The very shape our urban fabric takes seems to accommodate vehicles much better than it accommodates the needs of people and our environment. This is because we have been building our cities primarily around the needs of the car. Are we really going to base our urban future on the needs of the car too? It feels like we need to rethink the fundamentals of what we base our urban form, lifestyles and functions on. And if we were not to base our cities around cars – what would it be instead? Considerate Urbanism is about just that. Prioritising human interaction and connection as the key fundamental. Asking questions like, what do people need to live successfully in a city or place? How can we care for everyone’s needs and wants? What do we need to do to ensure we are looking after our environment so it can look after us? Can we all feel good in urban environments, not just some of us? Creating urbanism for all. Centring care, empathy, affinity, emotion, and human experience to move us from car-based urbanism to care-based urbanism. The world is socialising and in previous blogs I’ve talked about the time for the social city being now. The social city is predicated on the quality and power of connection, interconnection, relationships and community. Where capitalism feels like it’s about separation: humans and nature; business and society, resources and value; Considerate Urbanism about how these things are interconnected and reliant on each other. It is the antidote to separation and instead focuses on reintegration. So, we bring together a broad range of topics and disciplines under Considerate Urbanism’s three tenets of social justice, economic inclusion and environmental resilience; with an overarching focus on enabling the future “next city”. This includes health, equality and inclusion, dignity and social justice, accessibility and engagement, identity, belonging and culture, regenerative and inclusive economies. Fostering considerate urbanism is a systemic and emergent approach that needs to happen on multiple levels, across multiple disciplines and stakeholders, with a variety of lenses and timescales. It is a process, a state and a mindset. Universal and specific. Material and theoretical. It won’t happen by itself and it won’t happen alone. That is why we are building Considerate Urbanism as a: Movement: unifying ideas, connecting people and propelling action. Mindset: growing a different mindset and behaviours for decision-making and commissioning. Method: learning, developing and applying the concept of considerate urbanism in practice. Our Seven C’s framework helps to weave tangible activities and action from this complexity. The framework is flexible enough to allow the Seven C’s to be explored when considering anything from a project or a space, to a whole city or its infrastructure: Considerate Framing: this provides the focus for Considerate Urbanism application – it helps understand why we are doing something and what Considerate Urbanism means in this context. Considerate Process: helps to ensure the process itself is considerate – this could be in terms of how you are engaging, who you are engaging with, and the narrative and the tools you are using. Considerate Results: this concerns what outcomes, outputs, legacy, objectives and deliverables you are seeking to generate and to what extent they are considerate. Considerate Experience: this focuses on the experience that is generated and created for people, what does it feel like, how are people using and engaging with it. Considerate Behaviours: this explores what kind of behaviours and interactions are fostered by the experience; how can this create resilient and healthy communities and strong social fabric. Considerate Future: this asks us to explore and imagine what kind of urban future are we creating and how it can enables a transition to the next city, expressed through the measures of social justice, economic inclusion, environmental resilience. Considerate Impact: this asks what the overall impact of the project to different stakeholders is, over different spatial and temporal scales and the different types of value (beyond monetary) it creates.  As our structures and systems change to address the challenges we face together, our cities will bear the strain of their development, form and function being built on concepts and ideas (i.e., cars, capitalism, materialism) at the point of concept fatigue. Time to use our collective imagination and skills to socialise our cities and build a new and more considerate basis for our shared urban future.

Considerate Urbanism is an alternative philosophy and way of thinking about cities and urban life; to make this is a kinder experience but also a kinder future for our people and planet. We know that we urgently need to adapt and transition to a different model of living, existing, and producing on our planet. A more considerate form of urbanism recognises cities are more than bricks and mortar, they are an experience, a philosophy, a mode of production and a lifestyle. And this can either be a positive for you, or it can hold your health and life chances back in ways that fundamentally make the city nasty, brutish, and short. I’m interested in how we can create better lived experiences and everyday life in cities for everyone. When I think about cities, I see them as being social networks - and streets, spaces, parks, buildings are social media. They operate through behaviours, interactions, and relationships. To understand how a place works we need to understand the networks and flows within it, and the activities, behaviours, decisions, actions that govern them. We’ve had the physical city; growing from a need to be close to resources, easily defendable by its physical setting, catering for basic survival and human need. We’ve had the economic city; being spaces of mass capital accumulation and growing upwards exponentially to signal power and wealth. Urban space becomes a commodity to be traded and coveted for its value and abstract transformation into capital. I am convinced that the future of the city and our understanding of its growth, potential, and processes of change, will be governed by more overtly humanised and social drivers. I think we are moving into the age of the social city. This age of the social city comes at a time of major flux. Climate change is showing us that our lifestyles and systems are fundamentally unsustainable. Economic disparity and persistent poverty is showing us that our economic system is unjust and inequitable. Social Justice movements show us that people still feel unseen, unheard, and unvalued. The seeming emergence of Industrial Revolution 4.0, Web 3.0, Blockchain 2.0 has profound implications for prevailing social and economic models, and means citizens are gaining agency over the macro things that have governed us before; access to work, access to assets, access to currency. It feels like this transition to a new way of living, working, and doing business will necessitate a dismantling of the systems, structures and processes we had before. And we need whatever comes next to enable the massive changes needed for us to adapt successfully to a more socially, economically, and environmentally resilient world. Like any transition it could be difficult and messy, exhilarating and emancipating, uncomfortable for some and not others. As we navigate this new and emerging world, now more than ever, we need to be kind and considerate to each other. Because what will hold us together will be social glue: our relationships, our shared affinity, our common ground, mutual trust, shared aspirations, empathy and care for ourselves and our communities. A knowing and a feeling that we are all going to face change to some extent; so our fate is a shared one. And because our survival rests on our capacity to live successfully in a community of other humans. Millions of years ago, that meant life and death. Today the challenge facing us is how we can, all muti-millions of us, live together day to day – on a micro level in our neighbourhoods, at school, in work – and on a macro level, as citizens, as shared cultures, as nations, as a civilisation. What comes with this transition though, is an explosion of new ideas, ways of thinking, ways of engaging, ways of living and organising society and our economy, ways of learning and doing that will turn our existing systems on their head. This explosion needs to be driven by a key question – how will humans live on this planet next? And a profound shift in mindset - how can we live on this planet better together? As more of us will live out our lives in cities; cities will become the thing most of us will share and have in common. City life. This means we need to make cities the solution and not the problem. Use cities as the fundamental basis for creating that new baseline for living. So for me, the key battle for our adaptation is not technology or funding – it is a battle for our emotions. We can have solutions if we want them. We can have funding if we want it. We can change the world if we want it. But we have to want it. And we need to collaborate, share and be more considerate of how people will be affected and impacted. This means setting aside individualism, excess, materialism, short-termism, selfishness, and greed, for more concern and care for each other as a global community. I see more and more of this mindset emerging in how we talk about finance, how we approach design, how we shape services, how we think about transport, how we engage people in our decision-making, and how we grow our organisations and leaders. There is a humanising emotional revolution going on. And the time for the Social City is now.

My interest and work is on the social future of cities and how we live in and experience urban space. I am interested in people’s emotional attachment to place and how to ensure we have strong and resilient social fabric in our communities. That's partly about making people more aware and interested in their places, but also engaging people properly in the placemaking process. Underneath this is an even more core interest about the urban experience; from the exciting and inspiring to the challenging, obstructive, and unwelcoming ones. I’m on a mission to make urban experience and urban life better for everyone. This shouldn’t be a lottery or anything to do with who or how old you are, what you look like or where you come from. I believe everyone has the right to have a positive urban experience. Our culture and society is changing and evolving, as it does with every generation and we are seeing the effects of that in generational attitudes to work, the economy, the environment, and politics. We've got a growing climate change emergency, an ongoing global pandemic, the fallout of Brexit, ongoing political instability, and numerous social justice movements demanding change from our pernicious and stubbornly ingrained lack of social justice and inclusion. I feel there is a general feeling of society being under immense pressure and flux. We feel anxious, mentally fragile, and emotionally exhausted and it shows in our places. We wear our hearts on our streets as well as our sleeves. I’m left wondering if we all need a break - to know we matter, we are valued and cared for? We’ve seen a shift towards greater responsibility and transparency as citizens and consumers. An urge to strip away the sheen and the façade; to see the realness and integrity of things. With products, we want to know where they come from, how they were made and if that was an ethical process. We have cruelty free, fair trade, locally produced, and ethically sourced goods. We want our food to be clean, honest, better for us. We want to connect emotionally and value the authenticity of a product being what it is, and not something it isn’t. All of this is powered by consideration - of user needs and wants, of emotional connection and meaning, of impact on people and planet. I see this transfer to other aspects of our lives; business, personal wellness, organisations, and institutions. But what about urban space?