WMUD

conceptual, strategic and development work in urban design, town making, city planning, urbanism and place-making

Raymond Unwin and Gretna

Our current work on a [tag]masterplan[/tag] for [tag]Gretna[/tag] has brought us into contact with the work of [tag]Raymond Unwin[/tag]. Unwin set out a plan for the development of Gretna early in World War I as a new settlement to house the considerable number of workers in the munitions ...

De-Construction in London

An amazing image from Gizmodo though the story is deeply boring and actually very disappointing. The original news item came from the Daily Mail which also shows the proposal for this site - a building nicknamed the Cheese Grater designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners - shown below. ...

The high ground

Looking at this remarkable image of recent flooding in England (courtesy BBC and Getty Images), it seems likely that those who built the church and the surrounding buildings not only knew a little bit about the forces of nature but also had some very sensible ideas about building towns. In the ...

Design Awareness Training

Willie Miller is a member of a number of teams chosen by the Improvement Service to deliver Design Awareness Training to Scottish local authorities. As part of the team led by Drew Mackie, we have just delivered a well attended two day introduction to urban design to an enthusiastic and ...

Working with communities

The role of local communities in regeneration is crucial to long term sustainability. If local people are involved in the preparation of plans they are likely to feel a greater sense of ownership in the eventual outcome. The status and practice of community involvement has changed markedly over the last ...

Structure, process + product in urban design

Over the last decade Urban Design in the UK has become almost synonymous with 'Big Architecture'. The people who have made the Urban Design headlines are almost exclusively architects. The profession has become very "product" oriented and proposals are increasingly judged by their building design qualities. While this is important, ...

November 4th 2008
Tags: comment, strategy One Comment

A banana republic welcomes Trump

The Scottish Government's approval yesterday of the Trump Organisation's plans for Menie in Aberdeenshire is unsurprising and shameful. Obviously this is a political decision in the face of compelling environmental, economic and planning reasons for refusing the application. Scotland's politicians, like their counterparts at Westminster are so obsessed (and ...
July 12th 2008
Tags: cities, comment, research, strategy 2 Comments

Lewis Mumford on the city

These short film clips featuring Lewis Mumford, author of the City in History, were recently published on the Planum website. Before the end of 1961 the New York publishing company Harcourt, Brace and Co. had the first edition of Lewis Mumford's highly successful book The City In History ready for publication. ...
June 28th 2008
Tags: cities, comment, place making, strategy One Comment

Signs and the city

The Spring 2008 edition of JoLA, the excellent peer-reviewed academic Journal of Landscape Architecture established by the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools, contains an article on the work of Gregor Graf which raises the question, "How do we read a city without signs?". With a mixture of purist ...

Network mapping

by Drew Mackie It has become fashionable to talk of networks of organisations, people, computers, transport and so on. In organisations there is talk of being more “networky” and getting away from the older more hierarchical ways of doing things. Conferences are organised around “networking” both formal and informal. Yet, the more ...

Remarkable Rieselfeld

Much has been written in recent weeks about Rieselfeld and Vauban, both extensions of Freiburg in Breisgau in south west Germany. These areas have been under construction since the 1990s but the current interest in them from a UK perspective comes from the Government's plans to build a number ...