WMUD

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

Bathtubs, hoovers and dustbins

An approach to the economics of local areas by Drew Mackie This paper is a summary of a talk given to the Rural Forum Scotland. It describes a way of looking at localities which is useful in working with local communities and which allows the often abstruse subject of economics to ...

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 ...