WMUD

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

place-making

Place-making strategy for Campbeltown

The term genius loci usually refers to a location’s distinctive atmosphere, or its spirit of place. The idea that design or action should always be adapted to context is one of the most widely agreed principles of urban design, town-making or landscape architecture.

The clues to successful urban design and regeneration lie in the nature and character of places and – quite often – in their people. Approaches which drop external, un-rooted solutions into a locality without regard for local circumstances usually fail.

We therefore use skills and specialist techniques to draw out this underlying potential and express it as a positive shaping force in urban design solutions and town-making processes.

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 ...
December 22nd 2007
Tags: cities, comment

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Eindhoven 2001

This is the first part of an atmospheric short film made by Wladimir Manshanden in 2001. It explores the city of Eindhoven mostly between dusk and dawn through its transport corridors, infrastructure, factories, construction sites, spontaneous landscapes, as-found objects and odd events. The gloss of the city centre ...
December 15th 2007
Tags: cities, comment, place making, strategy

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Terrain vague: place and landscape

In an article in the Guardian on 8 December 2007, Robert Macfarlane described a walk around the perimeter of London's Olympic Games site with Iain Sinclair. The walk was to be in Sinclair's words, "...a complex transitional ecology of CGI imagery, doomed allotments and virtual arcadias." Light industrial spaces, ...

Gillespie Kidd & Coia: St Paul’s, Glenrothes 1956

The major retrospective exhibition of the work of Gillespie Kidd and Coia currently showing at the Lighthouse in Glasgow features two films on the approach of this distinguished architecture practice. This short video clip made available by bd-online is a mini-lecture on St Paul's Glenrothes, Fife (1957) by ...