Stephen Marshall’s research while affiliated with University College London and other places

There is increasing use of digital technologies in urban planning, including in the generation of designs and the participative side of planning. We examine this digital planning by reporting on the application of an experimental online participatory platform in the regeneration of a London housing estate, enabling reflection on participation processes and outcomes. Drawing on lessons learned, the paper synthesises a conceptual representation of online participation and a relational framework for understanding the participatory platform and its context. We subsequently develop a ‘matrix of participative space’, building on Arnstein’s ‘ladder of participation’, to present a two-dimensional framework of online participation, identifying cases of ‘participative deficit’ and ‘democratic deficit’. We conclude with implications for future digital participation in urban planning and design.

The paper is based on the experience of creating and piloting a functioning ‘Incubator’ crowdsourcing platform for designing public spaces in an estate regeneration project in South London. The paper uses a cybernetics framework to analyse and present the way the platform itself was created and how issues of effectiveness, efficiency and equity were dealt with. It explores the generic qualities of interface and reviews applications of variety reduction in established crowdsourcing CS) models. It briefly presents the legal and socio-spatial parameters (like property rights) associated with the creation of the Incubators platform as well as the generic rules applicable to human-spatial relationships, based on studies exploring human-spatial interactions. Practical constraints including costs, catchments, life-span and meaningful feedback are looked into, followed by a discussion on social and political limitations associated with this form of public participation. The paper explains how those constraints where taken into account when establishing the operational parameters of the software platform and the experiences gained from the operation of the platform. Challenges and complications, such as the exclusion of actors, are identified together with the responses encountered in practice. While the Incubators platform succeeded in attracting younger planning participation demographics, older demographics were marginalised by the platform’s graphical user interface and social networking features. These findings highlight why, in spite of what it promises, ‘crowdsourced urbanism’ is prone to similar traits with those of analogue participation. In that sense, creating a CS platform which could convey the grass-roots ideas of actors and users of urban spaces in an efficient way that could be applied to a broad range of planning systems, appears to be a challenge.

In strategic transport planning, rail stations play different roles at different scales, particularly in large cities and metropolitan regions, where movement structure shows polycentric patterns. However, there is a general lack of evidence-based studies investigating the relative network roles of rail stations. Therefore, this paper aims to explore rail stations' roles within and beyond metropolitan communities in London. Drawing on the Transport for London's newly released NUMBAT passenger origin-destination data, we unravel the travel structure and identify the stations' roles through network methods, community detection and Z-P scores. Our research has three results: First, London's passenger movement network can be subdivided into seven communities. The majority of stations within the same communities are geographically localised with few exceptions. Second, stations play distinct roles in handling the patterns of movement at different scales. Typically, there exists a set of stations that are significant for connecting between metropolitan communities, because the disruption of those stations will have a greater impact on overall network efficiency and affect a larger and more diverse group of passengers. Third, a classification of rail stations is developed based on stations' commitment at two scales. This classification allows planners to have a finer level of understanding of the network role of the stations and thus develop and adjust tailored (re)development strategies.

Cities are continuing to develop and are grappling with uncertainties and difficulties as they do so. It has therefore become essential to understand how urban spatial structure changes, particularly with the increasingly available sources of ‘big data’. However, most studies mainly focus on delineating the spatial structure and its variations. Only a few have investigated the incentives behind the movement dynamics. To identify the urban structure of Greater London and uncover how it co-evolves with socio-economic and spatial policy factors, this study applies network community detection, using smart card data derived from the years 2013, 2015 and 2017, respectively. Our findings show that, firstly, between 2013 and 2017, London's urban structure moved towards a more polycentric and compact pattern. Secondly, it is found that Greater London can be clustered into five communities based on the characteristics of passengers' travel patterns. Thirdly, the dynamics of structural change in different urban clusters differ both in terms of changing intensity and potential motivation. In addition to spatial impact and spatial strategic policies, our results show that employment density and residential densities are also the main indicators that affected the interaction between Londoners in different areas on various levels.

Nature has inspired generations of urban designers and planners in pursuit of harmonious and functional built environments. Research regarding self-organisation has encouraged urbanists to consider the role of bottom-up approaches in generating urban order. However, the extent to which self-organisation-inspired approaches draw directly from nature is not always clear. Here, we examined the biological basis of urban research, focusing on self-organisation. We conducted a systematic literature search of self-organisation in urban design and biology, mapped the relationship between key biological terms across the two fields and assessed the quality and validity of biological comparisons in the urban design literature. Finding deep inconsistencies in the mapping of central terms between the two fields, a preponderance for cross-level analogies and comparisons that spanned molecules to ecosystems, we developed a biotic framework to visualise the analogical space and elucidate areas where new inspiration may be sought.

Centralisation of activities and developments around metro station areas is a key transit-oriented development (TOD) policy to encourage more public transport travel through providing maximum access to passengers, thereby enhancing economic efficiency, health, well-being and social inclusion. The node-place-design model is an analytical approach, which investigates the interaction between land use, transportation and the walking friendliness around station areas. Nevertheless, current research focuses on the role station areas plays at the local scale, and little consideration is given to the strategic network (system) level. In this research, we combine a strategic network indicator (criticality) with the node-place-design model to gain deeper insights into London metro station areas in terms of their transit-oriented-development at both local and system levels. Our research has three principal findings: first, most of station areas in Greater London show balanced situations between transport and land use development, except for some stations with a non-walking friendly environment such as Victoria station. Second, the two-tier approach finds that the system criticality of each station area can vary substantially even within the same cluster grouped by the original node-place-design model. Therefore, identifying station groups with relatively high network criticality and relatively low node-place-design score is of potential value. The promising transport connection and less-developed conditions of those station areas could help policymakers locate an intensification-diversification TOD group. Conversely, locations with high node-place-design values but low criticality could point to stations suitable for network expansion (new lines or interchanges). Third, the result reconfirms the value of introducing the third dimension – design – into the TOD evaluation of stations at the local scale. The relatively low correlation between node and design value is consistent with previous findings that a transport service-intensive and functionally diverse metro station area does not necessarily produce an accessible friendly walking environment. Overall, the paper provides a platform for further studies integrating strategic network and node-place-design attributes.

The social sustainability of cities is increasingly assisted by smart apps, social media and the awareness of how social interactions relate to urban space. Within cities, communities or neighbourhoods are no longer easily spatially defined. Similarly, how a community might govern itself does not necessarily follow traditional, simple, spatially self-contained loci. The role of housing management companies, managing a portfolio of social and private housing, adds additional complexity to relations between individual properties and their collective governance, at a level below that of the local municipality. meanwhile, the advent of online crowdsourcing and crowdfunding poses new challenges about the influence of outsiders and ‘who gets a vote’—and who uses their vote—when making decisions about a neighbourhood’s future. This poses a number of challenges for planning and local democracy in the smarter city. This paper reports on new research from the Incubators of Public Spaces project, involving the use of a novel online design and crowdsourcing platform as an experimental tool for public participation, in the case of a london housing estate. In particular, this chapter analyses relationships between different actors and instruments involved in the governance of the different areas or territories of the housing estate. We report on the challenges of holistically engaging a focused yet diverse pool of users in the regeneration of a series of courtyards associated with social housing blocks. This involves non-trivial decisions about user access rights within the platform, which becomes a challenge of reinventing a micro-scale democracy. by modifying standard approaches to social network analysis, the paper develops and demonstrates visualisation of the socio-spatial relationships, linking actor networks and area structures, applied in a novel way to a site’s micro-morphology. This research, yet in progress, can help inform a new generation of planning procedures for more equitable, inclusive and hence socially sustainable cities.

The ‘compact city’ concept is prominent in contemporary planning policy debates about ideal urban forms. However, the property of compactness itself is not well defined, and is sometimes confused or conflated with density. This chapter develops a new geometric interpretation of compactness with specific indicators—relating to diameter and perimeter—that can capture this property in the urban context. The chapter demonstrates these compactness indicators first by application to theoretical geometric shapes and then a range of English urban areas. The chapter reflects on the interpretation of the core concept of compactness, and suggests additional indicators such as ‘built compactness’ and ‘population compactness’.