Strengthening the sense of cohesion: The potential of walkable street designs and cultural…
Community: East London
This year’s Spring Studio examined the notion of ‘community’ in urban design terms. It focussed on one of the sites designated as one of a series of ‘legacy communities’ to be developed in the wake of the 2012 Olympics. Known as Rick Roberts Way, this lies along the eastern edge of the Lea Valley and to the south of the main Olympic Park within the London Borough of Newham
Since 2012, the whole area that was devoted to the 2012 Games has been a development site as the sports-focussed complex produced for the Games is converted into a mixed-use ‘piece of city’ encompassing residential, employment, cultural, recreational and educational uses. The larger goal of the project, as articulated since the days of the Olympic bid in 2003, is to regenerate an area in East London associated with deprivation and the decline of industry in the late-twentieth century. The construction of ‘communities’ has long been portrayed as an important part of the process. Ideas of community have been expressed through many different stages of planning and urban design for the site, reflecting evolving spatial as well as political ideas of what communities are and should be to be regenerative and sustainable, of who they include and how, and how they are constructed and shaped through design.
Students were asked to respond critically and imaginatively to the challenge of transforming Rick Roberts Way into a legacy community in view of existing social and spatial contexts. This involved exploring ideas of community through the planning history of the site, reviewing academic of literature on how design shapes the development and evolution of communities, understanding the demographics of the local area, considering how governance affects processes of community-building, and developing robust yet creative strategies for the site.
Module Leader: Dr. Juliet Davis
Rick Roberts Way, Stratford
This urban design project has been prepared for Spring Studio to illustrate our…
Designing urban community for the Rick Roberts Way
This urban design proposal acknowledges the need for community involvement in the design…