Category Archives: Urban

Joint Laboratory of Healthy Space: Exhibition of student research and design work

From 9-13 February, 2026 the Joint Laboratory of Healthy Space a collaborative project established between the School of Design and Art at Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) and OPENspace Research Centre and Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at ECA, held an exhibition of student research and design work at Matthew Gallery in Edinburgh.

The exhibition featured results from the 2024 summer school in BIT, where designs were intended to improve a blue space in Beijing, outputs from the MArch programme at ESALA which feature the design of edge structures along blue spaces, results of the Landscape and Wellbeing programme course on “Landscape design for health and wellbeing” featuring the Union Canal in Edinburgh and doctoral research in landscape architecture which focused on various types of green and blue spaces and their health and wellbeing potential.

Town Centres: Co-Producing Strategic Priorities

Ahead of the World Towns Leadership Summit on 15th and 16th June 2016, guest blogger David Thompson of DPT Urban Design reflects on two recent projects exploring the co-production of place-based priorities with local communities in Scotland…

Photo of a design charette

Everyone seems to have their own view of what is a priority. Rightly so in some respects.

Each person, whether a member of the public or an officer in a Local Authority, arrives at their conclusions based on the available data or more simply, what matters to them.

We’re awash with datasets. Clearly a useful resource but this can lead to strategies being created largely from desktop studies alone, sometimes based on data a few years old. The overriding purpose of Community Planning is to make a difference, in other words make a positive change in people’s lives, so we need to know what is happening right now.

So how can genuine, place-based priorities be created that are co-produced with local people?

Two recent projects in Lennoxtown and Blairgowrie (both Town Centre Charrettes) were both designed to address this challenge.

The starting point of each process was to support the new approach to creating Local Outcome Improvement Plans, in which people are benchmarked, not service performance.

A key aim in Scotland is to create consistent approach for understanding people and their place. In this respect, the Place Standard was introduced as a national tool to provide the same starting point for any conversation about a place, anywhere in Scotland. The 14 themes cover most of the topics that shape people’s lives and the places in which they live.

For both projects, the Place Standard questionnaire was reshaped and a number of tools introduced to support the creation of a robust, person-centred, qualitative data set that could help to determine:

Thematic priorities for the place (e.g. work and economy, natural spaces, etc);
Priority projects within each theme (e.g. safe indoor place for young people, business start-up accommodation, etc); and
Priority areas for change, on a thematic and grouped basis.

The data set was robust due to a focus on the quality of the individual conversation with members of the public and by keeping the process fully transparent. Early reflections on the process suggest the following:

Keeping track of what matters to people: the simple dashboard reporting enables year-on-year comparisons to re-direct policy to reflect what matters to people in a place;
A sustainable, repeatable process: Resource efficient approach to creating primary, people-based data in a place;
Supporting local governance and capacity building: a specific role for Community Councils could be to create the space for this conversation and then keep it going; and
Scaling the conversation up: The emerging Locality Planning arrangements in some Local Authorities require a consistent and comparable approach for a conversation between neighbouring towns, villages or neighbourhoods to determine co-produced, area-based policies. The dashboard for each place supports a larger conversation.

Some of these themes are going to be discussed at the World Towns Leadership Summit in Edinburgh on 15th and 16th June 2016 and also feature in the emerging World Towns Agreement, which you can still shape.

The learning from these projects suggests it’s the approach to a conversation that matters most.

Catharine in Macedonia for WHO Task Force meeting

Greetings from Skopje in Macedonia where Catharine is presenting evidence on urban green spaces and health to the World Health Organization European Environment and Health Task Force (EHTF).

The Task Force is the leading international body for implementation and monitoring of the European Environment and Health Process, and we welcome the emphasis it is placing on the relationship between the quality of our urban outdoor spaces and people’s health and wellbeing.

We are delighted to have been invited to talk about our research to the group, framing the issue in the wider context of topics such as land use, urban planning, urban adaptation to climate change and demographic changes.

We are also pleased that the presentation is being followed by a discussion on the formulation of policy goals and political commitments in this area.

Keep an eye on the EHTF website for outcomes from the meeting and details of the Sixth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health in 2017.

OPENspace at EUROCITIES 2015

We’re at the EUROCITIES 2015 conference in Copenhagen / Malmo, where Catharine Ward Thompson is bringing a focus on the pedestrian environment to a roundtable on urban mobility.

It’s a pleasure to be in such esteemed company. Sitting to Catharine’s right (in the blue scarf) is Hella Dunger-Loeper, Permanent secretary and State of Berlin Delegate to the Federation and former Permanent Secretary for Building and Housing at Berlin’s Senate Department for Urban Development… Catharine Ward Thompson speaking at the Eurocities conference

… and in this photograph, taken after the roundtable, she is pictured with panellist Klaus Bondam, Director of the Danish Cyclists’ Federation and former Chair of the EUROCITIES Mobility Forum…

Máire Cox also attends the conference to promote OPENspace research to policymakers within 130 of Europe’s largest cities.

And finally… we’re delighted to share the news that the City of Edinburgh won a EUROCITIES award at the conference for community participation in making the city more attractive and sustainable.

More about EUROCITIES 2015, the focus of which was ‘sustainable growth and quality of life’