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The Developer podcast

The Developer

111 episodes

3 weeks ago

How do we make places where people want to live, work, play and learn? A podcast on cities, property, architecture and urban design. Support us on Patreon www.patreon.com/thedeveloperuk

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Society & Culture

All content for The Developer podcast is the property of The Developer and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

How do we make places where people want to live, work, play and learn? A podcast on cities, property, architecture and urban design. Support us on Patreon www.patreon.com/thedeveloperuk

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Show more...

Society & Culture

Episodes (20/111)

The Developer podcast

Neuroarchitecture: The impact of design on the unconscious mind

Get on a crowded train, and your brain may not like it. With strangers around you, cortisol levels shoot up to prepare you for fight or flight, stimulating the liver to produce and release glucose into your blood stream, just in case. Unless you run screaming from the train, your blood sugar levels won’t go down for a few hours – just in time for you to take the train again.

“You’re dosing yourself with almost pure glucose twice a day for your working life,” says Nick Tyler, a professor who investigates the ways in which people interact with the built environment. Tyler believes we need to design the built environment not solely for the conscious mind, but for brain and the body impacts taking place out of sight. As Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering, Tyler works with a transdisciplinary team to study what that means for design – collaborating with psychologists, neuroscientists, architects and others to research the health and safety impacts of the built environment.

Learn about his immense laboratory in East London, PEARL, and his large-scale experiments with bus stops, zebra crossings, urban parks, supermarkets and e-scooters that have revealed safety gaps and failings.

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3 days ago

43 minutes 52 seconds

The Developer podcast

Design by AI: Why we need to hack the algorithm

Wait five minutes and someone will tell you the latest thing they’ve outsourced to AI; How it’s taking minutes of meetings or summarising reports they haven’t read. If you point out that the work of AI isn't exceptional, they say 'Just wait, it will get smarter'. But will it?

According to Professor Jutta Treviranus, director and founder of the Inclusive Design Research Centre in Toronto, the answer is, well, concerning: Unless we do something fundamental about how it works, the output of AI will continue to be just average.

“When we’re using statistical replicators, they are making decisions based on statistics, so they look for the statistical average and use predictive analytics to decide the best thing to do.”

Of all the possible dystopian predictions, the fact that AI tends towards the typical, standard and normative doesn’t sound so bad – except that when applied to systems including the built environment, it’s dangerous.

“What people don’t seem to recognise is that for people who are outliers, the systems will always decide against them.” And who is an outlier? All of us at some point.

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2 months ago

38 minutes 43 seconds

The Developer podcast

Trauma and place: Avoiding triggers in design and engagement

If we want to create inclusive, supportive and safe places, we can't ignore trauma. At least half of all people will experience a trauma at some point in their lives and may be triggered by sights, sounds, questions or spaces that remind them of a past traumatic event. Olaide Oboh, a director at the developer Socius and managing director of Populate, speaks about how she learned about trauma-informed practice and why as a developer they are adopting trauma-informed practice at scale on the London Cancer Hub, a £1bn development to create a leading centre for research and treatment in Sutton.

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3 months ago

30 minutes 21 seconds

The Developer podcast

Purple pounds: Designing for the deaf and disabled

The spending power of disabled people, known as the purple pound, is worth £300bn: "Hello, does that not tell you something?" says Amanprit Arnold, a deaf city urban strategist passionate about creating an accessible city for everyone. "It's not charity. There's a commercial return to inclusive design." Born deaf, Amanprit Arnold is a visionary built environment changemaker renowned for her expertise and commitment to inclusivity. In this interview, Arnold speaks about belonging, the growing role for technology and AI in enabling greater participation, the increasing awareness of neurodiversity and her work to create a Deaf City Hub for the deaf community – a cultural hub for the deaf in the city. A video of this interview with Arnold signing in BSL and captions is also available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/4ueuJ9Vr0o0 with a transcript on www.thedeveloper.live

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4 months ago

42 minutes 11 seconds

The Developer podcast

Fighting for a Feminist City in Glasgow

How do we change policy to create gender equal cities? This story starts with a book: Feminist City by Leslie Kern. Read during lockdown, Holly Bruce, Scottish Greens councillor for Langside in Glasgow said it opened her eyes to the ways in which design can limit a women's participation in city life. The book was “the catalyst” for a political movement that would see Bruce move from reflection to action in short order, first joining a women’s collective and eventually leading a political movement. In 2022, Bruce led a successful motion for feminist town planning to be written into policy, which saw Glasgow become the first “Feminist City” in the UK. Bruce describes her “relentless” effort to get feminist urban planning into policy with Christine Murray.

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4 months ago

40 minutes 32 seconds

The Developer podcast

The civic role of a new town hall

How do you develop a new town hall and civic hub in a community with a longstanding mistrust of its local authority? “You’ve got to listen,” says James Stockdale, Development Director at Muse. Your New Town Hall in Brixton, the project to restore the Grade II-listed Lambeth town hall was never going to be easy. According to a 2013 resident’s survey, the council was not held in high regard. The report said residents felt “policymakers have stopped listening to them, and their culture and identity is gradually being lost.” Not a great starting point for a major development project. “Regeneration is always going to be contentious. Buildings will get knocked down,” says Stockdale. “You’ve got to listen. And by doing that hopefully more people will be happier than not.”

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1 year ago

53 minutes 56 seconds

The Developer podcast

Is this the year of the landscape architect?

As regulations on biodiversity net gain and sustainable drainage become mandatory, Carolin Göhler, president-elect of the Landscape Institute, explains why the role of the landscape architect is as vital as it is misunderstood. In areas prone to overheating, flooding or drought, having a lead designer focused on land use makes sense. The increase in social impact measurement, social prescribing and ESG investment also highlights the role of green spaces in improving health and wellbeing. But if the discipline is to take its place at the head of the table, people need to understand exactly what they do. A wide ranging discussion on urban trees, future-proofing heritage planting and the electrification of maintenance.

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1 year ago

53 minutes 39 seconds

The Developer podcast

How local councils are leading on net zero in spite of central government

Local authorities are moving head with net zero and climate resilience plans, installing solar panels and heat pumps. But a recent report from Key Cities, a group of 27 UK cities, concludes that "progress is being hindered by central government through a lack of powers, clarity, capacity and funding". Gina Dowding Lancaster County Counsellor and Richard Cook, Leader of Gloucester City Council, discuss the recommendations from the report, Levelling Up, Emissions Down, which captures the palpable frustration at the lack of clear direction and mandate for action on climate change.

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1 year ago

51 minutes 55 seconds

The Developer podcast

We need to talk about SLOAPs: Sites Leftover After Planning

We need to talk about SLOAPs, aka Sites Leftover After Planning. We've all seen them, corridors of tarmac or patches of grass with no purpose or social life. Could we put these fragmented spaces to better use as sites of biodiversity, food growing, play or connection? Soham De from EcoResponsive Environments and Valerie Beirne from Where Pathways Meet have been adding up the potential of this multitude of tiny sites, and want to spark an industry-wide conversation about the mapping and transformation of leftover spaces into sites of care, biodiversity and creativity.

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1 year ago

57 minutes 39 seconds

The Developer podcast

Turds in the plaza: How do we fix public art?

Art in public space has long been subject to hot debate. It was back in the 1970s that James Wines referred to Modernist sculptures as "turds in the plaza" and "Plop Art". The removal of sculptures associated with slavery as part of the Black Lives Matter are proof positive that public art matters deeply to people and places. So when seeking to commission public art, is community involvement the answer to question of relevance, appropriateness and permanence? Shiro Muchiri, founder of SoShiro art gallery and Hanna Afolabi, founder of Mood and Space, have teamed up to create Art in Architecture, a consultancy that believes public art can deliver social value – if you get the community involved from the very beginning. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of commissioning art for urban public spaces.

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1 year ago

51 minutes 14 seconds

The Developer podcast

Painting the town: What street art brings to public spaces

Street art has a lot to do with play, says Dr Lee Bofkin, co-founder of Global Street Art, who points to the evolving role of streets as a backdrop for content creation and personal digital expression. Global Street Art has connected street artists with sites to paint 3,000 murals in the UK since 2012, including pieces created under the Art for Estates programme and launching the London Mural Festival. In this podcast, the co-founder of Global Street Art discusses the expansive role of public art and why we should all live in painted cities.

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2 years ago

57 minutes 25 seconds

The Developer podcast

Dignity by design: What is the architecture of a good life?

In this special 100th episode of The Developer Podcast, author Carolyn Steel hosts Stephen Witherford, co-founder of Witherford Watson Mann architects and Sophia Craxton, food anthropologist and manager of the community kitchen at almshouse Appleby Blue. What emerges is passionate and emotive discussion about how we design spaces for dignity, and the building as the beginning of a conversation about how we live and what we value. In a city where loneliness is one of the biggest killers, the question was how to create an architecture that promotes the good life: The answer was the use of food as an instrument for creating community. "Eating on your own and cooking for yourself can be one of the most soulless things, when you've lost people you spent time cooking and eating with," says Witherford. "We wanted to a place where people cook together and they eat together and share their experiences. Ultimately this is all about how to get residents to speak to one another."

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2 years ago

57 minutes 49 seconds

The Developer podcast

Could adventure playgrounds boost community and solve the building skills shortage?

The construction industry is struggling to attract young people with an acute shortage of skilled workers hampering innovation and quality. Architecture and engineering need more diversity. At the same time, developers are creating playgrounds and spaces for teenagers to attract families and create community. What if we could solve all these needs with a single intervention? The adventure playground is not a new concept – the first one opened in Camberwell in 1948. But their longstanding tradition of giving children the tools, skills and materials to build their own play structures under supervision of trained playworkers has fresh resonance. "These places have been doing co-design from the beginning," shares Nitasha Kapoor, anthropologist and trustee of SWAPA in Hackney. In this interview, Kapoor talks about the potential for adventure playgrounds and their skilled staff to transform places and lives with one caveat – they need our help, skills, materials and financial support.

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2 years ago

50 minutes 8 seconds

The Developer podcast

Embracing industrial: The call for more urban sheds, breweries and makerspaces

The regeneration playbook is to takeover industrial spaces in favour of housing and mixed-use development, displacing the garages, workshops and sheds and pushing them to the margins of the city. But an increase in industrial rents and a shortage of industrial spaces has led to a radical rethink, with councils seeking industrial intensification instead, funding the creation of multi-storey light industrial spaces. In this interview, Regeneration Officer Francis Moss from London Borough of Ealing and Holly Lewis, Co-founding Director of We Made That explain the radical shift taking place and why industrial uses are essential to local economies and communities, making the case for keeping, and increasing, the sheds on our doorstep

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2 years ago

52 minutes 16 seconds

The Developer podcast

Camden Highline: The campaign to green the tracks

The popularity of New York's Highline saw other cities scouring maps for disused infrastructure – and Camden was no exception. The discovery of a disused viaduct running between King's Cross and Camden Road sparked the campaign for a Highline. Fast-forward and the design has planning permission and is now fundraising towards the build. We speak to Simon Pitkeathley, CEO of Camden Town Unlimited and CEO of Camden Highline about the journey so far, Georgie Street, Head of Projects at Camden Town Unlimited on the future green loop strategy and Tatiana von Preussen, architect and co-founder of vPPR on how to make the park, which runs along a live set of tracks, accessible and magical.

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2 years ago

43 minutes 51 seconds

The Developer podcast

Breaking the cycle of demolish, rebuild

Back in 2018, one of The Developer’s first podcasts was an interview with Linda Thiel, director of White Arkitekter’s London studio. The Scandinavian practice had been hired for the second phase of the regeneration of the Gascoigne estate in east London, replacing 1960s high rise blocks while adopting what the practice calls a “Scandinavian approach” with an emphasis on public space. More than four years on, Thiel got in touch to say that there had been a change in the practice’s thinking and, for the final stages of the project, they were now proposing that rather than demolish the original buildings, they should consider retrofitting them. Such an approach could also break a cycle of demolish and rebuild that began in the 1950s when the Edwardian terraced housing that originally sat on the site was razed, having been condemned as slums, only to be repeated as, in turn, those towers fell out of favour, creating a level of intergenerational trauma as communities were once again uprooted. Speaking in a new podcast, Thiel tells the story of White Arkitekter and Civic Engineers’ investigation into the feasibility of retrofit and raises fresh questions of equity and inclusion

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2 years ago

44 minutes 41 seconds

The Developer podcast

Cultural compact: How to fund grassroots arts and boost wellbeing in deprived places

The Key Cities report, Culture and Place in Britain, identified access to culture as a driver of wellbeing in areas of socioeconomic deprivation. But how can we seek stable and sustainable funding for grassroots culture in our places? Alan Waters, Culture Lead for Key Cities and previous leader of Norwich City Council and Sarie Mairs Slee, who previously led the Salford Culture and Place Partnership, discuss how the Cultural Compact, which partners institutions with artists and grassroots initiatives, can help unlock investment

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2 years ago

56 minutes 13 seconds

The Developer podcast

Co-designing Horatio's Garden: "The planting is informed by different ways of seeing"

Horatio’s Garden Chelsea, designed by Harris and Bugg with McMullan Studio, has been awarded the coveted Best in Show title at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. In this podcast, we sit down with Charlotte Harris and Andrew McMullan to discuss the process of designing a fully accessible garden for this UK-based charity that nurtures patients after spinal injury in NHS spinal centres.

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2 years ago

44 minutes 3 seconds

The Developer podcast

Paul Monaghan and the Office for Place: Beauty is not shorthand for 'traditional'

Paul Monaghan, architect and co-founder of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, talks about his role on the advisory board for The Office for Place, a government body helping to shape design codes and neighbourhood plans in England. Announced in July 2021, having emerged out of the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission, the purpose of the Office for Place is “to make it easier for all neighbourhood communities, wherever they might be, to require what they find beautiful and refuse what they find ugly.” Monaghan explains why he's pleased the government is passionate about design quality, even if he's not entirely comfortable with its new favourite buzzword: ‘beauty’

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2 years ago

47 minutes 9 seconds

The Developer podcast

The death and life of city trees with Elaine Cresswell, ReShaped

What are we doing wrong when it comes to urban tree planting? With an estimated 30 to 70% of city trees expected to die within a year of planting, landscape architect Elaine Cresswell, founder of ReShaped, dishes the dirt on the reasons city trees die, from funding to specification, soil to maintenance. With targets for net zero, flood resilience, air pollution and Biodiversity Net Gain, we need our landscapes to work harder than ever. Other topics covered include why architects shouldn't put cherry blossoms or birch trees in their renderings and planning applications. Please subscribe if you like our podcasts.

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2 years ago

49 minutes 25 seconds