Smallworld Urbanism

Urban planning, design, making, creating, growing, teaching, learning, enabling and collaborating to deliver socially and environmentally prosperous places

Story

We are a rolling collective of urbanists, planners, designers, gardeners and architects formed initially through the Bartlett school of planning, but with ongoing new affiliations and collaborators.

Philosophy

Our philosophy has been shaped by systems thinking, smart urbanism, design thinking, ecology, permaculture, and the circular economy. In the current paradigm shift, we are working not only in multiple disciplines, but also in finding ways to design and deliver projects that take advantage of network benefits of collaboration and leveraging the systems in play.

Through viewing problems as systemic and fractal amounts to seeing that small localised actions can amount to large changes in the built & natural environment and our quality of life. By tapping into the calmness that overcomes us when surrounded by nature and the fact that we all eat food is engaging as we all have it in common - and most of us enjoy colour – so why are our streets grey, hard and devoid of free food provided for us by bountiful nature? We can easily work together to retrofit a more natural, abundant and colourful environment.

Method /Approach

The process of delivering of projects with various people, visions and resources within small budgets means a dynamic system of planning and design is preferred. One that can immediately respond to an unexpected event, new ideas or new resource and can evaluate the practicalities involved in responding. Through utilising the mass-produced waste in the capital means we can keep costs to a minimum and create interesting environments through upcycling. This amounts to a more messy and organic process that is more like play. Keeping construction as simple as possible means more people can get involved using their hands, and where expertise is needed, the collaborative network in london is amazing.

Offering workshops, regular workdays and guerrilla gardening & graffiti flash mobs invites new activities to neighbourhoods, where reclaiming spaces for food, play, colour and nature is offered as an alternative to consumption or car based constraints. Over time this approach will result in many incremental projects that give the built environment a new feel, a finer grain, full of interesting, imaginative, vibrant and free spaces, that many people have had a hand in making. Our quality of life, social life and knowledge can be improved by recolonising the built realm with our collaborative imagination.