This book calls attention to the public space of cities. It proposes that the environmental performance of public space is underdeveloped, and is primed to play a more integrated role in combatting the urgency of climate change, while also creating a more meaningful experience of the city. The approach is influenced by recent insights from neuroscience that are generating a growing body of evidence for the underlying bodily basis of mind and meaning imply a reformulation of urban design theory.
Minding the City is an effort to refocus the subject of urban design on the tangible and visceral experience of public space, to remind urban designers that our concept of the city is grounded in bodily experience. It discusses emerging insights from neuroscience and their potential impact on urban design in detail, not as a formula for design, but to bring awareness, a new sensibility to the design process. It uses a set of case studies to illustrate how the insights from neuroscience are operative in how we experience and value the built environment. It finishes with an exploration of the sensory and aesthetic potential of sustainable systems and then illustrates, through a series of urban design studies, how they might be used to create better environmental performance while creating more meaningful, even poetic urban spaces.
Educated at Princeton and Cambridge Universities, Harrison Fraker is considered a pioneer in climate responsive architecture and sustainable urban design. He has received major awards over 50+ years of teaching, practice and research, first at Princeton, as chair and founding dean at Minnesota, and Dean at Berkeley. Having retired from full time teaching, he continues to conduct research on his ‘ecoblock concept as a professor of the Graduate School and lectures globally on the urgency of sustainable urban design.
Peteer Siostrom was educated at the AA in London and received his MArch from Lund University. Currently he is the Director and Founder of the Master program in Sustainable Urban Design (SUDes) at Lund, Chairman of the SUDes Urban Lab and holds distinguished international appointments related to sustainable urban research. He has been the designer of interiors, architecture, urban design, competitions, conferences and exhibitions for over 40 years and lectures globally on sustainable urban design topics.
Atanaska Foteva is an architect with an MA (Hons) degree in Architecture from Edinburgh University and an MSc degree in Sustainable Urban Design from Lund University. After working as a teaching assistant in SUDes Program, she is currently interested in addressing the fragmented identities of contemporary city development, with a keen eye on resilience and sustainability.
