Karl Dickinson

From targeted participation to making it fun, the Urban Minded project shows what strategies and activities really work to involve people usually excluded from engagement processes. “One of the pitfalls of citizen participation is that we tend to ask people what they want, and that is the wrong question,” says...

Poor city design correlates with poor mental health. Urban Minded sought to involve young women, among those worst affected, in determining how planning can support wellbeing. Even a small space can produce a lot of joy if it has meaning for the people using it. Outside a youth culture house in...

What if the perceived barriers to retrofitting the built environment are actually helpful perimeters that steer each job in the right direction? That’s one of the themes discussed in this episode of the Talking Place webcast, which is featured on CityChangers with the kind permission of its presenter, Tanisha...

Environmental health officer “Dog Poo Daren” Clark found purpose in a job no one else wanted to do. He ended up improving public spaces nationwide. About a quarter of a century ago, a story emerged about a man working for Sheffield City Council in the UK, whose job it was...

As extreme weather becomes commonplace, the Darwin Living Lab evaluates what cities in the tropics can do to stay cool enough to be liveable. Temperatures in Darwin can easily reach above 30°C all year round and are predicted to rise because of climate change. The capital of Australia’s Northern Territory...

Honorata Grzesikowska explains how football centrism, where schoolyards are built around sports fields, excludes girls from accessing and enjoying sport and shared spaces. Culturally revered and a money-making machine, football – or soccer – is popular the world over. The design of a standard football pitch is so ubiquitous that...

Street gardening gives city-dwellers a way to reconnect with nature. In Melbourne, it is also helping Australia’s wildlife and makes people feel safer in the street. Little did Emma Cutting realise when she broke ground in 2016 on a patch of street outside her suburban Australian home, that a tiny...

This article is reproduced with the kind permission of Urban Solutions Journal. In it, the urban planner behind “China in 5”, Lile Mo, explains how the Chinese city of Hefei came up with sustainable responses to flooding and urban sprawl through strategic zoning and borrowing ideas from ancient infrastructure. By...

Krater is a feral site reshaping Ljubljana’s ecological stewardship by embedding it in creative practices. It’s also changing the way international communities perceive invasive species. Less than a 30 minute walk from the Old Town of Ljubljana, Slovenia, a team of creative young professionals have transformed a semi-abandoned patch of...

Omer Juma’s organisation 4 Lines 4 Days assesses the accessibility of metro stations. Findings in Montreal surprised city leaders, who have since commissioned improvements. Between 1984 and 2014, a succession of law changes related to the built environment secured stronger equality rights for citizens in Spain’s Catalonia region. “It was...

London’s mobile Skip Garden was co-constructed by local communities from construction waste. Now named the Story Garden, it has finally found a permanent home. The Story Garden gives people in and around the busy King’s Cross district of London, UK, a much needed connection with nature. Known by many as a...

Co-founder of DSDHA, Deborah Saunt, explains how social value optimises the investment in public spaces, and why redevelopment projects are improved by random conversations. When Deborah Saunt was asked to design a landmark building for South Molton Street in London, UK, she could not have envisaged the technological behemoth that...

How can cities reduce their gender cycling gap? Organisers of the Vienna Woman Bike Ride believe it starts with improving visibility of female bikers. Every September for ten years, people on the streets of Izmir, Turkey, stopped to wave and cheer as a large group of cyclists passed by. They...

Buzz stops are an example of how underutilised everyday spaces can be retrofitted simply, improving urban environments and creating habitats for biodiversity in the city. Commuters pass a lot of time at bus stops. Waiting times that we deem as acceptable can be as high as 13 minutes, although in...

ICAM provides an ethical choice for population management of free roaming animals, an issue largely ignored by leaders but a priority for citizens. National responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were a reminder of how a coordinated approach can be highly effective at keeping populations safe from harm. If the origin stories...

When an alleyway became too undesirable to even walk through, play and tactical interventions helped residents address their neighbourhood’s trauma and reclaim the space. Alleyways don’t get much attention but can be a critical space for revitalising a neighbourhood. One, in the West Hill neighbourhood of Albany, New York, USA, is...

Digital Twins offer cities an affordable, low-risk chance to experiment, tweak, and reformulate potential plans and possible solutions in an easily understandable, life-like virtual environment. Imagine if urban planners could test new concepts without risk and at minimum cost. What if we could see in advance what would go wrong,...

A city that prepares for the worse is disrupted the least. We explore what disaster preparedness looks like and how municipalities should be planning. The 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay area of California, USA, on 17 October 1989 damaging more than 23,000 homes, killing 63 people,...