Academic Projects
Urban Design Experience
​​Although urban design principles aim to improve the sensory experience of the urban environment, its teaching and learning mostly takes place indoors, fully insulated from the city environment. Lectures typically use a variety of visual material such as photographs and graphics to exemplify the experience of the built environment. However, by being situated out of context in an indoor environment, these lectures run the risk of imparting only a limited understanding of the complexity generated by the interaction between all forms o life and the built form.
Urban Collage
​​A workshop that aims to develop the idea of different scenarios that can occur within the city. Using imagery to express the concepts of 'heterotopia', 'utopia' and 'entropia' from Michel Foucault's paper 'Of Other Espaces, (1967)'.
The objectives are:
• To experiment with new cognitive processes in the process of urban collage.
• To develop different urban images (heterotopia, utopia and entropia) for a same city profile.
• To discuss how the different images can evoke different perceptions for the user of the city.
• To discuss cultural, social and economic differences between the cities of Pelotas, in Brazil and Oxford in the UK.
Brazil Urban Design Study (BUDS)
​​This is a fascinating project where our undergraduate students demonstrate how they can apply their urban design and planning knowledge and skills in live international projects. The work in three different Universities in Brazil will enable them to become responsible and responsive global experts and the Department of Planning is proud to support their challenges and enthusiasm.
Oxford Open Doors 2013
​​Oxford Brookes University hosed a workshop in partnership with Oxford Preservation Trust annual event Oxford Open Doors. Children could participate in the workshop with theme being 'Build the City of your dreams'. The workshop was hosted by students from the MA in Urban Design course and 4th year MPlan students. It gave the children to opportunity to be creative and change their city for the better, whilst giving the designers a a view of the city from the childrens perspective. With over 140 people through the doors, the workshop proved to be a massive success.
Competitions
Integration for Placemaking
​​Undergraduate students participate in an international competition. The submission addressed Architectural urban planning and landscaping interventions, and integration for placemaking. By facilitating the elements of a successful community, the residents' can transform a house into a home and a space into a place.
The fundamental concerns which included flood risk as well as providing a safe community have been attained. Additional space is also still available to the development as we can appreciate that a place will never be static and constantly evolving. The proposal can still accommodate additional residents which can only increase the ambience predicted.
Student Projects
The Churches of Vancouver
Will Pedley is a third year undergraduate student, studying City and Regional Planning at Oxford Brookes University. He has mostly lived, learnt and worked in Oxfordshire but also spent two years living in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
While living in Vancouver I developed a fascination with the 20th century church architecture that is prevalent within the city and decided to create a photographic record of them.
Compared with the churches of old, which are generally surrounded by small graveyards, set back from the street with their own protected territory demarcated by low stone walls, these modern churches have a very different relationship with their surroundings. Here they are more likely to be found on a corner plot or amid a row of residential dwellings, abutted by a car park for its congregation. Their grounds often resemble the well-kept suburban gardens adjacent to them, replete with the same immaculate topiary.
Many of them are far more modest in their detail and design than the grandiose churches of previous centuries; ornate detailing and stonework are replaced by simplified forms and wooden cladding or concrete. Where elaborate or ostentatious features do exist, they are less a signifier of wealth and power and more an expression of the idiosyncrasies of the prevailing architectural styles of the 1960s and 1970s.
I see these buildings as examples of the various diaspora living in Vancouver manifested in the built environment. They represent the diversification of the Christian church into the many denominations depicted in these photographs and the spiritual–if not the geographical–nexus of each church’s community within the city. Given the diverse origins of many of these denominations they are also evidence of the proliferation of Christianity on a global scale.
In her book, No Place for God (2007), Moyra Doorly is heavily critical of modern church architecture, stating that it is more about the celebration of people than revering a ‘transcendent God’, but it seems to me that the resultant churches have a greater humility and are more interesting and beautiful in their own individual and unique ways.