Dr. Jon Cooper
Senior Lecturer Urban Design
Prior to joining the Dept. of Planning and the Joint Centre for Urban Design at Oxford Brookes University in 1997, Jon was principle landscape architect and urban designer with Birmingham Design Services. Jon is currently a Director of independent consultancy ud+m. He runs in-house urban design, character assessment, density and coding training programmes for a large number of local authority clients and carries out collaborative consultancy with a number of private sector developers and consultants. He has recently been involved with a number of urban design coding projects, with new settlement developments in Devon, Cambridge and Hampshire, urban extensions, and collaborative community engagement projects for clients such as Land Securities, Places for People, Tesco, Gallagher and the DCLG. In over twenty years of practice experience, Jon has won awards for the design of housing and public space schemes, including Secured by Design and BDI awards for housing refurbishment and parks design. His current research interests are in the development of fractal evaluation techniques for assessing urban visual quality. Jon is also a peer reviewer for a number of academic publications including Urban Design International and Landscape and Urban Planning.
Non-Designers create a new urban centre
This workshop at Brooklands, Milton Keynes helped empower local stakeholders to take an active and informed role in the development of an Urban Design Development Framework for a new centre. The workshop was based on a collaborative process whereby selected stakeholders such as local and Parish Councillors local authority officers, Milton Keynes Partnership officers, consultants and developers were actively involved in formulating design and development principles for the Brooklands Centre.
The workshop provided:
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generic urban design principles that then formed part of the design consultant’s rationale;
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15 design qualities that it was agreed would constitute a “good” centre;
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14 key design principles as specific guidance on how to achieve a “good” centre;
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the identification of significant site and contextual characteristics;
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the establishment of specific strategic design principles for the development site in terms of the layout and the character of a new centre.