image from Video

A video is now available of a lecture Winy Maas recently gave in Scotland  on the theme of What Makes a Successful City Region'. The session also featured a panel discussion and was chaired by Kevin Murray, chairman of the Scottish Planning Skills Forum. Winy discussed how ideas which initially seem speculative, provocative and visionary, can become reality over time (e.g. solar mountains; hotels at 4000m; limitations on settlement fringe envelopes). In a further scaling up of ‘what makes a successful city region’ Winy spoke of the importance of Agenda Making and linking to wider ideals such as sustainability and placemaking.

The event, focused on three topics as introduced by Graham Ross, Head of Architecture and Design Scotland (A+DS):

• What visual thinking, tools and techniques can help develop planning concepts and convey regional/national spatial planning?
• What is an appropriate level of ambition, detail and timeframe for such plans?
• What scope is there for research and testing of alternative strategies toward refining visionary spatial planning?

In his introduction to ‘region making and the power of regions’ Winy described that Rotterdam has been identified as a place worth visiting because of the power of iconic architecture and its influence on urbanism. He stated we need to better integrate architecture, which needs to be more appropriate and focus beyond objects, and planning which needs to become more sexy! Through illustrating a number of projects Winy showed how the gap between architecture/objects and urbanism / spaces can be bridged, and how successful city regions can be considered by working across scales of thinking.

Building upon the idea that strategic issues can be scaled up from smaller starting points, Winy spoke about exploratory studies for ‘regions in the world’ that speculate on possible optimised futures for how different regions might behave, and where activities might best take place. In this study different regions take on different roles in an optimised world.

Watch the Video

> via MVRDV