Exam file

Despite the strong Utopian traditions of urban planning, there has often been a reluctance to think beyond the short term. Long-term planning is complex; electoral cycles are short and it's easier to focus on the everyday challenges than those of the far‑off future. For this reason, urban planners have often struggled to describe how a city might develop over the next 30 or 40 years. Recent research has shown that it's essential to take a long-term, participatory approach to urban planning, to manage continuous socioeconomic and environmental change. This means bringing together local government, universities, businesses and people living in cities.

Newcastle, Milton Keynes and Reading are examples of this in action in the UK, as shown by the recent Government Office for Science Future of Cities Foresight Project, which used a range of tools and techniques (including workshops with local people) to imagine different possible futures for the cities. But there also needs to be a physical space where everyone can reflect on how a city has evolved, understand what sort of a place it is now and debate how it should develop in the future. That's where “urban rooms” come in – they're an important building block in making a city vision “real” for the people who live there.

Past meets present

An urban room can act as an exhibition hall, a community centre and a learning space, while giving people opportunities to help redesign and reimagine their city's 25 future. Urban rooms are already commonplace in countries such as China and Singa- pore, in the form of urban planning museums, city galleries or exhibition centres. [...]

Many of these spaces not only incorporate very large physical models, but also have space dedicated to understanding the urban planning stories and future paths of these cities. Models are a useful tool to help people visualise key public spaces, and the impact that new design proposals will have on the cityscape.

A growing movement

Urban rooms are just one way of giving communities the confidence to actively participate in helping shape places, often in relation to the small scale changes of good open space and housing provision and air quality improvement that are so important in people's lives. In this way, universities have a crucial role to play in creating stron- ger engagement with local people, and helping them to understand and influence the long term future of their city.