Thank you, Laura, for making a post in “Designing our Neighbourhoods to Promote Health and Well-being”. I found it interesting when you discussed about the physical environment because it has a strong relationship to the well-being of a human. As our Professor Tim Townsend discussed, well-being focuses on the psychological side, such as Hedonic meaning…
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Thanks, Sydney, for expanding on ideas of design in urban health promotion. I found your inclusion of Pokémon Go and ideas of augmented reality particularly interesting, and would like to expand further here on this concept of active engagement with the city through smartphone technology. The case study of the Pokémon Go phenomenon is one…
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In Dr. Georgiana Varna’s lecture ‘Measuring Public Space: The Star Model’, she outlined the wide theoretical background that exists in relation to the topic of public space, whilst also introducing the notion that public space is a ‘slippery’ concept. In essence, she was referring to the fact that over many years there have been countless…
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«When public spaces are successful […] they will increase opportunities to participate in communal activity. This fellowship in the open nurtures the growth of public life, which is stunted by the social isolation of ghettos and suburbs. In the parks, plazas, markets, waterfronts, and natural areas of our cities, people from different cultural groups can…
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The charrette group I was part of was the “People Watching” one, where we were assigned an area of Newcastle city to observe and to film, in order to identify and understand how people use space, their behavior using it, and their perception of it. The area assigned to my team was Byker. We did…
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Arriving in Newcastle as a foreign exchange student I was not entirely sure what to expect. Over the past four years, I have studied Urban Planning and Design in Canada; where I grew up and hope to someday make a difference as an urban designer. Would urban design be similar to what I had learnt…
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