Bold, Compassionate & Data-Driven: Urban Planning Principles to deliver the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs)

Using case studies from international urban planning practice, Tim Stonor will show how digital tools are helping cities address sustainability challenges through the creation of human-centred spatial development strategies. These tools range from GIS-based mapping of mobility patterns, and algorithm-based analysis of spatial connectivity, to AI techniques for ‘growing’ cities automatically.

Tools alone are not enough. What matters more are:

- First, the goals towards which the tools are directed: health, climate resilience and dignified shelter, and

- Second, the urban planning principles with which the tools are applied: spatial connectivity, the creation of mixed-use urban centers, a focus on streets, slow-speed mobility, public transport and shade.

Taken together, these goals and principles define the ‘spatial culture’ of urban settlements, reflecting and shaping their histories, belief systems, climates, places of social encounter, places of commercial transaction and the ways in which they integrate with natural environments.

MR. TIM STONER

Architect, Urban Planner and Managing Director of Space Syntax 

Tim Stonor is an architect and urban planner specialising in the analysis and design of human behaviour patterns – the ways in which people move, interact and transact in buildings and urban places. He is recognised internationally for his work in the development of data-driven design techniques, and their use in urban planning and architectural design projects from city masterplans to individual building interiors. 

Tim is the Managing Director of Space Syntax, an urban planning and design company – originally created at the Bartlett, University College London in 1989 – with a mission to develop, apply and disseminate a science-based and human-focused approach to architectural design. 

He is a founding member and former director of The Academy of Urbanism, a Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and a Harvard Loeb Fellow. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Norman Foster Foundation and a former Deputy Chair and Trustee at the UK Design Council, where he is now an Ambassador. 

Date: 5th February 2024, Tuesday at UHall Auditorium

Time: 6:30 p.m. SGT - 8:30 p.m. SGT