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Idea by

Ming Cheng, Steve Smith, Laura Argentieri

Place Profile

http://www.placeprofile.co

London, United Kingdom
We are architects, urban designers, urbanists, creatives and visionaries who are determined to make cities better through data-driven design. Place Profile is a collective of architects and urban designers who design holistic solutions to complex masterplan, research and urbanism problems. Our experience is vast, but our goal is specific: we want to design better places that allow urban life to thrive. We focus on innovative approaches to public space, structures and urban issues.

Call for ideas 2021

Place Profile


Creating successful places with empirical evidence

Place Profile


Creating successful places with empirical evidence
How can we measure successful places empirically so that data can be compared and replicated elsewhere?
File under
Type of project
  • Systemic changes

Architects often assume that a single, cluster of buildings or public space will bring unmeasurable change to the area with little evidence to demonstrate their claim beyond imagery or the reputation of the architects. This intuition-based design lacks rigour and is often led by design opinion rather than empirical evidence.

We aim to answer the following questions through our research:

• What is the genetic makeup of a place?
• Instead of describing the design of spaces through qualitative measures, is there a way to measure a place quantitatively?
• Can we develop a method for evaluating masterplan proposals similar to those for buildings such as BREEAM or LEED?

Place Profile stems from our hypothesis that the places we value as successful carry an emerging pattern of particular and similar characteristics which can be summarised by a set of empirical values. We hope to expand our dataset to evaluate urban places across the UK and around the world.

The breakdown of public, semi-public, semi-private and private space of Covent Garden, London United Kingdom

High-level summary describing the physical condition of the area and key headline empirical data on the makeup of the neighbourhood

Place Profile


Creating successful places with empirical evidence

Place Profile


Creating successful places with empirical evidence
How can we measure successful places empirically so that data can be compared and replicated elsewhere?
File under
Type of project
  • Systemic changes

Architects often assume that a single, cluster of buildings or public space will bring unmeasurable change to the area with little evidence to demonstrate their claim beyond imagery or the reputation of the architects. This intuition-based design lacks rigour and is often led by design opinion rather than empirical evidence.

We aim to answer the following questions through our research:

• What is the genetic makeup of a place?
• Instead of describing the design of spaces through qualitative measures, is there a way to measure a place quantitatively?
• Can we develop a method for evaluating masterplan proposals similar to those for buildings such as BREEAM or LEED?

Place Profile stems from our hypothesis that the places we value as successful carry an emerging pattern of particular and similar characteristics which can be summarised by a set of empirical values. We hope to expand our dataset to evaluate urban places across the UK and around the world.

The breakdown of public, semi-public, semi-private and private space of Covent Garden, London United Kingdom

High-level summary describing the physical condition of the area and key headline empirical data on the makeup of the neighbourhood

Idea by

Ming Cheng, Steve Smith, Laura Argentieri
Place Profile
London
United Kingdom
We are architects, urban designers, urbanists, creatives and visionaries who are determined to make cities better through data-driven design. Place Profile is a collective of architects and urban designers who design holistic solutions to complex masterplan, research and urbanism problems. Our experience is vast, but our goal is specific: we want to design better places that allow urban life to thrive. We focus on innovative approaches to public space, structures and urban issues.
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