Laura Vaughan: "Redefining Sustainability"

This lecture will show some results of a study undertaken by Adaptable Suburbs , of London's outer suburban town centres over the past six years. It will open with a brief introduction to space syntax and then show some results from our analysis of the transformation of an area of London from 1850 to the present day, suggesting that the success of town centres is tied to their built form and spatial adaptability over time. It will close with some suggestions on how we can design and plan for such adaptability, showing that one of the most important factors is diversity of scale and use both within the block and the building unit itself and that smaller centres have the potential to provide a more targeted, genuinely sustainable growth, because of their scale and urban form: enabling local/non-local transactions alongside each other.

Professor Laura Vaughan has an extensive research track record of using space syntax technology to study the micro-scale of settlement form in relation to society, using a combination of spatial, social, historical and geographical research methods. She is a Professor of Urban Form and Society at the Bartlett , University College London and is a member of the UCL Space Research Group . This is one of only two UK research groups in any field to have received three consecutive UK Government Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Platform Awards for internationally outstanding research (2000, 2004 and 2009). Professor Vaughan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 2005 and is a member of the International Space Syntax Steering Committee. She is a co-Director of the UCL Environment Institute, leading on the Migration and Settlement theme. She directs the Spatial Justice module on the MSc Advanced Architectural Studies (AAS) at the Bartlett and also lectures at various universities in the UK and abroad, including Queen Mary College, London and Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem, Israel. 

The lecture will be followed by two brief presentations on implementations of space syntax in Swedish contexts by KTH faculty Daniel Koch and Professor Lars Marcus.

This event is organized by KTH Arkitekturskolan in collaboration with  Architecture in Effect: Rethinking the Social in Architecture , a Strong Research Environment funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas.