Project Title: Floating Gardens

Type: Competition

Categories: Urban System

Location: London, UK

Credits: Sushant Verma, Pradeep Devadass, Abhimanyu Acharya

An Evidence Based Approach to Place Making

The evidence Based Design approach was based on Space Syntax analysis and methodologies. Using the various spatial analysis tools to assess the existing conditions helped provide a solid platform to start the design process.

Space Syntax analysis was used to study the movement potential of the streets Vauxhall . The spatial system of Vauxhall was modeled such that all possible routes, regardless if they were designed or incidental were mapped. The reasoning for this was to understand the true movement potential of the spaces. On Site observation highlighted the lack of ‘co presence’ or in other words the interaction and meeting of people on the streets of Vauxhall, which was creating an unsafe, and lifeless urban environment, unlike the vibrancy found in the nearby Southbank centre. The Spatial Analysis at both local and City wide scale highlighted many streets in the region with a high movement potential, thus showing their suppressed of hidden potential to be activated as flourishing commercial, lively and vibrant streets which are full of people.

The city wide analysis highlights the Albert Embankment, Lambeth road, Kennington Road and Kennigton Park Road as the Streets with highest accessibility and movement potential at acity wide scale, while the local street hierarchy highlights the Black Prince Road, Lambeth Walk, Hercules Road as streets with highest local accessibility and movement

The image  A highlights the segments with high movement potential at both local and city wide scales. The streets highlighted at both city wide and local scale work at a multi scalar level had have a great potential for activity. These streets were indentified as the focus of the design in combination with segments important only at a local scale in Vauxhall were used to create a vibrant pedestrian environment. The network was also used to activate and bring to life the dormant potential of the plethora of greens open spaces present around Vauxhall.

Besides making the configuration and network of streets more efficient to activate the potential for movement and activity of the streets the Vauxhall the design also focused on creating attractors at key points identified as points or physical features of both local and city wide movement potential to create destinations and give Vauxhall the character of a ‘Place’ . Below listed are the elements or locations identified for a drastic design intervention.