4x4 making places: size matters!

Once again, 4x4 making places successfully brought people together to learn and debate place-making. For four evenings in March, a Chair, four speakers and an average of two hundred audience members from various disciplines investigated and debated numbers as the hidden force behind place-making on a range of themes including sustainability and community size, details and tolerances, how low energy housing really works, measures for use in consultation and post occupancy evaluation, the dark arts of valuation, how to measure quality, comparative costs and quality across national boundaries.

Speakers included Professors Wulf Daseking, Freiberg and Par Gustafsson from Swedish Landscape University, Dublin City Planner Dick Gleeson and public artist Gordon Young, alongside UK experts and practitioners from Renzo Piano, Proctor and Matthews, Surface and Riches Hawley Mikhail Architects. The themes for the four weeks were Big numbers at the country and regional scale, Middling numbers (town/city), Local numbers (neighbourhood/community) and Personal Digits looking at the home and streets scale. 

Week 1:  Ian Tod welcomes everyone to this years 4x4, CHAIR: Claire Morrow (Welcome to Yorkshire), SPEAKERS: Lindsay Smales (Leeds Metropolitan University Urban Design), Dick Gleeson (Dublin City Planner), Paul Simmons (Igloo), Stephen Hodder (Hodder and Partners)(no photo)

Week 2: CHAIR: Phil Crabtree (Leeds City Council) SPEAKERS: Gordon Young (artist), Will Matthews (Project Architect for the London Shard, Renzo Piano), Professor Wulf Daseking (Planner for Frieburg)

Week 3: CHAIR: Elizabeth Heaps (Pro-Vice Chancellor for Estates and Strategic Projects at University of York) SPEAKERS: John Thorp (Leeds Civic Architect), Richard Scott (Surface Architects), Simon Green (Sheffield City Council), Andrew Matthews (Proctor and Matthews)

Week 4: CHAIR: John Hocking (Joseph Rowntree Trust) SPEAKERS: Anna Scott-Marshall (RIBA), Annalie Riches (Riches Hawley Mikhail), Professor Fionn Stevenson (University of Sheffield) Professor Par Gustafsson (Swedish Landscape University, Lund)
Photographer MJHeritage Photography

debate!
Photographer MJHeritage Photography

Our fantastic audience
Photographer MJHeritage Photography

For more information on 4x4 making place please visit the website www.makingplaces.com 

Photographs of Week 4 were taken by MJHeritage Photography. All other photographs were taken by Rachel Hunnybun and Ruth Donnelly of RIBA Yorkshire