Speculating Urban Futures: An Architectural Methodology

Architectural design is a speculative exercise, producing testable imaginaries in a critically astute context. Architects make design proposals which endeavour to respond to requirement by drawing on data, observations and stakeholder requirements, including the client’s brief, regulatory, physical and non-physical contexts. Requirements that exhibit competing demands and potential paradoxes or contradictions are formally and spatially exposed through the medium of the design project.
Architectural production is not just about making buildings. It is part of a much broader trans-disciplinary discourse concerning various possible futures of the spaces and environments that support human activity, addressing challenges such as sustainability and societal inclusivity through the design process and project proposal. Technology and the shift towards Smart Cities, is one scenario affecting spatial design and its relationship with data. Characterised by complex relationships, data and analysis aim to decode spaces and activity patterns, yet volumes of data do not necessarily support spatial and architectural design because they can only describe past trends, and not, with any certainty, predict future scenarios. Architects, therefore, must convert data into useful information to propose and test the effectiveness of possible futures, but how can this be done in order to enable better-informed speculation in design processes?
The Authors’ Research Group has been exploring this through in-depth case studies of the Scottish Highlands, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly and the entire length of the UK-Irish border. The research has tested spatial analysis methodologies which reconcile objective data with structures and systems that locate human activity in place as a central aspect of their origin. Data-mapping enables designers to understand the spatiality of data, whilst foregrounding the need to accommodate and take advantage of technology, without displacing social and cultural activity which define the character of place. The paper will present Data-Mapping as the critical methodology which develops theoretical approaches through testing in an applied context, with a view to producing effective urban futures and is especially pertinent in the context of complex transnational challenges, such as climate change and the implications of Brexit.