Vertical Cities

A waiting list for ticket returns will be taken on the lecture theatre door from 5.30pm.

Skywalks, megastructures, towers and tunnels – reimagining the city vertically.

From Le Corbusier’s futuristic city designs of the 1920s, to 1960s Tyneside – the separation of cars and pedestrians was arguably the chief tenet of modernist planning. This separation often took place vertically, with traffic buried in tunnels or elevated on vast flyovers, and pedestrians correspondingly lifted onto skywalks or submerged into underpasses.

Although often emerging from a genuine design to make cities more functional, these ideas have since become thoroughly discredited, though continue to shape many cities around the world – not least Newcastle and Gateshead.

In this event, we explore the past, present and future of vertical cities. What drove the vertical separation of cars and pedestrians? How were these ideas enacted? Why did they often fail? And what possibilities exist for reimagining the city vertically today?

Speakers

Otto Saumarez Smith – Associate Professor, University of Warwick; author of Boom Cities: Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Euan Lynn – Artist, photographer and musician, whose work explores the intersection between architecture and politics, with a focus on the built environment of the 20th century.

Dan Burn – Senior Associate at Faulkner Browns Architects; Associate Lecturer at Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape where he leads the Masters studio ‘Material Change’.

Stef Leach – Chartered Landscape Architect, creative practitioner and educator. Degree Programme Director for the Master in Landscape Architecture at Newcastle University.

Part of ‘This Was The Future’ – a series where expert speakers tackling the big questions and key issues around Tyneside’s 1960s and 1970s transformations.

If you missed the event, you can listen to a recording here.

Image credit: Owen Luder’s Trinity Square, Gateshead photographed Sam Lambert, 1967. Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections