4×4 making places: size matters!

Guest post by Ruth Donnelly – Events and Professional Development Coordinator for RIBA Yorkshire

For more than ten years 4×4 making places has been influential in bringing people together to learn and debate place-making in an open neutral “space’, outside the usual project and business networks. The concept is simple: 4 speakers, 4 weeks, followed by debate between the speakers and the audience.

This year, 4×4 will investigate and debate the numbers behind place making. Numbers are the hidden force and often the deciding factor in making places, whether we highlight them or not. All place making involves assessment by measure, size, proportion, cost, value, efficiency, turnover, time, footfall, energy consumption and so on. At every step, from the size of streets, cars and communities and economies, to escape distances and embodied energy, to policy, budgets and appraisals, to the building teams preparing and repairing, and to the people and businesses operating and enjoying places, the numbers must ‘work’!

The first week will discuss “big” numbers, scaling down to the final week where discussions will focus on the domestic scale.

This year’s list of speakers is as impressive as it is diverse and includes Wulf Daseking Chief Planner from Frieburg, Professor Par Gustafsson from the Swedish Landscape University, architects from Renzo Piano, Hodder and Partners, Riches Hawley Mikhail, Surface Architects, Proctor and Matthews as well as local decision-makers and the artist who brought us the Blackpool Comedy Carpet.

The 4 sessions will take place from 6pm at the Rose Bowl lecture theatre at Leeds Metropolitan University on Thursdays 08, 15, 22 and 29 March.

More information can be found on the website www.makingplaces.com You can also follow RIBA Yorkshire on Twitter here.

Everyone is welcome, you don’t have to be a professional place maker to come along, you just need to have an interest in the built environment around you. Oh, and attendance is free, so please come along and join the debate!