Connecting Places, Connecting People ─ A Paradigm for Urban Living in the 21st Century

What if the reason people travel is not to move but to access places? Connecting Places offers a practical model for designers and planners to align and design activities to augment social interaction while making places accessible. Rather than building more and more roads to connect people and places, activities themselves can be brought closer together. The design and location of urban activities can be every bit as important as road construction in creating an accessible city.

The significant amount of time we spend in spaces in between our origin and destination points begs us to explore the nature of these ‘in-between spaces’ and the experience that travellers or commuters have when they inhabit them. These spaces, like streets, corridors, transit-stations or hubs, have been designed with a focus solely on efficiency in the movement of people, inadvertently leading to decreased social interaction and place-lessness. Connecting Places presents a model for designing movement systems in a way that will integrate movement and social functions, enhancing users’ experience of these spaces, rather than making place secondary to, or a function of, movement.

With detailed case studies from around the world, including Australia, Asia, Europe, USA, South America and Canada, it is essential reading for practitioners and students looking at how to create more accessable, liveable places.

Reena Tiwari is Fellow of the Curtin Academy. She has published extensively on space psychology and place-making; urban ethnography and community engagement; sustainable transport and urbanism. Fundamental to her work on urban transport and place making is the philosophy of democratic urbanism and a model of enquiry which is ethnographic, collaborative and trans-disciplinary, and has the goal of facilitating change and adaptation for all involved in the process.