How Architecture and Urban Design Can Help Build Communities

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us all how critical connectedness is for our health and happiness. And for architects, it has highlighted how community building needs to be the central focus when designing for urban centres today.

Humans are innately social beings. As we all learned first-hand over the course of ongoing lockdowns around the world, our need to feel connected to others has a huge impact on our health and wellbeing.

But what role does architecture and urban design play in helping promote this sense of togetherness?

I have long believed in the power of well-designed communal space to have a hugely positive impact on our health and happiness. In all of the projects UNStudio works on, we approach the design from the perspective of the people who will use the space, looking in-depth at what will benefit them and improve their quality of life.

Now as cities continue to open up, we need to all put community building at the core of how we design our urban centres for the future. This is where placemaking becomes critical.

Placemaking is essentially a key facilitator of community building, and is all about creating quality places that spark an emotional attachment for people. Such places thrive when users have a range of reasons to be there. In essence, a successful placemaking strategy ensures that urban areas feel like real communities, rather than isolated - and isolating - concrete jungles.

Of course, these concepts are also not totally new; historically, towns and cities across Europe were built around centres of gathering, from markets to places of worship. But urban planning policies of the past often failed to understand the human and economic value of community building, resulting in monofunctional neighbourhoods without sufficient public space, prolific and dense high-rise development with few social

Today, placemaking strategies intertwine the physical, cultural and social identities that define a place and support its continuous evolution. And, they can incorporate technology to enhance the built environment even more.

Integrating Technology

Much was said in the early 2000s about the benefits and pitfalls of digital communities, and indeed that they ran the risk of threatening or completely replacing physical connectedness. Even though we have recently discovered the convenience of digital meetings and the relative ease at which many knowledge workers could abandon the office and shift to working from home, the pandemic has in fact highlighted how essential to our mental health physical proximity truly is.

We have now been encouraged to think about care in exciting new and holistic ways. A key example of this is the concept proposal we developed alongside our sister arch tech company UNSense for the Bruzzano masterplan. This is a new intergenerational health-themed urban district in Milan, and was recently selected by Unipol for further design development.

With this project, we wanted to form a new community where health, nature and people are at the centre of the urban design.

Here, technology plays an integral role in the design. It will help us target, execute, monitor and enhance the environment for its residents, with the aim to achieve neighbourhood-level inclusivity and accessibility to healthcare-related services.

This is not the first time we have used a data-driven approach. It is also at the heart of our design for the Brainport Smart District, which will be a living lab for new ways of living and working.

As such, it is not designed with a pre-determined, fixed plan, but will rather be a responsive urban environment where we use data to assess what users want and need, and design and construct the neighbourhood based on this.

This self-learning urban development will encourage residents to adopt communal resource schemes, including energy generation, water purification and food production. Here, we have an exciting opportunity to achieve a sustainable, circular and socially cohesive neighbourhood through the smart use of technology.

Giving residents and users the power to essentially design their own urban environment also plays an important role in our design toolkit for Distelweg, a mostly logistics-related street in the north of Amsterdam, which will become a major street for new residents and shops in the future.

Created for the CLEAR consortium, our toolkit for this ‘street of the future’ is aimed at enabling people and nature to reclaim our city streets. It is important to remember that designing a street is not a short-term process; streets continue to evolve as the needs of their users change – and as technology evolves. So we need to design them in a way that they can adapt to changing mobility innovations, a growing need for greenery and changing commercial facilities.

The first phase of the Distelweg project is about improving the health and safety of the street, by incorporating features that encourage connectivity and social interaction, such as street furniture, interim public plazas, parklets, playgrounds and activated sidewalks. Over time, interactive technology will be embedded in the street surface, and new building technology will be introduced into the urban scape. But through all of this, residents and the local community will be invited to contribute to the design of their own place and embed their own sense of identity.

Rethinking City Spaces

In high-density cities, community-building and placemaking can also take on innovative approaches that make effective and positive use of every bit of space. This can include looking upwards, and to the often-underused fringes of urban centres.

In 2020, we were invited by the Royal Institute of Dutch Architects, BNA, alongside four other multidisciplinary teams, to take part in an urban study to investigate new typologies for the development of the outskirts of Amsterdam. It was called HyperEdge, and we were assigned the south-western edge, where the Amsterdamse Bos (woodlands) and Schiphol Airport are located. The brief was to design a vision for how to make this a quality urban space for the community.

Due to the airport noise and safety risks associated with this area, we were unable to develop this to become a standard urban development area, but instead, we looked at how to maintain the greatest quality of this area: its free space. Therefore, we envisioned connecting two sides of the city’s edge with a continuous building/path, opening up currently inaccessible areas for local residents to discover and appreciate, with zones for recreation, arts, research and experimentation.

For another approach to maximising urban space, we can look at the Southbank by Beulah development in Melbourne. Working in collaboration with COX Architecture, our design was motivated by the concepts of togetherness, joint ownership and open access for local residents and the wider community. Here, we explored how to grow a community in what will become Australia’s tallest tower. So, we brought the public realm into the vertical structure, creating pocket parks all along its green spine for residents and guests to enjoy.

Temporary Placemaking

Of course, not all community projects take the form of urban development – and not all of them are permanent. Pavilions and installations are key examples of this.

In 2014, our Xintiandi Installation opened in Shanghai, in collaboration with the city’s Fashion Week. This temporary intervention was a 30-metre-long twisting mirror, which was designed to give people a new perspective on their surroundings. What it did for the community was to inspire interaction and activity between people by seeing each other – and their urban context - from a new angle.

Living and Working

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, facilitating the creation of communities related mainly to the workplace. But as we now look at the need for human connectedness on a broader scale, we are also expanding the idea of what a workplace can offer not only their direct employees, but the wider community too.

Our design for the new Booking.com campus in Amsterdam is a prime example. In 2015, Booking.com, together with Bouwfonds Property Development, approached UNStudio for the design of a new campus to be place on the tip of Oosterdokseiland in the centre of the Dutch capital. From the very beginning, the goal for this building was to create a community; to bring employees together and to attract new talent from across the world.

We designed a new Urban Campus that was based around the concept of a small town. Through mixed-use facilities designed with a holistic approach to health and wellbeing, the campus creates a positive experience for all users: from the citizens of Amsterdam who use the public space and retail facilities, to the tenants who live in the residential building, to the young Booking.com workforce.

We also drew on this broadened approach for the design for the St. Petersburg office of the international software development company JetBrains, transforming their current premises into a modern immersive campus environment.

Overlooking the Gulf of Finland, the new JetBrains’ campus is designed as a place of true connectivity and openness; a place that fully engages people and enhances their everyday lives. In addition to providing efficient and flexible workspace for the organisation, the campus will create a sense of belonging for its occupants - not just  to the industry, but also to the community and to the city of St. Petersburg.

Creating a truly multifunctional and community-centric place is really about finding ways to bring together a diverse array of people, and offering them a wide variety of activities to keep the space lively at all times.

Our ‘City for All’, currently under construction in the heart of Frankfurt, will do just that. Called FOUR Frankfurt, the project will bring new life to a former Deutsche Bank site that has been inaccessible for the last 45 years. Executed by UNStudio and HPP, the development of these towers, reaching heights of 228 metres, will open up new streets to create a multi-use, vibrant inner-city quarter, bringing together a healthy mix of work, living, relaxation and recreation.

Here, we also incorporated a variety of publicly accessible spaces into the development - such as a roof garden, a city square, a daycare centre for children, two hotels and numerous restaurants and shops. We hope to entice more people to this new city quarter and vastly improve the quality of time spent in the financial district.

For more on this topic, read UNStudio's new Community Building and Placemaking Report.