Terrain, climate and constraint as the first design move — reading a site before a single road goes down, and naming the three metrics the studio is marked against all semester.
22 February 2027
The argument#
Before a single road goes down, the site has already decided most of what the district can afford, how far people will have to travel, and how pleasant it will be to live in — so the studio reads the ground first, and names the three metrics it will be read against for the next twelve weeks.
What you will learn#
- Read a site’s terrain, hydrology, wind and resource layers as separate overlays before proposing any development on it.
- Define fiscal performance, mobility performance and livability in the exact terms the studio marks against, and name where each one is read in the simulation.
- Locate a first settlement area on the standard map and defend the choice as a named tradeoff between two of the three metrics.
- Set up the semester’s save discipline and the studio’s standard reading convention, so every later week’s evidence is comparable.
Theory into practice#
- Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (1915) — the regional survey comes before the plan; diagnosis before treatment.
- Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (1969) — suitability read as a stack of single-factor layers, each mapped separately, then overlaid to find the ground that resists development least.
- Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960) — paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks as the five terms people actually use to hold a place in their heads.
- Kevin Lynch, Good City Form (1981) — five performance dimensions (vitality, sense, fit, access, control) plus two meta-criteria (efficiency and justice), offered as the way to argue about city quality without retreating into taste.
- Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879) — the value of a location is produced by everything around it rather than by the owner’s improvements, so it can be captured publicly.
The deck walks through where each of these lands, slide by slide, against the studio’s own site.
Simulation mapping#
| Theory move | Cities: Skylines II mechanic | What students should watch happen |
|---|---|---|
| McHarg’s single-factor layers | The info views, read one at a time — natural resources, water, land value, ground pollution, and the wind arrows inside air pollution | The same 4 km of riverbank scores differently under each overlay, and no single overlay picks the site |
| Geddes’s survey before plan | The map at hour zero, with the road tool not yet opened | Fertile soil, ore and forest are already priced into the ground before any spending decision is made |
| Lynch’s paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks | The terrain and outside connections on the standard map — the River Kerrow, the Dunthorpe interchange, the rail line entering from the east | The site has a structure before it has a plan, and the structure is legible from the map alone |
| Lynch’s performance dimensions | Well-being and health readouts, the land value overlay, the economy panel’s monthly balance | Three different panels are needed to answer one question about quality, which is why the studio names three metrics rather than one |
| George on location value | The land value overlay, and building level 1–5 responding to it | Land value rises around things the district paid for collectively, not around the buildings that sit on it |
| Terrain as cost | Road placement on gradient, terraforming charges, water pumping height | The same 400 m of road costs a different amount depending on which contour it crosses |
Evidence standard. Named interface fields are direct readouts. Calculations shown from those fields are derived measures. Every fixed scenario value on this page is a worked hypothetical, not a captured run. See resources and evidence for access arrangements and worksheets.
The decision this week#
Fiscal performance against livability, forced by where the first road goes: the cheap, flat Halstead Reach terrace against the costlier, better-sited Ludworth Bench shelf on Verrall Ridge. The deck works the two sites’ numbers side by side. Students defend a site preference on paper. The cohort then uses Halstead Reach for comparable experiments; the first confirmed road is placed in Week 2.
Into the studio#
Arrive on Monday with the untouched Kerrow Basin map. Survey five overlays, then drag and cancel candidate roads to measure length and gradient; confirm no road. Defend either site in the report, but continue on Halstead Reach as the shared lab site. Save the untouched archive as <student ID>-w01; upload it and the site report by 21:00. Read the studio brief for the room sequence.
Assessment connection#
Feeds Assessment 1, the Neighbourhood Unit Plan (Week 4, 25%) directly: the settlement area chosen this week is the ground that plan sits on, and the site report is the evidence the defence memo will cite when it explains why the unit is where it is. More broadly, this lecture defines the three criteria that every assessment in the studio is marked against, so its definitions are loadbearing for all three. No weighted assessment is due; the weekly save and report upload still applies.
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor