Week 4 Studio: Upzoning the Amenity Core

Upzone around a central amenity and test how far its radius really reaches. First assessed pin-up of the semester, with the visiting critic on the jury.

15 March 2027

The jury#

This afternoon is a jury, not a build session. Sixteen plans occupy the long wall and are heard in one bay, two rounds of eight from 14:00. Marisol Quaye chairs both rounds; Sunniva Marek, who has not watched the work develop, sits through both. Each plan has six minutes: two to present and four for questions. The two rounds finish before a recess, when the room leaves so the jurors can read the wall as one body of work. The afternoon closes with Marek’s response and a metric round.

Before 13:00#

The assessment upload closes at 12:00. Use the next hour to hang in roster order, not to revise the artefact. Put the plan at the top of the bay, the required views beneath it, and a legible card at the bottom stating the cell’s allocated monthly cost and return in ₡. Work not on the wall at 13:00 is marked from the noon upload alone: the criteria still apply, but the jury cannot ask the questions that a defence would answer.

What was upzoned before 12:00#

The week’s production happened before the deadline. You upzoned the Pelling Cross frontage and tested the clinic on disposable three-cell branches. Keep three measures separate:

• service coverage is the radius shown by the live UI with the building selected;
• walking catchment is distance along the issued network sheet;
• the clinic’s one-third cost is a worksheet allocation, not a native district budget.

The mixed-use core recovers mobility and raises mean land value, while its noise lands on nearby dwellings. Read the normalised land-value score separately at the core and the cell edge. Also check that through movement remains on the Kerrow corridor boundary rather than using interior streets. None of these branches is run after 13:00, and nothing discovered in the jury changes the submitted artefact.

The readings#

The reference row is 6,900 residents in 2,650 households, +₡2,100/month, a 5.9-minute timed route, transit 0%, walk share 34%, happiness 69%, and district land value 31. The land-value sheet carries two further rows: 48 at Pelling Cross and 19 at the cell edge.

Livability moved the wrong way. Happiness fell from 72% to 69%, even as land value rose from 24 to 31. Land value is not a livability reading — the studio reads it on the fiscal side, and Week 8 spends it — so the two numbers are not halves of one metric. They are the trade itself, showing up in two places at once: quoting the rising one alone is how a plan claims an improvement it did not make. The 48/19 gradient is not noise in the evidence. It is the spatial result the plan must explain.

The tradeoff#

This is livability against fiscal performance, made through the clinic. Inside the cell, it sits within the intended walk but carries its full upkeep. Shared on the Kerrow corridor, the cell pays roughly one third and the service radius is centred on none of the three cells. Upzoning can close the same shortfall by adding rate-paying residents, at a cost visible in core noise and happiness.

Neither move is free. A plan claiming all three metrics improved has not been read carefully. At the metric round, name the traded pair and point to the element on the wall where it is visible.

What you leave with#

Keep <student ID>-w04, its off-machine copy and the two pre-deadline clinic branches. Record all nine readings, with core and edge land value on separate rows, and have the chair initial the traded-pair sentence. A correction made only for display is labelled display-only; there is no mark-changing re-upload after noon. Written comments return in ten working days.