Ideal Spaces Working Group

In this episode, documentary and architecture photographer Filippo Romano joins podcast host Flora Loughridge to share his experiences capturing the devastating earthquake in Haiti for a photoreportage commissioned in 2010. He speaks of his ongoing interest in the relationship between architecture and communities, and the importance of trust when capturing the spirit and stories of people living in the Mathare ghetto in Nairobi, 2011.

Filippo studied at ISIA in Urbino and specialised in photo documentary at the International Centre of Photography (ICP) in New York. His work explores cities, architecture and urban dwellers, and has featured in magazines, including Abitare, Dwell, Domus, Io Donna, Courrier International, Huffington Post, Newsweek and Skira. Filippo has travelled widely throughout his career, working in cities including Tokyo, Nairobi and Cairo. He also works on diverse projects closer to home, in Italy, and currently teaches at the Naba Design School in Milan and in the Photography Department at IUAV in Venice.

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Podcast co-hosts Flora Loughridge and Ulrich Gehmann speak to Dr. Khalid Kadir, a Continuing Lecturer at UC Berkeley and recipient of the 2017 Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley’s most prestigious honor for teaching. In this episode, we discuss the intersection of poverty, engineering expertise and politics, as well as the complex role that expertise plays in the politics of international development and poverty alleviation. Along the way, we talk about everything from social media and Silicon Valley to resilience, utopia and who is accountable for the social injustice in the technology-focused society we have built.⁣

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In Episode 3, the Ideal Spaces team is joined by Stan Allen, an architect and Professor of Architecture at Princeton. Stan holds degrees from Brown University, The Cooper Union and Princeton.  In 1991 he established an independent practice, and since that time, has pursued parallel careers as architect, educator and writer. He has taught at Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, and served as Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton from 2002 to 2012. His books include Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (1999); Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation (2008); Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain (2011); and Four Projects: A Stan Allen Sourcebook (2017). His most recent book, published in 2020, is Situated Objects, a book of buildings and projects located in the Hudson River Valley where he lives and works.

We discuss architecture as a material practice that should anticipate and continuously evolve over time and architecture as the immaterial structures and spaces between things. We explore the importance of re-connecting architecture with time and process, to once again find a human measure that makes functional spaces sustainable, human living environments.

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Flora Loughridge and Ulrich Gehmann are joined by Andy Jones, Professor in Public Health at UEA’s Norwich Medical School. Andy’s primary research focus is on the environmental influences on population health. His core work explores the manner by which characteristics of the social and physical environments act to influence the health of the population. 

This interview focuses on Andy’s recently published co-authored study on Environmental Equity and Perceived Accessibility to Urban Parks in Osaka, Japan. This opens up a thought-provoking discussion on the history of parks, problems with accessibility and funding of urban parks, as well as the future of green spaces.

The study, ‘Quantitative Environmental Equity Analysis of Perceived Accessibility to Urban Parks in Osaka Prefecture, Japan’, was published on October 17, 2020 in the Journal of Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy.

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In Episode 2 of the Ideal Spaces podcast, we are joined by Professor Kean Birch, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change as well as Graduate Program Director of the Science & Technology Studies Program at York University, Canada. Kean’s research focuses on the emergence of a specifically technoscientific capitalism, entailing the increasing entanglement of technoscience and finance. His most recent project focuses on the diverse modes of rentiership in technology sectors, especially in the extraction and exploitation of our personal data, and what this means for the organization of markets and economies. Kean talks to us about the entanglement of space with financial logic, using two key examples of financial/social assets: bio-fuels and houses. We discuss the complex relationship between people and managed spaces, the collection and use of personal data, and the future of management.

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Welcome to Episode 1 of the Ideal Spaces podcast. Flora Loughridge is joined by the founder of Ideal Spaces Working Group, Ulrich Gehmann, and Michael Johannson, who leads New Developments and Digital Design at Ideal Spaces to explore the question ‘What is Space?’. This episode is the first in a series of 10 ‘vignettes’, in which the Ideal Spaces team discusses the driving forces behind society as it is today: not only the built ‘architectural’ world we live in, but also the human processes of social imagination that architecture is an expression of.

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