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This chapter explores creative drawing mediums in research practice and education, through speculative drawing methods, and the use of temporal mediums such as film, animation, and augmented reality [AR] to move outside entrenched perspectives of communicating towards more inclusive storytelling narratives. Architectural representation mediums provide means of conveying rich layers of information, having evolved through cultural influences and technologies with their origins in Western world views. However, these methods of drawing are limited in how they convey multiple and diverse views or social understandings, ultimately delivering static representations. The student and staff approaches discussed in this chapter demonstrate approaches that recalibrate from a singular, designer-led perspective to one that is multivalent, considering and engaging other stakeholders in the negotiations and conversations of the spaces in our built environments. Through making architectural communication more accessible and inclusive of diverse audiences and voices, alternative world views can be both enabled and facilitated.

In an era of unprecedented technological innovation and evolving user expectations and information seeking behaviour, we are arguably now an online society, with digital services increasingly common and increasingly preferred. As a trusted information provider, libraries are in an advantageous position to respond, but this requires integrated strategic and enterprise architecture planning, for information technology (IT) has evolved from a support role to a strategic role, providing the core management systems, communication networks and delivery channels of the modern library. Furthermore, IT components do not function in isolation from one another but are interdependent elements of distributed and multidimensional systems encompassing people, processes and technologies, which must consider social, economic, legal, organisational and ergonomic requirements and relationships, as well as being logically sound from a technical perspective. Strategic planning provides direction, while enterprise architecture strategically aligns and holistically integrates business and information system architectures. While challenging, such integrated planning should be regarded as an opportunity for the library to evolve as an enterprise in the digital age, or at minimum, to simply keep pace with societal change and alternative service providers. Without strategy, a library risks being directed by outside forces with independent motivations and inadequate understanding of its broader societal role. Without enterprise architecture, it risks technological disparity, redundancy and obsolescence. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this conceptual chapter provides an integrated framework for strategic and architectural planning of digital library services. The concept of the library as an enterprise is also introduced.

The entirety of a region’s architectural expressions, that is, its building culture, has a strong impact on a region’s atmosphere. Being a collective and networked endeavour, building culture is difficult to coordinate. Against this background, this chapter presents an empirically informed reflection on architectural governance. The chapter is based on a multiple case study which compares five regions in the European Alps in terms of their coordination mechanisms in the areas of architecture and spatial planning, that is, architectural governance. The analysed regions include Grisons (Switzerland), Vorarlberg, Tyrol (both Austria), South Tyrol and Trentino (both in Italy). By combining conceptual considerations with empirical evidence, the chapter concludes with hypothesised relationships between architectural governance, building culture, socio-economic development dynamics and tourism.

This chapter exposes the official view that seems to portray New Towns in the UK as unbalanced communities built on the premise of a failed statist policy but it does not accept these views as fact. A principal critique is that the historiography of New Towns has been predominantly written by experts (academics and otherwise), providing a limited interpretation of the legacy of (living in) New Towns. This chapter uses a selection of key experts and helicopter specialists who contribute to its legacy through academic writing, policy reports and professional advice in their role as planners and architects (including the author/myself a chartered British architect). Experts and helicopter specialists were instrumental in writing and disseminating a specific understanding of the New Towns programme to unpack the stereotypes that were constructed around New Towns, which have (as a result) contributed to their so-called decline. This chapter also questions whether certain issues are due to a biased misrepresentation of the New Towns narrative, and if an alternative perspective is available.

The characterisation of New Towns as communities doomed for failure in their ideological pursuit of balance has been thematically classified as belonging to five stereotypes and each is discussed in a separate section: New Towns represent a statist approach to planning; A case of New Town Blues or suburban dystopia? Design driven stereotypes of New Towns as mostly Modernist projects; New Towns are nothing more than large council estates; Land-banking over Compulsory Purchase Orders.

Presenting the data in such a way permits a deconstruction of ‘balance’ as a lofty abstraction into five clear example-based observations that assist the evaluation of the traditional historiography and writings of British New Towns (Fig. 3.1).

The aim of this chapter is to help library administrators understand the concept of Service Design, and to maintain that any consideration of the future of library spaces should begin with a service design focused approach.

The chapter is a combination of general review, literature review, case study, and conceptual paper. It focuses on describing the basics of the concept, highlighting essential resources for further understanding, highlighting service design specifically applied in libraries, and providing one case study of an academic library undergoing a master planning project utilizing the lens of Service Design. The chapter will conclude by emphasizing the importance of attaining an appropriate understanding and buy-in for the Service Design process by library administrators and staff in order for its effective implementation.

Practical implications to employing Service Design to library spaces are endless, and span that gamut from making smart decisions based on user input and evidence, to creating spaces and services that are relevant to library users. Employing a Service Design approach to library building projects helps administrators position themselves to advocate for needed technology and funding in the highly competitive resource arena. The ideas gleaned from this chapter can be applied in any library: academic, public, special, or school. The results will be different, because every library has a unique group of users, but the processes employed are the same.

Library literature related to Service Design is slim but slowly emerging. This chapter fills a gap in literature geared specifically to administrators as well as building design and redesign projects.

The aim of this book is to understand the causes and consequences of new scales and forms of territorial and spatial restructuring in a context of accelerated globalization by focusing on a diverse array of urban megaproject developments that, in various forms and with various objectives, are transforming the global urban landscape at the outset of the 21st century. The contributions to this volume explore the architectural design, planning, management, financing, and impact of urban megaprojects, as well as the social actors and innovations driving them. The contributions also articulate the various socioeconomic, political, and cultural causes and consequences of UMP development, thus providing a context to understand the reconfiguration of urban spaces in the new millennium.

Launched in the 1960s, the nine French New Towns are generally considered as a pragmatic response to the urban growth of the Paris region, before it was extended as a national policy to other regions (Merlin, 1997). If their creation is usually placed in the continuity of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Movement and of previous New Towns experiments, especially those conducted in England, this historical lineage has never been appreciated in terms of architectural and urban research. Were the French New Towns projects formulated against these early ideas and models or, on the contrary, planned in light of them? Moreover, what are the main characteristics of their projects, their points of resemblance and particularities? These questions, often raised by observers, cannot be answered without a comprehensive knowledge of each New Town’s story, which is not yet available. But a renewed comprehension of their common history can be proposed by analysing their creation in light of the French urban debate of the twentieth century, and by giving special attention to two housing projects which, in Évry and Le Vaudreuil, were presented as ‘landmark operations of contemporary urban planning’ (New Towns Program, 1971).

This chapter looks at the changing politics of urban redevelopment in a politically divided democratic regime following the end of state socialism in 1989. It contrasts the emergence of two cultural institutions of national importance, the Palace of Arts and the National Theatre, as part of a megaproject in Budapest. They emerged almost at the same time as part of the Millennium City Center, a large-scale urban redevelopment project, but have come to stand for two radically opposed worlds dividing the nation and pitting against each other – the cosmopolitans and the nationalists. The research design is that of incorporated comparison; the two case studies are embedded in the analysis of the larger redevelopment project. The study mixes primary and secondary sources; draws on interviews, extensive discussions with architects and planners, as well as an analysis of planning documents, expert reports, and media coverage. It describes the dynamics of private–public partnerships in urban politics pointing to the changing role of the post-socialist state and the new power relations among the various groups involved in urban development in a newly democratizing regime. On the one hand, the analysis shows how local and national-scale political fights make sense from a larger political–economic perspective of waterfront regeneration; on the other, it argues that party politics in politically divided regimes have serious implications on the processes of large-scale urban development, ultimately making them even more under-determined than suggested by the literature. The chapter breaks the assumed unity of the state in studies of urban megaprojects and demonstrates the usefulness of both a scalar analysis and that of the changing political content of the state, which ultimately account for much of the variation in this global genre.