From Geddes’ city museum to Farrell’s urban room: past, present, and future at the Newcastle City Futures exhibition

Abstract

Genuine engagement about how best to achieve liveable urban futures should be part of planning's raison-d'etre but it has a chequered history of delivery. Exhibitions harnessing the communicative power of mixed media and linked to a progressive and responsive programme of focused discussion and debate remain relevant to community consultation and civic engagement. Terry Farrell's concept of the 'urban room' to involve citizens in engaging with the past, present, and future of towns and cities offers a contemporary refreshment of the approach propounded by Patrick Geddes from the early 1900s. The possibilities of creating novel and compelling opportunities for civic discourse in this guise are explored in this review article though the Newcastle City Futures pop-up exhibition and events held in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK in 2014. This event carries lessons for imagining how planners, developers, governments, and community groups may come together to critically and creatively forge future propositions for the urban condition.

Examining the effectiveness of urban planning exhibitions in planning communication: A contextual model of learning

“…There are only a few studies that have been conducted around urban planning exhibitions worldwide, concerning their historical development (Freestone, 2015;Freestone & Amati, 2011;Hein, 2015;Nakajima, 2021;Tewdwr-Jones et al, 2020), exhibition design (Tan & Cho, 2022;Lu et al, 2020;Qian & Wu, 2012), and its connected political metaphors (de Jong et al, 2018). So far, there is a gap in research on the effects of urban planning exhibitions on the communication of planning contents.…”

“…For example, through post-visit ratings and interviews Fan (2014) found that visitors were generally content with its role of communication while there are limited opportunities for public participation. Tewdwr-Jones et al (2020) demonstrated that the visitor interaction board, which was used at the Newcastle City Futures exhibition, received predominantly positive feedback from visitors. Nakajima (2021) compared the post-visit ratings of experts and non-experts for each program presented at the 'Urbanism Places Exhibition 2018' in Shinjuku, Japan.…”

“…Later, the 'Futurama' ride was installed at the New York World's Fair in 1939. Other examples include 'The Hannover 2000 Expo', which served as the centrepiece for a confluence of world fairs, model planning and housing exhibitions; 'Barcelona in Progress', a permanent exhibition featuring a 1:1000 scale model of the city in 2004; and the idea of the 'Urban Room', which was proposed by Farrell and put into practice in more than 15 British cities and towns, typically as popup settings that were limited in size and scope (Tewdwr-Jones et al, 2020;Lu, 2021).…”

Co-Designing Urban Planning Engagement and Innovation: Using LEGO® to Facilitate Collaboration, Participation and Ideas

“…The work included developing both a trust-building exercise through visual means (Tewdwr-Jones et al, 2019) and a state of the region report (Tewdwr-Jones et al, 2015) that would be used in the later period of NCF's endeavour. This was an attempt to get partners across sectors to work together to think of new shared project ideas.…”

What Is Metropolitan Planning and Governance for?

“…But it would be necessary for this visualisation to become part of the broader metropolitan planning process, where professionals listen and view a citizen's perspective of the urban together with their likes and dislikes, represented in visual form. Pilot exercises run in Newcastle upon Tyne indicate a positive take-up of new digital photographic, video and drawing media in addressing the long-term future of the city, often led by children and young people that, in turn, attract the attention of parents, grandparents and other family members and friends (Tewdwr-Jones et al, 2019). The challenge would be to convince professional planners to see the knowledge gathering, idea generating merits of more visual means that could inform their hitherto closed and predominantly written communication devices.…”