Rob Cowan (born 20 November 1950) is a British urbanist, writer, editor, speaker, consultant, cartoonist, illustrator and lexicographer.
After working in housing research at the Planning Exchange in Glasgow and planning aid at the Town and Country Planning Association in London, Rob Cowan turned to journalism as editor of the TCPA's journal Town and Country Planning in 1982, [1] editor of Roof (the magazine of the housing charity Shelter) from 1983 and at the Architects' Journal in various roles, including as acting editor in 1990.
From 2000 to 2007 Cowan was the first director of the Urban Design Group [2] and from 2007 he was a director of the consultancy Urban Design Skills. He has originated three influential urban design methods: the Placecheck method of urban design audit (now a web app that he runs with the architect and software developer Chris Sharpe); [3] the skills appraisal method Capacitycheck (which now provides the criteria for the Urban Design Group's recognised practitioner membership category); and the design appraisal method Qualityreviewer. [4]
He has been a senior research fellow in the Department of Architecture, De Montfort University (1995–2003); an external examiner in town planning at the Bartlett School, UCL (2001–03); an external examiner in town planning at the University of Manchester (2002–05); and a teaching fellow (urban design) at the Bartlett School, UCL (2004–06). He was a corporate member of the Royal Town Planning Institute from 1999 to 2023.
Cowan began working on urban lexicography in 2000. The first edition of his acclaimed The Dictionary of Urbanism was published in 2005, and he has been updating and expanding it ever since. The second edition will be illustrated and have more than 12,000 entries.
In 1973 Cowan founded the Wyndham Lewis Society, devoted to the modernist writer and painter. The society publishes the Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies and the Lewisletter. Cowan was chairman (1990–92) and a trustee (1992–99) of Vision for London. He has been editor of Context, the journal of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation, since 2000. [5] He was an assessor for the Scottish student urban design awards (2002–05) and a special advisor to the House of Commons ODPM Committee (2004). He was a board member of the Nordic Urban Design Association from 2006 to 2014, and he chaired its first four annual conferences in Norway. Cowan has been a trustee and secretary of the Lady Margaret Paterson Osborn Trust (set up by the family of the town planning pioneer Sir Frederic Osborn) since 2006. He gave the Royal Town Planning Institute's masterclasses on urban design for many years. He was The Planner 's cartoonist for 20 years, and his cartoons have been published in Context and the Architects' Journal . He presents the Plandemonium series of online cartoon videos. He has been a member of the judging panel for the Civic Voice Design Awards since 2015. [6]
Thomas Telford was a Scottish civil engineer. After establishing himself as an engineer of road and canal projects in Shropshire, he designed numerous infrastructure projects in his native Scotland, as well as harbours and tunnels. Such was his reputation as a prolific designer of highways and related bridges, he was dubbed the Colossus of Roads, and, reflecting his command of all types of civil engineering in the early 19th century, he was elected as the first president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a post he held for 14 years until his death.
Sir Patrick Geddes was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, Comtean positivist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and sociology.
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is a professional body for architects primarily in the United Kingdom, but also internationally, founded for the advancement of architecture under its royal charter granted in 1837, three supplemental charters and a new charter granted in 1971.
Richard Murphy OBE is a British architect and businessman. He is the founder and principal architect of Richard Murphy Architects, an architectural firm operating in Edinburgh. He is a winner of the 2016 RIBA House of the year.
The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, also known as The Bartlett, is the academic centre for the study of the built environment at University College London (UCL), United Kingdom. It is home to thirteen departments that have expertise in individual subfields, including the Bartlett School of Architecture, Bartlett School of Planning, Bartlett Development Planning Unit, and the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. The Bartlett is consistently ranked the highest in Europe and the UK and among the highest in the world for the "Architecture and the Built Environment" category in major rankings. It is currently ranked the first in the world for the year 2023.
Penicuik is a town and former burgh in Midlothian, Scotland, lying on the west bank of the River North Esk. It lies on the A701 midway between Edinburgh and Peebles, east of the Pentland Hills.
Tom Turner is an English landscape architect, garden designer and garden historian teaching at the University of Greenwich in London. He is the author of books and articles on landscape and gardens and is the editor of the Garden History Reference Encyclopedia. Educated at the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, he studied landscape architecture under Frank Clark.
The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) was an executive non-departmental public body of the UK government, established in 1999. It was funded by both the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Communities and Local Government. It was merged into the Design Council on 1 April 2011.
While purpose-built towns and cities have many precedents in antiquity - the 195 BC iteration of Chang'an providing a case in point - the New Towns movement refers to an ideologically-driven social campaign. An associated government-driven building and development program to realise the creation of new towns took place in two tranches in the United Kingdom after World War II. Towns were planned and built with two main intentions: to remedy overcrowding and congestion, and to organize scattered ad hoc settlements. An additional purpose was to rehouse people in freshly built, fully planned towns that were completely self-sufficient for the community. Ideological aspects of environmental determinism predominated in this last purpose.
Charles Henry Bourne Quennell (1872–1935), was an English architect, designer, illustrator and historian. According to the heritage architect Cath Layton, "his great influence [as an architect and urban planner] can be felt in the houses and streets of London’s suburbs and across the country." His obituary in Nature noted that his books for children and young people had "strongly stimulated interest in the cultural background of the more formal study of history".
The architecture of Scotland includes all human building within the modern borders of Scotland, from the Neolithic era to the present day. The earliest surviving houses go back around 9500 years, and the first villages 6000 years: Skara Brae on the Mainland of Orkney being the earliest preserved example in Europe. Crannogs, roundhouses, each built on an artificial island, date from the Bronze Age and stone buildings called Atlantic roundhouses and larger earthwork hill forts from the Iron Age. The arrival of the Romans from about 71 AD led to the creation of forts like that at Trimontium, and a continuous fortification between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde known as the Antonine Wall, built in the second century AD. Beyond Roman influence, there is evidence of wheelhouses and underground souterrains. After the departure of the Romans there were a series of nucleated hill forts, often utilising major geographical features, as at Dunadd and Dunbarton.
Malcolm Fraser is an architect from Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the founder of Malcolm Fraser Architects, a firm of architects based in the Old Town of Edinburgh from 1993. The company entered liquidation on 21 August 2015 and Fraser worked with Halliday Fraser Munro Architects before setting up anew with Robin Livingstone as Fraser/Livingstone Architects in January 2019.
Sir Terence Farrell, known as Terry Farrell, is a British architect and urban designer. In 1980, after working for 15 years in partnership with Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Farrell founded his own firm, Farrells. He established his reputation with three completed projects in London in the late 1980s: Embankment Place, 125 London Wall aka Alban Gate and SIS Building aka Vauxhall Cross.
Michael Lynch, FRHistS, FRSE, FSA Scot is a retired Scottish historian and a leading expert in the history of the Scottish Reformation and pre-modern urbanisation in the Scottish kingdom. In 2010, five years after his retirement, he was described by one reviewer as 'one of the most influential historians in Scotland of the last thirty years', whose work has been characterised by an 'ability to bring ecclesiastical, cultural and urban perspectives to traditional Scottish political and governmental histories', as well as the ability 'to clarify a difficult theory within a deceptively simple phrase'.
Architecture in modern Scotland encompasses all building in Scotland, between the beginning of the twentieth century and the present day. The most significant architect of the early twentieth century was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who mixed elements of traditional Scottish architecture with contemporary movements. Estate house design declined in importance in the twentieth century. In the early decades of the century, traditional materials began to give way to cheaper modern ones. After the First World War, Modernism and the office block began to dominate building in the major cities and attempts began to improve the quality of urban housing for the poor, resulted in a massive programme of council house building. The Neo-Gothic style continued in to the twentieth century but the most common forms in this period were plain and massive Neo-Romanesque buildings.
Architecture of Scotland in the Industrial Revolution includes all building in Scotland between the mid-eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century. During this period, the country underwent an economic and social transformation as a result of industrialisation, which was reflected in new architectural forms, techniques and scale of building. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh was the focus of a classically inspired building boom that reflected the growing wealth and confidence of the capital. Housing often took the form of horizontally divided tenement flats. Some of the leading European architects during this period were Scottish, including Robert Adam and William Chambers.
Housing in Scotland includes all forms of built habitation in what is now Scotland, from the earliest period of human occupation to the present day. The oldest house in Scotland dates from the Mesolithic era. In the Neolithic era settled farming led to the construction of the first stone houses. There is also evidence from this period of large timber halls. In the Bronze Age there were cellular round crannogs and hillforts that enclosed large settlements. In the Iron Age cellular houses begin to be replaced on the northern isles by simple Atlantic roundhouses, substantial circular buildings with a drystone construction. The largest constructions that date from this era are the circular brochs and duns and wheelhouses.
Nahid Majid OBE is a Bangladeshi-born British civil servant, chief operating officer for Regeneration Investment Organisation at UK Trade & Investment, deputy director within the Department for Work and Pensions and former urban planner. She is currently the most senior British Bangladeshi Muslim woman in the civil service.
Events from the year 1819 in Scotland.
Romano Roland Paoletti, CBE was a British-Italian architect. He was best known for his work on the early stations for Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway, and for commissioning the award-winning designs of the stations of London Underground's Jubilee Line Extension. He was described by the Architectural Review as "the Medici of London Transport".