Name: This Was The Future: Vertical Cities
Start: 2024-11-07T18:00:00+00:00
End: 2024-11-07T19:30:00+00:00
Location: Farrell Centre

Skywalks, megastructures, towers and tunnels – reimagining the city vertically.
About this Event

Skywalks, megastructures, towers and tunnels – reimagining the city vertically.

From Le Corbusier’s futuristic city designs of the 1920s, to 1960s Tyneside – the separation of cars and pedestrians was arguably the chief tenet of modernist planning. This separation often took place vertically, with traffic buried in tunnels or elevated on vast flyovers, and pedestrians correspondingly lifted onto skywalks or submerged into underpasses.

Although often emerging from a genuine design to make cities more functional, these ideas have since become thoroughly discredited, though continue to shape many cities around the world – not least Newcastle and Gateshead.

In this event, we explore the past, present and future of vertical cities. Why did the vertical separation of cars and pedestrians? How were these ideas enacted? Why did they often fail? And what possibilities exist today for reimagining the city verticality?

Speakers to be announced.

Part of ‘This Was The Future’ – a series where expert speakers tackling the big questions and key issues around Tyneside’s 1960s and 1970s transformations.