Dr Ben Guy

Planning for Humans™: the mission

Urban planning became a British profession with the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, and it arrived carrying an inheritance. The plan seen from the helicopter rather than the footpath. The machine served ahead of the person. Le Corbusier and the modernist movement, applied at civic scale, cleared established fabric and produced social ghettos in city after city.

The same decades took out the tramways — in the United States, General Motors and a group of tyre, fuel and truck companies were convicted in 1949 of conspiring to monopolise the supply of buses and equipment to the transit systems they had bought — and the highway era drove monolithic structures through the middle of settled cities. In Britain the head of engineering ran the planning department, took a fat red pen to the inner ring, drew a road, and filed it as regeneration and slum clearance.

The intricate laneways and quarters that survived that period are now among the most valuable urban land on earth, and cities are spending fortunes rebuilding what was removed.

Planning for Humans was born against that inheritance: monolithic, siloed, top-down, and supremely confident. The argument is set out at length in Engaging the workforce to deliver the programme.

Oxford Circus, Earth Circus, Urban Circus

Oxford Circus → Earth Circus → Urban Circus

A circus was a piece of urban form long before it was ever a troupe: a ring, a meeting of streets, a place built to hold a crowd. Three of them run through this story, and between them they carry the whole argument.

Oxford Circus is the proof. Stand in it, or in Piccadilly Circus, and you are standing in a single coherent public space assembled by many separate owners, separately financed, built decades apart. The architecture agrees with itself. Height, rhythm and enclosure hold across every property boundary, kept by parties whose obligations ran only to themselves. That is a behavioural achievement wearing architecture: the visible residue of a great many people coordinating with strangers across a century, often against their own short-term interest. Today the same profession, with far better tools, works hard to persuade two adjacent landowners to respect each other.

Earth Circus is the troupe Dr Guy juggled fire with in North Queensland, somewhere between a science degree and a planning career.

Urban Circus is what he called the company, pleased with a name that meant both at once. Twenty years on it became Urban CGI, once it was clear that a minister’s office reads the word circus as chaos.

The doctorate: measuring sense of place

The argument has a formal source. His doctorate at Anglia Polytechnic University, now Anglia Ruskin, examined post-war engineering-driven reconstruction in the United Kingdom, and the profession’s want of an objective method for saying whether a large insertion belonged in a place or destroyed it. Genius loci was endlessly discussed and left unmeasured.

His answer was an instrument. The Morpholograph records the three spatial variables a person experiences from inside a street — width, height and vertical rhythm — plot by plot, and expresses the street’s characteristic structure as a ratio with a stated band of tolerance. A proposal is then tested against it. Inside the tolerance, however contemporary the style, the place holds. Outside it, the output visibly distorts, and the argument becomes evidential rather than aesthetic.

He proved it on one of the most compromised high streets in England, extended it across a hundred and seventy hectares of the surrounding city, and presented the universality of the method in the United Kingdom, Greece and Poland. The perceptual side of that argument is developed in Gordon Cullen and serial vision.

Dr Ben Guy, the physicist

He read physics at the University of Adelaide, and rather more mathematics than he had bargained for. Astrophysics and quantum mechanics held him: wave-particle duality, probability distributions, fuzzy logic — a way of thinking in likelihoods and superpositions, set against the absolutes that govern engineering and accounting. The move from Newtonian certainty to quantum probability occupied a large part of his youth, along with the papers and biographies of the people who made it.

The interest stayed current. He follows Sir Roger Penrose closely, and the argument Penrose developed with Stuart Hameroff that non-computable quantum state reduction in the microtubules of neurons may be fundamental to consciousness — consciousness as a basic feature of the universe, in the way electricity and magnetism are, rather than a by-product of complexity. It is also the most interesting question now standing over artificial intelligence.

Physicists tend to hold a whole system, uncertainties included, in mind at once. That is the habit he brought to infrastructure.

Dr Ben Guy, the psychologist

The same degree carried psychology: environmental psychology, social psychology, human behaviour, and a proper grounding in statistics. Environmental psychology studies how a physical setting shapes what people do inside it, which turned out to be the exact question a planner needs answered.

In the nineties the mind itself was treated as an embarrassment, granted at best the status of an emergent property. Thirty years on, consciousness sits among the live frontiers of thought, worked across psychology, philosophy, physics and neuroscience. He has followed it the whole way, and it remains the reason his planning starts with perception.

Dr Ben Guy, the planner

Environmental planning at James Cook University in North Queensland, alongside a year as a project officer on the Trinity Inlet Management Program in Cairns: farmland runoff reaching the Great Barrier Reef, and a city council, a port authority, a state government and a fishing industry who agreed on very little. The environmental problem was tractable. The relationships were the work.

The same years produced a student paper he remains fond of. Gondwanan Australia lost its megafauna, Diprotodon among them — a large soft-footed browser — and gained hard-hooved cattle and sheep, which compact and cut a landscape that evolved under padded feet. The paper proposed the endangered black rhinoceros as an ecological analogue for the North Queensland savannah. Serious ecology wrapped around a provocation, which describes a good deal of his work since. The same instinct runs through Advanced pedestrian simulation: being, doing and the limits of level of service.

Dr Ben Guy, the creative

He identifies as a creative intellectual rather than an artist, and the record is long. Airbrushing and screen printing. Furniture designed and built, some of it more mathematical than furniture usually is. A handmade jewellery business that funded a good deal of travel. Then fire eating, fire skipping, juggling and performance. He held a contract with the youth arts body in Cairns, representing North Queensland artists to the state government on funding, and gave free public lectures around the region on the creative city, after Charles Landry.

The design instinct runs through the company and through the work. There is a company name in it too: he juggled fire with a troupe called Earth Circus, and a circus is both a troupe and a piece of urban form — Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus. The company was Urban Circus for twenty years, until it became clear that a minister’s office reads the word circus as chaos.

Dr Ben Guy today

He is glad to be working at a moment when Bent Flyvbjerg, Jan Gehl and others are gaining real influence, and when the confident post-war habit of setting environmental, social and human impact aside is finally being moderated. The means to moderate it are now available. The constraint is leadership.

He works with the small number of programme leaders who already suspect their delivery risk is behavioural, and who hold the standing to act on it. On the competency side of that, see Route competency and operational readiness. Urban CGI operates from the United Kingdom and Australia.