Senior Associate: Transport, Ben Krastins

What does Movement and Place mean to you? Movement and Place means something different to everyone but provides a common purpose to improve the way we travel and the places we work, eat, sleep and meet!

What makes you uniquely qualified to make Movement and Place assessments? Ratio offers a working environment where we get to work with urban designers, planners and engineers everyday, so not only do we understand each other, but we also work better together.

What about Movement and Place primarily interests you? The ability to work closely with a range of authority and community stakeholders to enhance the safety, accessibility and enjoyment of our activity centres.

Senior Urban Designer/ Landscape Architect: Ariel Utz Wirnsberger

What does Movement and Place mean to you? Any transport initiative or transport infrastructure form an integral part of our urban environment. Movement and Place is a new approach that acknowledges the complexity of our cities as being comprised of various social, infrastructure and natural layers, encouraging a more integral vision for transport initiatives for the future.

Why are you uniquely qualified to make Movement and Place assessments? As an urban designer and landscape architect, I possess the knowledge and tools to assess urban environments from multiple angles. This assessment, which forms part of the Movement and Place approach, sets the basis for subsequent discussions on transport alternatives.

How does Movement and Place primarily interest you? Urban challenges should be addressed with a multidisciplinary approach. Movement and Place is a tool that can bring different professions (and ‘languages’) together, allowing engineers, urban designers, planners and other professionals to tackle urban challenges in a more efficient way.

Senior Associate: Urban Design, Mathew Furness

What does Movement and Place mean to you? Movement and place is about recognising and understanding the range of roles our streets and roads play as corridors of various movement modes and as a key elements of the public realm of our towns and cities.  Movement and place provides a framework to address competing pressures and how they can be balanced based on their existing and future roles and the needs of communities.

Why are you uniquely qualified to make Movement and Place assessments? Because Ratio is multi-disciplinary we are uniquely qualified to consider movement and place from both a traffic and transport perspective as well as from a planning and design angle.  As a planner and urban designer I am particularly focussed on the issues of place and the role of streets as part of an integrated team.

How does Movement and Place primarily interest you? The opportunity it provides to address issues in a holistic way that considers all users of our streets rather than prioritising or focusing primarily on car movement.

Urban Designer / Planner, Rechelle Brookes

What does Movement and Place mean to you? Movement and Place is an approach that sees that movement isn’t just about passing through, it’s how we experience and connect with our neighbourhood and the broader city.

Why are you uniquely qualified to make Movement and Place assessments? Movement and Place is more than just infrastructure. It’s also about education and shifting behaviour patterns. Within the team, I bring an approach that involves the community and soft infrastructure. This compliments the technical aspects to achieve a holistic redesign.

How does Movement and Place primarily interest you? Making public spaces arenas of interaction, and the streets a method of community building.

Transport Planner, Harry Jorgensen

What does Movement and Place mean to you? Movement and place is a framework which allows streets to be addressed by both their value as a place and transport function. This allows us as practitioners to understand how the street currently perform and how it can be envisioned into the future. High streets can often be complex beasts where people want to stay and linger can conflict with a high streets function in moving as may people to and through the area as possible.

Why are you uniquely qualified to make Movement and Place assessments? As an urban planner by qualification who works in transport by trade, it is a framework that attracts me greatly by getting to look at improving the public realm as well as providing transport solutions that look away from solely the car and encompasses a human centred perspective.

How does Movement and Place primarily interest you? The facilitation of either movement or place inherently compete against each other over often scarce public space and poses a difficult question to answer – How can we accommodate the needs of everyone and everything in one space? Tackling this tough question from a multi-disciplinary approach through co-design between different professions is an extremely testing and rewarding challenge.

Why Ratio?

We’ve been listening. More often than not, government agencies and road authorities are now looking at Movement & Place in our Activity Centres together, not in isolation. In many locations, historic approaches to planning in isolation have contributed heavily to the problems we face today.

The Movement & Place approach provides a solution addressing this challenge. Ratio’s multidisciplinary team are well-versed in collaboration: Movement and Place is simply an emerging approach for our talented team to exercise their strengths.