About Us
ConnectedCities is the brainchild of Oliver Christopherson, a Cambridge educated lawyer and Bahai who had a lifelong passion for town planning. See photo and statement below.
Brian Q Love is a Chartered and Registered Architect, a fellow of the RSA, member of the TCPA and associate of the CIHT. He is director of Love Architecture Ltd, a RIBA Chartered Practice of architects, project managers and urban designers.
This website and other documents describing ConnectedCities have been created with the assistance of very many hard working supporters including, in alphabetical order:
Avishek Subba
Bejal Keshav
Graham Freer
Kamal Benissad
Lalit (Leo) Chauhan
Marwa Altai
Michelle Blom
Sabatino Torchitti
Veronica Petruzzi
Oliver & Kariana Christopherson (2nd & 3rd from left) unveiling the Braille plaque at the Forster Memorial, 24 June 2006 © Friends of the Forster Country.
Oliver wrote: One day in 2006 my wife Kari-Anna and I found ourselves in St Nicholas churchyard (in Stevenage), at the unveiling of a Braille plaque next to the monument to E M Forster: “Only connect”. In this peaceful setting, looking at the monument and out over the Forster Country, I was suddenly aware both of the value of this archetypal piece of Hertfordshire countryside and of its relationship with the towns which surround it - Stevenage, Hitchin and Letchworth, three towns close to each other geographically yet very different in their history and nature: Stevenage, the first post-war New Town, Hitchin, an old-established market town and Letchworth, the first of Howard’s Garden Cities.
How good it would be, I thought, if these three towns, which between them have the potential to become a great and marvellous city, could be brought together - not physically joined, but sharing a common purpose and identity. So the idea of the ConnectedCity was born.
The obvious model for the ConnectedCity is Ebenezer Howard’s “social city” – a group of new settlements in the countryside organised around a larger central settlement – see diagram. But here we are not trying to create the city from scratch, we are taking a collection of towns and developing and unifying it to form a coherent city. To achieve this, government and people must act together.