Joe Holyoak News Blog

Much as, generally, I admire and extol the personalisation of space and the untidy, anarchic visual order that usually results, I have never really felt enthusiastic about allotments, nor indeed about the growing of vegetables at all. My father was a keen gardener, so perhaps it is a reaction against him, for I always wanted to be unlike him; I still can’t listen to Gardeners’ Question Time. I enjoy their scenographic aspect, as we pass by on the railway embankment, like Philip Larkin in The Whitsun Weddings, and the allotments below reveal their patchwork of human and horticultural diversity. I enjoy David Crouch and Colin Ward’s book on allotments, and its celebration of cooperative individualism.[i] I am pleased that Birmingham, where I live, has the distinctions of both the greatest provision of allotments in the country, and the country’s oldest surviving allotments (Guinea Gardens in Edgbaston, albeit with its tenants seemingly having to continually fend off threats to its survival).

But perhaps I need to get more engaged, because allotments may be one of the motifs of our urban future. The ways in which we produce and consume food constitute one of the most disfunctional features of our modern life, and have been thoroughly documented in recent years. Where to begin listing the interlocking problems? Many people have become alienated from the origins of their food, have no knowledge of how to cook food, and do not know the dinner table as a constituent part of family life. Bad nutrition contributes to illhealth and growing levels of obesity among both adults and children. The market dominance of Tesco and other supermarkets forces small shops out of business and damages local economies. Their centralised distribution patterns put thousands of lorries on to our crowded roads, which also contain their customers driving to and from their car parks. The huge food miles figures which result reduce the freshness of food. The supermarkets’ use of imports to obtain year-round availability of food helps to disconnect us from awareness of seasonal change, and their emphasis on uniformity and standardisation reduces local variety and local distinctiveness. In short, there is hardly a quality of our lives which remains unaffected by our damaged relationship with food.

An innovative study of the availability of fresh and affordable fruit and vegetables in Sandwell, one of the most deprived boroughs in the country, was carried out by the local PCT and Warwick University in 2000.[ii] Using GIS mapping, residential streets which were within ‘reasonable walking distance’ (500 metres) of a shop selling at least eight different kinds of fresh and reasonably priced fruit and vegetables were identified. The results were very worrying in what they indicated of the connections between poor health, deprivation, and unhealthy eating patterns. There are large residential areas where no shops selling fresh fruit or vegetables exist. Inexpensive, good quality food is available only in small, concentrated shopping areas to which the majority of residents have to drive or go by bus. Small retailers selling healthy food struggle to survive against competition from larger stores, and against crime and harsh working conditions. It is a graphic illustration of the pathological situation that Joanna Blythman has documented in her various books on the British people and their food.[iii] Yet Sandwell, like similar post-industrial areas, has extensive areas of leftover brownfield land in no productive use which could, without great infrastructural investment, be producing food for local consumption.

In addition to these issues of health and food miles and so on, there are the global economic facts of food shortage, and the huge increases in basic food prices, and what they mean for our national economies. In Britain, we produce only about 40% of the food which we eat, and the government and many authorities maintain that this proportion needs to be considerably increased if we are to gain a necessary degree of economic autonomy. But where do we see the influence of all these factors on urban planning and urban design? We have eventually shut the stable door of the out-of-town supermarket, but the supermarkets’ dominance nevertheless increases yearly. If we are to increase our productivity, eat more healthily, re-establish a relationship with real food, reduce food poverty, reduce imports and food miles, and allow food to contribute more to local culture and identity, then it seems there has to be a process of localisation, which will make our towns and cities very different from the way they are at present. Localisation will, among other things, necessitate the urbanisation of food production, whether in the form of allotments or in other ways. Food production will not be confined to the countryside.

Here we encounter a problem with the orthodoxy of urban design, as expressed in PPS1, the Urban White Paper, and other manifestos. Central to these is the principle of intensification. In reaction against the low density spreading of towns, the exporting to greenfield sites of business parks, and the blurring of distinctions between urban and rural, that typified the period of late modernism in the twentieth century, orthodoxy now requires the concentration of development in towns and cities, and the raising of urban residential densities. (Which is not to say that these are necessarily  everywhere either fully supported or being achieved, only that this is the party line). In a more general sense, as well as the justification of these measures by the sustainability agenda, there is also a renewal and a celebration of the culture of urban compression, intensity and diversity. Town and country are to be made more expressive by their opposition. As I write this, I think of the current development of Upton, on the western boundary of Northampton, where an urban edge of four storey terraced houses addresses the countryside; an opposition almost unheard of in England, and more evocative of a European bastide town.

As a consequence, there is now (or at least there was recently, until the collapse in economic confidence, which presumably will return to where it was, at some time) considerable development pressure on open spaces, both formal and informal, in towns. In Birmingham there is a waiting list for allotments, but a few years ago it took considerable local opposition to reduce, but not eliminate, the encroachment on to the Victoria Jubilee Allotments in Handsworth by the housebuilders Westbury Homes (later Charles Church) to build houses for sale. So, if we are to make our towns more sustainable by building more densely, how are we also to make them more sustainable by having open spaces for growing food? This is the conundrum.

In the past, the pre-industrial town accommodated food growing by being a patchwork of buildings and small gardens. The intensity of land use was often encouraged, or enforced, by the defensive walled form of the town, wherein the town had to be capable of autonomy in a crisis. Similarly, the time of maximum food production in Britain was the Second World War, when the country was cut off from foreign sources of food, and many urban recreational spaces were turned over to intensive horticulture. Presently, one of the most impressive models for urban agriculture is Havana in Cuba. Because of the American ban on trade, and then the disappearance of its Soviet Union supplies, Havana is now obliged to augment its rural production by growing in the city. The urban fabric is interspersed with many small productive gardens, called by the Cubans organoponicos, creating an environment that is not only considerably sustainable, but also a sensory and physical delight.

The example of Havana makes the point that spaces for productive growing and spaces for recreation are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Recreational space does not only have to be ecologically degree-zero football pitches. Among the leading promoters of this idea are the architects Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen. Viljoen has edited a book which contains a number of demonstration urban agriculture projects for London, the largest being a continuous green corridor, called LeisurEscape, accommodating both growing and recreational spaces, connecting Tate Modern, on the banks of the Thames, to East Croydon.[iv] Although an isolated project, Bohn and Viljoen’s proposal is reminiscent of earlier, more visionary projects that introduced the greening of the city, such as the 1938 MARS plan for London, with its wedges of open space penetrating deep into the urban fabric. This in turn has its roots in Ebenezer Howard’s proposal for the third of the Three Magnets; an alternative settlement form that represented “the marriage of town and country”. This of course, both in its theoretical form and in the built form of Letchworth, was low density development. So was Bournville, where George Cadbury provided every household with a fruit tree in its garden, and the garden was large enough to grow vegetables to feed the family.

These are delightful places to live, but their low density makes them incompatible with today’s orthodoxy of sustainable development. How are we to square the circle of having both more buildings and more gardens within the same urban area? One obvious answer is contained within the generally discredited urbanist ideology of Le Corbusier in his “Five Points for a New Architecture”; to replace the open space lost by the construction of a building, on its roof. A couple of years ago there was a very enterprising proposal for a new Asda supermarket in Birmingham, designed by the architects Gardner Stewart, but not yet built. The large single-storey footprint is sandwiched between a basement car park below, and another car park above. On the roof is a park, accessible by steps from the higher ground level on one side, and at the edges of the park stand six storeys of flats. The park is for recreational use, but I have often thought that supermarkets could at least help to redeem their negative role within society by growing food on the roof, and then selling it minutes later within the store. A roof could be covered in a huge greenhouse, growing all the tomatoes that the district could want. Or there could be thousands of free-range hens running about and laying eggs, to be boxed on the roof, and the boxes slid down ramps directly on to the shelves below. What could be fresher? The multi-storey urban farm designed by the architects MVRDV as the Dutch Pavilion for the 2000 Expo provided, as Expo projects historically have done, an extreme version of an idea that is capable of domestication, and translation into a more normative form.

Rooftop gardens would require additional structure, and for a single-storey supermarket or similar building the additional cost would be considerable and perhaps prohibitive. But for the three-layer Birmingham Asda the smaller proportionate cost presumably made the park economically viable. Green roofs are now quite common and affordable, with both thermal and environmental benefits; it is only a relatively small further step for a roof to become a productive garden. Even less space-consuming are vertically planted surfaces. These have inherent problems of access and irrigation, but there are being developed new conventional methods for overcoming these. Amazon currently lists eleven books on vertical gardening.

Buildings covered in plants, whether horizontally or vertically, or both, conventionally represent a romantic and perhaps eccentric eco-vision of the future; a reversion to timeless peasant ways in opposition to the supposedly rational twentieth-century high technology vision. But perhaps the hard physical, social and economic circumstances of the twenty-first century mean that the romantic image of a goat on the roof, sitting shaded by the runner beans from England’s Mediterranean sunshine, is the necessary reality of the future. 

[i] David Crouch and Colin Ward, The Allotment: its Landscape and Culture, Five Leaves, 1997.

[ii] Dowler, E., Rex, D., Blair, A., Donkin, A., and Grundy, C., Measuring Access to Healthy Food in Sandwell, University of Warwick and Sandwell Health Action Zone, 2001.

[iii] Joanna Blythman, Bad Food Britain, Fourth Estate, 2006.

[iv] Andre Viljoen, CPULs: Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes. Designing urban agriculture for sustainable cities, Elsevier, 2005.

Four preliminary observations.

1.

Firstly, a note about history. In making plans for the future, it is essential that proper respect is paid to the history of what has gone before. There should be no distortion of the past in order to present the plans more favourably. The strategic expansion of the city centre from 80 hectares inside the Queensway to 800 hectares inside the Middle Ring Road was a decision taken twenty years ago at the Highbury Initiative in March 1988, and implemented by the City Council soon afterwards. It is not an innovation of the Big City Plan. Furthermore, the boundary drawn in yellow and labelled “existing city core” on page 6 of the Big City Plan booklet has no status that I recognise.

More generally, in the desire to reinvent and reposition Birmingham in an international league table, it is necessary to understand and respect the history and the nature of the city. At a superficial (but still important) level, this means continuing to use historic place names, and not seeking to replace them by bland invented marketing terms such as “Eastside” and “Westside”. More fundamentally, it means appreciating what is characteristic in the nature of Birmingham’s urban fabric. The city’s publicity campaigns continually stress the big, the exceptional, the upmarket, the glamorous elements of the fabric. They have little to say about, and even dismiss, as does the Big City Plan in a number of instances, the ordinary and the utilitarian, as exemplified in inner city districts such as Digbeth, Highgate, Hockley, and Aston Newtown. These districts are not only economically important to Birmingham, but in their fine grain and their diversity, they are particular to Birmingham; they are a large part of what makes Birmingham special. The Big City Plan should respect and value them.

2.

Whatever the Big City Plan may be, it is not a masterplan. A masterplan is an explicitly physical plan for an area under a single control, which sets standards for the design of its various parts, which may be built independently at different times. The Big City Plan is an aspirational policy document for a large, diverse area under multiple controls; there is nothing wrong with that, indeed it is appropriate, but to call it a masterplan is confusing.

3.

When the City Council commissioned Professor Michael Parkinson in 2006, we were told that his report would become the basis of the masterplan which would follow, translating his socio-economic analysis into physical form. There is little evidence in the Big City Plan that this is happening. This is disappointing, as Parkinson’s report (published in 2007) is an extremely intelligent and perceptive work. Taking one important example, Digbeth, Parkinson states (paragraph 6.74);

“This is one of the most exciting parts of the city which has authenticity, grit, great buildings, waterways. In other cities it would be a jewel. It is absolutely critical that this area is developed in the right way for the city. It certainly must not be overdeveloped or sanitised by conventional development”.

But the Big City Plan’s entry on Digbeth makes no reference to this perspective; instead it asks conventional questions about land use and building stock, similar to those in entries on other quarters.

4.

The Big City Plan consultation document repeatedly asks questions, district by district, which are based upon land use alternatives, such as “What do you think the focus for Eastside should be in the future – as a learning quarter, a new office quarter, a residential quarter, or a media and creative quarter?” These questions are naïve and inappropriate, for two reasons. Firstly, they suppose that these uses are alternatives, as though we were still living in the modernist period of land use zoning in which an area could have only one use. These uses are not mutually exclusive, and indeed are mutually beneficial if mixed appropriately. Secondly, a look at any part of the city over the past thirty or so years will show that land uses are not fixed; they continually shift and change in response to social and economic change, and the changes are largely independent of top-down planning. So it is mistaken and misleading to suggest that the future nature of a district can be determined by designating its use. The job that the Big City Plan should be doing is to propose an appropriate and responsive framework, with a high degree of permanence, which can accept changing development and occupation over a long period of time, without compromise. This would be a sustainable urban fabric.

Having made these four general points, I now address the specific topics in the consultation document, with some specific responses.

Business and industry

The emphasis on the “high value-added sector” is typical of Birmingham’s recent agenda. It is a mistake to relegate ordinary low value manufacturing to a subordinate position. Manufacturing things, what Birmingham has always been good at, is likely to become again a more important part of the economy.

Shopping

History tells us that in the development of shopping, the planning process is merely reactive to the initiatives of the private sector. Strategic planning had no role to play in the development of Birmingham’s two most celebrated recent shopping locations, the Bull Ring and the Mailbox, and this is probably equally true of all retail development outside communist countries.

Community, population and households

“A city for young people” is a meaningless phrase. There can be no equitable city that favours one particular sector at the expense of others.

More family accommodation is needed, in and near the city centre, but it cannot be left solely to the private sector to build. A significant proportion of it needs to be rented, and it requires innovation in high density design. Birmingham not long ago had numerous streets in the city centre of 18^th and 19^th century terraced houses, ranging from the small and utilitarian to the large and elegant. All but a few have been destroyed. A 21^st century equivalent is necessary, and the Birmingham House project, if executed properly, could generate it. But it is not an architectural project. The primary role of the new city centre housing programme, if there is to be one, has to be to create a normative urban fabric, reinventing the urban block. It is an urban design project. (c.f. Rudlin and Falk, Building the 21^st Century Home: the sustainable urban neighbourhood).

Education and learning

It is necessary that we provide primary and secondary education within the city centre, if the city centre is to support a wide range of population. These may not look like conventional schools as found elsewhere in the city.

The city centre should have more flexible and low-cost workspaces, as found in, for example, the Custard Factory, to enable graduates and other young people to set up businesses.

Culture, sport and leisure

There is little that connects the diverse activities that are mentioned in this entry. Cultural diversity will grow organically if there is a supportive context for it. There is currently an under-provision of medium-sized venues in the city, and this should be addressed. The City Council needs to act to ensure that popular music venues, such as the Rainbow and the Spotted Dog, are not threatened by the new occupants of gentrified inner city districts. The inner city must not be purified (c.f. Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder).

Built and natural environment

Birmingham needs to drop its mistaken emphasis on the big-scale and the exceptional, and to develop instead a way of providing a high-quality environment which is thematic and small-scale, both in terms of its built form and its urban spaces (c.f. Glenn Howells, Making the Ordinary Extraordinary, in L. Kennedy (editor), Remaking Birmingham: the visual culture of urban regeneration).

The main contribution that the city centre makes to biodiversity is in what the entry on Digbeth describes dismissively as “unkempt leftover spaces”. These include the canals and their towpaths. Excessive tidying-up should be resisted. Kelvin Campbell has gone on record as favouring messiness, but there is no sign of this preference in the consultation document.

The City Council should give a higher priority to the conservation of historic buildings and districts. This has been downgraded in recent years, and mistakenly perceived as being in opposition to development; the approval of the damaging 103 Colmore Row redevelopment forced through DC Committee is a recent example. All the European cities which have a high international status, which the City Council states that it wishes to join, are characterised by the respect which they pay to their historic districts.

Connectivity

The City Council’s policy to discourage car use in the city centre is being executed half-heartedly and inconsistently. The decision to approve 3,000 spaces to encourage shoppers to drive to the Bull Ring, although not a recent example, is not an exceptional contradiction. New development in the city centre must not lead to an increase in numbers of cars. No increases in highway capacity, which will inevitably lead to more car usage, should be allowed. A high priority should be given to the redesign, incorporating a reduction in road space, of the A41 through Digbeth and Deritend.

High priority should also be given to the extension of the Midland Metro system, and the addition of new heavy rail commuter lines, particularly the re-opening for passenger traffic of the Kings Heath line.

The Core

Priority should be given to the design and management of a public realm of consistently high quality, and the production of urban design guidance that sets appropriate standards for the production of new development, and which is consistently followed. (BUDS urgently needs updating; it was an innovative document in 1990, but is now rendered partly obsolete by developments since). If this is done, the development market can determine the answers to the other questions.

Southside

I propose that other names be found, so that Southside and Westside do not enter the popular language. They are lazy neologisms, following the introduction of Eastside, which is an unnecessary name for a district that already has historic names, and which appears to be in the process of erosion anyway, if the evidence of the Big City Plan is any indication.

The redevelopment of the Wholesale Markets is a major opportunity for a new mixed-use quarter of exemplary design. A “major new public square” is not necessarily a key ingredient; there could instead be a series of more intimate and smaller urban spaces. Bigger is rarely better. The complete removal of the wholesale markets function may not be necessary. The mistake made in the 1970s was to make the area into an exclusive walled fortress. In the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century, the market functions were integrated with other normative urban functions. It could be so again.

Highgate

The apparent choice of Highgate as the focus for new residential development seems arbitrary. I am not aware that the residents of Highgate have been consulted on this choice. The existing residential area certainly has potential for new development, upgrading and densification, but it needs to be incremental and carefully considered.

The industrial part of Highgate has considerable character, in its street grid (unusual in Birmingham), in its buildings, and in its diverse industrial and other activities. It should not be dismissed. The dismissive tone employed in the Big City Plan is unfortunately typical of a failure to recognise and appreciate what are true Birmingham urban qualities; utilitarian, gritty, diverse and small-scale.

Westside

My answer here is as elsewhere; get the framework right, get the design policies right, and the place will be able to respond flexibly and responsively to economic and social change. This is the lesson which any successful city centre – Edinburgh, Lyons, Barcelona, for example – has to teach. They have a structure which, by being well-designed and locally specific, is able to be continually modified while continuing to be permanent. The mistake that Birmingham makes frequently is to create short-lived structures which cannot persist, which become redundant, and which then have to be destroyed and replaced. With few exceptions, use is largely independent of form. What is needed most of all from the Big City Plan is the creation of a responsive and lasting infrastructure (c.f. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City).

Ladywood

My comment on the residential part of Highgate applies similarly to Ladywood. There was a missed opportunity in the Ladywood Regeneration Framework of the early 1990s to create a transformational structure, when £35m of Estate Action money was spent on improving housing fabric, but little on structure. My 12 Design Principles contained in the 1991 LRF document, and my 1995 Ladywood Urban Design Study are the basis of what could be a transformation, but they were never implemented

Jewellery Quarter

I am astonished, after all the contentiousness caused by planning policies since 1998, and the City Council’s current proposal for the Jewellery Quarter to achieve World Heritage Site status, that the Big City Plan’s question on the Jewellery Quarter should be so open-ended. Any encouragement of non-manufacturing uses will continue to put pressure on the indigenous industry, which in turn will lead to the degradation of the urban quality of the area and the reduction of its conservation significance. English Heritage correctly recognised in its excellent Jewellery Quarter appraisal that the architecture and the industrial economy of the quarter are interdependent; they cannot be separated without damage to both.

Gun Quarter

Again the Big City Plan displays its misunderstanding of what characterises Birmingham, in stating that “industrial and warehouse buildings ….. do not relate well to Birmingham’s global city ambitions”. If this were true, then the overused slogan “A global city with a local heart” would be truly meaningless. Look at any great city, and it will have the high-profile exceptional architecture that Birmingham aspires to have (but finds it so difficult to achieve), but also it will have districts of normative, even utilitarian, urban fabric. The two are complementary, not in opposition, and the ordinary districts are economically essential. Go to the Gun Quarter, and you will find for example a wonderful and thriving indoor climbing wall and an associated shop selling equipment and books. This could exist only in a cheap converted factory. I refer you to the Eastside Sustainability Advisory Group’s postcard, which asks “Prestige developments – always the best option?”. The City Council’s tiresome emphasis on high-profile prestige development, believing that this is what represents “global”, fails to recognise what a sustainable city is about.

Eastside

The diagrammatic map of the spatial structure of the city suggests not only that the Eastside regeneration programme has a lower political priority than it had under the previous Labour administration, which we already know, but that its physical area is shrinking, which has not been publicly announced. Eastside apparently now comprises only the area north of the Euston line. This is unfortunate and regressive.

The recent built developments of Masshouse and the Unite student housing, both of poor quality, and the negative assessment given recently by the CABE Design Review Panel to both the Eastside Locks proposal and the Vertical Theme Park proposal, are indicative of the disappearance of the previously high design aspirations which were held for Eastside. This is discouraging, and should be corrected.

Digbeth

Digbeth and Deritend are historic areas which contain the most interesting potential for growth in the city centre. They used to be part of the Eastside programme, but now apparently are no longer. As noted earlier, Professor Parkinson’s appreciation of Digbeth and Deritend was very acute, but the Big City Plan sadly appears not to be accepting his analysis as the basis for planning. An appropriate design guide for Digbeth and Deritend is vital. The area only has two recently-produced conservation area management plans, and these, while strong on historical description and analysis, are seriously inappropriate in some of their advice; for example, their proscription of street trees, and their proscription of new public access to the canal.

With the right design guidance, Digbeth and Deritend have the capacity to become model mixed-use urban quarters, something new for which Birmingham could become internationally famous, in the way that Hammarby Sjostad in Stockholm has recently become. But this will not happen in a laissez-faire planning context, which would result in the obliteration of much that is intricate and valuable in the area. The Eastside Sustainability Advisory Group’s 2002 publication Sustainable Eastside – a vision for the future, and my own concurrent essay Eastsiders (co-written by Tracey Fletcher) set out some of the appropriate criteria which, if followed, would enable new growth to happen while maintaining the unique qualities of the area.

Joe Holyoak

December 2008

I enjoyed UD108’s topic of The Spaces in Between, dealing with those marginal spaces, often overlooked by planners and developers, but sustaining a wide range of vital human activities. The literature of placemaking usually concentrates instead on more formal urban locations. They have well-known names which appear on maps, and they are pretty much unchanging. If you went back there twenty years from now there might be a few details different but it would be recognisably the same place. Red Square, Times Square, Trafalgar Square….. public places, permanent places, fixed nodes in an urban landscape. The Urban Design Group’s The Good Place Guide is an admirable collection of such places. In his foreword to the book, John Worthington does mention the importance not only of formal space and material character, but also of experiential quality in the making of a good place; “…..memories of an event in a place or a feeling of well-being…..”. And while most of the photographs in the book are populated (several are eerily deserted like a de Chirico painting), they of course are all conventional permanent urban enclosures.

There is another kind of place, which would make a different book, in which the placemaking is temporary, created entirely by an event. The event is set up in a non-place, and for the duration of the event, its inhabitation by people, and the intense life they live there, creates a memorable place through a shared experience. Then the event ends, the people disperse, and the place ceases to be. In August I had two such memorable place-experiences. Firstly I went to Cropredy in Oxfordshire, to the annual Fairport Convention festival. For three days we sat in a field. For the rest of the year it is a totally unremarkable field among thousands. But for those three days, 20,000 of us, many bands, and a great variety of places to eat and drink, together created a distinctive place. We belonged there; it was our home, we all sang Meet on the Ledge. It had Lynchian paths, edges and sub-districts. But if I went back to Cropredy now, I might not even recognise the field. The place has gone.

Later in the month I went to the annual production of the wonderful Birmingham Opera Company, directed by Graham Vick. The company has a policy of not performing in theatres, but instead temporarily inhabiting a disused building, which it dresses for the occasion. This year it was doing Mozart’s Idomeneo, in an empty rubber factory in Ladywood. The audience hung about under a Belfast-trussed loading bay by the canal until the factory doors opened, and then filed in to the gaunt, lofty space punctuated by great steel stanchions. There are no seats; the audience occupied the space with the singers, actors and chorus, and walked about following the action; an earthen hill on one side, a platform with a big mirror over here, a big sacrificial table over there. Vick, in an old jumper, walked around among us, mouthing every line of song. For three hours or so, a few hundred people, joined together by an intense experience, transformed an old industrial building into a memorable public room.

After the final night’s performance, everyone walked out into the night excited and exhilarated. The next day the orchestra platform was dismantled, the lights unbolted, the big mirror removed, and driven away. Once more, just an empty, disused factory, nowhere special.

Joe Holyoak

Endpiece, Urban Design, Winter 2009, Issue 109

Apologies for my indulging in childhood nostalgia again, but after considering the contribution of food to local distinctiveness in UD105, my thoughts are straying towards the related matter of smell. The characteristic smell that a neighbourhood may possess, usually deriving from a particular work-related component of the place – the fishdocks, the chocolate factory, the brewery, or whatever – is a key element that makes that place distinguishable from others. Many towns and districts are characterised by a brewery smell, that distinctively sour mixture of hops and malted barley. Maybe a blindfolded CAMRA expert could decide whether he – it would be he – was standing in Edinburgh, Burton or Masham, smelling McEwans, Bass or Black Sheep – I couldn’t.

But one of the strongest and strangest place-smell memories from my childhood is of the unique hybrid of smells that was Aston Cross in Birmingham. I used to take the 64 bus to and from school, passing through what was then a densely populated inner city district. On adjacent corners of the nodal space of Aston Cross stood Ansells brewery and the HP Sauce factory. Pace my imaginary CAMRA member, all breweries smell pretty similar, but a blindfolded triallist smelling that astringent combination of vinegar, fruit, malt and hops would have known he could be in only one place on the earth’s surface. Its distinctiveness has now disappeared, a casualty of deindustrialisation and redevelopment. Ansells went long ago, transferred to Allied Breweries, and production of HP Sauce sadly migrated to the Netherlands last year. Unlike conventional Lynchian landmarks and edges, the geography of local smell changes with wind direction and strength. With your head in a school book, you would always know when you were approaching Aston Cross as the smell infiltrated your nostrils, but sometimes you would be taken by surprise by how far, and in which direction, the olfactory boundary had shifted.

These smell characteristics of places, though powerful, are of course accidental and unintended by-products. I wonder whether the place-branding consultants (yes, they do exist – I met one at the Academy for Urbanism recently) might steal a trick from Asda and others, who deviously pipe smells of bread and coffee through ducts to induce the desire of consumption in their customers. An ecotown that smells permanently of mown grass and honeysuckle? – I hope not, but I wouldn’t be too sure.

The values of local distinctiveness can of course cause ambivalence; not every local peculiarity is seen as positive by all. I am sure that some people, particularly those living nearby, hated the Aston Cross smell. Another (non-smelly) example which I sometimes muse upon is the floor numbering system in Birmingham’s Millennium Point building, designed by Grimshaw Architects. This large unattractive building has five floors, three of which, because of the sloping site, connect with the ground. Someone, and I wish I knew who, numbered these floors, reading from the bottom to the top; G2, G1, G0, L1 and L2. For years, whenever I travelled in the lifts, I would listen to visitors trying to make some logical sense of this code, and to work out whether they needed to go up or down, and how far. The system was locally distinctive, certainly, but also very irritating. I used to comment frequently to friends and colleagues on the stupidity of it. This year the management of the building has clearly lost patience with it, and has renumbered the floors 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4, just like any other five-storey building. Do you know what? I perversely miss those old numbers. The world now has one peculiar thing fewer than before.

Joe Holyoak

Endpiece, Urban Design, Autumn 2008, Issue 108

As a child in the 1950s I lived on a busy High Street, and grew up accustomed to the daily noise generated by the shops lining the street, the Palace cinema next door, the Roebuck pub a few doors away, and the market on the next block. Daily Monday to Saturday in the daytime, that is; after 5.30 it was a lot quieter, with only pub and cinema customers coming and going, on foot, and after pub closing time, very quiet. (Sundays were quieter still. The still urban air was broken only by the St Barnabas bellringers calling the congregation to church. Between the changes, one could also hear, from a long way away, the approaching Boys’ Brigade band, marching echoingly along the deserted High Street to church service.)

It’s not like that now in the typical High Street. Not only is Sunday much like any other day of the week, but retail, commercial and leisure activity has extended from daytime into the night. Whether by popular demand, commercial opportunism, or government policy, we have moved some way towards the 24 hour city. Opinions vary on the virtues and utility of this, but on the whole I think our streets are better for having activity extended into more hours of the day. (Although I remain nostalgic for that empty 1950s High Street; always sunlit in my memory, with an imagined quality like a de Chirico piazza).

Parks are different. Whereas the street is legitimately a 24 hour space, the park traditionally has a clearly diurnal pattern, and is used only in daylight. Parks have enclosing fences, they may have gates, and if they are lucky enough to have a keeper, the gates may still be locked at dusk. The park at night is generally perceived as an unsafe place, where, if there is activity, it is nefarious and illicit, and maybe illegal. Both in fact and in imagination, the park at night is where murders take place. As I write, two teenagers have been given life sentences for the murder of a Goth in Stubbylee Park in Bacup. In film, an archetypal image of the park at night is still David Hemmings in Blowup, searching for the body in the shrubbery in Maryon Park, Woolwich, deserted and silent except for the wind soughing in the trees.

The Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, recently caused controversy when he proposed more night-time use of parks by children, including “midnight basketball” leagues, an idea imported from the USA. His motive, totally admirable, is to increase involvement in sports by children and to reduce obesity, but criticism was widespread, focussing on the established view of parks at night as locations of drug use and anti-social behaviour.

Our small local park, where I am Chair of the Friends, is making modest steps towards reclaiming the night. We have made a funding application to have floodlights installed on the all-weather playing pitch. In February we held our second annual “In the Park after Dark” event. Residents, particularly children, were invited to bring hand-held lights. Helium-filled balloons containing LED lights were tied to the railings. (Most got stolen, but that is perhaps a sort of appreciation). The local school designed, made and presented a spectacular back-lit puppet show in silhouette. Hot soup and baked potatoes were consumed. Fun was had. We hope that perceptions of the nocturnal park were changed, in a small but significant way.

Joe Holyoak

Endpiece, Urban Design, Summer 2008, Issue 107 

When looking at new developments, we pay most attention tothose who plan and design them; they get the credit and the publicity. But allurban designers know that without equally good developers, who are equallycommitted to making quality places, and prepared to take financial risks, theycould not succeed. I am reminded of Jonathan Barnett’s succinct definition thatthe medium of urban design is money. This is recognised in the theme of thisyear’s Congress for the New Urbanism, taking place in Providence, Rhode Island(for which, incidentally, my daughter is one of the organisers), which is Developingthe New Urbanism. This focuses on the roleof the developer in delivering new urbanism.

The public perception of developers is of greedy,unprincipled men who carelessly despoil our towns for their own financial gain.Urban designers meet more developers than most other people, and we know that,while the vulgar stereotype does exist, the best developers, people like Argentand Urban Splash, are intelligent and creative people. I recently invited afriend who is a developer to talk to our urban design students at UCE aboutwhat he does and what urban designers should know about the developmentprocess. Bill is one of the nicest persons you could meet, and quiteself-deprecating  about his work.He claimed that his job was easy, compared to that of the urban designer; hehas a single objective, to make money. But designers and planners have manymore, and sometimes conflicting, jobs to do; not least, ensuring that privategain is not at the expense of the public interest.

Our students learnt from Bill something of the relationshipbetween built form, land uses, and money. We set them an exercise in which theydesigned a mixed-use development for a 1.5ha inner city site, modelled it inplasticine, and did a residual sum calculation on a spreadsheet, all in one anda half hours, which I feel must be some sort of a record.    

They have become used to working fast. In their previousunit, a comparative study of 20^th century housing models, theydesigned a new housing block in Letchworth, redesigned part of Park Hill,Sheffield, in anticipation of Urban Splash’s makeover, and designed an improvedurban block for Hulme. Each of these was designed, and a model of the designbuilt, in two and a half hours. We are familiar with the principle that workexpands to fill the time available; I find this is certainly true in designeducation, and I am inclined towards intensifying the design task, andachieving more in less time.

Bill told the students about back-of-fag-packetcalculations, describing the way he turned the packet inside-out to do the sumson the unprinted side, and regretting, now that he and colleagues no longersmoke, that they no longer have any fag packets to use. I would describe my quick-and-dirtydesign projects as back-of-fag-packet projects, if only I smoked.

Joe Holyoak

Endpiece, Urban Design, Spring 2006, Issue 98

Natural England , the Governments ineptly-named rural agency - can urban designers expect shortly to be dealing with Unnatural England? – has proposed the creation of a coastal footpath around the whole of England. Previous environment secretary David Milliband stated that he wanted “families to have safe and secure access to walk, climb, rock scramble, paddle and play”. One wonders what kind of family climbs sea-cliffs? But more importantly, how do you make climbing sea-cliffs “safe and secure”? Fix handrails to the rocks? Surely it is the risk of falling off, counteracted by the deployment of skill, that makes climbing a rock face more fun than walking up a staircase.

This story is an example of the concern to reduce or eliminate risk that we find in many areas of life. There is even a popular though inaccurate shorthand description for it – Health and Safety. It remains to be seen what it may do to the coastline. But there is plenty of evidence that excessive concern with risk has a damaging effect on the design of the public realm, reducing innovation and variety, leading to standardisation and blandness. I was urban design consultant to a team from the University of Birmingham which was commissioned by CABE to research how the fear of risk affects the design of public space, and what to do about it. CABE has published our work under the title Living with Risk.

The report makes a number of recommendations on how risk can be handled, and even used creatively. We selected ten case-studies, nine in England and one in the Netherlands, to identify and analyse issues. Three or four of these places contain water in various forms, and it occurs to me that water in public spaces is particularly associated with perceived risk. I suppose it is the fear of drowning, although generally the chances of a drowning must be tiny compared with those of being hit by a car.

I was reminded of this at the 2007 CABE Summer School when the German landscape architect Herbert Dreiseitl gave a talk on his work. His theme is water, which he approaches scientifically, ecologically, and artistically, and his work is extraordinarily impressive. Many of his public spaces contain bodies of still and moving water, and rough or irregular surfaces adjacent to them, with no separation between the two[1]. I am sure that they would make many municipal health and safety officers in this country very nervous.

Yet I expect that the worst that has happened in any of them is that a child has got his or her clothes wet and caught a chill. The hazards are totally explicit and obvious, and even a small child will modify its behaviour accordingly in order to stay safe. On the positive side, Dreiseitl’s adventurous spaces feed and educate the senses, rich in shapes, textures, materials, colours and planting. We need designers like him who can, in an informed way, resist the inhibiting fears of others, and can equally be confidently unafraid of the consequences for themselves. Last year I asked Martha Schwartz, whose Exchange Square was one of the ten case-studies in our CABE report, and who often includes apparently risky elements in her designs, whether she had ever had a claim made against her. Never, she replied.

Joe Holyoak

References: Herbert Dreiseitl, Dieter Grau (editors), New Waterscapes, Basel; Birkhauser, 2005.

Endpiece, Urban Design, Autumn 2007, Issue 104

I think the conventional wisdom among urban designers is that architectural style doesn’t matter much. Other things being equal, a beautiful building is preferable to an ugly building. But this issue, and the matter of whether the architecture is Late Modern or neoClassical, Hightech or Regional Vernacular, tutti frutti or plain vanilla, are unimportant compared to its response to urban design issues such as massing, site planning, building lines, space enclosure, ground floor uses. Get those things right, I think most urban designers would say, and you can design it in any style you like. This is the typical response to criticism of the sentimental architecture of Poundbury, for instance.

Designing in the correct style is, however, an important matter for architects. It is after all an area over which they claim to exercise sole professional authority. This difference in the valuation given to style can make it difficult for an urban designer teaching in an architecture studio. I’m frequently criticising students’ dramatic object-building schemes from an urban design point of view, and it often feels as if we are speaking different languages.

The Architects’ Journal is claiming victory in its campaign to retain a clause in the Government’s new Planning Policy Statement no.7 which allows the normal ban on new residential development in the countryside to be circumvented in the case of large new one-off “country houses”. Viewed in terms of the responsibility of the planning system to contribute towards social equity, this is bad enough. That a Labour government should give a loophole to a rich elite, to enable them to occupy hundreds of acres of rural land, that is denied to the other 99% of us, is reactionary enough to make one send back one’s party membership card, if one hadn’t already done so.

But another extraordinary aspect of the new PPS7 clause is that it is reworded so as to restrict new “country houses” to those built in a modernist style. No more neoPalladian or neoGrecian monuments, only modern ones. At least, that is the interpretation widely put upon the ODPM’s criteria of “outstanding and ground-breaking” and “highest standards in contemporary architecture”, and it was certainly the AJ’s overt wish.

There is of course a wonderful irony here. As Tom Wolfe[i] and many others have observed, modern architecture, which was created by European socialists as a  revolutionary ethical tool for social reform, long ago become an aesthetic, which while by no means restricted to the rich, has certainly acquired a capacity to signify wealth, privilege and exclusiveness.

Government planning policy increasingly recognises the importance of good design, and increasingly tries, with some success, to specify in words what that actually is. But this appears to be the first time that policy has defined good design in a way that prescribes certain styles and excludes others. I look forward to this principle of modernist taste being tested in a planning appeal.

But surely these rural goings-on, while entertaining, are nothing to do with us urban designers? We continue to talk about the real urban issues - mixed uses, density, urban form - and let the style ideologues argue it out among themselves. Except that a worrying precedent was set by last year’s inquiry decision on London Bridge Tower, Renzo Piano’s “Shard”. Here the Inspector decided that the outstanding architectural quality of the proposal was sufficient for it to override valid objections to it on urban design grounds by English Heritage and others. Architectural style is not always a peripheral issue; sometimes it can be counted as more important than good planning.

Endpiece, Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House London: Jonathan cape. 1982.

olyoak

Our understanding of what creates local distinctiveness has been greatly enriched by the work and publications of the organisation Common Ground. As urban designers, we think of local distinctiveness mainly in terms of the topography and character of the landscape, and the patterns, typologies and materials of built form upon it. But Common Ground goes way beyond that, and documents and celebrates differences between local cakes, and the varieties of apples traditionally grown in the district, as ways of defining what makes one place different from another.

The principle of local distinctiveness defined by what we grow and what we eat was also celebrated by the Food Heroes TV programmes of Rick Stein. These visited mainly rural districts and small towns, and it seems it is more difficult for distinctiveness to thrive in bigger urban areas. There is little food grown in the city, and citizens have mostly lost touch with the origins of their food. The growth of farmers’ markets is a significant and encouraging exception to this.

The supermarket businesses too are making moves towards localism, albeit in small ways yet. Asda has regionalised its distribution points, where food from local growers is collected, and Waitrose is making efforts to source locally where it can, within 30 miles of the shop. These moves though are not motivated so much by a desire for local distinctiveness, more by economy and quality - the political and consumer pressures to reduce food miles and to increase freshness.

I was at a wonderful event recently which sought to suggest how our urban food might contribute more to local identity. It was a dinner organised in Birmingham by MADE, the West Midlands architecture centre, for the regional design review panel and guests. Called Edible Eastside, it took place in a disused factory in the industrial area of Deritend which is part of the Eastside regeneration area. The interior was dressed up and lit for the occasion, and looked surreally reminiscent of the set of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

The event was described as “a culinary appreciation of a place, with a menu inspired by the rich fauna and food heritage of Eastside”. Digbeth and Deritend have a long history of food production, including perhaps most famously Bird’s Custard, which together with rose hips gathered from the canal banks made a lovely Crème Brulee. Also from the biodiverse Grand Union Canal were nettles, chickweed, spearmint, blackberries, mugwort, wild garlic, and birch, all combined beautifully into a menu specially devised by a local chef-patron, cooking in a corner of the factory. The other famous past local product, Ty-Phoo Tea, perhaps surprisingly did not appear.

I am sure that not everything we ate and drank was sourced locally. The embankments of the Euston line are not yet planted with vines, and we have no local herd to produce cheese (though cattle used to arrive here by train to be slaughtered for the Smithfield market). But Edible Eastside was an innovative and imaginative attempt to connect food to the process of urban place-making, and having been to the first I shall be disappointed if there are not more.

Joe Holyoak

Endpiece, Urban Design, Winter 2008, Issue 105.

I’ve been reading Malcolm Moor’s and Jon Rowland’s book Urban Design Futures. It’s a collection of 21 essays by writers who are each considering in which direction urban design is going to go from here. The answers are very diverse, and sometimes contradictory. It’s interesting that it appeared at the same time as the previous issue of Urban Design, no.100, which addressed the same question. A theme which connects several of Moor’s and Rowland’s contributors is the idea that what we might call mainstream urban design principles and methodology, as exemplified in By Design and the Urban Design Compendium, which now have widespread acceptance, are relevant to only a small part of the earth’s surface. Even setting aside the vast differences between the centres of British cities and places like Sao Paulo and Shanghai, our orthodox urban design policies have little or nothing to say about what we should do with our own residential suburbs and the growing numbers of huge distribution sheds around the M40 and M42. The photographer Andrew Cross goes further, and suggests that, as Venturi and Scott-Brown proposed of the architecture of parking lots and signs in Learning from Las Vegas, the urbanism of airports and distribution centres is a new kind of place which has not yet been recognised and codified.The danger, explicitly or implicitly expressed, is that we try to apply our orthodoxies of masterplans and frameworks to locations where they are not relevant, where something else would be more appropriate. But what would that be? At the time of writing, I am running an urban design project for a group of graduate architecture students, set in Hereford. The centre of Hereford is a delightful, dense, mediaeval structure on the north bank of the Wye. A ring road curves around the north side of the city centre, following the town wall, and beyond it is about 40 hectares of land known as the Edgar Street Grid (I don’t know why – there is no grid). It is a fascinatingly heterogeneous area which has never seen any planning. It contains the cattle market, the railway station, the stadium of Hereford Town FC opposite Glenn Howells’ Courtyard Theatre, a mediaeval hospital and the ruins of the priory, some fragments of nice small-scaled old housing, lots of surface car parking, a Morrison’s, and an astonishing number of DIY sheds, plumbers’ merchants and builders’ suppliers, one of which sits on the site of the filled-in canal basin. It is messy, fragmented, uncoordinated, but undeniably has episodes of real interest and character. The regional development agency and the county council have decided it needs a masterplan, and that is what our project is about.In the city, the regeneration company has commissioned Urban Initiatives and CZWG, as urban designers and architects, to produce the masterplan. I am finding it challenging to tutor the project, because I suspect that there is a danger that a conventional urban design masterplan may inappropriately homogenise the untidy but attractive diversity that characterises the place at present. Maybe what is needed is not a plan, but a series of individual interventions, which can allow the spontaneous and unplanned growth, which has characterised the area so far, to continue. I am reminded of a talk which Sean Griffiths of FAT gave at UCE a year ago entitled Ad Hoc Urbanism, about this very approach. By the time this column is published, the Urban Initiatives proposals should have been completed. We look forward to seeing whether they think there is room in the plan for adhockery. 

Joe Holyoak 

Endpiece, Urban Design, Winter 2007, Issue 101