Joe Holyoak News Blog

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.

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.

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

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.

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 HolyoakEndpiece, Malcolm Moor and Jon Rowland (editors), Urban Design Futures, London: Routledge, 2006.

The title is borrowed from William Morris’s 1887 essay on socialism. How we might live was also the theme of his book News from Nowhere, published three years later. Here Morris creates a utopian vision of a post-industrial, post-revolutionary, early 21st century England, returned to an agrarian society by the depopulation and disaggregation of its towns and cities. Its subtitle is An Epoch of Rest. It is an attractive vision in many ways, and would be a quite sustainable proposition if only people stayed put and didn’t move about all the time; or if they did they went about by foot, rowing boat or horse, like the narrator Guest and his new friends.In fact our future looks unavoidably urban. But if we could achieve the peacefulness of Morris’s imaginary England in our towns and cities, urban life and society could have something of the idyllic nature of that vision, without sacrificing too much convenience (in fact gaining a lot more). From our second-floor Velux window in Balsall Heath I can look out over about 20 square kilometres of Birmingham. Especially with the July sun shining on it, it looks very green, and calm. I know that below the tree canopy, at street level, much of it is teeming with noisy, dangerous and polluting vehicles. But I can imagine another, better, version of it, without them.I have memories of times and places where I have experienced that wonderful combination of serene quietness in a densely populated city. A Sunday morning in the centre of Oxford, walking to the Turf Tavern. Opening an apartment window in the early morning on to a street in central Helsinki, smelling the bakery and hearing music (was it really the Karelia Suite or did I make that up?). Drinking beer with my daughter and her husband on a sunny pavement in Jordaan in Amsterdam. An uncelebrated campo in the far reaches of Venice, populated by old women and cats.One key characteristic of these quiet urban places, I think, is the combination - somewhat paradoxical - of intimacy in public space. To achieve this, they need to have a double identity; to be populated both by strangers, visiting shops, bars, cinemas or passing through, and also by resident locals, at home in their own territory, on familiar terms with their neighbours the publican, the greengrocer, the antique dealer. These places are that apparent oxymoron, urban villages.I described in the previous Endpiece the attempted forcible removal of people and businesses from Birmingham’s Eastside regeneration area. This misguided process would make the quality of intimacy difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. In 2002 I co-wrote an essay which we called Eastsiders – a day in the life of a family who had sold their car and moved into the new inner city in 2012. They live in a low-energy town house in Digbeth near the newly-green corridor of the River Rea, they shop in local shops and the farmers’ market, and they walk and cycle locally to their work and study. Much of the small-scale industry remains, and adds to the diversity and utility of the quarter. The place has a combination of the genteel and the grotty, of the planned and the spontaneous. It is a picture, admittedly romanticised, as Morris’s 21st century England also was, of the good life lived in a densely-settled inner-city district, a place which while busy, also possesses the civilised qualities of peace and serenity. I like to think this is achievable.Joe HolyoakWilliam Morris, News from Nowhere and other writings, Penguin Classics.Eastsiders (Joe Holyoak and Tracey Fletcher, 2002) can be found on the website http://www.localisewestmidlands.org.uk/Eastsiders.htm

  It was the late Jane Jacobs who first awoke my interest, in the 1960s, in the ordinary things that ordinary people do in ordinary streets, and made me realise that these were important, and that they could and should be a source for the decisions that designers make about public space. Since then there have been others who have also excited my interest, and given me principles, standards and methods to use; notably William Whyte, Jan Gehl, Richard Sennett.  What the work of these writers collectively represents to me is the powerful idea of the urban street as the living room of the citizen, where social and political life takes place, a place of free encounter governed by democratic principles. The old Hanseatic city slogan Stadt luft macht frei expresses a similar ideal – the freedom of the city street. But this democratic ideal is constantly under attack. The private sector has continued to acquire more of the public realm and privatise it, often with the positive support of the municipality, keen to divest itself of expensive responsibilities. Privatisation is augmented by the formation of Business Improvement Districts, where the private business sector gains more control over public space, and can manage it in the interests of retail and commerce. In addition, our towns and cities have the greatest concentration of CCTV cameras in the world, with unknown and invisible authorities watching us through 4.2 million cameras. Now the integrity of the space of the res publica is under threat from a new direction. Middlesbrough Council has given the power of speech to nine of its 160 cameras. Council officials can give verbal instructions and reprimands through loudspeakers to anyone in the street whom they suspect of antisocial behaviour. Already one woman has received an apology after having been publicly reprimanded, mistakenly, for dropping litter. The Home Secretary, John Reid, foolishly believes that this Orwellian misuse of authority is “interactive”, and is proposing extending it to Derby, Norwich and Southwark.  I think we should be very worried by this latest expression of illiberal politics, which brings reality frighteningly close to the fictional fascism of Airstrip One in 1984. But beyond the politics, I also think that as urban designers we should be concerned about the consequences of this innovation for the quality of the public realm. CCTV cameras, for all their ubiquity, are rarely registered by our senses. They may be sinister, but they are discreet and do their work quietly. Our streets are already loud with uninvited music from shops and passing cars. Now we are to be threatened by voices of faceless authority booming out of loudspeakers. It matters not whether the instruction to behave is directed at us or another; we all suffer from the noise and the intrusion, and the inevitable sense of civic diminishment, of being mere proles under the direction of the Outer Party.   In Birmingham recently we have had a similar infringement of the integrity of public space, also promoted and defended by the City Council. While the Town Hall was wrapped in scaffolding for its renovation, a big TV screen was placed next to it on

. One could turn one’s back on it, but the noise was inescapable, rendering the square an intolerable place to stay. It had temporary planning permission for the duration of the renovation. Now the scaffolding is down, but despite opposition the Council wants to extend the planning approval, even though the screen is an ugly visual intrusion next to the Grade I listed building. I wrote in UD100 about the delight of peace and quiet in the city. Some hope of that!   

Last year I wrote an Endpiece about Fred Grove, the man in his late 70s upon whom Birmingham City Council has served a CPO. He owns and lives in an old canal cottage in a conservation area. There is no intention to demolish his house; but every property within the development area is covered by the indiscriminate CPO. They want a tabula rasa; Fred has to go. The public inquiry starts in February, so will be over when this column appears; it should be interesting. I’ve just been writing evidence for the opposition.One of the main planks in the Council’s case is the principle of comprehensive development. Now to me, as I imagine to anyone who lived through the 1960s period of city rebuilding, that phrase is pretty discredited. It evokes elitist planning, a blindness to the merits of mixed, complicated, organic neighbourhoods, and an uncaring attitude to the invisible network of community relationships which created them, and which were destroyed in the redevelopment. I find it extraordinary that it can be used in the 21st century as a positive aspiration, apparently without shame.Our suspicion that the principle of comprehensive development is essentially there for the convenience of the future developers was confirmed in a meeting which we had with the City Council and the regional development agency. In response to our critique of comprehensive development, the representative of the RDA said “People want a comprehensive approach”. “Which people?” I asked him. “The development fraternity” was his answer. It’s striking that in his frankness he didn’t realise he was giving anything away.Apart from Fred’s house, we are also objecting to the CPO on Rosa’s café and the Los Canarios restaurant. These are both long-established businesses, both unfortunately in the way of the new City Centre Park. Rosa’s is run by a family descended from Italian immigrants, now in its fourth generation. The Spanish restaurant has also been there as long as I can remember. They are both the kind of places – bars, cafes, restaurants - which the City Council explicitly states it wants facing the new park. Yet if they are demolished, it is likely they will go out of business. Instead of local businesses with their roots in local history, we are likely to get global corporations such as Pizza Hut and Starbucks.One of the themes of our evidence objecting to the CPO is social justice. People receive financial compensation when CPO’ed of course, at the current market value. But when a neglected, rundown inner city area is subsequently redeveloped with new apartments, workplaces and restaurants, that value goes up, maybe several times over. Yet the people who have invested many years - several generations in the case of Rosa’s - of their lives in the neighbourhood are forcibly excluded from enjoying the benefits of the new prosperity and environmental quality. These will instead be enjoyed by newcomers who buy in post-development. This is fundamentally unjust.A friend and ally from Friends of the Earth put it succinctly. When the area is unvalued and overlooked, as it has been for decades, local residents like Fred and local businesses like the café and restaurant are ignored by authority. They persist and manage as well as they can. When a new plan is made, big investment is prepared, and a new prosperity is on the horizon – then they get rejected.Stop press: The City Council has backed down over Fred’s house.

In the 1950s and 60s, the new orthodoxy of the comprehensive redevelopment programme swept through the inner areas of British cities. It was based on the indiscriminate clearance of everything – roads, housing both good and bad, factories, shops – enabled by the legal tool of the Compulsory Purchase Order. Thank goodness things are different now.I am a member of a group in Birmingham called the Eastside Sustainability Advisory Group, made up of a diverse range of people. We are a semi-official group which advises the City Council on how the regeneration of the huge area on the eastern edge of the city centre known as Eastside can be achieved sustainably. We define sustainability in a very broad way – not only the usual energy and technical criteria, but also economic and social ones. Will new development displace the existing small-scale industry? How do we avoid new housing being just expensive apartments for sale? How do we get a mixture of different kinds of people living there?To assist this we have just started an Eastside Community Group, to give a voice in the planning process to people who live and work in the area, and to counter the common perception that Eastside is a tabula rasa. One of the people who came to the first meeting was a 76 year old man who lives in a canalside cottage built as a lock-keepers house. It is in a part of Eastside designated as the Learning Quarter, which has recently had a masterplan prepared for it by LDA and Arups.He was feeling extremely anxious, as he had been told a CPO will be served on his house. He has lived in the cottage for 41 years; his wife’s family lived next door for several generations. The cottage is locally listed, and is in a conservation area. The CPO (now served) states that his house will not be demolished. To add insult to injury, the letter states that one of the reasons for the CPO is that it is for the good of his health. He is being made ill with worry.The house is not in the way of anything. But its owner, all of whose assets and memories are invested in the house, has to leave, presumably to be replaced, after “regeneration”, with a new buyer. This is how planning works; a uniform, tidy state has to be achieved within a boundary, with all the awkward bits ironed out. What we have here is the incapacity, or refusal, of planning to deal with real complexity; the complexity which is the natural result of people living their lives, and which makes places attractive and efficient to live in.Richard Sennett described the psychological roots of this refusal very well in The Uses of Disorder. In the planners’ ideology of what he calls the purified city, all the parts have to be subject to the “urban whole”. “Their impulse has been to give way to that tendency, developed in adolescence, of men to control unknown threats by eliminating the possibility for experiencing surprise”.The reasons given for the CPO of course invoke sustainability. “The overall objective is to secure the redevelopment and regeneration of the area to create a sustainable mixed use development including a thriving waterside community around the canal”. So sustainability means throwing an old man out of his house? Not in any definition of sustainability that I know. It’s a distortion of the term; at best negligent, at worst cynical.Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder, Penguin; Middlesex, 1971.Joe HolyoakMore about the old man on the canalLast year I wrote an Endpiece about Fred Grove, the man in his late 70s upon whom Birmingham City Council has served a CPO. He owns and lives in an old canal cottage in a conservation area. There is no intention to demolish his house; but every property within the development area is covered by the indiscriminate CPO. They want a tabula rasa; Fred has to go. The public inquiry starts in February, so will be over when this column appears; it should be interesting. I’ve just been writing evidence for the opposition.One of the main planks in the Council’s case is the principle of comprehensive development. Now to me, as I imagine to anyone who lived through the 1960s period of city rebuilding, that phrase is pretty discredited. It evokes elitist planning, a blindness to the merits of mixed, complicated, organic neighbourhoods, and an uncaring attitude to the invisible network of community relationships which created them, and which were destroyed in the redevelopment. I find it extraordinary that it can be used in the 21st century as a positive aspiration, apparently without shame.Our suspicion that the principle of comprehensive development is essentially there for the convenience of the future developers was confirmed in a meeting which we had with the City Council and the regional development agency. In response to our critique of comprehensive development, the representative of the RDA said “People want a comprehensive approach”. “Which people?” I asked him. “The development fraternity” was his answer. It’s striking that in his frankness he didn’t realise he was giving anything away.Apart from Fred’s house, we are also objecting to the CPO on Rosa’s café and the Los Canarios restaurant. These are both long-established businesses, both unfortunately in the way of the new City Centre Park. Rosa’s is run by a family descended from Italian immigrants, now in its fourth generation. The Spanish restaurant has also been there as long as I can remember. They are both the kind of places – bars, cafes, restaurants - which the City Council explicitly states it wants facing the new park. Yet if they are demolished, it is likely they will go out of business. Instead of local businesses with their roots in local history, we are likely to get global corporations such as Pizza Hut and Starbucks.One of the themes of our evidence objecting to the CPO is social justice. People receive financial compensation when CPO’ed of course, at the current market value. But when a neglected, rundown inner city area is subsequently redeveloped with new apartments, workplaces and restaurants, that value goes up, maybe several times over. Yet the people who have invested many years - several generations in the case of Rosa’s - of their lives in the neighbourhood are forcibly excluded from enjoying the benefits of the new prosperity and environmental quality. These will instead be enjoyed by newcomers who buy in post-development. This is fundamentally unjust.A friend and ally from Friends of the Earth put it succinctly. When the area is unvalued and overlooked, as it has been for decades, local residents like Fred and local businesses like the café and restaurant are ignored by authority. They persist and manage as well as they can. When a new plan is made, big investment is prepared, and a new prosperity is on the horizon – then they get rejected.Stop press: The City Council has backed down over Fred’s house.

This is a slightly (but only slightly) tongue-in-cheek piece I co-wrote in 2002, to coincide with the publication by Eastside Sustainability Advisory Group of Sustainable Eastside, to which I contributed.

Eastsiders.

Ultimately, the only purpose of plans, standards and policies is to enable people to live a certain quality of life. That lived quality is the measure of how good the policies are. Our document Sustainable Eastside contains a lot of recommended standards and policies. But instead of repeating them, we have chosen to illustrate what kind of life they might enable for an ordinary family living and working in Eastside ten years from now – let’s call them Eastsiders.

April 12th 2012 starts sunny, and Jessica is first up, at 6.30. She pulls on her track suit, and is down the back garden and through the allotments to the river. She runs, skirting around the balancing pool, looking out for the kingfishers that live there, and then jogs along the riverside path towards the Custard Factory. The willow trees along the Rea are beginning to come into fresh green leaf.

While she is out, her mother and stepfather, June and Eric, get going. The electricity generated by yesterday’s sunshine and stored in the batteries in the basement is warming up the house. June cooks eggs from yesterday’s Digbeth Farmer’s Market, while Eric goes to buy bread and the newspapers from the corner shop. Returning, he encourages his son Wayne out of bed.

Jessica runs in through the back door, showers quickly in the ground floor shower room, and almost before the water is in the greywater recycling tank, joins the others at breakfast in the conservatory. The family moved to this new low-energy three-storey house in a development off Curzon Street five years ago, when June got a new job as design engineer in Bordesley Electronics in Adderley Street. Tired of commuting from Bartley Green, they decided to sell their car and move into the city. Eric was already working for a printer’s in Sandy Lane, so it made sense for them to take advantage of June’s relocation allowance and move into Eastside. With the new locally-built trams, and all the facilities they needed within a few minutes walk, they could borrow a car from the Economy Car scheme on the few occasions when they needed to.

On her fifteen minute walk to work, June has to call into the office of the Community Development Trust to pick up the key to the street’s guest suite. Her mother is coming from Sheffield to stay for a few days, so they are renting the suite for her. Mother is a wheelchair user, and the guest suite, like all the other new buildings and public spaces in the district, is totally accessible. The streets are busy at this early hour, with people coming and going. Not many cars, because of the local traffic restrictions. Four thousand people have moved into Digbeth and Deritend in the last few years, families as well as young single and retired people. Some industry has given way to residential development, but much remains. In Allcock Street, June passes the plant which recycles bits of end-of-life vehicles. It’s basically scrap, but they have a comical King Kong figure in front made from recycled metal, and the workers have their lunch hour in a wonderful garden on top of the adjacent disused railway viaduct.

June’s company really took off when it won the contract for all the energy controls in the new Library on Curzon Street, thanks to the local purchasing policy in the City Council’s contracts. June is now working on a new heat exchange device which can use the cooling capacity from water in canals and rivers. Her boss, who lives in a topfloor flat in Typhoo Wharf, is currently Chair of the Digbeth Business Forum, which has been very successful in reducing energy consumption and pollution from local businesses.

Eric reminds Wayne to bring in the red, green and white boxes, and the empty compost bin, from the street, and then they get their bikes out from the garden store. Wayne is renting a bike from the CDT bike pool, until he has saved up half the cost of a new bike for his birthday. He takes his clarinet, because he is going straight from school to a rehearsal of the local Youth Band at Digbeth Civic Hall. They follow the River Rea cycle route, cross into the Irish Quarter by the new Kennedy Square, and ride up Bradford Street to Wayne’s school. It’s a broad, tree-lined street, lined by apartments and offices, and now quite a fashionable place to live.

After dropping Wayne off at St Anne’s School, Eric crosses the Middleway by the cycle underpass, and reaches Camp Hill Printing. He has got a 9 oclock meeting with the rep from the paper recycling business in Lawley Middleway that they get a lot of their paper from. After that, he has got some work to do on the catalogue for next month’s open air sculpture show in the canalside arts centre at Warwick Bar.

Jessica, by contrast, is taking it easy. She doesn’t have any classes at South Birmingham College until noon, so she decides to walk through the park, and then through Masshouse, to Selfridges. Birds are singing in the trees as she strolls up Curzon Street past the Job Centre, the gymnasium, and the block of flats with the electric car charging point. In the park, overlooked by the zero-emissions and district-heated office buildings, she sees some friends playing tennis, which reminds her that she hasn’t voted yet on the Eastside Youth Council sports budget. She gets the display up on her mobile phone, and votes in favour of the new volleyball equipment and the cycle maintenance tools. Then she emails her friend Alex, who is in the Rockface in AB Row, to remind her to meet in the Black Redstart Youth Cafe in Latif Square that evening, before she goes to work behind the bar at the Spotted Dog.

Coming out of the park by the community orchard, she waves to old Mrs Demetrios who is getting a lift on the electric home delivery waggon, which reminds her that she said she would do some shopping. She uses the local shops as she enjoys seeing people she knows, and she can use her loyalty card to build up some credits. The shops are a quirky mix, helped by the low local-residency business rates. As well as the traditional grocery in Fazeley Street, there is Sarah’s home-made cake and pie shop, Sima’s delicatessen, and Mr Singh’s hardware shop, which seems to sell everything along with lots of free advice. There is also a local Swap Shop containing the bizarre along with the mundane, and retired Mr Carter who sells jewellery and clocks out of his kitchen made from old machine parts from the surrounding factories.

After lunch at the Camp Hill Diner, Eric takes a proof copy of the new catalogue along to the Arts Centre in his bicycle pannier. Eric really likes the Arts Centre, colourfully covered in aerosol art, and open to anyone who simply wants to have a go at creating something. He is learning to do mosaics there, and has already covered an old table, but he really enjoys showing off his carpentry skills to the young people who are trying to make some benches for the community garden in order to earn some pocket money. On his way back he cycles past the gardens which are looking good. They are mainly run by Charlie Soames and the Patels, but a few kids are having a go at growing vegetables to sell, and some of the mums have made a willow house.

It’s evening, and after his rehearsal Wayne cycles to the Wharf community centre where the family plans to have dinner, stopping off with some friends on the way to take some boxes of aluminium they had collected to the scrapyard in exchange for a Mars bar each.

The Wharf Community Centre is a friendly place containing an inexpensive café bar and creche, information boards, meeting rooms and even a tiny laundrette. It had been a lot of fun converting the old pub and setting the place up two years ago. Eric had helped paint the murals, and the local kids had all enjoyed making nuisances of themselves. Now there are two paid staff, but people still give a hand when needed, and some of the retired people seem to live there as they are always doing something to the place. If you really want to find out what’s going on in the area, the Wharf is where you would come.

The café overlooks the canal and a number of families have decided to eat here tonight. Families take it in turns to cook for each other, but tonight is someone else’s turn, so June and Eric can relax and get waited on. June enjoys meeting her friends and catching up on the gossip. People are discussing the merits of the new pool cars which the Neighbourhood Council has decided to buy. With little through traffic, the streets are green and pleasant for walking and cycling. Even some of the elderly residents say they feel safe even at night, as there are always people walking around.

After dinner Wayne goes off to the canal to do some fishing with his friends, leaving his parents relaxing over coffee. The canal is busy with boats and people out enjoying the spring evening, and they manage to catch two fish. Unfortunately, they are too small to take home so they reluctantly put them back, and decide to build a den under the black poplars instead.

Jessica has decided to miss the family meal in favour of a snack at Manic Organic with some friends, mainly because it is loud and fashionable and has boys there with weird haircuts and trendy trainers. Afterwards they wander over to Latif Square, where a group of Afro-Caribbeans has set up an impromptu steel band. Alex and others are dancing but Jessica has to go to work. The sun has gone down, and the corner pubs are filling up.

Joe Holyoak and Tracey Fletcher, Eastside Sustainability Advisory Group, 2002.