Joe Holyoak News Blog

  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.