Joe Holyoak News Blog

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