The planned and the unplanned.
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.