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.