Health and danger
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.
December 21st, 2007 at 6:40 pm
You might add other designers to that list, like Lawrence Halprin, whose Forecourt Fountain was designed to encourage people to clamber about and get their feet wet. Portland now has several other wading fountains, so it seems the idea has triumphed over the culture of risk-aversion.
See http://www.altportland.com/consume/splash.shtml for some details.