The Big City Plan - A response to the consultation document
Monday, January 12th, 2009
Four preliminary observations.
1.
Firstly, a note about history. In making plans for the future, it is essential that proper respect is paid to the history of what has gone before. There should be no distortion of the past in order to present the plans more favourably. The strategic expansion of the city centre from 80 hectares inside the Queensway to 800 hectares inside the Middle Ring Road was a decision taken twenty years ago at the Highbury Initiative in March 1988, and implemented by the City Council soon afterwards. It is not an innovation of the Big City Plan. Furthermore, the boundary drawn in yellow and labelled “existing city core” on page 6 of the Big City Plan booklet has no status that I recognise.
More generally, in the desire to reinvent and reposition Birmingham in an international league table, it is necessary to understand and respect the history and the nature of the city. At a superficial (but still important) level, this means continuing to use historic place names, and not seeking to replace them by bland invented marketing terms such as “Eastside” and “Westside”. More fundamentally, it means appreciating what is characteristic in the nature of Birmingham’s urban fabric. The city’s publicity campaigns continually stress the big, the exceptional, the upmarket, the glamorous elements of the fabric. They have little to say about, and even dismiss, as does the Big City Plan in a number of instances, the ordinary and the utilitarian, as exemplified in inner city districts such as Digbeth, Highgate, Hockley, and Aston Newtown. These districts are not only economically important to Birmingham, but in their fine grain and their diversity, they are particular to Birmingham; they are a large part of what makes Birmingham special. The Big City Plan should respect and value them.
2.
Whatever the Big City Plan may be, it is not a masterplan. A masterplan is an explicitly physical plan for an area under a single control, which sets standards for the design of its various parts, which may be built independently at different times. The Big City Plan is an aspirational policy document for a large, diverse area under multiple controls; there is nothing wrong with that, indeed it is appropriate, but to call it a masterplan is confusing.
3.
When the City Council commissioned Professor Michael Parkinson in 2006, we were told that his report would become the basis of the masterplan which would follow, translating his socio-economic analysis into physical form. There is little evidence in the Big City Plan that this is happening. This is disappointing, as Parkinson’s report (published in 2007) is an extremely intelligent and perceptive work. Taking one important example, Digbeth, Parkinson states (paragraph 6.74);
“This is one of the most exciting parts of the city which has authenticity, grit, great buildings, waterways. In other cities it would be a jewel. It is absolutely critical that this area is developed in the right way for the city. It certainly must not be overdeveloped or sanitised by conventional development”.
But the Big City Plan’s entry on Digbeth makes no reference to this perspective; instead it asks conventional questions about land use and building stock, similar to those in entries on other quarters.
4.
The Big City Plan consultation document repeatedly asks questions, district by district, which are based upon land use alternatives, such as “What do you think the focus for Eastside should be in the future – as a learning quarter, a new office quarter, a residential quarter, or a media and creative quarter?” These questions are naïve and inappropriate, for two reasons. Firstly, they suppose that these uses are alternatives, as though we were still living in the modernist period of land use zoning in which an area could have only one use. These uses are not mutually exclusive, and indeed are mutually beneficial if mixed appropriately. Secondly, a look at any part of the city over the past thirty or so years will show that land uses are not fixed; they continually shift and change in response to social and economic change, and the changes are largely independent of top-down planning. So it is mistaken and misleading to suggest that the future nature of a district can be determined by designating its use. The job that the Big City Plan should be doing is to propose an appropriate and responsive framework, with a high degree of permanence, which can accept changing development and occupation over a long period of time, without compromise. This would be a sustainable urban fabric.
Having made these four general points, I now address the specific topics in the consultation document, with some specific responses.
Business and industry
The emphasis on the “high value-added sector” is typical of Birmingham’s recent agenda. It is a mistake to relegate ordinary low value manufacturing to a subordinate position. Manufacturing things, what Birmingham has always been good at, is likely to become again a more important part of the economy.
Shopping
History tells us that in the development of shopping, the planning process is merely reactive to the initiatives of the private sector. Strategic planning had no role to play in the development of Birmingham’s two most celebrated recent shopping locations, the Bull Ring and the Mailbox, and this is probably equally true of all retail development outside communist countries.
Community, population and households
“A city for young people” is a meaningless phrase. There can be no equitable city that favours one particular sector at the expense of others.
More family accommodation is needed, in and near the city centre, but it cannot be left solely to the private sector to build. A significant proportion of it needs to be rented, and it requires innovation in high density design. Birmingham not long ago had numerous streets in the city centre of 18th and 19th century terraced houses, ranging from the small and utilitarian to the large and elegant. All but a few have been destroyed. A 21st century equivalent is necessary, and the Birmingham House project, if executed properly, could generate it. But it is not an architectural project. The primary role of the new city centre housing programme, if there is to be one, has to be to create a normative urban fabric, reinventing the urban block. It is an urban design project. (c.f. Rudlin and Falk, Building the 21st Century Home: the sustainable urban neighbourhood).
Education and learning
It is necessary that we provide primary and secondary education within the city centre, if the city centre is to support a wide range of population. These may not look like conventional schools as found elsewhere in the city.
The city centre should have more flexible and low-cost workspaces, as found in, for example, the Custard Factory, to enable graduates and other young people to set up businesses.
Culture, sport and leisure
There is little that connects the diverse activities that are mentioned in this entry. Cultural diversity will grow organically if there is a supportive context for it. There is currently an under-provision of medium-sized venues in the city, and this should be addressed. The City Council needs to act to ensure that popular music venues, such as the Rainbow and the Spotted Dog, are not threatened by the new occupants of gentrified inner city districts. The inner city must not be purified (c.f. Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder).
Built and natural environment
Birmingham needs to drop its mistaken emphasis on the big-scale and the exceptional, and to develop instead a way of providing a high-quality environment which is thematic and small-scale, both in terms of its built form and its urban spaces (c.f. Glenn Howells, Making the Ordinary Extraordinary, in L. Kennedy (editor), Remaking Birmingham: the visual culture of urban regeneration).
The main contribution that the city centre makes to biodiversity is in what the entry on Digbeth describes dismissively as “unkempt leftover spaces”. These include the canals and their towpaths. Excessive tidying-up should be resisted. Kelvin Campbell has gone on record as favouring messiness, but there is no sign of this preference in the consultation document.
The City Council should give a higher priority to the conservation of historic buildings and districts. This has been downgraded in recent years, and mistakenly perceived as being in opposition to development; the approval of the damaging 103 Colmore Row redevelopment forced through DC Committee is a recent example. All the European cities which have a high international status, which the City Council states that it wishes to join, are characterised by the respect which they pay to their historic districts.
Connectivity
The City Council’s policy to discourage car use in the city centre is being executed half-heartedly and inconsistently. The decision to approve 3,000 spaces to encourage shoppers to drive to the Bull Ring, although not a recent example, is not an exceptional contradiction. New development in the city centre must not lead to an increase in numbers of cars. No increases in highway capacity, which will inevitably lead to more car usage, should be allowed. A high priority should be given to the redesign, incorporating a reduction in road space, of the A41 through Digbeth and Deritend.
High priority should also be given to the extension of the Midland Metro system, and the addition of new heavy rail commuter lines, particularly the re-opening for passenger traffic of the Kings Heath line.
The Core
Priority should be given to the design and management of a public realm of consistently high quality, and the production of urban design guidance that sets appropriate standards for the production of new development, and which is consistently followed. (BUDS urgently needs updating; it was an innovative document in 1990, but is now rendered partly obsolete by developments since). If this is done, the development market can determine the answers to the other questions.
Southside
I propose that other names be found, so that Southside and Westside do not enter the popular language. They are lazy neologisms, following the introduction of Eastside, which is an unnecessary name for a district that already has historic names, and which appears to be in the process of erosion anyway, if the evidence of the Big City Plan is any indication.
The redevelopment of the Wholesale Markets is a major opportunity for a new mixed-use quarter of exemplary design. A “major new public square” is not necessarily a key ingredient; there could instead be a series of more intimate and smaller urban spaces. Bigger is rarely better. The complete removal of the wholesale markets function may not be necessary. The mistake made in the 1970s was to make the area into an exclusive walled fortress. In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the market functions were integrated with other normative urban functions. It could be so again.
Highgate
The apparent choice of Highgate as the focus for new residential development seems arbitrary. I am not aware that the residents of Highgate have been consulted on this choice. The existing residential area certainly has potential for new development, upgrading and densification, but it needs to be incremental and carefully considered.
The industrial part of Highgate has considerable character, in its street grid (unusual in Birmingham), in its buildings, and in its diverse industrial and other activities. It should not be dismissed. The dismissive tone employed in the Big City Plan is unfortunately typical of a failure to recognise and appreciate what are true Birmingham urban qualities; utilitarian, gritty, diverse and small-scale.
Westside
My answer here is as elsewhere; get the framework right, get the design policies right, and the place will be able to respond flexibly and responsively to economic and social change. This is the lesson which any successful city centre – Edinburgh, Lyons, Barcelona, for example – has to teach. They have a structure which, by being well-designed and locally specific, is able to be continually modified while continuing to be permanent. The mistake that Birmingham makes frequently is to create short-lived structures which cannot persist, which become redundant, and which then have to be destroyed and replaced. With few exceptions, use is largely independent of form. What is needed most of all from the Big City Plan is the creation of a responsive and lasting infrastructure (c.f. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City).
Ladywood
My comment on the residential part of Highgate applies similarly to Ladywood. There was a missed opportunity in the Ladywood Regeneration Framework of the early 1990s to create a transformational structure, when £35m of Estate Action money was spent on improving housing fabric, but little on structure. My 12 Design Principles contained in the 1991 LRF document, and my 1995 Ladywood Urban Design Study are the basis of what could be a transformation, but they were never implemented
Jewellery Quarter
I am astonished, after all the contentiousness caused by planning policies since 1998, and the City Council’s current proposal for the Jewellery Quarter to achieve World Heritage Site status, that the Big City Plan’s question on the Jewellery Quarter should be so open-ended. Any encouragement of non-manufacturing uses will continue to put pressure on the indigenous industry, which in turn will lead to the degradation of the urban quality of the area and the reduction of its conservation significance. English Heritage correctly recognised in its excellent Jewellery Quarter appraisal that the architecture and the industrial economy of the quarter are interdependent; they cannot be separated without damage to both.
Gun Quarter
Again the Big City Plan displays its misunderstanding of what characterises Birmingham, in stating that “industrial and warehouse buildings ….. do not relate well to Birmingham’s global city ambitions”. If this were true, then the overused slogan “A global city with a local heart” would be truly meaningless. Look at any great city, and it will have the high-profile exceptional architecture that Birmingham aspires to have (but finds it so difficult to achieve), but also it will have districts of normative, even utilitarian, urban fabric. The two are complementary, not in opposition, and the ordinary districts are economically essential. Go to the Gun Quarter, and you will find for example a wonderful and thriving indoor climbing wall and an associated shop selling equipment and books. This could exist only in a cheap converted factory. I refer you to the Eastside Sustainability Advisory Group’s postcard, which asks “Prestige developments – always the best option?”. The City Council’s tiresome emphasis on high-profile prestige development, believing that this is what represents “global”, fails to recognise what a sustainable city is about.
Eastside
The diagrammatic map of the spatial structure of the city suggests not only that the Eastside regeneration programme has a lower political priority than it had under the previous Labour administration, which we already know, but that its physical area is shrinking, which has not been publicly announced. Eastside apparently now comprises only the area north of the Euston line. This is unfortunate and regressive.
The recent built developments of Masshouse and the Unite student housing, both of poor quality, and the negative assessment given recently by the CABE Design Review Panel to both the Eastside Locks proposal and the Vertical Theme Park proposal, are indicative of the disappearance of the previously high design aspirations which were held for Eastside. This is discouraging, and should be corrected.
Digbeth
Digbeth and Deritend are historic areas which contain the most interesting potential for growth in the city centre. They used to be part of the Eastside programme, but now apparently are no longer. As noted earlier, Professor Parkinson’s appreciation of Digbeth and Deritend was very acute, but the Big City Plan sadly appears not to be accepting his analysis as the basis for planning. An appropriate design guide for Digbeth and Deritend is vital. The area only has two recently-produced conservation area management plans, and these, while strong on historical description and analysis, are seriously inappropriate in some of their advice; for example, their proscription of street trees, and their proscription of new public access to the canal.
With the right design guidance, Digbeth and Deritend have the capacity to become model mixed-use urban quarters, something new for which Birmingham could become internationally famous, in the way that Hammarby Sjostad in Stockholm has recently become. But this will not happen in a laissez-faire planning context, which would result in the obliteration of much that is intricate and valuable in the area. The Eastside Sustainability Advisory Group’s 2002 publication Sustainable Eastside – a vision for the future, and my own concurrent essay Eastsiders (co-written by Tracey Fletcher) set out some of the appropriate criteria which, if followed, would enable new growth to happen while maintaining the unique qualities of the area.
Joe Holyoak
December 2008