Joe Holyoak News Blog

I enjoyed UD108’s topic of The Spaces in Between, dealing with those marginal spaces, often overlooked by planners and developers, but sustaining a wide range of vital human activities. The literature of placemaking usually concentrates instead on more formal urban locations. They have well-known names which appear on maps, and they are pretty much unchanging. If you went back there twenty years from now there might be a few details different but it would be recognisably the same place. Red Square, Times Square, Trafalgar Square….. public places, permanent places, fixed nodes in an urban landscape. The Urban Design Group’s The Good Place Guide is an admirable collection of such places. In his foreword to the book, John Worthington does mention the importance not only of formal space and material character, but also of experiential quality in the making of a good place; “…..memories of an event in a place or a feeling of well-being…..”. And while most of the photographs in the book are populated (several are eerily deserted like a de Chirico painting), they of course are all conventional permanent urban enclosures.

There is another kind of place, which would make a different book, in which the placemaking is temporary, created entirely by an event. The event is set up in a non-place, and for the duration of the event, its inhabitation by people, and the intense life they live there, creates a memorable place through a shared experience. Then the event ends, the people disperse, and the place ceases to be. In August I had two such memorable place-experiences. Firstly I went to Cropredy in Oxfordshire, to the annual Fairport Convention festival. For three days we sat in a field. For the rest of the year it is a totally unremarkable field among thousands. But for those three days, 20,000 of us, many bands, and a great variety of places to eat and drink, together created a distinctive place. We belonged there; it was our home, we all sang Meet on the Ledge. It had Lynchian paths, edges and sub-districts. But if I went back to Cropredy now, I might not even recognise the field. The place has gone.

Later in the month I went to the annual production of the wonderful Birmingham Opera Company, directed by Graham Vick. The company has a policy of not performing in theatres, but instead temporarily inhabiting a disused building, which it dresses for the occasion. This year it was doing Mozart’s Idomeneo, in an empty rubber factory in Ladywood. The audience hung about under a Belfast-trussed loading bay by the canal until the factory doors opened, and then filed in to the gaunt, lofty space punctuated by great steel stanchions. There are no seats; the audience occupied the space with the singers, actors and chorus, and walked about following the action; an earthen hill on one side, a platform with a big mirror over here, a big sacrificial table over there. Vick, in an old jumper, walked around among us, mouthing every line of song. For three hours or so, a few hundred people, joined together by an intense experience, transformed an old industrial building into a memorable public room.

After the final night’s performance, everyone walked out into the night excited and exhilarated. The next day the orchestra platform was dismantled, the lights unbolted, the big mirror removed, and driven away. Once more, just an empty, disused factory, nowhere special.

Joe Holyoak

Endpiece, Urban Design, Winter 2009, Issue 109

Apologies for my indulging in childhood nostalgia again, but after considering the contribution of food to local distinctiveness in UD105, my thoughts are straying towards the related matter of smell. The characteristic smell that a neighbourhood may possess, usually deriving from a particular work-related component of the place – the fishdocks, the chocolate factory, the brewery, or whatever – is a key element that makes that place distinguishable from others. Many towns and districts are characterised by a brewery smell, that distinctively sour mixture of hops and malted barley. Maybe a blindfolded CAMRA expert could decide whether he – it would be he – was standing in Edinburgh, Burton or Masham, smelling McEwans, Bass or Black Sheep – I couldn’t.

But one of the strongest and strangest place-smell memories from my childhood is of the unique hybrid of smells that was Aston Cross in Birmingham. I used to take the 64 bus to and from school, passing through what was then a densely populated inner city district. On adjacent corners of the nodal space of Aston Cross stood Ansells brewery and the HP Sauce factory. Pace my imaginary CAMRA member, all breweries smell pretty similar, but a blindfolded triallist smelling that astringent combination of vinegar, fruit, malt and hops would have known he could be in only one place on the earth’s surface. Its distinctiveness has now disappeared, a casualty of deindustrialisation and redevelopment. Ansells went long ago, transferred to Allied Breweries, and production of HP Sauce sadly migrated to the Netherlands last year. Unlike conventional Lynchian landmarks and edges, the geography of local smell changes with wind direction and strength. With your head in a school book, you would always know when you were approaching Aston Cross as the smell infiltrated your nostrils, but sometimes you would be taken by surprise by how far, and in which direction, the olfactory boundary had shifted.

These smell characteristics of places, though powerful, are of course accidental and unintended by-products. I wonder whether the place-branding consultants (yes, they do exist – I met one at the Academy for Urbanism recently) might steal a trick from Asda and others, who deviously pipe smells of bread and coffee through ducts to induce the desire of consumption in their customers. An ecotown that smells permanently of mown grass and honeysuckle? – I hope not, but I wouldn’t be too sure.

The values of local distinctiveness can of course cause ambivalence; not every local peculiarity is seen as positive by all. I am sure that some people, particularly those living nearby, hated the Aston Cross smell. Another (non-smelly) example which I sometimes muse upon is the floor numbering system in Birmingham’s Millennium Point building, designed by Grimshaw Architects. This large unattractive building has five floors, three of which, because of the sloping site, connect with the ground. Someone, and I wish I knew who, numbered these floors, reading from the bottom to the top; G2, G1, G0, L1 and L2. For years, whenever I travelled in the lifts, I would listen to visitors trying to make some logical sense of this code, and to work out whether they needed to go up or down, and how far. The system was locally distinctive, certainly, but also very irritating. I used to comment frequently to friends and colleagues on the stupidity of it. This year the management of the building has clearly lost patience with it, and has renumbered the floors 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4, just like any other five-storey building. Do you know what? I perversely miss those old numbers. The world now has one peculiar thing fewer than before.

Joe Holyoak

Endpiece, Urban Design, Autumn 2008, Issue 108

As a child in the 1950s I lived on a busy High Street, and grew up accustomed to the daily noise generated by the shops lining the street, the Palace cinema next door, the Roebuck pub a few doors away, and the market on the next block. Daily Monday to Saturday in the daytime, that is; after 5.30 it was a lot quieter, with only pub and cinema customers coming and going, on foot, and after pub closing time, very quiet. (Sundays were quieter still. The still urban air was broken only by the St Barnabas bellringers calling the congregation to church. Between the changes, one could also hear, from a long way away, the approaching Boys’ Brigade band, marching echoingly along the deserted High Street to church service.)

It’s not like that now in the typical High Street. Not only is Sunday much like any other day of the week, but retail, commercial and leisure activity has extended from daytime into the night. Whether by popular demand, commercial opportunism, or government policy, we have moved some way towards the 24 hour city. Opinions vary on the virtues and utility of this, but on the whole I think our streets are better for having activity extended into more hours of the day. (Although I remain nostalgic for that empty 1950s High Street; always sunlit in my memory, with an imagined quality like a de Chirico piazza).

Parks are different. Whereas the street is legitimately a 24 hour space, the park traditionally has a clearly diurnal pattern, and is used only in daylight. Parks have enclosing fences, they may have gates, and if they are lucky enough to have a keeper, the gates may still be locked at dusk. The park at night is generally perceived as an unsafe place, where, if there is activity, it is nefarious and illicit, and maybe illegal. Both in fact and in imagination, the park at night is where murders take place. As I write, two teenagers have been given life sentences for the murder of a Goth in Stubbylee Park in Bacup. In film, an archetypal image of the park at night is still David Hemmings in Blowup, searching for the body in the shrubbery in Maryon Park, Woolwich, deserted and silent except for the wind soughing in the trees.

The Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, recently caused controversy when he proposed more night-time use of parks by children, including “midnight basketball” leagues, an idea imported from the USA. His motive, totally admirable, is to increase involvement in sports by children and to reduce obesity, but criticism was widespread, focussing on the established view of parks at night as locations of drug use and anti-social behaviour.

Our small local park, where I am Chair of the Friends, is making modest steps towards reclaiming the night. We have made a funding application to have floodlights installed on the all-weather playing pitch. In February we held our second annual “In the Park after Dark” event. Residents, particularly children, were invited to bring hand-held lights. Helium-filled balloons containing LED lights were tied to the railings. (Most got stolen, but that is perhaps a sort of appreciation). The local school designed, made and presented a spectacular back-lit puppet show in silhouette. Hot soup and baked potatoes were consumed. Fun was had. We hope that perceptions of the nocturnal park were changed, in a small but significant way.

Joe Holyoak

Endpiece, Urban Design, Summer 2008, Issue 107 

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.

Joe Holyoak

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.

Joe Holyoak

References: Herbert Dreiseitl, Dieter Grau (editors), New Waterscapes, Basel; Birkhauser, 2005.

Endpiece, Urban Design, Autumn 2007, Issue 104

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.

Joe Holyoak

Endpiece, Urban Design, Winter 2008, Issue 105.

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 Holyoak 

Endpiece, Urban Design, Winter 2007, Issue 101 

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 

Joe Holyoak 

Endpiece, Urban Design, Autumn 2006, Issue 100 

  It was the late Jane Jacobs who first awoke my interest, in the 1960s, in the ordinary things that ordinary people do in ordinary streets, and made me realise that these were important, and that they could and should be a source for the decisions that designers make about public space. Since then there have been others who have also excited my interest, and given me principles, standards and methods to use; notably William Whyte, Jan Gehl, Richard Sennett.  What the work of these writers collectively represents to me is the powerful idea of the urban street as the living room of the citizen, where social and political life takes place, a place of free encounter governed by democratic principles. The old Hanseatic city slogan Stadt luft macht frei expresses a similar ideal – the freedom of the city street. But this democratic ideal is constantly under attack. The private sector has continued to acquire more of the public realm and privatise it, often with the positive support of the municipality, keen to divest itself of expensive responsibilities. Privatisation is augmented by the formation of Business Improvement Districts, where the private business sector gains more control over public space, and can manage it in the interests of retail and commerce. In addition, our towns and cities have the greatest concentration of CCTV cameras in the world, with unknown and invisible authorities watching us through 4.2 million cameras. Now the integrity of the space of the res publica is under threat from a new direction. Middlesbrough Council has given the power of speech to nine of its 160 cameras. Council officials can give verbal instructions and reprimands through loudspeakers to anyone in the street whom they suspect of antisocial behaviour. Already one woman has received an apology after having been publicly reprimanded, mistakenly, for dropping litter. The Home Secretary, John Reid, foolishly believes that this Orwellian misuse of authority is “interactive”, and is proposing extending it to Derby, Norwich and Southwark.  I think we should be very worried by this latest expression of illiberal politics, which brings reality frighteningly close to the fictional fascism of Airstrip One in 1984. But beyond the politics, I also think that as urban designers we should be concerned about the consequences of this innovation for the quality of the public realm. CCTV cameras, for all their ubiquity, are rarely registered by our senses. They may be sinister, but they are discreet and do their work quietly. Our streets are already loud with uninvited music from shops and passing cars. Now we are to be threatened by voices of faceless authority booming out of loudspeakers. It matters not whether the instruction to behave is directed at us or another; we all suffer from the noise and the intrusion, and the inevitable sense of civic diminishment, of being mere proles under the direction of the Outer Party.   In Birmingham recently we have had a similar infringement of the integrity of public space, also promoted and defended by the City Council. While the Town Hall was wrapped in scaffolding for its renovation, a big TV screen was placed next to it on

. One could turn one’s back on it, but the noise was inescapable, rendering the square an intolerable place to stay. It had temporary planning permission for the duration of the renovation. Now the scaffolding is down, but despite opposition the Council wants to extend the planning approval, even though the screen is an ugly visual intrusion next to the Grade I listed building. I wrote in UD100 about the delight of peace and quiet in the city. Some hope of that!   

Joe Holyoak

Endpiece, Urban Design, Summer 2007, Issue 103