Reviews

CABE Urban Design Summer School 2007

Urban living newsletter, January 2008

Find out here what the delegates from Urban Living, the Birmingham and Sandwell housing market renewal pathfinder, thought about their experience at the 2007 school.

Urban Design Quarterly, Autumn 2007

Nursing a cup of tea in Aston Business School, I am surrounded by 120 strangers all of whom seem to know considerably more about urban design than me. I am ‘only’ a town centre manager (officially designated an ‘uninformed client’ by her Technical Services Department) and right now I cannot fathom out why I wanted to attend CABE’s four day Summer School.

The first afternoon is deceptively relaxed, with a site visit to Tamworth. It is also just the sort of place I could happily pootle around on a Sunday afternoon, visiting the church and the castle. Everyone around me is dissecting the town in scathing terms; as we talk and walk I begin to view it more analytically, and rapidly realize that I am going to learn as much from my fellow delegates and their different perspectives and skills, as I am from the formal coursework.

Monday and it’s time for another field trip – this time to Newtown. A solid sheet of rain obscures our vision, but despite our sodden state, my fellow ’Green Field’ team members and I have already begun to talk animatedly and share ideas.

We return to presentations, interactive briefings and workshops. The Summer School begins in earnest that afternoon when, in our designated groups, we begin work on formal site analyses and producing a brief. I used to be able to draw but I don’t know quite what has happened. My colleagues are very diplomatic about my child-like daubs, and I am beginning to find my voice among this talented group of people, and starting to make real contributions.

That night we go to Brindleyplace for a stimulating series of presentations, while glimpses of the canals from the uppermost floor of Argent’s stylish offices remind us of Birmingham’s history.

Water has been an unwitting theme of the School, and the following morning this reaches its culmination with a striking presentation by Herbert Dreiseitl. Delegates are still talking about this the next day – his descriptions of water technology stimulate our collective imaginations. I am starting to use words like hydrology, spatial strategy and massing, as if they have always formed part of my vocabulary; after two days of disjointed confusion, the concepts and ideas with which I have been bombarded are starting to crystallize and make sense. I begin to understand that a lack of technical knowledge is no barrier to urban design, which seems to demand creativity and imagination, and is limitless in its potential. I had struggled to relate plans about building a new city in Japan to my meagre potential development sites in Tooting, but I now realize that the same underlying principles can apply to any development big or small.

At 7am on the last day the daily newsletter is pushed under my door informing me that my group is one of the six shortlisted for the Best Masterplan. This brings a mixture of exhilaration and dismay that we now have to face the Dragons Den just before School closes and we will do the final pitch. I am nominated to present our work and when the big moment comes, the training of the last three days kicks in and somehow I talk through our project. My team does not win, but I feel a huge sense of achievement when we are awarded Best Brief.

Barely an hour after facing the Dragons Den, I am on a train back to London, my head whirling with all I have learned and my prize copy of ‘The Art of City Making’. I am enthused, exhausted and exhilarated – and weeks later I am still buzzing with the excitement generated by CABE’s Summer School.

Audrey Helps is Tooting’s Town Centre Manager at Wandsworth Council