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- What next? Taking your learning further
- Streets as quality places
- Ecominimalism (the antidote to eco-towns)
- Community-centred urban design skills: a solution to the skills gap
- Some questions that are frequently never asked
- The analysis of place
- Creating a vision
- test
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Where next? Taking your learning further
By Dr Noha Nasser, Birmingham School of Architecture, BCU
By attending the CABE urban design summer school you have embarked on the first step to appreciating your role in the urban design process. To follow on from your intense four day experience, there are several routes you may wish to consider to stay up to date with what’s going on in the urban design world.
One route is to seek a validated urban design course. There are about twelve urban design Masters courses!!!!LINK!!!!! in England and Wales which offer one year full time or two-year part-time programmes (on a day-release basis). Increasingly, clients or commissioners are requesting to see qualified urban designers on the design team. Validated university courses generally offer three urban design qualifications: Post-graduate Certificate, Post-graduate Diploma, and Masters. The latter two are considered of professional standing whereas the Post-graduate Certificate reflects a basic understanding of urban design. Some courses are more flexible than others, such as the course offered at Birmingham City University where you can pick up modules at your own pace, or the University of the West of England where there is distance learning provision.
If you are not keen to make a long term commitment to an academic course, there are other routes you can take to support your Continuing Professional Development (CPD). Professional Institutes such as the Royal Institute of British Architects, or Royal Town Planning Institute, offer a number of urban design related CPD sessions to their members which contribute to an overall minimum annual requirement. Universities can also offer short courses, or even bespoke courses to suit your organisation’s training requirements. Urban Design London (website) and the Centre for Urban Design Outreach and Skills (CUDOS) are such providers.
Don’t forget that staying up to date with developments in urban design is about staying connected. As an alumni you will benefit from being part of the summer school’s Alumni network. You could also become a member of the Urban Design Group (www.udg.org.uk), or the Resource for Urban Design Information (www.rudi.org.uk), or a free member of the RTPI Urban Design Network (www.rtpi.org.uk/urban_design_network). Why not sign up for CABE’s free newsletter. Many of these networks will keep you informed of new policies and issues, and about conferences and lectures you can attend.
As you can see, there are plenty of ways you can take your next steps towards life long learning in urban design.
Streets as quality places
Elizabeth Hoehnke, CABE Space enabling advisor
Ask anyone what their favourite public space is and they will most likely say a local park, green space or civic square. Yet streets make up about 80 per cent of our urban public spaces. If we didn’t have to use streets every day, we probably wouldn’t go anywhere near them. Step outside your front door and you will see the ongoing daily demonstration of street design failure – people jump over barriers, walk outside railings, disregard signals, ignore underpasses and weave through traffic to get on with their lives. Street design certainly needs to take a radically new approach to make them enjoyable places to be, rather than just a way to get from A to B.
When it comes to disregard for streets as quality public spaces for people, however, the UK has form. Jake Desyllas in his essay for CABE on the cost of bad highways design points to the traffic acts of the 1930s which gave vehicles special rights of way across the entire road network. This fixed a basic premise that streets should not be thought of as spaces for all people to use with due care and responsibility towards others. In a sense, this policy asks streets to perform only one function. Further culprits are design policies dating back from the 1960s which have long resulted in strict segregation of pedestrians and traffic.
Thanks to new government thinking, a fundamental shift in the way that we think about and design our streets is underway. Manual for Streets identifies streets as key elements of placemaking and emphasises their role in creating successful, well designed neighbourhoods. CABE supports this shift and recommends a strategic approach to the design and management of public spaces underpinned by robust research and evaluation. Spatial tools are valuable in guiding this process. Principles and objectives for streets should be set out in a public realm framework, masterplan, design guides and policy documents, as described in Manual for Streets.
Traditionally, streets have hardly been designed. In fact, 85 per cent of professionals who make design decisions for our streets have no design training at all. We expect our public buildings to be designed by trained professionals, so why not our streets? If we’re committed to creating successful, well designed neighbourhoods we need to create confidence among professionals to a new understanding of what streets can be. From January to March 2008, CABE will be delivering regional training events on Manual for Streets and well designed neighbourhoods. These events will encourage professionals to think more creatively about their roles in the process of delivering streets and break away from standardised prescriptive risk-averse methods.
Too often street design is dominated by certain stakeholders, resulting in unimaginatively designed streets which have tended to favour motorists over other users. In Nottingham a city wide public realm strategy focussed on the integration of highways and urban design to great effect. Once voted by the public as Britain’s fourth worst street in CABE's Streets of shame campaign, Maid Marian Way is now an excellent example of how determined initiative tackled a segregated inner-city ring road, by the replacement of underpasses and sunken roundabouts by a crossing at road level.
As policy and practice moves away from segregation of traffic and civic functions and towards a more integrated urban environment, there is a growing realisation of how an obsession with avoiding risk paradoxically leads to riskier behaviour. CABE’s report Living with risk sets out an agenda for public space design that is risk aware, not risk averse. Strong leadership and a clear design vision are both vital when dealing with risk. It’s too easy to justify a decision that avoids risk rather than a decision that uses risk creatively.
A pleasant street doesn’t need to be dominated by bollards to feel controlled. Clutter should be avoided, and each marking, sign or other feature must truly work to prove its worth. Kensington High Street shows that reducing clutter and signage in urban streets can heighten road user awareness and as a result reduce risk and improve the quality of public space.
There is also economic value in high quality streets. It seems common sense that if you improve the quality of a street it will improve the quality of the area, but now we have the evidence. CABE’s Paved with Gold research demonstrates a direct link between street quality and property prices. It shows that quality can add at least 5 per cent to the price of homes and to retail rents.
But despite the growing evidence of the wider economic, social and environmental benefits of good street design, there remains a need to identify and apply good practice to secure a more widespread and sustainable improvement. The value of case studies is not in setting them up as unattainable perfection but in learning from the challenges they faced and what they have achieved.
The UK is better placed than ever before to transform the quality of new and existing streets, with new government guidance, sound policies and a range of spatial tools to guide this process. Creating a sense of place is fundamental to achieving richer and more fulfilling neighbourhoods. As designers we need to be more joined up in our approach and bring together the needs of all street users and potential uses of that environment. In doing so, public life will return to the public realm and streets will become destinations, not just thoroughfares.
To learn more about CABE research, and for ideas and inspiration, visit: www.cabe.org.uk/streets
Ecominimalism (the antidote to eco-towns)
07 April 2008
“Things should be as simple as possible - but no simpler”
Albert Einstein
Mainstreaming
If we are to move forward from pilot projects in the form of eco-houses, eco-villages, eco-towns, green expos and even eco-cities ‒ towards mainstreaming ecological design as an integral part of building for the 21st century, then it is crucial that it is accessible, economic, genuinely environmentally-sound, gimmick-free and not stigmatised as a style.
At its roots eco-minimalism is not just about good 'green' value for money – but good value for money per se. This comes from eschewing overblown and often overspecified technology in favour of sound science, common sense and good housekeeping.
The root problem
For those who have a simplistic view of what the sustainable building agenda comprises, the solutions have been equally simplistic and, as such, ineffective ‒ or worse - creating an equally large problem elsewhere (e.g. making a building airtight, without dealing with toxic materials and humidity). On the other hand, those who have realised that the challenge is more complex have considered the search for solutions to be complicated and daunting and requiring a long list of interventions, which they have also assumed will come with a high price tag.
The bling list
An awful lot of money is being wasted, in the name of sustainability, on ‘eco-bling’, as people technically-fix their ‘green’ badges to their unsuspecting buildings. If they are putting costly photovoltaic cells, hot-water solar collectors and personal wind turbines on their becalmed, north-facing, turf-roofed, toxic timber-clad, non-airtight, poorly insulated houses, finished in high-emission materials – and they are sinking electricity-powered heat pumps and rainwater-filtration systems down deep holes filled with recycled concrete, next to their reed-bed gardens with a focal-point bird table – then they could, just possibly, be spending money more wisely.
In the light green corner we have this list:
“In technology Reality should take precedence over Public Relations, because Nature won’t be fooled”
Richard Feymann
The Ecominimal list
The alternative, which is both cheaper and has much better green credentials, is ‘eco-minimalism’ – a good-housekeeping approach to ecological building design and specification, involving apparently, non-glaringly obvious strategies such as insulation, draught-proofing and the use of healthy materials. Before we consider lobbying for more eco-towns, we need to look, critically, at the range of technical-fix options that are available to the aspiring green developer – be they involved in an ‘above-the-garage’ bedroom extension, or a major urban masterplan project, and see whether there aren’t some better options in the form of subtle good-housekeeping. The items outlined in the table below are relevant throughout all scales of building.
This is offered up as an approach that represents not just good ‘green’
value for money, but, quite simply, good value for money.
So, in the dark green corner we have this list:
Conclusion
After presenting the eco-minimalist approach over the past 5 years to a wide range of people from architects and builders through to the general public and clients, it has become clear that, they find this approach straightforward and therefore easier to embrace and more accessible than the approach which advises bolt-on, eco-bling technology, parading as the quick fix, but ultimately expensive (and therefore often unaffordable) solution to all our ills.
The fundamental question seems to be whether we wish to create an eco-technology industry in order to feed the GDP statistics with green-labelled fodder, or whether we want to work on productivity and reduce consumption at source.
Howard Liddell, Gaia, Edinburgh
Community-centred urban design skills: a solution to the skills gap
11 February 2008
It is not surprising that the term ‘communities’ has made a revival since the heyday of community architecture in the 60s. The Sustainable Communities Plan launched in 2003 has seen the term proliferate in to all corners of regeneration, housing, and ‘placemaking’. The Plan set forward a new holistic concept balancing and integrating the social, economical and environmental aspects of place to meet residents’ needs in the present and the future. This broader approach to ‘placemaking’ is gradually shifting urban design emphasis from a predominantly form-driven activity to a greater appreciation of the diversity of social fabrics that exist in different localities, and how that may contribute to local distinctiveness. In tandem, the planning system is making statutory community consultation as part of the development process in the form of Design and Access Statements, Statements of Community Involvement and Community Strategies. With this change in the political context, has the urban design professional made the necessary shift to engage meaningfully with the implications of this new direction?
Whether it is the private or the public sector, community consultation needs to have been undertaken in order for schemes to gain planning consent. But is the consultation meaningful? All too often consultation takes place after the design process is almost over; the vision has been decided; concepts have been drawn up; design briefs have been written; and a number of proposals have been generated. People are presented with almost-finished drawings and models of how their neighbourhoods are changing and asked what they think. Those NIMBYs use the opportunity to oppose plans, whilst the quieter members look on not quite sure how to give an informed opinion on the proposals. However, what if local people were engaged from the start? What if the site analysis also included a walk around by professionals and local residents shedding light on the workings and failings of the neighbourhood; what if local people were trained to understand the benefits of urban design and development in their area; what if local people could then be central to the development of design briefs and proposals? Achieving all this would mean that local opposition would be minimised and planning approvals granted much quicker. But more importantly, it would mean that the vision and design proposals for the area will be the most meaningful to the locality because it reflects the spirit of the community.
For a long time, professionals have considered themselves above ‘consultation with the layperson’. This is understandable given the length of time it takes to fully qualify to be a ‘professional’. The power of gained knowledge and technical skills means that the solution to a locality will present itself to them by looking at plans, visiting the site and doing some desktop research. Tight timescales push consultation to a tokenistic number of sessions towards the end. Many places have been created in this fashion. However, if an urban designer remembers that their training is about designing places for people, it seems absurd that local people are not part of the design process from the beginning. An urban designer has a duty to understand the nuances of a place and its inhabitants and build on these to create somewhere unique to that place. The few consultation sessions at the end can subsequently be replaced with sessions interspersed throughout the design process informing and shaping the final proposals.
Urban designers also have an un-stated duty of educating local people to engage with the design process. Potentially, each consultation meeting could be structured in a way which builds local skills and capacity. The Academy for Sustainable Communities recently published a report called ‘Mind the Skills Gap’ (2007) identifying labour shortages in architecture, landscape architecture and urban design of 91% by 2012. This figure suggests the significant variance between supply and demand. If these figures are true, radical approaches are needed to address this deficit. If urban designers took it upon themselves to inspire people about their local environment – especially young people and children - the profession would see a natural increase of enthusiasts to meet the skills gap.
Sustainable communities cannot be shaped by professionals alone. Communities have to be part of shaping their own destinies, facilitated and advised by the urban design professional. But in order for these exchanges between professional and community to take place, urban designers need to learn new skills of socio-cultural literacy, interpretation of local values, and advocacy. May be we have come full circle since the community architects of the 60s, let’s hope it is sustainable this time around.
Dr Noha Nasser is Director of the Centre for Urban Design Outreach and Skills (CUDOS) in the School of Architecture at Birmingham City University, and Project Director of the CABE Urban Design Summer School
Some questions that are frequently never asked
11 February 2008
Many people ask us about the summer school. The following is just one of the conversations that we have not had.
- I’d like to know more about the CABE urban design summer school.
- Ask away.
- What could I expect to learn about?
- Urban design.
- I had sort of assumed that. But what is urban design?
- Well, it’s not necessarily urban. It’s about places, whether they are in towns or cities, or villages or rural settings. And it is about design, but in the widest sense. A lot of people who make a great contribution to urban design never design anything. But they work in ways that contribute to making successful places. The CABE urban design summer school is for them just as much as for people who design at drawing boards or computers.
- I see. I suppose the CABE Design and Decision-making for Sustainable and Inclusive Urban, Peri-urban and Rural Placemaking Summer School would be a bit of a mouthful. So urban design is a way of working rather than a profession?
- Exactly. There are professionals who see themselves primarily as urban designers, but many other professionals who understand that they are part of urban design whatever their professional label might be. The professional landscape is changing. Great places – good places even – are made by people who know how to work in teams, who understand how to work with communities, and who expect to learn new things with every project.
- I like the sound of that. But I’m a bit nervous that the summer school might be too advanced for me.
- Plenty of people at the summer school are new to urban design. And many of them are not members of any profession. The school is organised so that everyone works at the level that suits them. The experience of people with different skills and experience working together and learning from each other is just like real life.
- I find professionals in the built environment world can be pretty intimidating. Architects who think that no one else is qualified to talk about design. Planners who think that no one else has a rounded view. Highway engineers who think that their decisions matter most because only they deal with things that are quantifiable. Landscape architects who think that only they understand natural processes. Quantity surveyors...
- Let me stop you there. Narrow-minded professionals don’t come to the summer school. They don’t want their prejudices challenged. They don’t want to work with people who don’t speak their professional jargon. They certainly don’t want to work alongside people who are exploring urban design from very different starting points. They are boring and self-centred, and their dress sense is appalling. And when it comes to their turn to buy a round of drinks? Forget it.
- But apart from that?
- Apart from that, they are the salt of the earth and I love them dearly.
- Isn’t it unrealistic trying to make people into urban designers in four days?
- It would be, but that is not what we are trying to do. Who prepares planning applications, helping to determine what development looks like, and whether it makes places more pleasant and more efficient, or whether it blights towns and cities and degrades the countryside? Well, only about 16 per cent of planning applications are prepared by someone with any design training.
- In time we need more people with a high level of design training working directly to raise standards of development, but we have to accept that it is not going to happen quickly. What we can do is begin to get as many people as possible committed to raising standards of design and discovering their role – however small or large – in achieving it. They will be councillors, community activists, design champions, developers, housebuilders and public artists, as well as planners, architects, landscape designers, regenerators and many others. These are the sort of people you will meet at the summer school.
- Is there anyone involved in the built environment who can’t contribute to urban design?
- There is someone in Solihull who claims to be in that position, but I have not been able to verify it. Apart from him, everyone can make a difference. Tomorrow at least 10,000 decisions will be taken that will make a significant difference to the quality of some place. That’s 10,000 opportunities to get it right. And 10,000 opportunities to screw up the setting for people’s lives. Whose side do you want to be on?
Rob Cowan (rob@urbandesignskills.com) is a director of Urban Design Skills and the author of The Dictionary of Urbanism
The analysis of a place
May 16th, 2007
One of the themes of the CABE Urban Design Summer School 2007 was ‘the art of analysing a place’. Joe Holyoak, a member of our Summer School Team reflects on how to discover the spirit of a place.
The ancient Romans believed that every place had its own guardian spirit, who dwelt there and looked after it. If humans proposed building there, the spirit had to be respected and mollified. It was called the genius loci, the spirit of the place.
It’s a charming idea, but one that we cannot today rationally subscribe to in a literal sense. Nevertheless, we can and should adhere to the Romans’ principle: that every place is inherently different, and that before we interfere with it we should ask ourselves ‘what is the spirit of this place?’, and design accordingly.
The principle is most clearly expressed in landscape design, where the designer can engage most directly with those natural elements of the place which give it its unique character; topography, geology, microclimate, flora and fauna. Alexander Pope described the process well:
Consult the Genius of the Place in all;
That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall,
Or helps th’ambitious Hill the Heavens to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale,
Calls in the Country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th’intending Lines;
Paints as you plant, and as you work, designs.
The landscape architect can identify the special qualities of a place and then accentuate them through thoughtful design interventions; placing a terrace in a sunlit spot, making a path climb a hill to an unexpected view.
In an urbanised area, there may be few or no natural features remaining, apart from topography. The spirit of the place lies in the accumulated results of generations of building and occupation, both on and around the site. This we call the context. It determines what CABE and others call ‘local distinctiveness’ - what makes one place different from others. Increasingly, our places are less different from each other, and it is important therefore that through our interventions we contribute to local distinctiveness.
The designer needs to look at the patterns of development, to see whether there are any which could be usefully followed or reinforced. Do streets lead where people want to go, and do they have a regular layout? Are there particular building types or local materials? Do buildings relate to the topography or address the street in particular ways?
This is not to say that local patterns always need to be slavishly followed; sometimes it is appropriate to do something different. But an analysis of what is already there is always the necessary first step if we are to make places, which are distinctive and memorable.
Creating a Vision
May 16th, 2007
By Rob Cowan, Director, Urban Design Group
The following is the transcript of the most recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme A Vision for Your Town. There is no such programme, of course, but let’s listen in anyway.
Presenter: Welcome to A Vision for Your Town, the weekly programme in which we bring together a panel of people to brainstorm the future of some well-loved corner of urban
Architect: I’m glad you asked me first. Traditionally architects were leaders of the building team, the people whose ability to visualise space in three dimensions makes them uniquely suited to providing the inspired leadership on which good design depends. One only needs to think of Le Corbusier…
Presenter: Can I bring you back to the question? What’s your vision for this place?
Architect: What we need is great architecture, and for that you need great architects. And since I can see that you are about to ask if I am available, I can say that I am rather busy at the moment, my particular approach to architectonic orthoganalism having finally found itself attuned to the cultural zeitgeist, not to speak of the current penchant among the middle classes for kitchen extensions, but such is my commitment to my home town that I would be happy to offer my professional services.
Presenter: And your vision for the place?
Architect: What we need is a landmark building.
Presenter: A landmark to what?
Architect: Did I say a landmark? I meant an icon. Or, more specifically, something iconographic.
Presenter: I’m sure the distinction is important. Let’s move on to our next panel member, a landscape architect.
Landscape architect: I’m surprised you didn’t bring me in last and ask me to specify some planting.
Presenter: But I didn’t. I’d like to hear your vision for the place.
Landscape architect: I know, it’s just that us landscape architects get used to being brought in at the last minute to prepare the planting schedule. Just before the budget for landscaping - don’t you just hate that word? - is cut. I don’t want to go in about it, but when I get asked for my opinion I wonder what the catch is.
Presenter: There’s no catch. What is your vision for this place?
Landscape architect: It’s not for me to say what my vision is - or for anyone else. Especially an architect. The landscape needs to be left to speak for itself.
Presenter: And what is it saying on this occasion?
Landscape architect: I think it wants to be left to go off to the corner by itself and have a good cry.
Presenter: On that poetic note, let’s ask our planner: what is your vision for this place?
Planner: We can do better than vision. We have policy and guidance. Local policy in line with national policy, local guidance in line with national guidance, local policy in line with national guidance, and area-specific guidance in line with local policy…
Presenter: Which is itself in line with national policy?
Planner: Exactly. There’s nothing so satisfying as a well-conceived hierarchy of policy and guidance.
Presenter: I’m sure the public will respond enthusiastically to that. Let’s go next to our highway engineer. What’s your vision for this place?
Highway engineer: Vision is what you need when you don’t know where you are going. We know exactly where we are going. Highway engineers are the only people who appreciate that the key to successful places is easy movement. We know how to keep the traffic moving, and we have the figures to prove it. Road widths, corner radiuses, turning circles: you name it, we’ll specify it. After that, the rest of the team - architects, planners and the rest - can get on and do their visionary stuff. We take pride in knowing that we will have left them no scope at all for their infantile fantasies.
Presenter: Let’s move on to the property consultant. What is your vision for this place?
Property consultant: Like the highway engineers, we deal with quantifiable things. We can tell you not what might be desirable in an ideal world, but what is actually viable. Our analysis of the local property market and the state of commercial lettings tells us exactly what sells now. And what sells now is what will sell in the future. If something else had the potential to sell in this location, believe me, the market would have provided it already. So I can tell you that what the market will support in the future is more of what is there at the moment, which makes me glad I live somewhere else. To hope that anything better will ever be built here is to live in cloud-cuckoo land.
Presenter: Finally, let’s ask our urban designer. What’s your vision for this place?
Urban designer: I can do better than simply telling you. I can show you. I have brought with me the masterplan of our latest scheme. It’s for a place no more than 50 miles from here. This is the configuration that works: connected streets, perimeter blocks, traffic-calmed zones and active frontages, all as recommended in By Design and The Urban Design Compendium. We need exactly the same here. We’ll just bend the grid a bit to allow for the river, and the job’s done. You’ll find our fee very reasonable, and we’ll throw in a design statement that will make it look as though the design were based on a thorough appraisal of the area. As John Wood the Elder said as he designed yet another terrace in
Presenter: Isn’t that what your predecessors said in the 1960s and ’70s?
Urban designer: Of course, but they were ideologues. We are empiricists.
Presenter: I’m sure the people of Enniplaice would be delighted to hear it. Unfortunately the studio audience have slipped out one by one, leaving our panel of professionals to stew in their malodorous ocean of self-absorption. So that’s all from me, and I look forward to welcoming you at the same time next week to the next edition of A Vision for Your Town.
Our radio critic writes:
A Vision for Your Town fails on all counts. The producer has clearly chosen the most inward-looking, old-fashioned representatives of their professions. Most built environment professionals today are not like that at all. Today’s professionals know how to work collaboratively with one another, bringing their own expertise and a great deal of imagination to the question: what do we want this place to become? They speak a language that is accessible to anyone who is interested in that question.
They know how to design a process that will lead from careful appraisals of existing conditions to inspired but practical expressions of what might be achieved, and from there to developing real options that can be assessed and tested. They know how to draw out local knowledge from the people who have it, to inspire local leaders who will maintain a commitment to high standards, and to build local support and understanding of the vision and how it can be achieved.
One can only sympathise with the studio audience who voted with their feet, recognising instinctively an attempt to inveigle them into giving legitimacy to a process that was fatally flawed.
