AoU Journal 5: Risk

Here & Now

AoU Journal No. 5 Spring 2015

In focus: risk

Rethinking Rotterdam Shared streets: accidents by design In conversation with Aarhus’ city architect MalmÜ: taking a bet on innovation

Contents

Front cover image: City of Rotterdam

1 Welcome 2 Editorial 3 The Academy in Action 7 Size still matters:

how to assess great cities

Nicholas Falk AoU reviews

a recent OECD report on urbanisation 10

Digital clusters beyond cities Shane Mitchell AoU explores new forms of participation beyond large cities

The Academy of Urbanism 70 Cowcross Street London EC1M 6EJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 20 7251 8777 www.academyofurbanism.org.uk @TheAoU Join The Academy of Urbanism on LinkedIn, Facebook and Flickr Editorial team Alastair Blyth Stephen Gallagher David Rudlin Editorial panel Steven Bee Kevin Murray David Porter Dr James White Saffron Woodcraft Design Richard Wolfströme Advertise in this Journal!

If you would like to reach our broad and active audience, speak to Stephen Gallagher on sg@academyofurbanism.org.uk or +44 (0) 20 7251 8777

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Community-led urbanism Raquel Ajates Gonzalez and Sam Brown look at the projects redefining risk and return in community-led urbanism

37

Feeling safe David Rudlin AoU looks at the role of defensive yet welcoming design in creating safer neighbourhoods

16 Plot-based urbanism:

a roadmap to masterplanning

for change

Ombretta Romice and Sergio

Porter AoU analyse the role

of plot-based urbanism in place-making

40

In conversation with…

Stephen Willacy AoU David Porter AoU talks with the city architect of Aarhus about the Danish approach to trust

43

Malmö: taking a bet on innovation Nicola Bacon AoU and Bjarne Stenquist visit Malmö to find out how innovation has boosted place-making

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Space for great places!

A gallery of ideas and reflections on great places

20 Participatory budgeting:

community X Factor or civic pedagogy?

Giving the community

a direct voice in budget

decisions is a growing part

of democratic life. Katy

Hawkins finds out how

this works 23

Rebuilding New Orleans Camilla Ween AoU explores how collaboration with Tulane University helped a city devastated by floods rebuild itself

52

My own view is…

Urbanism is not planning, but the pathway to urbanity, say Brian Evans AoU The Parliament Hinge,

by Paul Finch OBE

28

Shared streets: accidents by design James Gross AoU speaks to Ben Hamilton-Baillie AoU about making our streets safer

54

Urban idiocy Brilliant but flawed ideas for the city

31

Rethinking Rotterdam Mattijs van Ruijven AoU, head urban planner for City Development Rotterdam, explains the city’s pragmatic approach to future risks

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AoU programmes What we do and how to get involved

56

Academicians and Young Urbanists Who we are

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Run the risk Simon Hicks makes the case for breaking away from our low risk ‘cookie-cutter’ approach to urban design

Back cover …And a final thought…

David Porter’s third instalment of learning to learn from place

Welcome

This issue of Here & Now hits the news stands at the beginning of the Academy’s 10th Anniversary celebrations. There will be much more about this at our Birmingham Congress and on the website as the programme of events across the UK and Europe firms up. Ten years of Learning from Place gives us a remarkable achievement, as well as a better-informed membership, on which to build a bigger and more influential Academy. We are steadily increasing the opportunities for Academicians to engage in Academy activities across the UK, Ireland and Europe and we are establishing links and partnerships with an increasing number of organisations.

The scope of our activities continues to grow, and this edition of our Journal reflects the range of our perspective as urbanists, as well as a focus on a particular aspect of urbanism.

Risk – is this something we take or avoid? The success of many of the great places we have celebrated over the past 10 years offers examples of public or private agencies, and sometimes both together, embarking on an initiative with uncertain prospects. In some cases, the potential for failure has brought together an alliance to ensure the best possible chance of success, such as the community enterprise at the heart of the Devonport neighbourhood in Plymouth, one of last year’s Awards finalists. In other cases it was unerring conviction that something could be achieved, such as the shared surface highway improvements in Poynton in Cheshire, an Award finalist the year before, that overcame fears that it might not work.

Taking risks can be exciting; stimulating new energy and drawing together a community with common interests in making improvements to the qualities of a place. Having to take risks, however, can alienate people and reinforce their sense of vulnerability.

Not having sound health, a secure income, easy mobility or a voice in local affairs requires many people to risk exposing themselves to exploitation, neglect or discrimination in order to grasp the essentials of urban life. The plethora of public and voluntary agencies demonstrates civil society’s recognition of such problems, but these don’t remove the inequality that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

The Academy’s perspective is not Utopian. Complex urban societies will always represent mixed fortunes. It may be, as TS Eliot says in Little Gidding, that “Whatever we inherit from the fortunate, We have taken from the defeated,” although I remain rather more optimistic. In promoting a better understanding of how places work, as a whole and in their constituent parts, the Academy should try to define and explain the diversity of urban conditions and help communities to find the route that stimulates the greatest involvement with the least exclusion. We should be promoting the conditions that encourage communities to take risks by minimising the circumstances that require them to.

You may well be reading this Journal in the margins of our Annual Congress, with which its publication is timed to coincide. The Congress’s focus on health and happiness will no doubt touch on the risks to improving these, and the personal and societal risks if we don’t. I’m confident we will have made an important contribution to the debate by the time we depart.

Steven Bee AoU Chairman

Chairman’s introduction

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Moving towards a more sustainable urbanism

As city regions decide whether to take up the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s offer to receive more power from central government if they elect city-wide mayors, Manchester prepares for the election of its region-wide mayor to be held in 2017.

It will mean that the region will be given control over the regional transport budget, public health and housing. The election of a ‘Metro Mayor’ is a condition of receiving devolved budgets although it has not found favour in all cities yet, in some cities there is still opposition to the idea while other cities such as Bristol are just not ready for it, and in Government eyes will not be so until the city and its neighbours form a combined authority.

The economic power of cities and metropolitan regions is undeniable.

In this issue of Here & Now Nicholas Falk reads through a recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Metropolitan Century: how to assess great cities, and asks whether when we look at cities and other places do we really know how well they meet the needs of different people, how well they are connected? (see page 7) Income inequalities, affordability of housing, commuting times affect most people’s sense of well-being and that we should include such measures in the Academy assessments of places. Indeed it will be interesting in the future to see how places like Manchester fair under these measures once the new mayor is in place.

Elsewhere in this issue Shane Mitchell looks at digital connectivity and how digital infrastructures can enable new forms of collaboration and participation beyond large cities (see page 10). While digital urbanism enables civic engagement in different ways, community participation is the theme taken up by Katy Hawkins who looks at the increasingly popular process of participatory budgeting – giving the people a direct say in what their money is spent on (see page 20). Participation takes many forms from the role played by Tulane University in rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (see page 23) to community self-build projects (see page 13).

In our new In Focus section (starting page 27) we look at how ‘Risk’ impacts on urbanism in different ways, from creating safe places to long-term economic resilience.

As we continue to develop Here & Now we thank all of our contributors for taking the time to give us the benefit of their valuable wisdom, and making this such a vibrant issue.

Alastair Blyth AoU Editor

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The Academy in action!

In this issue we cover the road-testing of the Scottish Government’s new ‘place standard’ toolkit, the first event in the Young Urbanists’ creative cities series and lots more.

We also feature a report on The Glass-House Community Led Design’s 2014/15 debate series, ‘To a more ambitious place’, that the Academy partnered with.

If you have an idea for an event or activity the Academy should be focusing on, contact: kh@academyofurbanism.org.uk

Background image: Rotterdam, ph. Richard Wolfströme

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LEARNING FROM EUROPE November 2014

Celebration of the 2015 Urbanism Awards began with Learning from Europe, at which our European City of the Year Award finalists – Aarhus, Rotterdam and Turin – shared lessons and learning with an Academy audience.

Astrid Sanson AoU, director of inner city and urban quality in Rotterdam, Stefano Lo Russo, deputy mayor of Turin, and mayor of Aarhus Jacob Bundsgaard, each gave presentations on the challenges and opportunities facing their cities, including: the creative regeneration of port and inner-city areas, the reclaiming of public space, the reuse of former industrial sites, and the diversification of their economies.

Each explained their city’s unique approach to tackling these challenges, whether through Rotterdam’s culture of experimentation (page 33), Turin’s policies to shift heavy industry to the creative industry, or Aarhus’ continuous community presence in decision making.

Kevin Murray AoU, chair for the evening, closed the event by suggesting that all three cities have resisted the urge to stand still. Each has made use of both small and bold interventions – including marker events, such as the Olympics– to shape and develop positive futures. Success is therefore not only about good leadership, but also about collaboration and prioritising the happiness of citizens.

GROW YOUR OWN GARDEN CITY December 2014

David Rudlin AoU joined the End of Year Review to present URBED’s winning entry for the 2014 Wolfson Economic Prize (see last issue of Here & Now p11), which answered the question “How would you deliver a new garden city which is visionary, economically viable, and popular?”

The primary – and perhaps most contested – argument underpinning URBED’s proposal was that garden cities could not be built from scratch.

The team asserted that new garden cities could, and should, be built from the rootstock of existing small and medium towns and cities, growing on the existing infrastructure, history, culture and communities. The land for building these new urban extensions could start with brownfield development, but brownfields alone would be insufficient to accommodate housing need. The proposal asserted the need to take ‘confident bites’ out of the greenfield in order to clearly define areas for development and areas to be retained as countryside.

The urbanism awards ceremony

To read the full report by Young Urbanist Aaron David and watch each talk, search ‘Learning from Europe’ at academyofurbanism.org.uk.

THE URBANISM AWARDS CEREMONY November 2014

Representatives of our 15 finalists, drawn from across the UK and Europe, joined Academicians and friends at London’s Grand Connaught Rooms in November for the 2015 Urbanism Awards ceremony. The Awards, now entering their 10th year, have provided the Academy with not just a wealth of knowledge on great places, but also the chance to celebrate and recognise the people behind them. Our guest speaker Paul Finch OBE cast an entertaining and critical light over prevalent built environment issues in equal measure.

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URBED’s winning submission was told through the fictional city of Uxcester, which is representative of around 40 cities in the UK, each of a similar size and with similar challenges in meeting housing needs. In this case, the team used land-value capture to cover the cost of plot development, consent, and additional community facilities such as schools and doctor’s surgeries.

Harking back to the development of London villages such as Mayfair and Bloomsbury, the team suggested developing plots for individuals and for groups to allow for more flexible development including self-build.

Despite the audience being largely supportive of the URBED concept, a few concerns were raised about the economic viability of the scheme, including the logic of challenging the existing drip-feed method of releasing new homes onto the market to control prices. The URBED team responded that their proposal aimed to avoid this through the creation of the development authority and the sale of fixed-price development plots.

Read the full report by Adrienne Mathews and watch David’s talk - search ‘Garden Cities’ at academyofurbanism.org.uk

THE ORIGINS AND FUTURES OF THE CREATIVE CITY February 2015

The Young Urbanists launched their three-part ‘creative cities’ series with a talk by innovator of the concept, Charles Landry AoU. Charles explained the emergence of the idea in the 1980s, which then focused on distinctiveness, through to today’s version that is fundamentally about creative citizenship. This, Charles says, is about harnessing collective entrepreneurial energy and the spirit of co-production.

Charles touched upon the Creative City Index, which he developed in the context of Bilbao as a mechanism for measuring and quantifying the creativity of a city, informed by factors including: location, geo-politics, size, employment, activity within different industrial sectors, voting patterns and participation rates, cultural facilities, amongst many others.

The talk was followed by a response from Dr Andrew Harris of UCL, who agreed that knowledge and innovation are now very much the raw materials of creative city making. However, taking more of a critical stance, Dr Harris suggested that to be a truly ‘creative’ way of measuring creativity, the index should also take into account factors such as justice, equality, and the amount of public space available that has not (yet) been commodified.

Watch Charles Landry and Dr Andrew Harris’ talks - search ‘creative city’ at academyofurbanism.org.uk

PLACE BRANDING AND ITS CONTRIBUTION TO PLACEMAKING March 2015

Malcolm Allan AoU brought together a number of experts from the field of place branding to explain more about how it can help form a unified vision for a place – not just now, but for the future. “You need to have a vision that excites emotionally and brings people together,” Malcolm explained. In addition to the success stories such as Melbourne’s ‘M’ campaign which, according to its creators, tapped into the city’s “cool sophistication”, Malcolm highlighted some of the places that had failed to get it right; dazzled by the idea of marketing, some choose instead to look no deeper than a shiny new logo and the suggestion of dynamism.

Learning from Rotterdam

Malcolm’s recipe for success is all about delivery: “Once you promise an offer, it’s got to be there. This is not about a committee group, this is about teams of people taking responsibility for projects and making sure they happen.”

Participants also took part in a workshop exercise where they developed a brand for the rapidly changing area of London Bridge.

Watch Malcolm’s talk online by searching ‘place branding’ at academyofurbanism.org.uk

LEARNING FROM ROTTERDAM April 2015

private interests in achieving the city’s vision were all evident in what we saw and the conversations we had with a variety of local representatives.

The Academy is building a strong relationship with Rotterdam. We have a number of Academicians from the city and the wider area, and will be returning to hold further events there in the future. If you haven’t been to Rotterdam recently, do go and experience it. There is a lot we can learn (see also p31).

SPRING DEBATE – WHOSE PLACE IS IT ANYWAY? November 2014

Our return visit to our European City of the Year was an opportunity to re-examine the features that most impressed our assessment team, and to extend our knowledge of the city with visits to further examples of what this remarkable city is achieving. Our hosts generously gave their time to show and tell, and their pride in the city and what they have achieved is evident and justified.

We met the Mayor for the second time, and learned more about the history of the port, its importance to the city and the Netherlands, and the potential now for redeveloping former docks and industrial areas.

The Rotterdam approach to providing new and refurbished housing in the city centre, the commitment to a high quality and inclusive public realm, the commissioning of good modern architecture, and the strong partnership between public and

The negotiation of public and private sector agendas in public space was at the heart of the Academy’s open debate this month. The discussion, which focused on the value, relevance and democracy of public spaces, asked representatives from the private and public sector to defend and explore their stance and share their own experience of procuring and maintaining inner-city spaces.

The debate included representatives from institutions and private sector companies, all involved in the design and procurement of ‘public’ space.

The panel, although broadly in agreement that the maintenance of public space is key to its long-term success, differed in their approach.

This provided ample room for discussion on the root issue in public space – who is considered ‘the public’ and who is not. Notably the private sector representatives were keener Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action

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to emphasise the alleged necessity of active surveillance and the selective exclusion of ‘undesirables’, even if this results in a cleansing or gentrification of otherwise diverse spaces, while public sector representatives had a more broad view of who is entitled to occupy public space.

With the absence of under 18s, homeless and other typically underrepresented groups, the depth of insight was limited to the empathy of the professionals and academics present. Even the refreshingly optimistic panel reached a consensus that financial viability was the key to successful public space. The debate, rather than resolving whose place it was, rather emphasised whose place it wasn’t, and drove home the importance of including the silent majority in conversations about public space, so providing an opportunity to argue their agenda. In the context of the Academy, there was an obvious role for architects, planners and urban designers to enable this democratic approach, and at an early enough stage to achieve meaningful and long lasting impact.

by Hayley Chivers, Young Urbanist

PLACE TOOL ROAD TEST

We felt that the otherwise stimulating evaluation exercise would be benefited by the supplement of maps to allow for critical distinctions to be made, for example between hostile, peripheral underpasses and some of the most diverse and interesting streets in Glasgow. The relevance of the word “standard” to describe the assessment template was questioned on return to base. The findings from this event will be fed back to the Scottish Government, who will be tweaking the Toolkit according to their feedback.

By Ed Taylor AoU

TO A MORE AMBITIOUS PLACE: THE GLASS-HOUSE DEBATE SERIES The 2014/15 Glass-House debate series took four questions to four cities across the UK, providing ample scope to delve into our ambitions for place, bringing forward a range of voices and views: Glasgow / Does practice make perfect in place?

Sheffield / Do the right people have power in place?

Bristol / Is our view of place too short-sighted?

London / Do we accept the status quo in place?

April 2015

A number of Academicians and friends gathered in Glasgow to help road-test the Scottish Government’s new Place Standard Toolkit. The site chosen was Garnethill, mostly famously the city’s ‘Arts Acropolis’, but also a multilayered urban neighbourhood.

Any tool which helps to foster a better, broader understanding of ‘place’ has to be a good thing. The Toolkit covers a broad range of urban qualities, with reference to the local economy being the only notable absence. The value of choosing an actual site to test the framework soon became apparent as we set off on foot from our Art School base.

Although a compact area (650m x 300m in length and width), Garnethill is exceptionally varied in both content and topography, making it difficult in some instances to provide meaningful, average ratings for strengths and weaknesses. It also became clear that the geographical delineation of an area would be critical to the findings of any assessment.

Keenly supported by the Academy, the series saw strong advocacy for the need for experimentation and risk in placemaking. Academician and Bristol Strategic Director of Place, Barra MacRuairí, told us that an over reliance on rules curbs creativity and innovation, with the audience reminding us that “buildings are for life, not just the planning process.” It was suggested that a more value-based approach, rather than the usual cost-led system, could unlock greater value in place. While in London, we heard that policy sometimes drives out innovation and experimentation.

Consensus formed across the debates when the topic turned to collaboration.

Audiences shared their experiences of the failure of infrastructure projects to value the participation of local communities. Leslie Barson of London Community Housing Co-operative reminded us that “community leadership makes power disperse and diffuse.”

And at the Bristol debate, we were reminded of the recipe for success: “An inclusive conversation = a good brief = good design.”

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Can communities lead a process?

Pauline Gallacher, convener of the Scottish Community Alliance, declared “we have proven we can do it [lead the process].” Also on the Glasgow panel was head of Mackintosh School of Architecture, Chris Platt, who lauded the ‘heroes’ like Pauline who can speak the different languages necessary to make things happen in different places (community, local government, private sector…).

In Bristol, the panel and audience discussed the value of the ‘pop up’ concept as a way to answer the call for innovation and greater participation.

But what are the barriers to participation? The Sheffield debate suggested there is a need for civic governance to support diversity in community leadership. “People struggling to earn a living are further disadvantaged by not even being able to contemplate participating,” said one debater. In London, we heard about the ‘emotional toll’ that volunteers experience when leading projects, and how unrewarding the process can feel.

Many felt the systems in place do not enable communities – and that the solution is more openness, collaboration and creativity. Some also lauded the value of rules and regulation in supporting the creation of great places and advocated change that starts at the top. Barra MacRuairí questioned whether the public really trusted the people in power to be experimental and innovative.

Perhaps we do not need people in power. A number of participants argued that great places could be made without relying on local government – communities could act for themselves.

And in Sheffield, our speaker Tony Stacey, chief executive of South Yorkshire Housing Association and chair of Placeshapers, argued for local organisations that support communities and understand what makes a particular place unique and special.

A hum of agreement rippled through the room in our London debate when an audience member told us that deferring to the state, rather than taking up the mantle of community-led work, undermined our capacity to function as real communities. Andrew Carter, of the Centre for Cities, left us with a question to challenge the placemaker in all of us: “Who is going to be the maker of change?”

Size still matters: how to assess great cities In searching for the secrets of successful cities, a good place to start is a new report from OECD, Metropolitan Century, on urbanisation and its consequences1, writes Nicholas Falk AoU. The Paris based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has an unparalleled overview of the factors that drive economic success. In a comparative study with the European Union, they have delineated almost 1200 cities across 29 OECD member countries with more than 50,000 inhabitants.

Among these are 275 metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 people accounting for half the total population.

The metropolitan areas accounted for half of the OECD countries economic growth between 2000 and 2010.

Secrets of success

Manchester is one of the UK’s best performing cities in terms of environmental factors

The report sets out a number of reasons why big is best. These include greater appeal to the most talented young people, higher levels of economic productivity and innovation, and lower environmental costs thanks to better public transport and higher densities of development. Through a powerful series of comparative charts and a voluminous review of the literature, the report stacks up the evidence for focussing efforts on securing ‘agglomeration economies’,

and cutting living costs through measures such as improved public transport and the release of land for development.

However, as always in these comparisons the UK seems to lose out because of an over-concentration of activity in the ‘mega city’ of London, and an over-centralised political system. As a result the general rule of urban growth (Zipf’s Law) which ‘predicts that the largest city of a country has twice as many inhabitants as the second largest, three times as many as the third largest, and so on’ does not apply to the metropolitan cities of the UK. With a few exceptions such as Bristol, these generally lag behind their European counterparts and their surrounding regions. The reasons may be found in the poor transport systems that lead to workers spending much more time commuting along with the dispersed nature of residential growth, partly a consequence of our treasured Green Belts.

Differences Though one may criticise the OECD for equating success with both economic performance and population growth, the report does take up the issue of inequality. Polarisation imposes many costs, and the problems are

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getting worse, with wage inequalities increasing in the very largest cities.

However, for those who can afford them, the quality of services, including health, are related to city size, thanks to greater choice and competition.

Where the population is dispersed among many authorities, some improvements can be made through bringing them together. Thus the polycentric region of the Ruhrgebiet in Northern Germany actually performs quite well, as do the cities of the Netherlands. Though their cities are not that large, they not only have much better local public transport systems, but also have avoided house price inflation by making land more available on the edges.

It is the urban agglomeration, not the nation, that holds the key to what the future will be like. In some places, such as US cities, the recent trend of young professionals locating in city centres could produce beneficial results, and change the values that have traditionally favoured suburban

living. But in general, as the bulk of urbanisation has taken place, the relatively small size of our cities could hold us back in comparison with growing cities in emerging economies such as China. The report suggests we need to plan so that most people can reach amenities in half an hour, which means favouring mixed developments, in order to create ‘liveable metropolises for the 21st century.’

The number of megacities with more than 10 million is expected to grow to more than 40 by 2030, which is radically altering the balance of power in the world. This makes the role of ‘city networks’ even more vital as cities are ‘living organisms’ which need to provide higher levels of wellbeing for the most mobile of their residents.

London, Paris and Berlin are clearly competing with each other, but so too at provincial level are many other cities which would do better to collaborate and join forces than to dissipate their efforts. Thus it should be possible to see the Northern Powerhouse of England as an area with all the attractions of the Ruhrgebiet or the Randstad, rather than a collection of warring local authorities.

From top right to left: Frankfurt: leading the way in the ‘Planet’ category ph. Barnyz Flickr GDP growth per city: Europe (OECD)

0.40-0.70 0.70-1.00 1.00-1.50 1.50+

Low (first quartile) Medium-low Medium-high High (last quartile)

For those who want to learn, there are plenty of practical implications from the OECD’s analyses. Good metropolitan governance, which is covered in a much larger separate report with six comprehensive case studies, can overcome half the problem of fragmentation2. There are plenty of proven ways of taming the car, and avoiding urban sprawl, which the OECD report brings out. There are also plenty of ways of financing better transit systems by capturing the uplift in land values and other benefits. But what the report does not do is to show how to overcome the shortsighted and parochial nature of development in the UK, which tends to favour quantity over quality.

Sustainable Cities So how can The Academy of Urbanism, with its growing body of case studies, bring about the necessary shift in attitudes? Some clues can be drawn from another valuable report that benchmarks and ranks large cities throughout the world. Produced by the Centre for Economic and Business Research for consultants Arcadis, this very readable and effective report brings together information under three main headings: people, planet

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and profit3. For each theme a medley of statistical indicators is used to rank performance in 50 cities. Of course this has been done before, for example by Monocle and Local Futures, and there are plenty of bodies offering awards for excellent performance apart from the Academy. The problem is that the comparisons rarely compare like with like, and tend to focus on a single aspect, or are over complex. So how do the Arcadis rankings compare with the more subjective assessments made by Academicians.

The first good news is that Rotterdam (see page 21) tops the People category, thanks to its property being affordable.

Frankfurt and Berlin lead the way in the Planet category, scoring particularly well in waste management. Frankfurt also leads in the Profit category along with London and this is the only category where US cities do as well as European ones. These kinds of measures are vulnerable to criticism as they involve bundling together many different factors. Thus the People category rates transport infrastructure, health, education, income inequality, work-life balance, dependency and green spaces – a real case of what economists refer to as adding apples and oranges. But the general conclusions seem sound, so for example Copenhagen is up in the top five for environmental factors, whereas Birmingham and Manchester come a little behind but far ahead of their American or Asian counterparts.

Drawing conclusions I have long advocated that the Academy should not only be using some basic indicators in assessing places for awards, so that meaningful comparisons can be made, but should also be drawing conclusions from the places that have won awards.

Albert Einstein memorably said “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” So we need to combine the qualitative with the quantitative to produce a balanced picture. Yet our political leaders continue to concentrate on a very few factors such as GDP per capita or population growth, and neglect the many other factors, such as income inequalities, affordability of housing, or commuting times, that affect most people’s sense of wellbeing (see page 40 Aarhus).

The value of these massive statistical studies should be in correcting our prejudices such as those that favour High Speed 2 over local transport improvements, and in encouraging a longer-term perspective where we learn from similar places that have made most progress in the factors that concern most people. They also point us to places we may have missed thinking about, such as Frankfurt.

So when we assess places, why do we ask not just whether it is ‘exciting’ or ‘innovative’ but how well it meets the needs of different groups (residents,

employers, key workers) and the different perspectives of those who are young, old or in-between. Clearly as access to housing and jobs are so crucial, we should be spending much more time looking at how well different places are connected, for example by travelling around on public transport, and less time looking at the quality of the buildings. We might also be focussing on new residential areas, and not just the historic centres, and seeing how well they cater for new households. But this means thinking like an economist – or am I being blinkered?

Dr Nicholas Falk AoU is founder director of URBED, and describes himself an economist, urbanist and strategic planner!

The OECD has also just published its report Governing Cities looking at policy issues. Both reports are available from the OECD Publishing: The Metropolitan Century: http://dx. doi.org/10.1787/9789264228733-en Governing Cities: http://dx.doi. org/10.1787/9789264226500-en

1 Joaquim Martins et al, The Metropolitan Century: understanding urbanisation and its consequences, OECD 2015 2 Governing the City, OECD 2015 3 Sustainable Cities Index 2015, ARCADIS

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Digital clusters beyond cities Can digital infrastructures enable new forms of collaboration and participation beyond large cities?

Shane Mitchell AoU explores the potential for digital clusters to emerge in peri-urban areas and smaller towns and communities.

Oculus Rift, Raspberry Pi, Minecraft, and 3D printing are being explored by enthusiastic and curious young people on the south coast of England.

A recently launched initiative in Eastbourne, TechResort, is using these digital tools to develop a community engagement approach to the digital economy – one that can be extensible to other communities. While the current Zeitgeist to the digital economy is overwhelmingly dominated by cities, the expansion of urban centres such as on the South Coast, together with new ways of learning, provides a rich opportunity to engage smaller towns, peri-urban communities and the rural economy in this same technological transformation. Afterall, the trend towards digital urbanism, as several of us in the Academy have explored over recent years, is one that is accelerating, transforming our day-to-day interactions as citizens, businesses and communities.

Moreover, civic infrastructure, public services, retailing, financial services, energy networks, health, education and just about everything in between, are being transformed.

Engaging in change Living in small towns, suburbs and rural communities can often bring a strong sense of community and engagement in local issues and a contrast in lifestyles to cities. But here, as much as in the hustle of the city, technology is increasingly transforming our lives – tapping into our human desires, in the home,

workplace, schools, high street and so on. The opportunity today, like in no other era, is to use technology to explore the potential for new forms of engagement and a participative culture.

Some of the most resonant technology applications in business engagements that I have contributed to have been those that respond to citizen demand, a community purpose, or an individual’s changing patterns of behaviour. These have been as far ranging as mobility patterns, ways and modes of working and learning, accessing public data, making new services from re-combinations of open information flows, indeed to the transforming power of the sharing economy1.

The digital economy sector can enable community resilience, employment and business opportunities, and the ability to make meaningful impacts to the local economy, and for social outcomes. While ambitions for physical infrastructure can take decades to realise, the digital economy can be much more dexterous in responding to local demands, helping, for example, some of the fundamental supply issues in CDIT skills (creative, design and IT)2, experienced by many of the economy’s digital growth sectors.

Actions deliver outcomes Observing the very different economy that exists in small towns compared to our big cities has motivated me to explore the socio-economic dynamics. In my case, enjoying the

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good life in the grand and rapidly expanding coastal town of Eastbourne has led me to become a co-founder of TechResort, a Community Interest Company. The venture has been formed to engage the local business community, form a bridge to the wider digital economy in East Sussex, engage schools and young people, and provide a forum for like-minded individuals.

We aim to help solve local problems and help promote prosperity in Eastbourne. Through surveying local businesses, the opportunity quickly emerged to focus on addressing a local shortage of CDIT skills in the workforce. This is a major issue not just for Eastbourne, but internationally, with a recent Telegraph article suggesting a shortage of some 700,000 IT professionals in Europe. Locally, this is limiting the expansion of the technology and creative-related business sectors and in turn leading to skilled employees leaving the town in order to find work. In addition, it appears that a reduced take-up of IT-courses in local schools and colleges, together with the variable relevance of the curriculum, is exacerbating the quality of students entering undergraduate education and the workplace.

Eastbourne’s aspirations are to diversify from the more traditional retail, hospitality and elderly care sectors for local employment opportunities. However, there is a lack of understanding locally of how technology and creative industries expand. These related issues threaten

Clockwise from top: TechResort Pledge event TechResort Teens TechResort Teens ph. Phil Burrowes / Avant Photography

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ph. Phil Burrowes / Avant Photography

to reduce the attraction of Eastbourne for these business sectors. However, TechResort has made early progress through a series of coding sessions enabled through Arts Council funding as part of the Connective Cultures project and Catalyst funding from the RSA. This has enabled the team to pilot an approach and test engagement.

On the back of this, and alongside regeneration schemes in the town, we have just been awarded funding, through the Coastal Communities Fund, to develop a programme of engagement and digital skills sessions, and to develop a sustaining business model. This latest iteration is part of a funding award to the Driving Devonshire Forward regeneration scheme for a specific ward in the town.

This scheme is ambitious and will deliver: • Coding sessions as well as broadening the scope to making and electronics know-how • Digital literacy sessions • A talent matching service for creative, digital, technology students and local businesses • Accelerator funding models that can be applied to seed ventures and incubate ideas • A dedicated physical space within the community From an initiative built on minimal budgets and goodwill, we aim to develop an economically sustainable model, providing a legacy resource for the town and growing the knowledge economy into the future.

A spatial economic picture We are continuing to pursue new ventures across the town and the wider county. In doing so we will help to broaden the geographic and political jurisdiction lens to which we define our cities and communities, to one that is viewed not simply as places in space, but as systems of networks and flows3. This approach to a digital definition of urban scale has already spawned some influential collaborations with educational institutions, business groups, entrepreneurs, public agencies and individuals who bring the interest and experiences to bear, to really walk the talk.

We feel we are tapping into an irrefutable momentum and economic shift. In its ‘Silicon Cities’ report (Nov 2014), The Policy Exchange think tank made recommendations to enable technology clusters beyond London.

Whilst the TechNation report (Jan 2015) highlighted the growth in new businesses in the technology sectors which are increasingly dispersed across the country, with many clusters making up a complex and inter-related digital economy. However, there remains a large gap between interest and provision of digital skills. For example, a survey by innovation charity NESTA in March this year found that 82% of young people were interested in digital making, yet half of them make things with digital technology less than once a week or never. TechCity UK, the quasigovernment agency promoting the digital economy, points out that the demand for digital jobs is exceeding our ability as a nation to supply this, with, according to research by 02 and Development Economics, over

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745,000 extra digital workers needed to meet Britain’s demand over the next three years.

To inspire a nation Working with innovators like BlockBuilders, who engage young people in community planning using digital technologies such as the Minecraft game, the energy and interest is ramping up. A pledge of commitment by business, civic and venture leaders, locally and nationally, will also help us build an ambitious programme of activities. The success of this venture can, we believe, be a tangible catalyst to the local economy, but moreover can serve as a model for other communities to engage with, especially as we see expanding towns, villages, and new garden city-styled developments and regeneration schemes. This aim is lofty, though one that will be increasingly needed as our housing demands and service infrastructures come under more strain. The digital economy is one that can be achieved within a reasonable timeframe and simply requires the enterprise, dexterity and entrepreneurial culture to emerge to make this happen in any community.

Shane Mitchell AoU is co-founder of entrepreneurial community company TechResort CIC and director of the UrbanPeer Consultancy.

1 The challenges of the sharing economy (https://youtu.be/mBF-GFDaCpE) - Benkler Y, World Economic Forum Ideaslab – Feb 2015 2 http://www.brightonfuse.com/ the-brighton-fuse-final-report/ 3 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ new-science-cities

Community-led urbanism Three decades after the pioneering work of Swiss architect Walter Segal, a new generation takes up Segal’s self-build legacy. Raquel Ajates Gonzalez and Sam Brown describe how the Rural Urban Synthesis Society aims to create affordable homes but for a 21st century context.

In 1985, a remarkable and unprecedented self-build project took place in Lewisham, south-east London.

Led by a group of architects headed

by Walter Segal – a visionary Swiss architect obsessed with the idea of designing a house that anyone could build – a group of council tenants were given the opportunity to build their own family homes. Lewisham Council provided the land and gave a group of people the opportunity to become homeowners by building their own homes. Walters Way and other similar self-build projects that took place in the 1980s and 90s are widely regarded as having not only offered a solution to a housing need not met by masshousing, but also for having generated meaningful involvement of the participants in their communities and neighbourhoods that has lasted until this day.

The vast majority of the self-builders, councillors, architects and others directly involved will tell you, as any developer would, that the projects carried their own particular and significant spectrum of risks, but that the risks were worth it in the end, and the places they created became something to be proud of: sustainable homes populated by conflict-tested communities. The Lewisham self-builds were, and still are, a living, breathing embodiment of the assertion made at the Rio Summit that any system – including housing – requires people at its centre in order to be sustainable in the long-term. However, although some residents have gone on to invest in upgrading the energy performance of their homes, the issue of future affordability of access to those homes to sustain the community was left unaddressed. The pioneering properties, highly-affordable when

The Segal system used a standard set of details and a standard initial built form that could be customised and extended as the needs of its occupants changes. ph. Jon Broome Architects

Digital clusters beyond cities | Community-led urbanism

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originally built – with a sharedownership and zero-interest mortgage deal on offer from the council – have since mostly escaped into the superheated open market, now valued at upwards of £500,000.

Nearly thirty years after the first ‘Segal self-build’ project was completed, a group of people – including some of the children of the original self-builders – went on to form the Rural Urban Synthesis Society (RUSS). Established in 2009 as a Community Land Trust1 (CLT) – legally a Community Benefit Society – RUSS aims to bring sustainable and affordable housing into the 21st century, again through a self-build model, but with an emphasis on social innovation in the field of governance in order to ensure affordability in perpetuity, which alongside technical performance, is essential for any development to be sustainable in the long-term.

cradle to cradle design, RUSS’s aim is to create low impact urban living spaces through community self-build projects on unused land and to regenerate empty, derelict property into sustainable housing while enhancing the environment of London and its surrounding communities.

Aspiring to build homes that produce more energy than they use, RUSS’s positive development vision is also a reminder to acknowledge our planetary limits in a world where urban areas cover only 3% of the earth’s surface but often require ecosystem support needs of 500–1000 times larger than their physical extent2.

RUSS is currently seeking to build around 30 very low-impact and highly affordable homes to passivhaus standard, accommodating approximately 100 people (with a mix of affordable rent, shared ownership and outright sale), on a former school site called Church Grove that is owned by the London Borough of Lewisham.

The CLT currently has around 160 members and counting. Inspired by

The majority of CLTs in the UK are based in rural areas, however, a number of urban CLTs are emerging.

This is an understandable development given that over 80% of people in the UK live in urban areas and many increasingly feel like they have no control over the quality of the places they live in. Furthermore, there is a pressing need to overcome the resource nexus in cities and restrictive rural/urban divides: we need comprehensive approaches to urban living that can offer a sustainable approach to managing natural resources such as land, energy, food and water. The social innovation put forward by the CLT community living model enables the adoption of other technological innovations such as grey

Segal-system homes at Walters Way in Lewisham have since been adapted by their occupants and now look unique in a varied street-scape. ph. Jon Broome Architects

The Dutch municipality of Almere has zoned its Homeruskwartier to suit ‘private development’ (custom-built homes commisioned by individual citizen-developers and collectives). ph. Sam Brown

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water systems, rain water harvesting and solar panels, etc, often beyond reach of most individual households, but rendered possible if the investment potential at the scale of the neighbourhood in harnessed and controlled by residents.

A key challenge that community selfbuild projects face relates to the issue of ensuring affordability in perpetuity.

The CLT model offers the possibility of ‘locking in’ assets such as land and buildings into community-ownership, taking assets out of the speculative market and capturing any uplift in value for re-investment in other community projects. Placing at least part-ownership and decision-making powers in the hands of residents and their neighbours, CLTs can be a perfect marriage for democratising the idea of ‘building your own home’ while reducing risk of exclusion and housing inequalities by providing affordable housing options. Self-build in a group offers not only the opportunity to make an urban fabric that fits residents well, but also the potential to build a conflicttested community, ready-weathered by the development and construction process, alongside physical homes.

However, whilst Lewisham local authority is broadly supportive of a community-led development – and wants to do what it can to draw on its rich heritage and help develop Church

Development opportunities are marketed directly to citizens by the council in the stylish and customer-facing ‘plotshop’. ph. Sam Brown

Grove into the first sustainable and permanently affordable community self-build in London – it faces some key challenges, largely around the concept of risk and return. So although RUSS is a community-based organisation run by volunteers, it has been asked to compete for land in a similar way to that expected of a well-resourced commercial developer. The CLT is currently preparing to respond to a tender to become the ‘development partner’ for the site in Lewisham, in a competitive dialogue procedure following a notice in the Official Journal of the EU3.

Whilst there is certainly strong feeling within RUSS’s membership and its wider community that expecting ordinary people to perform competitively as a developer is incongruous to the idea of procuring genuinely community-led development, it is also true that the council faces considerable scrutiny and must exercise a fair and transparent process that ensures a robust delivery of development promises. Tender criteria have been designed to encourage bids from organisations that make a genuine commitment to community-led governance, but also those that will deliver the promised project within a reasonable timeframe, bring their own finance to the table and not place any of Lewisham’s assets at risk whilst

Self-build opportunities are marketed visibly on site-boards adjacent to council-enabled plots. ph. Sam Brown

offering a financial receipt for the land that the council can reinvest in other essential services. This may ultimately necessitate collaborating with a commercially-focused partner in order to access finance and technical expertise – and ultimately deferring control over the development in return for the development risks they agree to take on.

Raquel Ajates Gonzalez is a Young Urbanist and member and co-director of RUSS, and is undertaking a PhD in the Centre for Food Policy at City University London.

Enabling community-led development and actively preferencing it to commercial development also has the effect of increasing the diversity of the producers of housing – the famous ‘long-tail’ of small builders and citizen-developers – and builds a resilient market that meets demand, as well as maintaining a democratic threshold of access to housing.

For more information visit theruss.org

Regardless of whether individuals lift a hammer or a chisel to physically build a home themselves, participating effectively in the decision-making process that shapes our physical and social environments is fundamental to this pinnacle of human well-being. If we really want to build creative cities where people want to live, what better way than designing and building one’s home and community with your future neighbours, surrounded by energy and food generating spaces that open up opportunities to cover our human needs through meaningful housing experiences?

A typical street-scene in the Homeruskwartier, Almere, NL. ph. Sam Brown

Sam Brown is a member of RUSS and works at Jon Broome Architects and at the National Custom & Self Build Association (NaCSBA).

1. CLTs are non-profit, community-based organisations run by volunteers that develop housing, workspaces, community facilities or other assets that are owned and controlled by the community and are made available at permanently affordable levels: communitylandtrusts.org.uk/home 2. Folke, C., Jansson, Å., Larsson, J., Costanza, R., 1997. Ecosystem appropriation of cities. Ambio, 26(3), 167-172.

3. Competitive dialogue is one of the procedures set out in the European procurement directives.

Following publication of a notice in the Official Journal of the EU a number of bidders are short-listed using a pre-qualification questionnaire and invited to take part in a dialogue with the authority, and then submit their final tender offer.

Vrijburcht CPO, Amsterdam, NL - Citizen-led development can produce dense, well-designed and built housing projects. ph. Sam Brown

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action

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Plot-based urbanism: a roadmap to masterplanning for change A resilient city is one that allows change without losing its essence. Ombretta Romice and Sergio Porta AoU argue that resilience of cities lies in the relatively small urban components that can adapt, assemble and reassemble.

Recent data and predictions on the rate of urbanisation make cities the most common living environment of the future by far, with the current 3.8 billion inhabitants – which now make up for over half of the global population – set to increase to two-thirds by 2050.

In its 2013 report Streets as Public Spaces and Drivers of Urban Prosperity1 UN Habitat predicts that over three-quarters of these new urbanites will locate in informal settlements, and the effectiveness of governments in building, developing and managing the homes of new and existing urbanites is set to decrease.

One could see the prospect of having less money and less control to deal with more pressures as a scary proposition – in fact, many do. Others may see it as an opportunity, following on from Jane Jacobs’ notorious lament for the malicious effects of “cataclysmic money”2 on cities, which necessarily and restrictively ties development to large scale decision-making, financing, coordination, and management, be this institutional or corporate. The subject is too great to take either position, but here we aim to show that the prospect is not doom and gloom and in fact, a lot is being done already and is available to embrace our urbanising future with a degree of optimism.

Much of it boils down to defining what is failure and what is success. Whilst interpretations depend on what profession and perspective we examine them from, we shall from now on focus on urbanism and cities, and relate success and failure to how our cities cope with change and transformations over time; change, and time, are consistent conditions across which cities develop. On the one hand, we are greatly affected, at local level, by global dynamics, from climate to markets fluctuations; on the other hand, we impact on the global level with the accumulation of local dynamics, to the point that a new geologic epoch, called Anthropocene, has been identified to describe the ‘great acceleration’ of human activity on the globe since the 1950s4.

The city’s relationship with change then, is fundamental because of the scale and pace at which this is now happening – through migration, immigration, alterations in life patterns and cycles, technology and the economy.

prosperity of cities as the UN Habitat report notes. Places that are resilient show a high capacity to absorb change, to assimilate transitions, without having to renounce what gives them character and structure. Resilience can be considered at many scales in the environment. As our interest is in urban design, we shall think of resilience primarily in relation to city form. For too long the design professions have lived in a creationist mindset in which the designer’s task was to create the final product of the city, or what we can ultimately see, its form. Had we understood that cities are an evolutionary phenomenon, and that diversity does not come by design, we would have focused on the permanent and universal structure of cities to inform the process of change rather than trying to create and fix its final result from the start. There is no such thing as a final result, in cities as much as in life.

As designers following an evolutionary approach, the structure is our focus.

We should be interested in those components and their relationships, that survived through time, recurring across different scenarios. What remains through change, has resilience.

Resilience and form Resilience, as an essential property of places, is inherently linked with the

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The form of resilience is made of relatively small components that can adapt, assemble and reassemble. It is

Clockwise from top: Java Island, Amsterdam ph. Alain Rouiller; Java Island, Amsterdam ph. Tjerk Zweers; Edinburgh New Town ph. Ian Mackay

Plot-based urbanism

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a malleable urban tissue whose minimal unit of development can generate structures substantial enough to embed meanings for their users, be these individual, groups, or societies; structures complex enough to support modern life as an efficient, interconnected, multifunctional system; structures adaptable enough to withstand and react to change – be this significant or small, occasional, or recurrent; structures versatile enough to respond in different contextual and cultural manners to similar pressures.

Resilience then, depends on a system of units that maintain their own identity even when combined into greater wholes, and wholes that accrue their own character and identity whilst increasing, or changing, in complexity and functionality.

The plot as a reliable component of greater wholes The plot, intended as the minimum unit of developable land, is a consistently recognisable feature of the built environment across time and as such, has attracted some consensus over the past years as a meaningful unit of development1 for the next generation of cities. The plot may or may not coincide with ownership subdivision.

It is crucially important to distinguish the unit of development from the unit of ownership, as fine-grained development must – and can – be made compatible with large land ownership in processes of urban regeneration.

With a continuing trend towards single-use, suburban developments on large plots, we are in the process of losing the diverse, close-grain urban fabrics that once served as the foundation for our most beloved streets and flourishing town centres and which we still cherish and seek, as setting for both engaging, enhancing and practical ways of life. This has provoked urban designers and town planners, academics, community organisations and governments at all levels to rethink how to achieve more fine-grained, contextual, sustainable in time approaches to contemporary place-making, able to capture the everyday human experience of places.

Based on the fundamental importance of the plot in urban development, Plotbased urbanism (PBU) is now emerging as a viable approach to place-making, aligned with the growing role of the self-build and the right-to-build agenda in the UK and Europe, in the new financial scenario, pursuing compact,

sustainable urban design and masterplanning in an evolutionary perspective. Plot-based urbanism seeks to inform urban planning and design strategies in a way that is not only conducive to incremental growth and mixture of land uses and tenures, but is also resilient to economic risks, encourages informal participation, and respects local culture.

Here the principles of Plot-based urbanism will be discussed and presented to a wider audience of professionals and academics, and the Urban Design Studies Unit will present its developing work on ‘masterplanning for change’.

The quest for a new science of cities in the community of urban scholars is embracing the field of the science of complexity and, generally speaking, a more evidence-based approach to cities and the built environment.

Plot-based urbanism is a practice of place-making that takes advantage of this new climate, first of all by looking at evidence of urban form structure, what it is and how it works.

As such, Plot-based urbanism has developed a specific focus on urban morphology, a niche of urban studies that has for a long time struggled to find its way in mainstream urban planning and design and yet has been an integral part of the shift towards a more scientific, interdisciplinary and evolutionary understanding of cities which is now becoming more significant. Working across these two areas is helping urban design strengthen its conceptual, structural and methodological principles.

Dr Ombretta Romice is a senior lecturer in the department of architecture at University of Strathclyde and Professor Sergio Porta AoU is professor of urban design at University of Strathclyde

Watch this space!

References The fully referenced version of this paper, complete with acknowledgements, is available online, where contextual assertions and specific work by members of the team are cited. In this text, most references are under Porta, Romice (2014), where we first collated all relevant work on Plot-based urbanism.

Plot-based urbanism and masterplanning for change The Urban Design Studies Unit at the University of Strathclyde has invested almost 10 years of work to produce, catalogue and analyse some of this evidence, at all scales, with colleagues from a range of disciplines, clarifying the basis for a Plot-based urbanism approach to masterplanning and city design.

Recently, the first plot-based urbanism summit, an event organised by the Unit in October 2014, gathered together leading practitioners and policy makers, including UN-Habitat, to discuss the meanings and challenges as well as the practice and policymaking attributes of Plot-based urbanism. The team emerged from this event are all in some form committed to the advancement of Plot-based urbanism both in science and in practice. The Plot-based urbanism agenda is moving ahead, with Sheffield University having hosted the next event in April 2015, a further event planned for late 2015 in London, and a final event in spring 2016.

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1. Habitat, U. (2013). Streets as Public Spaces and Drivers of Urban Prosperity: Nariobi: UN Habitat.

2. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities: Random House LLC. 3. Porta, S., & Romice, O. (2014). Plot-Based Urbanism Towards Time Consciousness in Place Making. In C. S. Mäckler, Wolfgang (Ed.), New Civic Art (pp. 82-111). Sulgen, CH: Verlag Niggli.

4. Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., & Ludwig, C. (2015). The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.

The Anthropocene Review, 1-18. doi: 10.1177/2053019614564785

Thinking made visual As the largest grouping of UDG Recognised Practitioners in the country we provide creative, commercial advice, across all aspects of the built and natural environment.

We help our clients to shape better places.

10 years work, hand drawn figure ground plans, trellis plans and sketches of cities across the world. Drawn by David Rudlin and Shruti Henami.

Including the drawings done as Academy of Urbanism Artist in Residence 2013 and 2014* Fine Art, 1200dpi Giclee Prints on 308gsm photo rag paper, scratch and fade resistant

All profits from the AoU drawings will go to the academy

http://www.carta-city.com

Participatory budgeting: community X-Factor or civic pedagogy?

Handing over to the local community decisionmaking on how to spend public money may seem at first sight politically daring. Young Urbanist Katy Hawkins speaks to three leading practitioners of participatory budgeting to explore how this increasingly popular process may lead to more civic engagement and greater democracy.

Participatory Budgeting was conceptualised in Porto Alegre in Brazil 1989 and has since swept across Latin America and beyond. Whilst the rules of engagement and the design of the participatory budgeting process varies from place to place, it follows a common structure. A proportion of a national or local budget is allocated to the participatory budget and citizens, with the help of relevant experts, are then invited to pitch proposals for initiatives considered beneficial to the wider community – such as functional repair work or socially-minded outreach activities.

The community is then invited to vote online or in person, and those ideas that secure the most votes are added to the cycle of implementation.

Increasing in popularity internationally, today there are over 1,500 participatory budgets around the world including significant slices of expenditure in some large cities.

The newly elected mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has allocated the largest sum of public money in Europe for a participatory budgeting process – €426m between 2015 and 2020, about 5% of the city’s investment budget.

New York City, a long-time advocate of participatory budgeting, has furthered its reach to include public housing, enabling residents to vote on how funds should be spent to improve their homes and communities. Today, Poland is one of the newest countries to hype over the initiative.

So, why has it become so popular?

For those sceptical of participating in civic processes, participatory budgeting claims ‘real power over real money’. It produces tangible outcomes and results structured around relatively short timelines. It is an embodiment of direct, deliberative democracy.

In English public policy, participatory budgeting exists as an arm of the sometimes impenetrable Localism Act (2011), emanating with it ideas of the Big Society. Here, it is formalised into a comprehensive structure, relatively void of technical language, making clear the role that both participating citizens and municipalities play. It is a structure based on mutuality, where the two parties can meet in the middle and in which both stand to gain.

Moreover, the process has reportedly worked to increase transparency and accountability in terms of public spending by the local governing bodies involved, thus increasing citizens’ understanding and trust. While participatory budgeting is used in England – in Newcastle, Durham and Tower Hamlets, to cite but a few examples – it is often on a relatively small scale. Although Hazel Blears, secretary of state for Communities and Local Government from 2007 to 2009, was a core supporter, it never quite took off as the then Labour government had intended. Following a decline during the austerity of the last few

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years it is again rising up the agenda, particularly in Scotland where it has become linked to a wider devolution of powers to citizens. Until 2012, The PB Unit was the lead agency working for the UK government, but today this work is being taken forward by PB Network, an independent body advocating learning and innovation in the field.

Jez Hall, who helps co-ordinate the PB Network, spoke of how he was led to participatory budgeting on a learning visit to Porto Alegre. Hall describes how he was inspired by the passion, energy and coherence of the participatory budgeting process.

“Knowledge that existed in communities and which was locked up in the town hall – whether [it was held by] those with design skills or elected politicians – was able to amalgamate. A truly co-designed deliberative space, so different from tokenistic consultations in the UK,” says Hall.

He goes on to argue that: “The UK is one of the most centralised democracies in the world, which sees communities relegated to argue from a deficit position. Participatory budgeting usurps this and allows for innovation to pop up in an unexpected way.” Known sometimes as a ‘Community X-Factor’ or ‘Citizens’ Dragons’ Den’, Hall refers to it as an asset, not deficit-based model. The traditional UK format for participatory budgeting asks that participants give a three-minute pitch

of their idea in front of a community audience, who then vote for the ideas they like. This, he says, acts as a positive space for the community to exhibit itself and achieves a near reversal of the archetypal community meeting set-up, which can often feel reactionary.

Furthermore, Hall describes how the very act of a community congregating together in a common space, in which they are made to listen to one another’s proposals and enter into a dialogue, works to build consensus and social capital by way of increasing understanding and in triggering unplanned collaborations.

And it’s not just fellow citizens that attendees begin to understand more about. “One of the most common responses from the participating community is ‘I never understood how hard it was to make these decisions,’” says Hall. Thus the meetings act as a form of perspective-taking, whereby citizens are made privy to the oftendifficult choices and constraints faced by government. Being a part of the process works to close the gap in understanding between the ‘hard to reach’ politician or council officer, who talks in technical bureaucratic language, and the ‘hard to reach’ community member, with their own more pressing, day-to-day concerns.

However, concerns are often voiced about the competitive structure of the initiative, which many fear could be at risk of becoming something of a popularity contest based on the profile of the individual and the skill of the pitch. Jez Hall remains confident in the process. “Whilst people might come into a meeting with the intention of voting for their friends, the very act of listening unravels this intention,” says Hall.

on with the fictional politics in [television series] House of Cards or Scandal.”

Maria Hadden, head of the Chicago division of The Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), praises the inclusive nature of the process. “Participatory budgeting enables those who cannot participate in regular elections because of barriers like age or legal status to exercise a key component of our civic culture by making informed decisions to improve their communities,” says Hadden, whose non-profit organisation supports advocacy for, and implementation of, participatory budgeting in North America.

So, what are the solutions for dealing with lacklustre attitudes towards democracy? For Josh Lerner, chief executive at PB Project, it is turning these processes into something of a game, which he highlights in his new book, Making Democracy Fun. In the book he advocates clear structures and rules when designing democratic approaches to public participation, including competition, collaboration and measurable progress – qualities all belonging to a successful participatory budgeting process. In this vein, Hadden continues: “PB makes engagement real and easy with clear expectations and paths to participation.” In short, it takes a form that’s accessible and inclusive in nature, thus quashing the idea that it is only the usual ‘educated suspects’ who can, and will, engage in such a process.

Moreover, she continues: “There’s an honesty to the process that people sense that draws them in, and the focus on local dollars and local improvements keep them coming back.”

Hadden also notes a challenging starting point: “Most people are disengaged from what’s happening in their city, state and country. They’re tuned-out of what’s happening in their backyard and tuned-in to what’s going

International expert-in-the-field Giovanni Allegretti sees participatory budgeting from two positions.

Allegretti has spent the last 20 years as an international researcher on participatory budgeting and he

What can we learn from elsewhere?

A participatory budgeting meeting ph. PB Network

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currently continues this work in Portugal. He is also the appointed co-chair of promotion and participation to the Regional Parliament of Tuscany.

For Allegretti, the process is “a learning by doing space” whereby the practical outputs are secondary to the process itself – a form of “civic pedagogy and solidarity pedagogy.”

Reflecting on the ‘popularity contest’ fear raised by Hall, Allegretti cites anti-corruption activist Karel Janeček, whose work on alternative voting system Democracy 2.1 has informed many participatory budgeting processes. Working with algorithms, Janeček looked at how people’s preferences change when they are confronted with a multiple-choice vote. When this theory is applied to participatory budgeting, people are required to vote on more than one topic or project and, consequently, look further than their own vested interests. Janeček’s studies have shown that whilst the first vote might be motivated by personal gain, the second will force individuals to read up on the other proposals, seeing that they get to learn about both previously unknown areas of their community and the infrastructural and social needs of the people that dwell within.

Elaborating on this idea of civic education, what about those projects which are not deemed eligible?

Allegretti explains that Portuguese municipalities have set up a dialogue stream between their technical staff and the individuals behind the projects so they can work together to make them viable. This enables a hands-on opportunity to learn about the constraints faced by municipalities,

adding yet another learning space and another dimension to this notion of ‘perspective taking’. This also seeks to address and manage the potential sense of alienation for those whose proposals have been rejected.

Despite all the reported successes, the process is not without its problems.

In recent years, Porto Alegre municipalities have reportedly started to withdraw their support for some projects, leading to stagnation.

Allegretti suggests these less successful case studies provide highly productive learning experiences, as long as processes are critically reviewed. However, he cautioned that municipalities often lack the resources to do so: “Unless they are supported by a university researcher, the municipalities end up not knowing the feelings of the citizens so they repeat the same mistakes from year to year and they lose participants.” In order to improve on the participatory process, he is looking to technology. He suggests that collating digital data on the voters through phone applications would mean municipalities could first analyse, and then extend their reach.

Moreover, Allegretti suggests that there should be greater integration between participatory budgeting and urban planning. The risk with participatory budgeting as a standalone initiative, he says, is that it is based on a ‘geometry of alliance’, whereby people come together on a specific, fragmented topic, without thinking holistically. “Planning is very frustrating for people – they lose confidence in plans as they’re very bureaucratic and take a long time to be approved. When they arrive they are already outdated,”

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says Allegretti. Conclusively, he suggests combining the two, allowing them to strengthen one another, with ‘planning’ working to frame the decisions made, and participatory budgeting acting as a short-term, accessible and participatory, counterpart to long-term planning processes.

All these case studies and varied perspectives, derived from quite different contexts, provide valuable learning. Participatory budgeting can, it seems, provide an accessible, inclusive and enjoyable entrance point into participatory and democratic civic processes. It is a process that bears the potential to see a rejuvenation of the face of democracy. But whether the government and, more importantly, our communities choose to embrace this radical new way of deciding the future of our cities, remains to be seen.

Katy Hawkins completed an MRes in Interdisciplinary Urban design at The Bartlett and now continues to conduct her own independent fieldwork looking into community engagement processes in the context of redevelopment projects in London. She independently curates community focused projects in her local area of Peckham, is an active committee member on her T&RA and volunteers at SGTO (Southwark group tenants organisation). She writes for a number of hyperlocal press publications on engagement processes and is currently events executive at The Academy of Urbanism.

You can find out more about how participatory budgeting is being applied in the UK and how you can get involved here: pbnetwork.org.uk

Rebuilding New Orleans The world watched in horror as flooding caused by hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, destroying the homes and lives of many inhabitants.

Camilla Ween AoU tells the story of the pivotal role played by Tulane University in the rebuilding the city.

In August 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast of Louisiana. It had been anticipated for several days, and the city was partially evacuated. Much of the city is below sea level and has been protected by levees (embankments) since the 1800s, both from flooding of the Mississippi River and from the surrounding lakes and bays that encircle the city. These have, over the years, and particularly following floods in 1947 and 1965, been raised, but there has been criticism of the level of protection provided and the maintenance of the levees. It was the levees in the north that failed.

more were inundated with foul water, requiring total refurbishment. Indeed, many homes stood in putrid water for months. 600,000 families were homeless a month after the storm in the wider area affected. There were 1,836 recorded deaths, of which 1,000 were in the Lower Ninth Ward. The failure to maintain the levees has been blamed on lack of investment and political apathy. The total damage is estimated to be around $1tn. 10 years on, about a third of the population has not returned and many properties remain abandoned, with nature gradually claiming them.

The storm surge drove water up behind the city, raising the water level behind the northern levees. They were compromised catastrophically, releasing a three-metre wall of water into the Lower Ninth Ward, which suffered the most damage and loss of life. This area still had many residents remaining as it was a poor neighbourhood and car ownership was low. Houses were ripped off their foundations and carried away. The devastation was cataclysmic. Not all the city was flooded, but much was affected, because when the power went out the sewage pumping system failed and sewers overflowed, inundating many other areas of the city.

Thousands of homes were severely damaged or destroyed and thousands

Though Katrina was the immediate cause of the flooding, the fundamental problem lies in 85 years of destruction of the Mississippi Delta wetlands.

Since 1932, Louisiana has lost 25% of its wetlands – a million acres. This destruction has been caused mainly by the oil and gas industry carving shipping channels for access into the wetlands. Over the last century this industry has been granted licences to explore, on condition that they would repair any environmental damage.

However, this was never enforced.

Once a channel exists, even a small storm surge will drive water inland and widen the channels, whilst also introducing salt levels that poison much of the natural wetland plants.

As a result, an area the size of a football pitch is being lost from the Delta every hour. (At this rate Manhatten would disappear within 18 months!)

Furthermore, the Delta is also being starved of replenishing sediment as dams on the tributaries to the Mississippi now stop the sediment washing down. Since the 1920s, over 50,000 wells have been sunk that are causing the land to sink. The sea level is rising faster than anywhere else in the world. New Orleans is as vulnerable as ever. An intrepid local citizen, John M Barry, has taken out the most ambitious environmental lawsuit ever, against 97 oil and gas companies.

However, despite this, the current population is determined to restore and rebuild their city and preserve its unique culture. Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza, written within months of Katrina, is a passionate essay on why this major US port city should be saved. After the flood there was much chaos, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) monies were misappropriated and compensation for loss was a classic case of discrimination; white people got some, black people got less and Native Americans got nothing. In the end there was little money to rebuild the city and by necessity, most of the efforts have been bottom up.

Participatory Budgeting Editor’s introduction | Rebuilding | New AoU Orleans in Action

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The Lower Ninth Ward shortly after the storm – pink shows the former properties destroyed (black are those remaining).

Many properties throughout the city remain boarded up.

There is very little left of the tightly packed community in the Lower Ninth Ward today, mostly it is open lots and ghostly evidence of the footings of former houses that were swept away.

In the immediate aftermath there was much soul searching by some of the key institutions in the city. The University of Tulane, historically an exclusive ivory tower, was in crisis. Its students had all been evacuated and so it had a real academic challenge, but most importantly, it realised that it was utterly detached from the local community. The university saw that this lack of integration with the city at large was untenable. It resolved to urgently and positively address this schism and to become part of the rebuilding solution. In December of 2005 it published a radical strategy, creating a new curriculum that introduced a public service requirement; the faculty and its undergraduate students would be expected to engage with the local community.

directly to the reconstruction of New Orleans.” Community engagement and outreach would now be a core activity.

design services to the New Orleans neighbourhoods. The centre has, since 2012, had its home outside the university campus, and works with local community groups to help them realise their ideas, offering planning services, architectural and graphic design, design-build services, funding strategies and community capacity building. The centre has a small staff and Tulane students provide much of the graft and design to get projects from idea to reality.

“Tulane University and its faculty and students will play an important role in the rebuilding of the city of New Orleans…Tulane will encourage its students to develop a commitment to community outreach and public service through the creation of a Center for Public Service that will centralize and expand public service opportunities for Tulane students.”

Tulane also resolved to partner with the other academic institutions in the area to share resources in the immediate aftermath and develop collaborations and joint academic ventures. It entered into a unique partnership with Dillard and Xavier universities – the two ‘historically black colleges / universities’ – and Loyola University. It provided classroom and administrative space for Dillard and Xavier in spring 2006, while the heavily damaged campuses were being repaired. This was to be the beginning of a longer-term partnership and, according to the university, “a model of academic collaboration aimed at strengthening the institutions individually and collectively, accelerate Tulane’s ongoing diversity efforts and provide a model for others interested in closing the racial divide. The partnership will also eventually develop two new national institutes: the Institute for the Study of Race and Poverty and the Institute for the Transformation of Pre-K–12 Education” (primary and secondary education).

The Centre for Public Service was to be independent and would “seek service opportunities that contribute

Tulane Architecture School has set up the Tulane City Centre, whose mission is to educate, advocate and provide

24 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

Since its foundation the centre has helped to shape and deliver a wide range of small but ambitious projects; over 40 projects have now been delivered and most of them come directly from the community. The portfolio of what has been achieved is inspiring. Most projects reflect the aspirations of a local community that wanted to recover, rebuild and reconnect to their city and each other.

Many of the projects are about placemaking, creating purposeful and attractive open space where people can come together, restoring culturally significant parks and creating play-space. A significant need in the immediate aftermath of the storm was access to fresh and healthy food and so a number of urban farms and community gardens have been created. An urgent need in 2005 was

Make It Right houses in the Lower Ninth Ward

A fresh produce market will be located in this double height space in the former German Schoolhouse, which will also provide offices, R+D facilities and small business incubation units.

Open-air classroom at Grow Dat Youth Farm

the rebuilding of schools and in 2006 CITYbuild Consortium, with the help of the Tulane City Centre, launched plans for 10 schools. Culture is central to many of the projects, such as the Guardians Institute, which is a museum and multipurpose performance space, or the Candlelight Lounge, which has live music.

Tulane City Centre partnered with the New Orleans Food and Farm Network and City Park to create a youth training scheme centred on urban agriculture.

The seven-acre site has a beautiful classroom facility built from steel containers, with a covered outdoor area for lessons as well as extensive cultivation areas. The principle is that young people are invited to apply for the programme and, if accepted, they are expected to treat the appointment as a job, show up on time and engage fully with the activities. The young trainees are taught urban agriculture, food economics and cookery. The aim is to foster leadership, team working and environmental stewardship amongst the diverse young people who join the programme, through the collaborative work of growing food.

It is a truly inspiring project that gives young people an opportunity to work in a beautiful setting and get valuable skills training.

complete contrast to Brad Pitt’s very well intentioned Make It Right Foundation, which has explored sustainable housing typologies and, using famous architects such as Ghery and Adjaye, built a few prototypes in the Lower Ninth Ward. Nice as they may be, they have done little to address the urgent needs of the poor and disadvantaged in New Orleans and will most likely not be occupied by them in the long term. What the Tulane initiative is doing is acting as a broker and genuine partner to make regeneration projects reality and provide professional advice and encouragement to local communities that have probably never had to assemble the collective energy or skills to manage complex projects.

It has also done much to foster healing of communities suffering devastation as well as social exclusion.

Wellbeing is clearly an issue for a population so traumatised and so the Pyramid Wellness Centre was established to support people with homelessness, substance abuse and mental health issues. Inevitably there has been a focus on housing, with pilot projects and prototypes for self-build and affordable housing. There is also an emphasis on commercial property, restoring historic buildings and street fronts and a transport project to improve transit connectivity and interchange. They are mostly small and medium-sized projects, but they each bring valuable assets as well as learning and confidence to the local communities and unite them around common goals.

A project that stands out for its enlightened approach is one called Grow Dat Youth Farm, which was conceived to bring about personal, social and environmental change within the local communities. The

How Tulane has played a pivotal role in New Orleans’ recovery is an exemplary illustration of how academic institutions can bring together the aspirations of local people, the energy of students and the professional know-how of faculty to make things happen. This is a model that could be exploited in any regeneration area. It stands in

Camilla Ween AoU is a Director of Goldstein Ween Architects.

All photos copyright Camilla Ween

Rebuilding New Orleans

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4 1 9 7 6 — 2 0 1 5

FROM INNER CITIES TO URBAN RENAISSANCE 28 / 04 In 2015 URBED celebrates 40 years of practice through a series of events that explore key projects, key cities and key changes in the United Kingdom’s urban renaissance journey.

Moving from innovative early work in Covent Garden or Bradford’s Little Germany to larger schemes in Manchester, Brighton and beyond, the seven events will reflect on what was, assess what is and dream of what could be.

THE FIRST REGENERATION AREA? Covent Garden, London Venue:

Wallacespace – Covent Garden

Date:

18.00 - 28th April 2015

Chair:

John Worthington

Please visit www.urbed.coop/events to book your place.

Key:

Charles Landry

20 / 05

05 / 06

14 / 07

RESCUING INDUSTRIAL QUARTERS?

HOW TO LOSE YOUR RING ROAD AND FIND YOUR CITY CENTRE?

RETHINKING THE MASTERPLAN?

Little Germany, Bradford

Highbury Initiative, Birmingham

New England Quarter, Brighton

Venue:

Bradford Design Exchange

Venue:

AoU Congress* - Birmingham

Venue:

Jurys Inn - Brighton

Date:

17.30 - 20th May 2015

Date:

5th June 2015

Date:

18.00 - 14th July 2015

Chair:

David Rudlin

Chair:

Nicholas Falk

Chair:

David Rudlin

Key:

Marc Cole

Key:

Sir Albert Bore

Key:

Pam Alexander

All the events are free to attend, however booking is necessary.

16 / 09

12 / 10

11 / 11

A SUSTAINABLE URBAN NEIGHBOURHOOD?

HOW TO PROMOTE QUALITY HOUSING?

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT?

Hulme, Manchester

Cambridge

Bankside BID, London

Venue:

Venue:

Trumpington Meadows School

Venue:

15Hatfields - Southwark

16.00 - 12th October 2015

Date:

17.30 - 11th November 2015

Nicholas Falk

Chair:

Nicholas Falk

Dame Kate Barker

Key:

John Burton, USM

Date: Chair: Key:

Z-Arts Centre - Hulme 17.30 - 16th September 2015 David Rudlin Anne Power

Date: Chair: Key:

* This event is open to Academy of Urbanism Congress attendees only.

26 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

Risk…

In Focus Decisions in urbanism by their nature involve taking into account some element of risk whether it is reducing risk to personal safety (see page 28), people’s perceptions of risk (see page 37) or the risk of not responding to a changing economic context as in Rotterdam (see page 31).

The origins of thinking about ‘risk’ are routed in games of chance but it was not until the 17th century that mathematicians Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat developed probability theory. Yet many of the everyday decisions we make are often determined less by calculations of probability – do you ever run the numbers just before you run across the road? – they are perhaps more often made intuitively or based on subjective degrees of belief about an uncertain future. The question perhaps then, is whether risk is either an art or science, or both and?

In our brief look at how risk impacts on urbanism we have not calculated risk probabilities or even looked at the numbers behind decisions – although they will be there. The chance of a pedestrian being killed when hit by a vehicle travelling at 20mph is 1 in 20.

Instead we have looked at how what sort of decisions are taken to avoid, mitigate or reduce risk.

Very often the approaches and policies to tackle ‘risks’ need to be innovative, which as Nicola Bacon and Bjarne Stenquist (see page 43) point out are risky in themselves. But this perception can be a problem especially when the decision-makers are risk-averse.

Simon Hicks (see page 34) argues that segmentation in responsibility in the public sector creates a risk-averse culture which obstructs innovation. While he argues for structural change in the way that projects are organised, David Porter in his conversation with Aarhus city architect, Stephen Willacy (see page 40), suggests that the antidote might be ‘trust’.

Risk... In Focus

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Shared streets: accidents by design It is 10 years since Ben Hamilton-Baillie AoU wrote his paper on Shared Space, Safer Streets – looking at whether our public realm is safer after hazards are removed and exploring the maxim that sharing spaces decreases risk, not increases it, as common perception might suggest. James Gross AoU talks to Ben Hamilton-Baillie about making streets safer.

Hamilton-Baillie has played a key role in bringing forward the delivery of a number of award-winning schemes prioritising the public realm for non-vehicular users including Park Lane in Poynton and the much debated streetscape of Exhibition Road in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, both projects that have been recognised by the Academy’s Urbanism Awards.

His 2005 paper drew from the work of Professor John Adams of UCL on the ‘risk compensation effect,’ challenging the view that all accidents are bad and suggesting that exposure to hazards through a shared public realm is essential in helping humans, especially children connect with their environment.

So does he consider that the last 10 years have seen sufficient change in attitudes that might now bring us to the threshold of a new wave of shared public spaces? “It’s not going to be a revolution,” he says.

“Maybe it’s a matter of us switching from one paradigm to another with a number of factors, having a slow but steady influence on the way we value and treat the built environment.”

Hamilton-Baillie holds the view that change is closely related to how we ‘label’ the environment in which we live. “Ten to fifteen years ago the term ‘shared space’ was useful as it helped to crystallize a whole series of thoughts about integrating the driver with the built

28 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

environment,” he observes. This is helping to change the public mind-set, to acknowledge that traffic is best resolved as an urban condition when it becomes clear that integration is preferable to segregation.

But why the slow change? After all, there are numerous accounts of even the most hardened highway engineers experiencing ‘epiphanies’ following visits to the successful shared spaces so frequently achieved by our European neighbours. “Apart from anything else, streets are very resilient to change,” he suggests. “They are an extraordinarily durable aspect of our built environment. Buildings might last a couple of hundred years but their use continues for only maybe thirty to forty years before it changes. Streets go on for hundreds if not thousands of years; in fact parts of London are still Roman.”

Perhaps the root cause of an aversion to transforming streets, integrating traffic and creating a sea-change in favour of more shared space streets, stems from their longevity. “The process of transforming Exhibition Road took 12 years and that is not unusual. Things change very, very slowly and the bulk of our built environment is inherited. We have to work with it; we don’t start from a Tabula rasa,” he acknowledges.

So does Hamilton-Baillie consider there might be specific triggers that could accelerate the process of change, address risk and provide guidance and

precedents for schemes elsewhere? “I think that no amount of guidance or instruction is going to ultimately help with this change because it creates a paradox,” he says. “What the government’s Manual for Streets guidance was fundamentally about was to get engineers to think independently to exercise their own professional judgement. Implicit in that is the acceptance of experimentation and testing things, a creativeexplorative process. As soon as you issue guidance then you clamp down on that.”

Of course in the case of Exhibition Road, as with so many trailblazing projects, it came down to leadership (in that case Cllr Daniel Moylan). Are there specific aspects of leadership which Hamilton-Baillie feels might have greater ‘staying power’ than others in face of considerable opposition orchestrated by the ‘safety’ camp?

Hamilton-Baillie suggests that particularly effective leadership emerges from a broader Zeitgeist, sometimes from frustration that governs the status quo. He considers that growth in local activism and local loyalty is evidence of the increased empowerment of people, especially those relatively well educated and with time and resources on their hands. It points to a groundswell of people becoming involved in their very immediate local neighbourhood and expressing clear opinions in favour of improving place.

He makes reference to the Save our Streets campaign put together by English Heritage a few years ago.

This seemed to touch a very strong nerve with the public, concerned at a gradual and creeping ‘municipal vandalisation’ of public space “destroying the very qualities that make places valuable.”

Beechcroft Road in Oxford is a good example, where residents have teamed up with local artists to create a local and bespoke response to influencing driver behaviour by tiling the street. “The factors for colourful change are broadly based around the relative importance of the principles of urbanism – the language of place, of quality of encounter, of integration of life on the streets; this is now really what drives such change,” says Hamilton-Baillie.

But thinking back to the creation of some of our ‘great streets’, is it not just a little lackadaisical to leave the promotion of shared space to the minority of political champions or local agitators? Does Hamilton-Baillie consider that the private sector is doing enough to go beyond the red-line of a building and land ownership and influence the shape and role of the street, as have say Grosvenor in Mayfair who following a review by Jan Gehl have worked with the London Borough of Westminster to transform Mount Street and parts of Belgravia?

“Taking a broader perspective, it’s not long ago that

Shared streets: accidents by design 29

we assumed that local authorities did all that stuff and were the real sole arbiters and guardians of the street, but that’s no longer the case – we’re not in that world anymore,” he says. The difficulty comes when we start to resolve who should take responsibility (and thereby implicitly take a share of the risk). Hamilton-Baillie acknowledges that we’ve not really yet worked out what the replacement is.

But might this not offer up an investment opportunity?

Hamilton-Baillie notes that there is a wealth of research about the effects of standardisation in things like signs, and markings. “We assume that not only do we need signs but they have to be standardised – why? Why not exercise the driver’s brain by finding different ways of conveying information.” Perhaps this might offer a unique perspective into the personalisation of spaces and neighbourhoods?

This leads us into another paradox, that along with the introduction of signage, double yellow lines and lighting we commonly consider that we’re urbanising as well as standardising environments. Hamilton-Baillie takes a different view, one that suggests that far from an urbanising effect, these elements contribute to the ‘highway-isation’ of place, destroying truly urban places and introducing the highway world into the public realm with too much familiarity.

“If you want to influence drivers’ speed and behaviour you have to be very careful of measures that introduce the highway world into the public realm and be careful about linearity,” he says. Double yellow lines, or yellow line markings, have the same function they do in the highway control context and they provide a stronger perspective. “I suspect that they have influence on drivers’ speed but I’ve never seen any research on that, it’s merely based on empirical observations.”

30 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

Hamilton-Baillie believes that cultural change and an embracing of the opportunity to consider streets as viable entities for investment requires, by definition, constant experimentation and exploration and that means risk. “You have to be prepared to make mistakes and to vary the responses. We learnt a lot from Poynton and Ashford and so forth and we are not word perfect by any means. Unless we try things, experiment and see what happens when we do away with priority markings or whatever it is – then you never know.”

This brings us back to the question about motivation and risk. If we evaluate risk differently, is it likely that perceptions of both public and private investors in the public realm can be reshaped to consider shared surface projects as a valid ambition for all of our urban streets as distinct from our ‘highways’? John Adams took only serious or fatal accidents as evidence of risk of harm as a natural consequence of the urban environment. Hamilton-Baillie suggests that we need to reappraise the view that “minor accidents are the tip of the iceberg.” Instead he argues that “small accidents, although unwelcome, can lead to positive changes. It can be a very important process of individual and collective learning and adaption, but the notion that some accidents can actually help this process is quite a difficult or challenging one.”

This doesn’t sit easily with today’s compensation culture but it does seem like a common sense approach to the public realm. It’s also a view that’s timed nicely to coincide with a review of the shared space experiment at Park Lane in Poynton, and one that we all need to take a note of.

James Gross AoU is masterplanning director at Barton Willmore.

Rethinking Rotterdam Rotterdam has always been forward thinking. Mattijs van Ruijven AoU looks at how the municipality turns risk into opportunity to create a vibrant and attractive city.

However, Rotterdam still faces major challenges for the future. From an urban development point of view the two most important challenges stated in our 2007 urban vision strategy are maintaining a strong economy and being an attractive city to live in. The strategy states that we need more innovation to deal with these challenges.

Rotterdam is a city with its eyes on the future. There has always been an urge to find new ways to stimulate the growth of business, the port, housing and the spatial development of the city. During the 1920s and 1930s, the city demonstrated its forward-thinking ideals with the new Coolsingel central boulevard that provided more space and grandeur and the Van Nelle factory that introduced a spacious and bright working environment. In addition to these – the latter of which is now a Unesco world heritage site – it also experimented with better housing for the working class and use of new building techniques.

The port has always been associated with the city’s economy. But it also has a strong focus on sectors that now have an uncertain future, such as cargo and oil refinery. Adding to this uncertainty is the realisation that the port is becoming more and more automated and as a result the number of jobs it provides is falling. So the challenge for the port is to be innovative, sustainable and competitive in order to retain its position of importance within the global economy. The challenge for the city is to diversify to create other economic and employment opportunities and provide the necessary jobs.

The modern rebuilding of the city after the devastating bombing in 1940 was a logical continuation. Over more recent years many initiatives, large and small, and by the government, entrepreneurs, developers or citizens show that this way of thinking has once again been embraced by everyone in the city. This has led to positive media attention, something we are not always used to.

The medical and food sectors already provide a large number of jobs. The maritime cluster, which although related to the port, is broader than just direct shipping activity and has been growing rapidly over the last few years. Interestingly, most of the businesses in this sector are situated not by the port area, but in the inner city. One of the challenges we face is to provide the necessary room for experiments and crossovers between the main emerging economic clusters, whatever their focus.

From a spatial point of view we use the thesis that the old economy needs new buildings and the new economy needs old buildings.

The city has long suffered from an image of being an unattractive place to live. However, recent data show that more and more highly educated people are

Shared streets: accidents by design | Rethinking Rotterdam

31

choosing Rotterdam. This may be the case across many of the world’s cities, but in Rotterdam the rise is spectacular. Moving from a position well below the Dutch overall average – for years the authorities focussed only on the lower social class and neglected the middle and higher social class – to that above the Dutch average, is a promising development, leading us to conclude that city’s image is changing. However, despite the promising growth of the maritime cluster, the number of jobs for highly educated people has not yet followed at the same trajectory.

Successful experiments such as ‘do-it-yourself homes’ (cheap run-down housing owned and sold by the municipality or housing corporation with an obligation to invest in the renovation) have over the last few years led to an increase in housing projects suitable for young people and families to live in, especially in the city centre and its surrounding neighbourhoods.

But Rotterdam still does not have a balanced population. Therefore compared to most other cities in the world, we see gentrification as a good thing and actively try to support this process.

The city has identified two factors that pose a risk to our economy and, especially, its attractiveness: air pollution and climate change. Air pollution is caused by industrial activity and large vessels in the port, and by traffic in the city. Both should be tackled, but the city has decided to focus on traffic, where the biggest gain for everyday life in central Rotterdam can be made. However, simply reducing traffic in a street or only allowing ‘clean’ cars and trucks into the centre will not bring about the required improvement in air quality. We therefore need a solid

Map of estimated consequences (“gevolgen”) of flooding along the river (financially and loss of lives) Rights / source: Deltaprogram Rijnmond Drechtsteden, De Urbanisten, D.EFAC.TO

32 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

and innovative approach to all traffic flows across the whole city network. Monitoring traffic in the city shows that the number of cars in the inner city is declining, the use of public transport, especially the metro, is growing and the number of cyclists is almost exploding.

To tackle air pollution and the movement of people and goods, we have recently started the Rotterdam Mobility Agenda. The intention was to have an open debate about the future of traffic flows in the city, which led to four strategies approved by politicians and shared with citizens, entrepreneurs, businesses, innovators and so on. They included an urban mobility plan, a cycling plan and parking and traffic safety plans.

They should in turn lead to a more durable approach towards transport, causing less pollution and creating a more attractive city whilst supporting a strong economy.

The second risk is climate change. Rotterdam is situated in a large delta and so water poses the main threat to the city because there is either too much water or too little. In the case of drought, we have seen incidents elsewhere in the Netherlands where dykes made out of peat have become too dry and collapsed.

This of course has catastrophic wider consequences.

However, Rotterdam can still rely on its system of storm surge barriers and dykes, of canals and lakes, outlets, sewers and pumping stations to provide a robust basis for a climate-proof city. These systems are continuously being monitored for the greatest potential consequences (financial damage and loss of lives) and areas for improvement. But increasingly, our attention is on the potential threat posed by

cyber-attacks and indeed malfunctions to the high-tech computers operating this complex system.

associations, developers, knowledge institutions and interest groups, in addition to the government, all contribute to Rotterdam’s climate resilience.

The existing system will eventually reach its limit if periods of heavy rainfall intensify or if drought and high temperatures are prolonged. Severe rainfall already causes flooding on quays, streets, squares, basements and so on, while high temperatures cause a heat-island effect which has, on hot days, created a difference of up to 9 degrees C between inner-city neighbourhoods and the surrounding landscape. This harms the health of the people and affects their productivity, which is why we have taken additional adaptive measures to counteract these problems.

This ‘blue adaptation’ will make the living environment more attractive and can become the motor for new investment. For example in the city’s Zomerhofkwartier (ZoHo) district, private initiatives including a rain garden, polder roof and rain(a)way paving (temporary water storage in paving – a world-first), together with public initiatives such as a water square (a public square with a storage capacity of 1.7m litres), have led to a climate proof city district in just a couple of years.

The ‘sponge function’ of the city is restored with measures that keep rainwater where it falls, store it and drain it away slowly. To prevent the heat island effect almost the same interventions can be used. In both cases it means that the city should have more storage capacity, less paving and ultimately more green areas.

For example, there are green roofs that hold water (250,000sq metres have been realised in the last four years), more trees and green areas in streets, and less pavement in gardens and squares. Through simple programmes we try to increase the involvement of the public in these initiatives, for example by providing plants in exchange for garden paving, or creating small front gardens by letting people remove the first two rows of paving from the public pavement (as long as it is kept at least 1.80m wide).

Businesses are benefitting from the increased focus on climate adaptation and sustainable urban development too, in addition to the leading international profile Rotterdam enjoys in this field.

At present, there are approximately 3,600 jobs in the region that are directly linked to climate change adaptation. The many businesses in the maritime, engineering and delta technology sectors in the Rotterdam region all have excellent growth prospects.

Implementing adaptation measures in both the public and private urban spaces requires co-operation with other parties. Citizens, businesses, housing

Mattijs van Ruijven AoU is head urban planner for the City Development Rotterdam. More information: rotterdamclimateinitiative.nl, rotterdam.nl

Kralingse Plas – a lake which acts as a buffer for water and offers great recreational facilities / posibillities Image rights: Municipality of Rotterdam

Flooding in December 2013 of the quays of Noordereiland, an island in the river Image rights: Municipality of Rotterdam

By taking an open approach to tackling the risks posed to our city, trying to involve everyone and encouraging experimentation, we see that these risks can be turned into a positive energy for city development, leading to quick results, innovative ideas and a more attractive city.

Rethinking Rotterdam

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Run the risk Simon Hicks argues that a risk-averse public sector, through the segmentation of responsibility and suppression of collaborative design frameworks, obstructs innovation in the design, building and management of our public spaces and streets. To support better urbanism in our towns and cities a profound structural change is needed in the way design projects are organised, facilitated and exchanged.

34 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

According to the late great German sociologist Ulrich Beck, an obsession with risk has permeated almost every aspect of modern society and decision-making.

The public sector has been especially susceptible to adopting a cautious approach through the monetisation and manipulation of risk.

centre, only to later discover that the real footfall issue relates to inconvenient bus timetables.

In a similar vein, the need for quantifiable evidence to justify spending decisions presents obvious challenges for new ideas. In an urban context, traffic flow, footfall, parking spaces and so on form a powerful quantified evidence base, whilst the more nuanced aspects of good public realm design are not necessarily foreground when their long-term value is harder to justify. Design and management risks refer to the on-going costs of maintaining or managing a project post-completion, and the scope for design to control behaviour. They are mainly premised on the idea that unchecked social behaviour is a risk in itself, and therefore the design and both maintenance and management of a project are often used to control or to mitigate instances where people cause upset or damage. In this respect, to provide design conditioned for spontaneity and more chance encounters could bring with it its own risks for additional management or security in some cases.

Since the 1980s, successive governments have sought to shed the ‘Big Government’ image of the post-war years by downsizing according to ideologies such as value for money, or risk transfer. The public sector did formerly have a significant centralised role in the execution and management of built projects through institutions such as the Property Services Agency, but perceived poor value for money and a number of cases of corruption in the early 1980s reflected negatively on the central government, which led to the widening privatisation of this element of service delivery. In combination with the prevailing trend for a streamline public sector, the political risks of things like corruption and poor service delivery have warranted the present situation where commercial organisations become the primary bearers of many previously public forms of project success risk. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) is a pinnacle of the risk transfer paradigm, where even a set-term of management risks for a major public service project (such as a hospital) are held within the private sector.

By way of example, urbanism’s own de facto PFI might be the creation of psuedo-public spaces, where land is leased to a private organisation for regeneration. These pseudo-public spaces, such as Paternoster Square or Liverpool One, have come under scrutiny where the risks associated with unbridled human behaviour are controlled through design and management with, for example, segmented benches that discourage rough sleepers, or private security presence to prevent buskers, ballgames, or political protests. It is clear in such examples that the pragmatic transfer of risks from the public to the private sector in the long term can actually indirectly lead to negative externalities for some portions of the general public.

In an urban context, the preference for streamlining and value for money has aided the rigorous segmentation of responsibility and risk within and across sectors. Public realm projects play a central role in facilitating public life, and their accountability and subjection to security means they are so often the arena of dispute for the many interested parties with a stake in the civic sphere. Urbanism is therefore often a substantially risky undertaking for local government as the number stakeholders is so diverse, with a spectrum of political, social and economic risks represented. Broadly, we can identify project risks – the emergence of unforeseen obstructions, delays or negligence; and design / management risks – as the challenges of meeting present and future needs through designing for human behaviour.

In summary, innovation is risk and at present there are few incentives for new design solutions and holistic solutions across and within sectors, especially when new solutions are imbued with new unknown risk.

Poynton’s ‘Roundel’ (borderless roundabout more or less) shared space schemes by Ben Hamilton-Baille AoU (see page 27) at Park Lane and Fountain Place offer some hope for small towns embarking on risky innovative projects without fully transferring risk to private companies. At face value, the shared space scheme at Poynton poses risks far beyond the capacity of what one might expect from a small town of 14,000 and a town council with only two full-time staff, yet the project was driven by the town council.

The scheme presents risks in construction due to town centre retail obstruction, risks in design and management due to a presumption that considerate human behaviour will not pose injury risks where there is shared spaces, and project financing risks in achieving value for money and acquiring the long-term positive externalities of a renovated town centre.

Project risks are entrenched in public sector organisations where the prevailing risks of service delivery correspond to specialised departments or individuals. Culpability and rigid responsibility structures mean that there are few incentives for public sector managers to stray from the procedural linear ‘problem solving’ processes, or looking beyond status quo solutions – why expose oneself to the risks of a new design when cookie-cutter blueprints for various public space features exist. Crucially, new designs also welcome the possibility of challenges from other stakeholders, whilst the status quo is tried and tested. The siloed ‘problem solving’ approach may also lead to misidentification of the actual ‘problem’. For example, an authority might allocate more street space to parking in a declining town

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Curiously, interviews suggested that it was precisely due to the fact that the high street was dying that gave them the impetus to run forward with the shared space schemes – as one spokesperson from the town council indicated, “doing nothing wasn’t an option.” The ability to overcome risk, therefore, was not entirely driven by an agenda for creating better streets for the sake of better streets, as has been the case in the welldocumented ‘Naked Streets’ and Exhibition Road schemes in Kensington. Rather, Poynton had been driven by a sense of urgency for change where the status quo was failing. It is also the case that some dedicated members of the town council played an instrumental role in lobbying for the change, advocating for the shared-space scheme, particularly in overcoming segregated responsibilities in lobbying the risk averse Cheshire East Highways department, and in keeping local residents and businesses informed and up to date with the plans – managing those who anticipated that the scheme would be dangerous.

Financing for the project, characteristic of many local funding pots, has since been abolished. Poynton was delivered by a circumstantial combination of funding and local urgency, propelled through by a savvy and dedicated town council that was able to overcome the risk concerns of local planning authorities and the local community.

So what can we do to encourage ‘risky’ good urbanism where delivery is so contingent on circumstantial human interactions, access to financial or political leverage, and strong leadership? Firstly, organisational reform can help, particularly in the manner which the public sector allocates risk, and through creating better relationships across departments and beyond the sector. The public sector must be willing to burden greater financial and political risk when commissioning public realm projects to create a relational context of risk sharing across departments and sectors. An ‘all in it together’ framework may well engender a more collaborative framework for holistic solutions – both at commissioning and delivery stages of a project. How ingrained the private sector becomes in any project is not quite so clear. Poynton offers hope for innovative pursuit and cross-sector partnerships as the design in innovative and public ownership of the space is

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retained. However, we must not dismiss the applications of public authority cookie-cutter designs for efficient, less central projects. Similarly, fully private pseudo-public space schemes are not inherently devastating in small doses. The greatest challenge in this respect will be to create the frameworks necessary for the public sector to manage its own risks, and in turn, equip it with the means to work with the private sector to the greatest capacity.

Secondly, instituting some stronger forms of design representation in local decision-making processes might produce better design outcomes. This may be an organisational change, yet we must consider that local leaders can play a key role in driving innovative change against the odds. Acknowledging the limits of the public sector problem solving approach, designers stand to offer a more holistic overview of addressing the needs of a variety of stakeholders with designed solutions. It is not presently clear, however, if design representation should have a signing-off role, strong advisory role, or compulsory third-party role, and in reality this will often depend on local context and capacities.

Finally, the dissemination of good paradigms is essential if we are to popularise new forms of urbanism. Being risk averse reinforces the status quo, and as already identified, the incentives to break from the status quo are minimal. Creating positive feedback loops for experimental urban design is essential to challenging these self-reinforcing present models.

Of course, if I were a public sector manager, these recommendations might seem very risky. However, the greatest risk we face now is failing to take any risks at all and settling for a public realm that doesn’t serve our needs. We need to re-write the frameworks for innovation so that we might put into perspective the risks we face and bring to the fore the opportunities that a piece of city can deliver.

Simon Hicks is a Young Urbanist and research officer at the London School of Economics.

For more information on the ‘Roundel’ search ‘Poynton’ at academyofurbanism.org.uk

Feeling safe

by David Rudlin AoU

A few years ago I was back at my old university to give a talk to students. After the talk, one of the lecturers took me to task about what he saw as a contradiction in my argument. On the one hand I had railed against gated communities, on the other I had used the Homes for Change scheme in Manchester’s Hulme neighbourhood (that I had been involved in developing) as a good example of the new urbanism.

But surely Homes for Change is a gated community, he argued – it is built around a courtyard, most of the residents enter their flats through the courtyard and… the courtyard is gated! What did he know? He seemed to be one of those who had spent a career teaching a set of principles for the design of new towns, housing estates etc…that, one by one, were being challenged by new urbanists. However, the real problem was that he was right: Homes for Change is undeniably gated – it’s just that some forms of gated community damage urban vitality and some don’t.

they became the angry mob. So the defensive lines were redrawn, the wall around the city remained to protect against external threats but individuals also had to create new defensive enclosures to protect themselves from the enemy within.

The irony is going to be lost on the residents of some inner-city housing estates but, feeling safe was one of the original motives for people coming together in urban areas. There is safety in numbers, so the argument goes, whether it be villagers coming together behind a stockade to protect themselves from wild beasts or the citizens of walled towns and bastions built to repel marauding armies. Throughout human history walls have provided protection against bad spirits, wild animals, outlaws, raiding parties and invading armies. The point is that urban life, community, commerce – civilisation itself – took place within the walls, protected from the wilderness, lawlessness and mayhem beyond their protection. Urban life was the thing being protected rather than the thing to be protected from.

This gave rise to various urban forms. The ruling elite would retreat to castles or walled cities within the city – like the Kremlin in Moscow, the Forbidden City in Beijing or the Green Zone in modern day Baghdad.

In Southern Europe merchants would build palazzos – fortified town houses built around an internal courtyard with only small barred windows onto the street. The apartment block is another defensible form with its single entrance guarded by a concierge, or in cheaper blocks by an entry-com system.

However, the most common type of defensible urban form is the urban block with its public outer face and its private interior. This is the sort of gated community found at Homes for Change. All of the ground floor units in Homes for Change have doors onto the public streets that define the four faces of the block (including commercial units on the high street). The courtyard forms the private interior of the block and it is rightly barred to everyone but the residents. This is an urban form that is as old as cities and is the complete

Of course even the smallest settlements have their criminals although in a society where everyone knows each other, the threat is containable. However as cities grew it became clear that urban life was not always so benign and that not all the threats were beyond the walls. Indeed if you were rich and powerful you may have cause to be fearful of the whole population if

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opposite of the modern gated communities where the whole neighbourhood is behind a gate patrolled by a security guard. As urban areas grew, urban blocks became very efficient at accommodating large numbers of strangers in relatively small places. People could live safely surrounded by people who were not part of their family or close-knit community, people who they didn’t know and indeed people who could be harbouring bad intentions towards them.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman defined cities, in a lecture he gave at Sheffield School of Architecture, as “places where strangers live together without stopping being strangers.” His view is that living cheek-by-jowl is something humans are not very good at, creating a sense of perpetual anxiety or ‘mixophilia’ (those of us who love cities may disagree). Highlighting our survival instinct, he goes on to say that because humans derive great benefit from living in cities, we have developed coping strategies. The city walls have been drawn ever-tighter until now every household has its own.

However as the citizens of New York in the 1970s found out – or indeed the present day residents of certain South American mega cities – being able to retreat behind the palazzo walls, into the safe heart of the block or your fortified home is no good if you are in danger as soon as you step onto the street. In some South American cities affluent residents commute from their apartment or gated villa to their office building via rooftop helipads, never setting foot on the street. The role of defensible urban forms should not therefore just be to protect residents in their homes but to contribute to making the rest of the city safer. The point about the urban block is that it makes a clear definition between private and public space and it makes both safer.

The former is made safer by being inaccessible to strangers; the latter in quite the opposite way by being busy, over-looked and looked-after.

Bauman makes a similar distinction if in slightly less positive terms. He suggests that urban communities have generally adopted two strategies to keep themselves safe – the ‘panopticon’ and the ‘banoptican’ – both of which he considers to be bad ideas.

The panopticon is based on the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, the Victorian reformer who created prisons with radiating wings so that the inmates always felt themselves to be observed from the central control tower. In an urban setting the idea is that the street will be sanitised by exposure to the potential stare of authority. The boulevards of Paris were cut through the winding alleyways of the medieval city in the belief that crime and immorality thrived out of sight, around corners and in the shadows. The boulevards were designed to civilise the city to quell the crowd and to make it easier to police. Today’s equivalent, of course, is CCTV and the sense that in the modern city you are always potentially being watched.

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The opposite of this is the banoptican in which security is maintained through rules and barriers. These can be physical measures such as walls and gates protecting the interior of urban blocks. More likely in the modern world, the gates will be at the entrance to the entire housing estate in a gated community. The same is true of business parks and shopping centres, and the aim is to keep out the ‘wrong’ sort of people and to privatise and control the public realm as Anna Minton describes in her book, Ground Control. The problem, as Bauman points out, is that this means that social groups increasingly mix only with people like themselves, losing their ability to live within a diverse society and increasing their level of fear, thus fuelling a vicious circle in which they feel the need for more protection and control.

Bauman’s view is that the pan and ban-opticans are as bad as each other and argues for a new form of informal, collaborative urban society with negotiated rules of behaviour. A lovely sentiment, but perhaps where his argument is slightly weaker. We (URBED) spent some time recently collaborating with a well-known Swedish architect on a masterplan in London. Sweden is perhaps as close as we can hope to get to an informal collaborative urban society and it was interesting how it influenced the way that the architects approached urbanism. They were interested in the idea of semi-private space within urban blocks that could provide secondary pedestrian routes through the neighbourhood. Indeed, visiting schemes in Stockholm these areas work very well. But in the context of London the idea that there be any ambiguity about the status of space within the centre of urban blocks was, in our view, quite literally asking for trouble.

Until the day when all cities are as civilised as Stockholm we need to find ways of making them safe for everyone. The panopticon described by Bauman seems almost to be a police state. But the underlying principle that people will not do bad things if they feel that they are being watched holds true. The watchers don’t need to be the state, the effect is

even more powerful if they are fellow citizens. Indeed, this is how the ‘self-organising rules of behaviour are negotiated and enforced’. Many of the winding alleyways of Paris such as in Le Marais or the Latin Quarter feel perfectly safe despite being narrow and winding. This is because they are lined with shops and cafes and thronged with people. This is not to say that danger may not still lurk down the deserted back streets and byways. What it does suggest, as Jane Jacobs so eloquently described, is that what sanitises urban areas is people and activity, whether crowded into a narrow street or promenading on a boulevard.

gate is compromised because there will be fewer people to witness and deter crime. At the next level the lack of contact with people from different social groups, as Bauman points out, increases anxiety and the perceived need for even more protection. Finally, the people within these gated communities are not fulfilling their responsibilities as citizens to contribute to the security of the wider city. The inward-looking, gated estates turn their backs on the surrounding streets making them more attractive to criminals Having said that, there is no problem with gates.

The role of the urban environment is to create a clear distinction between public and private space. The job of the urban block is both to create the secure private interior and the lively surveilled external streets. The density of the block, the number of doors and windows, the active use on the ground floor all can help to make the surrounding streets safe through surveillance.

At the same time, to answer the Lecturer’s question, the interior of the block – like that in Homes for Change – should be gated and secure. The irony is that, when you get this right, even in a high-crime area like Hulme, then the gates can be left open as our Swedish friends were advocating. The level of overlooking and stewardship in Homes for Change is such that the gates aren’t always needed, but of course it is still important that they are there, just in case they are.

This is the core principle of urban safety. Strangers in cities are inevitable and most of them are not a threat, quite the opposite, they are the people who will potentially intervene to stop or report wrongdoing.

Many of them of course will be the ‘walk on the other side of the road and pretend not to have noticed’ types, but that is not the point, the ne’er-do-wells will not be sure. The problem with many modern forms of crime prevention is that they are designed to exclude these strangers. The suburban community, gated or not, is designed to welcome only its residents. This might make it easier to spot people up to no good but it also means that there are fewer people to do the spotting.

This may work well enough in middle-class suburbs with low levels of crime but in urban areas it doesn’t work on a number of levels. At the most basic there is a danger that it doesn’t even make the estate safer – in defining all space as private and relying on the gate for security, the community is at greater risk if the

David Rudlin AoU is a director of URBED and The Academy of Urbanism. Visit David’s blog at: climaxcity.wordpress.com

Paris

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In conversation with…

…Stephen Willacy AoU, city architect of Aarhus, on: Trust – the antidote to risk Aarhus is regularly cited as the happiest city in Denmark. That Denmark itself is cited as the happiest country in the UN World Happiness Report of 2013 makes for a pretty good case for arguing that this post-industrial city is the happiest city worldwide. So is the job of city architect Stephen Willacy AoU already made much easier?

Fresh from a ceremony in Arne Jacobsen’s town hall in Aarhus, where with the deputy mayor for environment and planning he was awarding prizes for the renovation of buildings, particularly shop fronts and signage, Stephen Willacy chats with David Porter AoU about his role and the importance of trust.

David Porter: Tell me about these awards...

Stephen Willacy: We give two types of awards. One is on Architecture Day in early October. Then there are the awards like today, which is how we promote quality in the public realm. And we are thinking of going a step further and giving an award for promoting activities at street level – the interface of buildings to streets and also public squares and parks, to encourage creative use.

DP: This is part of your role as city architect. Tell me about being a city architect in Denmark – we no longer have city planners or city architects in the UK. SW: You mean that in that the UK you no longer need experts?

DP: No, that’s not quite what I mean, but there has been a growing distrust in the role of civil servants.

So it is interesting to learn that the role of city architect still has efficacy elsewhere. How does it work?

SW: I am employed by the department of environment and planning, but I am city architect for the whole city council. So I work with all six of the city departments, each of which has a deputy mayor and, together with the mayor, they run the city.

The city architect has overall responsibility for achieving architectural quality for large-scale plans

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and projects – and therefore the overall responsibility for the city developing in a way where architectural considerations are of the highest regard. But as city architect, I also have a rather strange role that translates into English as a ‘free bird’, which means that if I want to go against something that is supported by the whole of the planning department, then I am allowed to do that.

DP: So they trust you to put another opinion, to challenge the consensus.

SW: That’s right, it’s all about trust. I have to argue my case – it is a democratic process. But one of the aspects of trust is that I have the opportunity to offer a different opinion in many different forums. Of course, you have to choose your battles.

DP: You have used to term ‘battle’, which sounds very British – we have a very adversarial system and so think in terms of battles. But what about in Denmark, is it more a matter of discussions that become more or less heated, but few real battles?

SW: This is part of the way consensus works here.

It’s a democratic process, and this is where trust is evident. There is a general sense of trust between the politicians and the public in general. Denmark thinks of itself as a trustworthy society with a strong sense of mutual wellbeing.

DP: And a trust of civil servants too?

Aarhus Town Hall ph. Per Ryolf / City of Aarhus

SW: We have elections every four years to choose a mayor and deputies, so things do change, particularly at the beginning of a new term where there is a period of adjustment.

SW: It is much less confrontational. In commercial practice I have been in situations battling with a design-build contractor where you are trying to protect a quality of detailing or materials – things can get quite heated, and sometimes with clients too.

DP: But your role carries on between elections – you are a civic appointment not a political appointment.

But I am now in a situation where viewpoints change quite regularly and so I have to bear that in mind when making a case. The politicians do get heated of course, and occasionally I lose my cool a bit – after all, I live by my own heart-felt meaning about things. After two and a half years in the role I am beginning to understand the dynamics and understand better my role as city architect. I am not saying that I am a chameleon, but I have to explain things differently.

SW: Yes. My previous deputy mayor was from the Liberal Party and my new deputy mayor, for over a year now, is a Social Democrat. So after a very good period of consensus we are now developing new politics with the new deputy mayor. I am not saying we are political but we have to be able to develop and adjust our policies to the new situation. It has taken me a while to adjust to this.

DP: Coming back to where we started – you had just come back from an awards ceremony, so how does the city actively promote good architecture and urbanism?

DP: As an Englishman working in Denmark?

SW: Also as a Dane. It is more to do with coming from many years in commercial practice into a role in a politically-led organisation. I found there were many things to adjust to. For example, I have found there are different ways of explaining myself, and I have had to adjust the way I do that in a political arena compared to a business situation.

SW: We have an architecture policy that the city council agreed in 2012 with five main points: community participation; sustainable city development; architecture; energy efficiency; and the fifth relates to infrastructure.

DP: Isn’t it harder though to work within a political arena?

In that way, architecture is covered not just in the policy but also in relation to the whole political process. The city is developed through its citizens,

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sustainability of course, and the public realm. We do not rule out design-build if it is right for the project.

DP: How do private developers fit into your identity as a trusting society?

SW: Denmark is a small country and we do not have many large players, and people’s reputation is terribly important. We are a closely-knit community built on trust, and the word gets out if things are not handled openly and fairly.

DP: So it becomes relatively self-regulating? through the politicians and into planning. When we talk about the development of the city we are talking about densification of the city and achieving a sustainable city.

In terms of architecture, we have agreed that we want Aarhus to be known internationally as an ‘architecture city’. That means, and this is important to me as city architect, that we must have as many architectural competitions as possible. We must have design of the highest quality, which means using the very best architects, and not just local architects, but also international, and also supporting young architects.

DP: So you see your role as promoting a younger generation too?

SW: Yes, that is it. I am trying to design the competition processes for different types of groups. For example, if we are planning a new development within the council we have a feasibility process where we will ask four or five young architects to come forward with an idea and an approach to the project by exploring it through developing a brief and a preliminary massing study showing a relationship to infrastructure, place and position on the site and so on. This material becomes the basis for a competition. We are trying to introduce these young architects to the idea of working with the council very early in their careers so they can get some projects under their belts and, of course, they can use this as promotional material for their practice.

DP: So then a developer is brought in?

SW: We try to use a two-stage competition focusing first on ideas. After the usual pre-qualification round we select a number of teams for a concept design, then select two or three to go forward working to a full design brief with a fee to develop their ideas.

We’re trying to get the teams to use their resources best by talking with them to help develop their thinking. Once we select the design team we move forward in a design-led process and then seek the right builder.

SW: Yes, I think so, because the system is relatively intimate. But there are some problems, and things might be changing. For example, during the recession some of our developers went bankrupt and now there are larger developers coming in from Germany.

This intimacy is of course not the same with these.

DP: One of the things that you seem to be describing is a very pro-active planning system. Where we have ‘development control’, you seem to be pro-active in creating the circumstances that will lead to good quality and maintain consensus.

SW: That’s right. But it helps that we share a generally high standard of building quality, with good design, good materials – and carefully put together.

This background of quality is an aspect of an egalitarian society that has grown from agricultural roots and a tradition of co-operatives. It is something that has built up over many generations. It is something in-bred, and goes through the whole school system.

There is another way of looking at this. I have worked in Germany and Asia and the UK and it is really interesting to see the length of the contracts used. In the UK when you negotiate a contract it ends up as a huge book! In Denmark it’s much simpler and shorter.

DP: The starting position in the UK is to minimize risk by trying to cover all possibilities and stop things going wrong.

SW: It’s the other way round here. We are obviously aware that things can go wrong, but we are a more tight-knit society where trustworthiness is central – there is still the sense that you can shake your hand on an agreement.

DP: You mean that responsibility is held personally and socially.

SW: Yes, that’s right.

DP: And that is within the context of an architecture policy?

SW: Yes. Design is an important parameter; it is not just economy, although that is always important, as is

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David Porter AoU is professor of architecture at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing

Malmö: taking a bet on innovation Malmö is not alone in having areas of social deprivation on its periphery.

Nicola Bacon AoU and Bjarne Stenquist show how with innovative thinking an area of the city can be revived and provide a model approach for many other cities.

Malmö is renowned internationally as an exemplar of environmental sustainability and a centre of innovation on green technologies. The Western Harbour development is the focus of study tours for planners and urbanists from Europe and North America. But the city also faces challenges in its peripheral housing developments where social problems have emerged. To tackle these difficult issues that do not fit so easily with its international image, the city is developing new programmes to innovate around social sustainability, experimenting with the idea of social investment to boost place-making.

Although some of the more ambitious ideas have proven difficult to put into practice, strong local programmes have emerged.

All innovation is risky, and this is an interesting tale of one city’s path through trial and experiment, to a tangible programme of actions that are improving residents’ lives. What has been developed in Lindängen, an area on the outskirts of the city, has resonance for all European cities thinking about how to deal with the social and environmental needs of making the mass housing of the 1960s and 1970s fit for the future.

There are two stories to Malmö’s development.

Whilst one narrative is of a city that is flourishing, with renewed pride amongst residents – symbolised by the Western Harbour, the new Øresund Bridge connecting the city to Copenhagen in half an hour by train – another story is of growing inequality in education, health and living standards.

Part of Malmö’s social democratic heritage is the welcome that city authorities have offered to refugees.

Since the Chileans in the 1970s, successive waves of incomers have found a safe haven and new home

in the city. Another group of incomers have come from Denmark, often settling in Malmö temporarily because of a quirk in the Danish immigration regulations, or moving because of cheaper living costs. Although ethnic minority communities tend to live outside the city centre, the city is notably diverse, over 40 per cent of the population are first or second-generation immigrants.

Within the city a significant number of people live in poverty, and many of these are newer migrants, concentrated in the suburbs that were built between 1965 and 1975 as part of the Swedish state’s ambitious ‘million homes programme’. Malmö has the highest child poverty level of all Swedish municipalities.

In 2009 the employment rate across Sweden was 79 per cent, in Malmö it was 65 per cent and in Herrgarden – one of the ‘million homes’ areas – only 20% of the working age population were employed.

Deprivation is experienced mainly by ethnic minority groups, who are mainly from different Muslim nations that have experienced turmoil over the last twenty years: Somalia, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan.

In spite of significant investment in education and social welfare programmes in the last decade, there have been only marginal improvements in education or living conditions in the more deprived areas.

However, the city has struggled to find ways of tackling entrenched social issues amongst a diverse population.

In response, they are looking at new ways of working.

A ‘commission for a socially sustainable Malmö’, the first of its kind in Sweden, inspired by the UK’s Marmot Commission, reported in 2012. This focused on the growing health inequalities in the city and how strategies could be developed to reduce these. In 2010, five ‘area programmes’ kicked off with the aim of finding new ways of tackling social exclusion.

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The Social Life team, while at the Young Foundation, worked with the city to develop the thinking behind a new programme of area-based social innovation.

We ran two workshops – ‘Hands on innovation’ – in 2010, to help inspire fresh thinking, and to promote the potential of innovation tools to reshape the city’s approach to its run-down areas. A further workshop in 2013 on social sustainability brought together agencies working in Lindängen, an area of apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city, built in the 1970s, with employment levels below 50 per cent.

This work became one element of an ambitious programme, the Regeneration Dialogue. The starting point for this was to see the connections between the different issues facing the million homes areas: neglected buildings, green-house emissions, unemployment and child poverty, and to find out whether these could become the foundation for new forms of co-operation, better use of public money and true placemaking with people at the centre.

The Regeneration Dialogue developed an ambitious model, using social investment to create jobs and social improvements, generating measurable savings in public systems, as well as in energy and maintenance costs. This was prototyped in Lindängen.

The intention was to bring together actors from the private, public and civic sectors to jointly understand and develop solutions for local areas. Since these areas generally lack bigger manufacturing or service employers, ‘value’ is often tied to housing. There are pent-up investment needs, including for energy efficiency and for social infrastructure. Analysis by the city suggested an investment need of €120m (1.1bn Krona) in Lindängen (half for energy savings) while costs for social exclusion over four years runs at

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€140m (1.3bn Krona). Property owners could not make the necessary investments stack up economically without huge hikes in rent (typically rises of 40 to 50 per cent). In other parts of Malmö and Sweden, large increases in rent have forced large numbers of low-income tenants to move.

Innovation often comes from combining existing resources and actors in new ways. In Lindängen the key actors (private housing providers, local social services, employment, insurance and health services and a number of NGOs) came together in drawing up a joint ‘socio-economic balance sheet’ for the area.

Money going into Lindängen is essentially the cost of social exclusion, paid by public agencies including social services, employment agencies, insurance agencies, health providers and law-enforcement agencies. If ‘cashable’ long-term savings could be generated in these budgets, then this could fund investment in local job creation and social mobilisation. In practice this would mean using contracts for regeneration work conditional on local job creation and social improvements, setting up a local recruitment and training company, moderate increases in rent, substantial energy reductions and local energy production.

However, this was difficult in practice. The model involving national actors and EU funding proved too cumbersome, the city’s finances became uncertain, and the program at its most ambitious could not be taken forward. What has emerged is a more local and more tangible process that is bringing work to residents, through the local regeneration dialogue in Lindängen involving one property company (Trianon), social services, the local job centre and a number of NGOs. A relatively small investment in energy saving by Trianon in their property in

Lindängen (€5m with a €1m EU subsidy) has kick started new ways of giving unemployed residents long-term work. So far eight permanent positions and 10 jobs on one-year contracts have been created.

terms of local job creation, resident involvement and placemaking. The city has prioritised long-term economic gains and neighbourhood revitalisation through higher employment, over short-term income from a property lease. Malmö alone has more then twenty areas similar to Lindängen, built in the 1960s and 1970s and now in various stages of neglect. In Sweden 650,000 multi-storey dwellings were built from 1965-1975, many in areas with characteristics like Lindängen.

The Regeneration Dialogue brokered a deal between Trianon and the city. Trianon has been given a 10-year reduction in property lease payments in return for a commitment to recruit a quarter of the work force to work on the construction of the first new apartment building in 37 years in Lindängen. This will create 140 low to medium cost apartments, designed for local people. Blocks include a communal laundry and meeting area, rather than each apartment having its own washing machine. A decision has been made to prioritise low-cost functional housing rather than the more affluent residents, who have moved into new homes in Malmö’s Western Harbour. Building started in April 2015.

According to Professor Michael Koch at the HafenCity Universität in Hamburg, there are 37 million towerblock apartments in western European Union states, and 10 million in eastern EU states. Malmö has a history of organisation at the local level that has helped shape solutions that are then either copied by others, or taken to scale by becoming part of state provision. Though local and national context differs among European countries, the ‘Lindängen model’ shows the beginning of an idea that could be used to unlock the creative potential of ‘les banlieues de l’Europe’. A new way of regenerating our increasingly out-dated stock of tower blocks based on renovation and regeneration, rather than demolition and replacement.

This is based on an understanding by Trianon that the value of their property in Lindängen is linked to the quality of life of residents living in these properties.

It signals faith in the area and its future. Trianon has signed up to an agreement that binds them to recruiting local workers through their contractors, and if the contractors fail in meeting these commitments they will be fined. Trianon sees this as good business, not charity, sustaining a struggling neighbourhood in the long term. Vandalism in the area has declined radically over the last two years. For residents, the sight of their neighbours going to work in buildings where they live or in the gardens and public spaces nearby is significant.

Nicola Bacon AoU is a founding director of Social Life.

Bjarne Stenquist is a civil servant at the city office in Malmö and former process manager of the regeneration dialogue.

More detail about Social Life’s earlier work on placemaking and social finance can be downloaded here: social-life.co/project/placemaking-andinnovation-in-malmo/

Some of the other bigger property companies are now waking up to the fact that a small local company, owning only 1,200 apartments, has achieved a lot in

Malmö: taking a bet on innovation

45

Space for great places!

The great places here are an opportunity to share what we love and know about the urban environment.

As you can see they range from small to large, inside and outside, and singularly identifiable to abstracted ideas of what a great place is.

Please send us your great places so that we can share them in the next edition. Be imaginative and creative – we want to make these places live on our pages. Send us an image, a drawing, a poem, a…you decide.

Send contributions to sg@academyofurbanism.org.uk

Adelaide Michael Hegarty AoU

George Strickland Kingston and Colonel William Light’s original 1837 design set out Adelaide in a grid of wide boulevards and large public squares surrounded by parkland.

The location on plains between hills and sea was well considered and the plan form has proven to be robust in accommodating the demands of society and developments in transport over two centuries of constant change.

Adelaide by Robert Thomas © State Library of South Australia

The plan for Adelaide was inspired largely by Catania, Sicily, which was studied and visited by Colonel Light as field research for the new city he was designing. Catania was founded as a Greek outpost around the time of Plato, who also first explored the concept of an ideal and healthy city.

In his famous treatise ‘Republic’, he depicts two cities: one healthy and one with ‘a fever’ (the so-called luxurious city). The citizens of the luxurious city “have surrendered themselves to the endless acquisition of money and have overstepped the limit of their necessities.” The luxury of this city requires the seizure of neighbouring lands and consequently a standing army to defend those lands and the city’s wealth. The main character Socrates says that war originates in communities living beyond the natural limits of necessity. In short, the healthy city is sustainable, limiting its consumption to actual needs, while the luxurious city is not and is in a perpetual quest for more. These ideas were explored again over time, notably during the renaissance by Leonardo da Vinci who felt the high number of plague deaths was partially due to

46 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

the condition of the dirty, densely populated cities where disease spreads rapidly.

Colonel Light’s plan for Adelaide does not include a stockade or city walls and instead the city is surrounded by landscaped parklands for civic amenity and to embrace the location.

The vision of Adelaide created by Kingston and Light was of a city capable of adapting to change. The city plan is fundamentally sound, however 20th century zonal planning and the private car lobby have taken their toll, compounded by the deeply embedded Australian desire for everyone to have a bungalow on a quarter-acre block of land. However, fresh minds and political will have now aligned and the city vision is being refreshed: the city is now growing up. The government’s new planning procedures with embedded design review for the central business district (CBD) are consistent with the design-led foundation of the city. The city council has taken advice from Jan Gehl and others.

“Adelaide is maintaining its reputation as Australia’s best planned city, however, I wouldn’t want anyone to think that the government was becoming complacent.

We still have work to do…working towards integrated design and making long-term plans for the future.”

SA Planning Minister Mr John Rau, 2012 Continuous improvement is something that Adelaide can manage. It is a young city and will probably be a great city… when it’s finished!

Penzance Geoff Haslam AoU

Like the curate’s egg Penzance is good in parts. Known locally as PZ from the registration marks on local fishing vessels, Penzance ward includes Mousehole and the fishing port of Newlyn. The Georgian extension was laid out with traffic-free squares and pedestrian streets creating unique places and routes.

Peripheral places succeed by understanding and celebrating their ‘specialness’. The elements that help define PZ are the station (five-hour sleeper train journey direct from London), the promenade overlooking Mount’s Bay and most importantly the Jubilee Pool which, according to blog Municipal Dreams, is “maybe the finest of Britain’s open-air lidos – a beautiful Art Deco memento of a municipal commitment to health, fun and modernity that illuminated an otherwise gloomy decade.” These assets have all

been threatened by the sea in recent years.

The commercial heart of the town revolves around the junction of three streets, each with its own strengths and character. They meet at a market square dominated by a classical bank and market building with an Italianate dome, and where the town’s bestknown son, Sir Humphrey Davy, is celebrated with a grand statue. The weak connections between this centre and the waterfront attractions provide some excellent regeneration opportunities. Chapel Street, a recent finalist for the Academy’s Great Street award, leads from the market to the ‘sacred headland’ (Cornish: ‘Pen sans’), which is terminated by the Jubilee Pool.

Commercial towns have more than one heyday. Penzance was once a wealthy trading port; it was also a popular resort

until the mid 20th century when the Pool was at the height of its popularity.

The next heyday may well be driven by entrepreneurs taking advantage of the superfast broadband being installed across Cornwall and choosing to settle in this lovely town, should it provide the high quality environment and lifestyle opportunities of which it is capable.

A group of such local trailblazers, many of whom were catalysed by the recent storm damage to the Pool, has recently launched a Neighbourhood Plan, which has drawn massive local support. The Plan sets out 16 big ideas, regenerating the sea front from Marazion to Moushole with a new protected Maritime Coastal Park and strengthening connections to the delightful and soon to be revamped town centre. At the heart of it all is the iconic Jubilee Pool.

Two for one Florian Ortega, Young Urbanist Two for one, a great place with a great view.

From a view down onto the peak time London Bridge morning rush, to the impenetrable building sites, They offer views that outshine Primrose Hill, and outstretch Peckham’s Multi-Storey Car Park.

Two for one, bulking icons of London, they beat any other touristic attraction, as they can transport you to all of them.

Two for one, where combining utility and charm is made possible.

You pay for commuting and get the sightseeing included.

Two for one, the rusty Routemasters of old, Have transformed into a royal-red symbol of green modernity.

London’s double decker buses are a great, sustainable and stylish place to hop into, and look out of.

Gallery Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action

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Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina Fred Paxton, Young Urbanist

As the freezing fog cleared, I looked down at Sarajevo and got an impression of the ease with which murder once rained down from the hills cradling the city. When the Bosnian war began in 1992, over 400,000 Sarajevo citizens were living in the valley, trapped, facing death from above. Bosnian-Serb forces and their tanks gathered on these hills and for three years – the longest siege of a European city since the Second World War – thousands of civilians were killed. Shooting fish in a barrel doesn’t even come close. The impact of the war continues to be visible in the city streets today, but the evidence of these brutal years has been embraced in creative ways.

Trams crisscross Sarajevo, full to bursting throughout the day, in a variety of shapes and colours. The lack of uniformity is a clue to their diverse origins. Most of the tramways were totally destroyed during the siege and since the ceasefire in 1995 cities from across the globe have donated trams to help Sarajevo return to normality.

Bosnia Herzegovina has a proud history of being a meeting place between East and West, where people of varied cultures mingle peacefully.

This was clearly evident in the high rate of mixed marriages before the war that, while shattered by the war like so much else, is beginning to show signs of returning to its previous levels.

I was visiting Sarajevo in December 2014 as a guest of Remembering Srebrenica, a British charitable initiative raising awareness of the Bosnian genocide by organising visits to Sarajevo, Srebrenica and other sites of the war. 2015 marks twenty years since the massacre of Srebrenica, a small town east of Sarajevo where 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian-Serb soldiers over 10 horrific days. Our guide, Resad Trbonja, had lived in Sarajevo all his life and showed us glimpses of the war still evident in his hometown. Burnt out shells remain on the outskirts of Sarajevo, where there once stood family homes. In the (almost) pristine centre of town, occasional bullet holes pock the Sacred Heard Cathedral.

Sporadic shrapnel scars mark the pavement from where thousands of mortar shells exploded. Rather than repaving over them, the dents have been filled with blood-red resin to commemorate the victims, nicknamed the ‘roses of Sarajevo’.

We walked past busy mosques, synagogues and churches of both catholic and orthodox denominations in the dense centre of town, all equally

astounding in their extravagance. After a few hours of wandering the cobbled, labyrinthine market lanes, the winter sun was already beginning to dim. We sheltered from the cold in a downtown café with other citizens and travellers, as has been the way in Sarajevo, except for a brutal and unforgettable series of interruptions, for centuries.

Remarkable that in the winding streets of the bazaar nothing seems to have changed for decades if not centuries.

Old and young drinking traditional Bosnian coffee in the sheltered courtyards. You expect to see merchants from the East and West, a priest, and so on (demonstration of diversity and place of centrality). The citizens I spoke to haven’t either forgiven or forgotten. The history has become part of the city’s fabric, painfully integrated into the vibrant and complex city.

The East Pier Scarborough Nick Taylor AoU

What a feeling of space you get here – nothing to contain you, a view over the slumbering town or out to sea. A place of arrival and departure.

How many new arrivals to the town have seen this as they rounded the breakwater to fall in love with the place and set down roots?

How many sweethearts have waved their loved ones off as they set sail – some never to return?

This is my favourite place as there are no boundaries – neither physical nor to your imagination.

48 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

LCNC’s straw bale office and garden, North West London

Homecoming Andreas Markides AoU

Louise Dredge, Young Urbanist

The fires burned brightly behind us.

We sat on the dirty deck of our ships And stared in the dark, away from the shore Where we had fought for 10 years, Now homeward bound.

We could feel the heat of the fires On our weary backs And even though none of us could dare look back We could all hear The crumbling walls of Troy.

We fixed our gaze ahead of us Tiredly trying to penetrate the dark night.

We had sacked the city.

Now our bodies weak and tired, Our clothes torn and blood-splattered And our weapons abandoned on the deck, We stared knowingly ahead.

As the anonymous, glazed towers continue to rise up on the London skyline, built by armies of reflective jackets and hard hats, I find myself drawn to the local and communal moments in place, and to the achievements of the ‘not powerful’.

On a warm summer’s day last July, I took part in a celebration and showcase for London Neighbourhood Community Co-Operative (LCNC), who had reached another significant milestone in their journey of great placemaking.

In the back garden of a terraced home in north west London, Leslie Barson,

one of the LCNC team, showed us around their new straw bale office, built by the hands of members and volunteers of LCNC. The project helped the group to learn an enormous amount about straw bale construction and managing a building project, which they hope to apply in their vision for a self-build, straw bale intergenerational apartment building.

Surrounded by a permaculture and food-growing garden, it’s a small yet thriving place that represents LCNC’s holistic approach to urban living – one that is socially, environmentally and financially sustainable, accessible and communal.

Beyond the dark waters Our blood-shot eyes could see The steaming baths being prepared.

Clytemnestra took great care – Aromatic bath salts (lavender and pine), Generously mixed in the hot water.

The clean clothes and shiny armour neatly placed by the side Of the bath.

She fussed with the slaves To keep the fires burning; She meticulously presided over the preparations of The courtesans (their hair, the perfumes and clothes they chose).

But more than anything She ensured that the long knife Was well hidden under the warm, scented towels.

Gallery Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action

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Cities in (D)evolution?

Book review by Graham Ross AoU

Patrick Geddes (1886)

Amid the white noise of the UK’s General Election it was easy to forget the extent of pre-campaign debate about the role of our cities at the vanguard of our national economy, innovation and culture. In recent months there has been a plethora of keynote speeches, conferences, commissions, charters, policy reports, published research and opinion pieces on the topic by eminent (and not so eminent) politicians, think-tanks, academics, commentators and protagonists; generating much lively discourse.

Debate about the importance of a ‘northern powerhouse’, of HS2 and HS3 and discussion about ‘Bridging the Gap’ between London and the rest of the UK received extensive coverage.

The Core Cities Group published a Charter, whilst the RSA Cities Growth Commission, the Centre for Cities, ResPublica and others published significant reports advocating greater devolution to city regions to drive sustainable economic growth and public sector reform.

That City Bright Pryde, Young Urbanist

The hustle and the bustle, the rustle of the leaves as people stroll the sidewalk in that city I call home.

The cars, the vans, the truck and bikes, the bus, the train and tram.

I can’t help thinking how lucky I am to live in that busy big city.

The people move, the rivers flow, the airplanes fly and boats row... in constant motion the city breathes.

Life in that city is breathless.

There is nowhere that compares – a complex web of interactions between friends, family, strangers and foe.

No matter where I go, I know...

This is my city.

This public reawakening of the vital role of cities was overdue and is very welcome. Mindful of its centenary, and recollecting its reference to some of these matters, prompted me to revisit an abridged 1949 edition of Patrick Geddes’s seminal Cities in Evolution, originally published in 1915.

Cities in Evolution touches upon many topics that still resonate today.

Geddes’s review of Britain’s emerging conurbations and the advocacy of city-regional spatial planning demonstrate the timelessness of many of his pioneering ideas. And whilst many of his concepts and techniques have been adapted into practice we should not overstate the absolute contemporary relevance of every aspect of Geddes’s lifework.

The book’s enduring quality is as a significant historic text that gives an insight into one of the most inspiring figures in city planning. The title, Cities in Evolution, fuses two of Geddes’s many areas of lifelong enquiry and expertise and gives a sense of his interdisciplinary mind at work. Written in Geddes’s idiosyncratic, often meandering

50 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 4 | Spring Autumn2015 2014

and discursive, manner it makes for a lively and opinionated treatise on cities past, present and possible and the role of the citizen, civic leader and planner in shaping the ‘neotechnic’ city’s future.

Drawing upon a wide array of historical themes and geographical reference points, Geddes name-checks renowned peers and coins numerous neologisms to illuminate his multifaceted ideas.

The breadth of reference points beguile and inspire. One can only wonder how Geddes’s elaborate way of thinking and connecting ideas would have blossomed in the internet age.

Cities in Evolution encapsulates much of the Scots polymath’s views on the (then emerging) role and education of the professional planner and the study of ‘civics’. He emphasises the importance of travel and citizenship, the need to understand and illuminate the essential spirit of cities, uncovered through civic surveys, analysis and city exhibitions.

Geddes advocated evidence-based planning and sought, through his legendary Cities Exhibitions, to index and share knowledge and illustrate historic and contemporary urbanism.

Indeed, one of the highlights of the 1949 edition are fine illustrations collated from Geddes’s second Cities Exhibition (the first having been lost at sea). The 1949 edition also benefits from a good introduction by Jacqueline Tyrwhitt and appendices including Geddes’s visual ‘thinking machine’ diagrams and lecture notes.

Cities in Evolution remains a key work by one of the towering figures of late 19th and early 20th century urbanism and city planning. It warrants reprinting, revisiting and reinterpretation, notably in this, its centenary year. But most importantly it encourages us to reconsider the contemporary issues of sustainable city-regional planning in the broadest contexts of our past, present and possible futures and challenges us all to engage in the debate.

Whitechapel Vision A masterplan for an east London inner city area to capture growth benefits and meet community aspirations.

Planning Awards 2014 Highly Commended RTPI Awards in Planning Excellence 2015 Finalist

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Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action

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My own view is…

Urbanism is the path to urbanity

by Prof Brian Evans AoU

I am often asked if Urbanism is what we used to call planning. Well it’s not – and here’s why.

Urbanists pursue urbanism as a pathway to urbanity – a consensual and dynamic state of civilisation that we admire and aspire to. For brevity let’s use the philosopher John Armstrong’s definition: a collective system of values; economic and political development; the pursuit of happiness; and a high level of (individual and collective) intellectual and artistic achievement1. We might contend that these are timeless principles that have guided city development since the first settlements of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley some 10,000 years ago – settlements that we would recognise today as cities.

With these aims of human endeavour in mind, these principles have helped cities adapt to the challenges of the four principal technological revolutions of mankind: agricultural; industrial; transportation and digital. In developed countries this process has taken centuries, but in the developing cities of Africa and Asia the transition is many times faster – three decades.

things away from where people live.

By contrast, the future of cities today is about the understanding of assets (social, natural, economic), managing expectations, employing technology, the digital revolution and social media to co-create processes to effect positive change. To manage this we need a people-centred approach that is trans-disciplinary and transparent and based on openness, honesty and trust. To do this we construct processes around Armstrong’s principles of urbanity that have helped us cope with earlier revolutions of change and to dismantle their worst excesses (think Boston and the Big Dig). Used well they will help us through the digital revolution too.

So Urbanism is not planning and, to paraphrase that great Scottish Philosopher Bill Shankly, it’s not even a matter of life and death – its more important than that – it’s the pathway to urbanity.

Professor Brian Evans AoU is head of urbanism at the Mackintosh School of Architecture

Ranged against urbanism is entropy – literally a lack of positive energy in the system leading to a decline into disorder. The forces of entropy include natural processes – drought, flood and disease – and manmade processes – war, greed and the careless and senseless exploitation of resources and people.

Planning – or to be more precise land use planning – is a 20th century solution to a 19th century problem – pollution and bad neighbour development – or keeping nasty

John Armstrong, In Search of Civilisation: Remaking a tarnished idea, Allen Lane/ Penguin, 2009

52 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

My own view is…

The Parliament hinge – or wilful forgetting is the hallmark of government policy on the built environment

by Paul Finch OBE

The Parliament hinge is the sort that allows a panel or door to swing through 180 degrees, aligning itself flat against an adjacent surface. It is particularly useful for display purposes, especially if you wish to conceal (or reveal) images as part of a presentation.

But in thinking about the way that politicians view the built environment, the Parliament hinge might also be thought of as a metaphor: now you see it, now you don’t. It is about wilful forgetting, the sort of amnesia which the ordinary public would think of as a problem, but which politicians seem to regard as a necessary condition.

No sooner are we told that localism is all-important than we hear that local views don’t count if they interfere with the ‘growth agenda’. One year it is established policy that new runways at Heathrow are off the agenda. The next year a cabinet minister supporting that view is removed as secretary of state for transport because that old policy is so not what we need today.

The idea of an estuary airport is dismissed as a new-fangled Johnsonian fantasy when it was London and government policy in the 1970s, although opposed by important democratic institutions like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

For three decades we were told that minimum space standards for new public housing were an anti-market depressant, preventing house-builders from giving us wonderfully generous new private homes. Now we accept that the consequence was the building of low-standard hutches, and that space standards are a social good, not just for London but across the country.

None of this is about one political party or another. All are prepared to talk rubbish if they think it will play to the electorate (cf the green belt debate). The worst recent example of unprincipled opposition to new housing I have come across personally involved LibDems and the unscrupulous use of judicial review in Tottenham’s Seven Sisters, wrongly claiming they were working for the common good.

In the world of the built environment, amnesia is ubiquitous. For years New Labour banged on about the importance of ‘place’. It informed policies trumpeted by everyone from English Heritage to the Homes and Communities Agency, the latter an organisation that gained importance in inverse proportion to its success, i.e. actually delivering homes where they were needed.

But guess what was important to the recent Coalition, especially after the Farrell Review of Architecture?

That’s right, ‘place’! Out go fuddyduddy design reviews in favour of ‘place reviews’, as though design reviews never discussed place. That will have come as news to those of us who reviewed, for example, the Olympic park, Stratford City, King’s Cross et al. This sort of desperate attempt to pretend that no one has ever thought about the blindingly obvious until some new political initiative sets a review in motion is typical of the political class. If the other side thought of it, it doesn’t count. If they didn’t implement something it was laziness.

If they tried and failed, they were a disaster.

Anyone who has experienced government policy for more than

a year or so will have noticed that what is really consistent about our politicians and the creation of homes, workspaces, schools, hospitals and cities is the following: by and large hardly anyone can name the last three ministers for construction or housing.

Nobody can remember if they made any impact whatsoever. Hardly any of them last for more than 18 months.

In addition, responsibility for the urban environment is spread so widely that it is almost impossible to give credit, or aim brickbats, at any particular government department. Might it be Communities & Local Government (housing and planning); BiS (construction, cities); DCMS (heritage and architecture); Cabinet Office (property and regeneration, actually rather good); Treasury (budgets) and so on. As Lord Beaverbrook used to enquire of the Daily Express night desk, ‘Who is in charge of the clattering train?’

With the new administration are responsibilities likely to be any more focused? Probably not, we will wait and see. Where we live, work and play will always come a poor third to other considerations in the minds of the great and the good in Whitehall and Westminster. But they will be bound to have exciting initiatives – which we have all seen before.

Now you see it, now you don’t.

The hinge will be in full swing!

Paul Finch OBE is programme director of the World Architecture Festival, deputy chair of the Design Council and editorial director of the Architectural Review and Architects’ Journal.

Editor’s introduction My | AoU owninview Action is... 53

Urban idiocy

Brilliant ideas that ruined our cities Part two: secured by design Urban idiocy refers to situations where planners and other urban professions do stupid things with good intentions.

The potential for idiocy is at its greatest when the issues are emotive like children’s safety, road deaths, public health, sustainability or...crime.

In the late 1990s someone I knew in the US went to a lecture by a policeman from West Yorkshire doing a tour of American cities. He was telling audiences that everything they had been told about new urbanism in the UK was wrong. The schemes that had been held up as good examples were suffering high levels of crime compared to more suburban design solutions that had been much more effective. This was just one shot in a battle between urban designers and the police that flared-up sporadically throughout the 1990s (that sounds much more dramatic than it was – urbanists have never actually rioted to my knowledge).

Secured by Design is an awards scheme that seeks to make new development in the UK more crime-resistant. It was developed in 1989 by police forces in England and is now run by ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers).

There are just over 300 police officers in the UK responsible for Secured

by Design (often called architectural liaison officers) including 52 in the Met who comment on almost 800 schemes in London every year. These schemes are reviewed as part of the planning process with a view to making new development more resilient to crime.

Developers who follow the guidelines receive a Secured by Design certificate.

The early guidelines focused largely on standards for door and window security and research has shown that they had a significant impact on reducing burglary rates. But then a little later the guidelines were expanded to cover urban planning – which is where the problems started.

Secured by Design was originally targeted at reducing burglary – rather than other forms of crime. The guidelines were developed from research into environmental criminology and theories of offender decision-making and drew heavily on the work of Oscar

Newman in the US and Alice Coleman in the UK who developed the concept of defensible space. This suggests that all space within urban areas should have a defined ownership, purpose and role so that local people feel able to take responsibility for it, challenge antisocial behaviour etc... The guidelines include natural surveillance – ensuring that all space is overlooked by the surrounding buildings. They also cover management, based on the broken window theory that suggests that a failure to tackle small-scale issues make areas vulnerable to more serious crime. So far so uncontentious.

The problem comes with the guidelines relating to access. Here, they state that there should be ‘a minimum number of access and egress points in an attempt to avoid unnecessary entrance into the estate by non-residents and potential offenders’ (it does not explain why non-residents who don’t harbour bad intentions should be kept out). This is clearly at odds with the urban design principle of permeability and seems to endorse the idea of gated communities.

The idiocy of this becomes clear if you try and explain to the residents of any housing estate that they should reduce the access and egress points to their estate – preferably to a single point.

They will see it as a strategy to help the police catch offenders and tell you it may reduce burglaries but it will mean that a single gang of kids can effectively control the entire estate. It is a strategy that risks making their estate a no-go area for law abiding citizens while doing little to deter criminals who probably live there in any case. It is a design concept based on the suburban cul-de-sac that makes no sense at all in urban areas.

Yes but what about the statistics?

Research by Teedon and Reid in Glasgow in 2009 showed a 61% reduction in burglaries on estates where the guidelines had been followed, compared to 17% where they had not. On reviewing the research Rachel Armitage and Leanne Monchuk of Huddersfield University found seven studies that supported the assertion that reducing permeability caused a fall in crime and only four studies that found the opposite (all four connected to Bill

54 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

Hillier’s work). Maybe the idiots in this scenario really are the urbanists who dogmatically stick to the mantra of permeability in the face of the evidence.

However, the original sources do not advocate single points of access.

Newman argues the benefits of fine-grained perimeter blocks while Colemen goes as far as to state that ‘as cul-de-sacs have multiplied so have deaths and serious injuries to child pedestrians’ and recommends traditional street plans. The problem is that evidence is difficult to pin down. Many of the new urbanism schemes criticised in the American lectures do still have relatively high levels of crime, but then again many of them are located in inner cities. It may also be true that areas with lower levels of crime tend to be cul-de-sacs but then again they are in the suburbs. The reality is that high crime areas are those where there are a lot of offenders. Sensible as it might be for a burglar to get a bus to a more affluent area to ply their trade, in reality they rarely travel far.

So while Secured by Design principles may lower levels of burglary, we don’t know how much of this is due to permeability and how much to better surveillance, stronger locks, or indeed to an overall improvement in the reputation of the area following the works. We should not fall into the trap of saying we should optimise one issue like burglary, however important it might be, at the expense of all the others. Secured by Design has many good points but like so many forms of urban idiocy its proponents bring to it their own agendas about the ideal city; they misinterpret the original research while asking us to accept a whole package of measures and then accuse those who disagree with them of being irresponsible.

Many architectural liaison officers are indeed happy to work with urban design principles and play an important part in the planning process. However, unlike other forms of urban idiocy that have been confined to history, the Secured by Design guidelines have not been changed and every now and again the arguments reemerge.

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56 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

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…and a final thought…

The arts of inhabitation – Learning to learn from place part III

David Porter, a regular visitor to China, reflects on what urban life in the Far East has to teach us about place and the art of inhabitation.

I am lucky enough to be learning from place in China as an observer of daily life – of what we in Europe would call ‘public space’. As with pretty well everything in China, this has set me thinking, or rather, set me re-thinking what I thought I knew about place and people and, as a foreigner, questioning what it means to have a sense of belonging.

Early in my long-distance commute I paid a visit to the artist and activist Ai Weiwei. I asked him about public space in China and wish I hadn’t.

“There is no public space in China!

What you are talking about is not public space at all…there can be no public space in China until there is political change!” Which ended that part of our conversation.

However, he made me look much harder and, over the two years since that meeting, I’ve become a much more inquisitive observer of urban life in China. I began to realise that what we call a ‘sense of belonging’ cannot be taken for granted. It does not come naturally, but is an acquired skill. It is not just we urbanists who learn from place – everyone learns from place.

Perhaps there is something in what the architects Alison and Peter Smithson called ‘the arts of inhabitation’: arts that are learned skills. China, being wonderfully ‘out of sync’ with home, reveals these arts being learned, practiced and refined on a daily basis.

When I first visited the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Art in 2002 it had just moved into a new campus on what felt like the edge of town. These days it is no longer on the edge but part of a huge

new city quarter, mainly 25 stories high, with shopping malls, offices and a huge new building by Zaha Hadid – the works. My neighbourhood predates this expansion, built in the 1980s as five-storey social housing blocks with landscaped areas between. On a sunny day, it looks quite Scandinavian.

Its great attraction for me is its street life, particularly the street market I walk through on my short journey to work. You can buy pretty much anything here: live fish, an extraordinary range of vegetables, fruits, nuts and eggs, ‘street food’, and songbirds. Even in the depths of winter workmen sit out in groups on low stools to share food and conversation or play cards.

Looking more closely I realised the landscaped areas are the home to patches of beans, rabbit hutches and chickens coops. Looking harder I see that ground-floor living rooms have been stripped out and that shops, cafes and workshops have been chopped into the structure. The building has adapted surprisingly well.

I have realised that my neighbours have learned to live simultaneously with extreme modernity and the semi-medieval, between hyper-urban and deeply rural. As children they had learned the ‘arts of inhabitation’ appropriate to their village, then adapted their public behaviour to live here, in the same way as they have adapted the structure of their homes. They have become literally ‘street-wise’.

What will happen in another generation when their children, whom I pass at the school gate, have grown up? Will they, as the ‘smartphone generation’, desert these streets just as we deserted ours when we stopped multi-occupying, got decent heating and television?

D Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

Certainly the smartphone is having a radical impact on how people inhabit the more conventionally photogenic parts of China. I was in a new park in central Shanghai in the autumn and watched a group of young children playing with fallen leaves. On closer inspection I realised this was an event staged by their parents. Around the circle of small children was a wider circle of parents, each filming the group with their phones, encouraging their offspring to throw up the leaves as if re-enacting an advertisement for happy families. The mini-movies will be immediately shared via ‘We Chat’ among the parent’s digital communities and probably their children’s too. The beautifully designed urban square slips from being a public space and instead becomes the backcloth for an event that, digitally shared, becomes private and displaced.

At home we have been recolonising our own cities by learning (or relearning) how to enjoy them, rediscovering inhabitation as an art.

We too have witnessed great changes and recognise, at last, that cities are not fixed in time. As they change, each generation has to relearn for itself the ‘arts of inhabitation’. We adjust the places to suit us, but we also adjust our patterns of behaviour – the arts of inhabitation operate both ways.

And as my home, London, leads the way in becoming more and more like a Chinese city, maybe we should be looking harder at how we are adjusting to accommodate these changes? There are changes happening at home, but maybe we are blinded by our own sense of belonging, and cannot yet see them?

Professor David Porter AoU is professor of architecture at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing