AoU Journal 12: Does size matter?

Here & Now

AoU Journal No. 12 Winter 2018 ISSN 2058-9123 ÂŁ7

Cities: does size matter?

Contemporary sustainable urbanism Can big cities be healthier and happier?

Cities on the rise: Congress 2018 recap Interview: Immy Kaur, Impact Hub Birmingham

Contents

Front cover image: Imandeep Kaur © Thom Bartley

1 Welcome 2 Editorial 3 The Academy in action 8 Resourcing smarter housing

growth in the UK

Nicholas Falk AoU shares

ways to improve housing quality 11

Isolating loneliness and what to do about it

Harry Knibb AoU on how we can tackle loneliness with good urbanism

14

Housing: let’s learn from Europe European solutions to address the housing crisis, by Tony Reddy AoU

Editorial team Alastair Blyth (Editor) Delano Bart-Stewart Steven Bee Stephen Gallagher Emeka Efe Osaji Frank McDonald David Rudlin Lucy Sykes Timothy White Design template 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

17 Designing for urban childhoods

Sam Williams on shaping

liveable and sustainable

cities that are child-friendly 20

Golden Lane Estate: A Great Neighbourhood under pressure Resident, Jacqueline Swanson, discusses the challenges in sustaining a mixed estate in one of London’s prime locations

23 Retrofitting the Kruschevka

Lucy Wallwork and Nazaket

Azimli take a look at the

iconic Soviet-era housing blocks

26

Cities: does size matter? ...in focus

27

Contemporary sustainable urbanism Husam Al Waer AoU shares learning from the recent ‘Contemporary Approaches to Sustainability in European Cities’ seminar in Dundee

33

From Auckland to Busan George Weeks compares and contrasts the second cities of New Zealand and South Korea

36 The town and the city

Francis Clay asks whether

big cities can be happier and healthier

39

Cities on the rise Tony Reddy AoU provides an overview of a successful Congress in Cork

42 In conversation with…

Imandeep Kaur

After an inspiring talk at

Congress, Steven Bee AoU

chats to the co-founder and

director of Impact Hub Birmingham 46

My place People with places that are significant in their lives

49

Space for great places!

A gallery of ideas and reflections on great places

53

Urban idiocy Brilliant but flawed ideas for the city

54

My own view is...

Urban development doesn’t need to cost the earth, by Claudia Murray AoU

56 Space Place Life

The Academy’s 15 Great

Places for 2019, featuring

poems by Ian McMillan,

drawings by David Rudlin

AoU and figure grounds by Lathams 72

Academicians and Young Urbanists Who we are

The Academy of Urbanism is a politically independent, not-for-profit organisation that brings together both the current and next generation of urban leaders, thinkers and practitioners. Our mission is to recognise, encourage and celebrate great places across the UK, Europe and beyond, and the people and organisations that create and sustain them.

Welcome

Join the Academy Become an Academician, Young Urbanist, Member or Group Member at academyofurbanism.org.uk/ membership

Academy Team Linda Gledstone Director of Operations Stephen Gallagher Director of Engagement Delano Bart-Stewart Marketing & Communications Manager Mina Manik Membership Co-ordinator Julie Plichon Young Urbanist Co-ordinator Jason Monaghan Accounts

This issue asks ‘does size matter?’ and it certainly seems to be the case that many cities worry about their size. There is a great article by John Elledge in CityMetric from September 2015 forensically investigating the claim that Sheffield is England’s third largest city. The conclusion is that it may be the third largest local authority but depending on which measure you use it is either the 6th, 7th or 10th largest city in the UK. The problem is that it is so hard to work out how large cities are. The article looks at the size ranking of Britain’s cities based on local authority boundaries, continuous urban area, primary urban area and metropolitan urban area each producing a completely different list. However, there are conclusions that can be drawn; London is our only mega city and the article suggests that we have two second cities Manchester, Birmingham (Leeds without Bradford is excluded), five major cities, Leeds, Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle and Sheffield and ten, or so, ‘large’ cities (even if by world standards they are small).

I’m not sure how it is possible to have two second cities – my home city of Manchester would certainly say that it’s second to no-one! The reality is that Britain doesn’t have a second city as most other countries do. There is a thing called Zipf’s law for cities which states that in most of the countries the second city is half the size of the largest city, the third, a third of the size, the fourth a quarter and so on. If you map this on the countries of the world it’s remarkable how well it holds up, except in the UK where we have some how mislaid our second city of 4-5 million – which was careless.

However as we heard at our Congress in Cork (urban area population around 400,000), and at our recent event in Dundee (237,000), we should probably stop worrying about size. You don’t have to have millions of people to be a thriving, exciting, economically vibrant city. Cork is all of this despite its size and its location on the far western edge of Europe. It has an incredibly lively city centre, a strong economy based on tech companies like Apple and a growing population. Dundee is seeing a similar transformation capitalising on the opening of the V&A museum. The event in Dundee organised by the Academy’s emerging Scottish chapter included presentations from Ljubljana (537,000), Aarhus (340,000), Bilbao (one million) and Freiburg (230,000) all small cities that have created a strong sense of urban vitality and growth. We can add other examples from our recent Urbanism Awards such as Montpellier (590,000), Nantes (900,000), Donostia/San Sebastián (186,000) and Eindhoven (755,000) where we will be for Congress next year.

The Academy of Urbanism 70 Cowcross Street London EC1M 6EJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 20 7251 8777 academyofurbanism.org.uk @theAoU Join The Academy of Urbanism on LinkedIn, Facebook and Flickr

The residents of mega cities like London, Paris and Madrid may look down on what they consider to be these provincial backwaters, but the Academy’s experience in recent years is that really good small cities can have the best of both worlds. They are large enough to create an urban buzz and to be attractive to creative people and companies but small enough to be manageable and to engender a sense of community and belonging that is missing in really big cities. The ingredient that makes this possible is ‘urbanism’ and it is something that we wanted to explore in this issue of Here and Now. Size really doesn’t matter, urbanism can exist at all scales and the particular variety found in small cities can be special indeed.

David Rudlin AoU Chair

Chair’s introduction 1

Support the Academy Sponsor one or more of our programmes of developing, learning, partnering and disseminating. Please contact Linda Gledstone on +44 (0) 20 7251 8777.

Editorial

Principal Sponsor Grosvenor Core Sponsors Alan Baxter Barton Willmore Lewis Hubbard Engineering Muir Group Awards Sponsors JTP Mayfields Savills U+I Event Sponsors Perkins+Will Scottish Government Sustrans Scotland Young Urbanist Sponsors Space Syntax Foster + Partners 2018 Congress Principal Sponsor BAM Ireland 2018 Congress Sponsors Arup Bus Éireann Clarendon Cork Chamber of Commerce Cork City Council Crawford Art Gallery GoBé Irish Rail JCD Nano Nagle Place O’Callaghan Properties O’Flynn Group Port of Cork Reddy Architecture+Urbanism Scott Tallon Walker Tower Holdings Group

And there’s yet another report on Britain’s housing ‘crisis’. What seems striking about the government’s recent briefing paper on tackling the under-supply of housing is that it doesn’t come up with a straightforward practical solution. As Nicholas Falk AoU suggests in his piece in this issue, despite so many reports there are so few obvious practical solutions. “We can learn most from the European cities,” he says, and offers an action plan and frameworks for balanced incremental development.

Tony Reddy AoU makes a similar point looking at what the UK and Ireland may learn from European countries, pointing out that: “… cities are more affordable and function better in countries where people respect each other more, and where human values are embodied in legislation.” This itself touches on a deeper agenda for urbanism picked up

by Harry Knibb AoU, who calls for using better urbanism as part of the solution to tackle loneliness experienced by nine million people in the UK. Designing cities for children, the subject of a workshop organised by Sam Williams at the AoU Congress draws on an issue that is not so often addressed, but gaining interest from the likes of the development banks as they connect education and the city as a learning environment.

One of Britain’s iconic neighbourhoods, the Golden Lane Estate in London, built in the 1950s, narrowly lost out on winning the Academy’s Great Neighbourhood award.

Jacqueline Swanson in her piece notes that it is exceptional in its neighbourliness, and is an example of how other parts of London and indeed other cities could be restored.

Lucy Wallwork and Nazaket Azimli pick up on another reminder of ‘50s housing, the Krushchevkas, which still dominate the skyline of some now former-Soviet cities, and asks whether these prefabricated buildings need to be destroyed.

However we approach urban development though, Claudia Murray AoU argues that in her own view “urban development doesn’t need to cost the earth”. She observes examples of co-management techniques that improve urban green-blue ecosystems, citing how Europe is demonstrating that collaboration is possible not only at regional level but also across country borders.

Alastair Blyth AoU Editor

Supporters in kind Jas Atwal Associates Lathams London Festival of Architecture Monocle Place Images Prentis & Co. RIAI RTPI Scotland Space Syntax URBED Wolfstrome

2 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

The Academy in action!

The Academy has explored mid-sized cities over the last six months, hosting a seminar in Dundee to examine contemporary approaches to sustainability in some of our past European City of the Year finalists. Looking into positive city region growth, Congress arrived in Cork, and a post-Congress legacy visit fedback lessons learned and thoughts on a way forward for the Irish city in transition.

The post-industrial theme of this year’s awards took us to three very different cities; Nantes, Zurich and Leipzig; whilst the Young Urbanists cycled from Freiburg to Strasbourg, and talked micro-activation in Glasgow.

If you have an idea for an event or activity the Academy should be focusing on, contact Stephen Gallagher, director of engagement: sg@academyofurbanism.org.uk

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action 3

© David Kennedy A oU – placeimages.co.uk

CONGRESS XIII: CITIES ON THE RISE After a successful Congress in Aarhus, The Academy took their flagship conference to another thriving European second city. Over an unusually hot four days in Cork, 275 delegates gathered to study the phenomenon of growing mid-sized cities in a city facing the opportunities and challenges such growth comes to bring.

Using a combination of presentations, workshops, walking and cycling tours, guests were provided a theoretical and material understanding of Cork, as well as an insight to the experiences of managing positive transformation in cities such as Bilbao and Hamburg.

Bus tours to the County Cork towns of Midleton and Cobh added context for the wider region.

Richard Florida, renowned urbanist and author, delivered the keynote address to further illustrate what he deems the ‘new urban crisis’ and how to confront growth without deepening inequality, gentrification and unaffordability. For a more detailed recap of the event, visit page 39.

POST-CONGRESS LEGACY VISIT Following this year’s Congress in Cork, our chair, David Rudlin AoU and fellow directors Jas Atwal AoU, Kevin Murray AoU and Tony Reddy AoU returned to the city in October, to share feedback and some thoughts on the way forward for Cork.

Three key sessions were held with: 1. The chief executive and senior management team at Cork City Council 2. CORE – a city centre partnership group, that includes local businesses, the Chamber of Commerce, Cork Business Association, city councillors and officers, and many of the sponsors, supporters and partners at Congress, including BAM Ireland, Arup, Scott Tallon Walker, Crawford Art Gallery, Nano Nagle Place and the River Lee Hotel

followed by a facilitated discussion.

The directors relayed some of the many accolades received from Congress speakers, guests and delegates, such as:

social effects/benefits need to be balanced whereby housing and facilities are affordable and accessible for all

“Cork seemed such a youthful exciting city, which I had not expected. The level of understanding of its potential gained from the event was very strong. The new thinking on streets and creative regeneration from speakers was inspirational”

5. Vehicle dominated traffic and air quality are huge risk areas – so need proactive strategies for improvement from outset – with change of priorities focusing on quality of life for all and judicious ‘placemaking’ infrastructure investment

“Cork is at a turning point, they have hopefully learned from past mistakes and how to go about tackling their redevelopment opportunities. It’s not just about good buildings and places – the positivity of the people who live there make a big impact”

6. Broad social and cultural inclusion is needed by different mechanisms in the discourse about vision, direction and then also decision making around detailed plans for actual change

“While each place is individual, there are key concepts to follow for successful urban environments and the communities in which they are created/ developed”

7. An enlightened, co-production form of leadership is required across politics and the many communities of interest – must be inclusive, inter generational and cross-cultural

Key themes we took from Congress to feed back to Cork:

8. Benchmarking success against key milestones and comparator places is a useful way to raise aspirations and track progress against vision

1. Major future urban growth needs to be planned to accommodate heritage and distinctive place identity/design and address implications of climate change 2. An outward-looking, international perspective needs to be complimented by Cork-specific identity, culture and ‘feel’ – keeping the place ‘special’

3. The wider public, including residents and members of community and civic groups

3. Demographic/development growth should not be in form of massive suburban sprawl – needs urbanistic (European scale) focus and transit-based concentration and connections

The format of the sessions was a short presentation by the AoU directors,

4. Economic growth is a necessary key driver, but the physical and

4 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 8 || Autumn Winter 2018 2016

9. Lots of small things done well – can have a massive cumulative impact By implication, the old ways of doing things will not suffice in addressing the new conditions for Cork city and its hinterland; a new culture and way of thinking and working together is needed.

There was a great turnout at the sessions and much support and aspiration to achieve these stepchanges to improve Cork for all.

Here’s to the Academy supporting Cork in coming years and supporting its progress.

URBANISM AWARDS ASSESSMENT VISITS: CITIES The Academy’s Urbanism Awards assessment visits are integral to the overall aim of Learning from Place and the annual Awards Ceremony is one of the highlights. In assessing cities, towns, neighbourhoods, streets and places, teams need to adopt a mindset that relates to the differing scales of these urban forms. Unlike the other awards, the cities category gives us a chance to look outside the UK & Ireland; and in recent years most finalists have been in mainland Europe.

Starting last year, the Urbanism Awards selection process has benefitted from a new structure whereby themes, such as ‘post-war’ in 2017 and ‘post-industrial’ in 2018, have been chosen. This narrows down the possible choices, makes it easier for comparisons to be made between otherwise diverse places that are addressing similar challenges, and broadens the range of candidates to include second- or third-tier cities that might otherwise be overlooked.

extensive bicycle and pedestrian network. We learned that high living costs are offset by high wages – even low-skilled workers earn around €30 per hour – so it’s mainly visitors like us who experience mostly mouthwatering food at often eye-watering prices!

The city is compact, cultured, scores highly on sustainability and waste management and its local green spaces are complemented by picturesque foot/cycle paths alongside rivers where swimming is a popular pastime. There are also good connections into the surrounding hills, set off by the enticing backdrop of the snow-clad Alps.

We were so impressed by Zurich’s achievements that when we considered Leipzig with its reputation for polluting industries and a turbulent history from WWII to German reunification, we were doubtful that it could match up.

During that period, Leipzig’s population had decreased from 750,000 to 590,000 due to loss of employment, and had changed from being a thriving to a shrinking city.

Foreign languages, currencies, timezones, transport systems and shop opening times all need to be taken on board, and the visits are interesting hybrids of work and holiday that include the pleasure both of spending several days together with colleagues one knows well and getting to know others for the first time.

But, having been greeted by the magnificence of the railway station and wandering through the car-free city centre’s beautifully refurbished streets, squares and delightful passageways, we began to realise that, in its very different way, Leipzig’s achievement was every bit as praiseworthy as Zurich’s.

Conversations consist of a mixture of urban-design-speak, when, where and what to eat and how to get to the next meeting, all punctuated by constant forays to take countless photos of whatever catches the eye. Fortunately, local guides are patient cat-herders.

Academicians attending their first overseas assessment visit are usually instant converts to the experience of exploring a new place with like-minded companions and sharing the challenge of working out what makes the places special and how the lessons-learned could be applicable elsewhere. This year’s visits were to Nantes, Zurich and Leipzig. On a combined trip in the last week of August, nine of us attended the Zurich assessment and eight were in Leipzig. Five of us attended both cities, and three had also been in Nantes.

In the city hall we were given excellent presentations about how Leipzig had turned its fortunes around in recent years, through an integrated strategy of economic, social and environmental initiatives. Having been shown around the compact, walkable city centre we took trams and buses to former suburbs such as Plagwitz and Grünau, which are being transformed into sustainable, liveable neighbourhoods.

These measures are proving attractive both to former Leipzig residents and

people from further afield, and the city is nurturing the regeneration process with great care.

As we relaxed in a 17th century coffee shop, mulling over the relative strengths of the two cities we’d been visiting, a few of our team chipped in with glowing reports of their experience a month earlier, assessing Nantes. This was a further gamechanger, making us realise that, for quite different reasons, there was a case for all three places to win European City of the Year!

Fred London AoU is a partner at JTP and deputy lead assessor for our visits to Leipzig and Zurich

Zurich

Leipzig

Our visit fulfilled all expectations of Zurich as one of the world’s most liveable cities, with well-managed housing strategies, excellent connectivity based on admirable, ‘classless’ public transport and an

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action 5

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO SUSTAINABILITY IN EUROPEAN CITIES

FROM MASTERPLAN TO MICRO ACTIVATION – GLASGOW APPROACH TO REGENERATION

In partnership with the University of Dundee, the Academy hosted a seminar to consider the application of contemporary strategies to make medium-sized cities, like Dundee, more sustainable in environmental, socio-economic and cultural terms.

Inspirations were drawn from key representatives of previous European City of the Year finalists. This included; Stephen Willacy AoU, city architect of Aarhus, Asier Abaunza AoU of Bilbao City Council, Liljana Jankovič Grobelšek, head of the planning office at City of Ljubljana and Freiburg’s former director of city planning, Prof Wulf Daseking AoU. Prof Ian Gilzean AoU, chief architect at Scottish Government, provided additional input and a UK perspective.

Following the seminar in Dundee, the Young Urbanists headed to Glasgow.

The event was organised by Young Urbanists Heather Claridge and Martin Fleischmann.

The seminar coincided with the opening of the V&A Dundee and delegates having the opportunity to visit the newly built cultural attraction.

Visit page 27 for the full event report.

Prof Brian Evans AoU, director of the Urban Lab at Glasgow School of Art, gave the group an introduction to Glasgow’s historical context and current challenge of creating a compact city from outer to inner edge.

The morning session focused on the ‘micro-activation’ element, where city planners become embedded ‘urban pioneers’, creating conditions for development along the Canal Corridor.

Heather Claridge, principal planner at Glasgow City Council and Rob Morrison from Agile City, explained how the Canal Corridor is a place of experimentation and flexible urbanism that actually delivers strategic projects incorporating housing, urban green space, workspace and connectivity.

Clockwise from the right: Young Urbanists cycle trip; Glasgow seminar Delegates trip to V&A Dundee; Sustainability in European Cities seminar

6 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 8 || Autumn Winter 2018 2016

The afternoon session examined the ‘masterplan’ element of Glasgow regeneration, taking the group to the town centre and Merchant City, followed by a visit to the Gorbals and Laurieston Housing regeneration project to the south of the city. Reflecting on the Gorbals and Laurieston, Paul Stallan, director at Stallan-Brand Architects and artist Peter McCaughey explained the incremental and community focused approach to the housing masterplan – bearing in mind that good urbanism will not solve by itself the complex needs the city faces.

BIKING BURG TO BOURG: YU CYCLE TRIP The Young Urbanists annual cycling trip took a group of ten to Freiburg and Strasbourg, two historic European cities that made a conscious decision to develop in a sustainable fashion and which are now reaping the rewards.

Starting in Freiburg, the group discovered how the city has positioned itself as a ‘green city’ for the last 30

years. The group cycled through the internationally acclaimed car-free, selfbuild neighbourhood of Vauban, the low traffic neighbourhood of Rieselfeld with architect Marco Bellini, and followed city planners Pieter Van Der Kooij and Clement Greiner on a tour of Freiburg’s latest densification projects.

After a 90km cycle ride along the Rhine and lovely canals, the group settled in Strasbourg, which is arguably the panEuropean city with bridges to Germany.

Faced with perpetual traffic jams in the 1980s, Strasbourg set about developing a car-free city, with the development of new tramways, seamlessly integrated into the historic centre. Strasbourg has the highest cycle modal share in France (14 per cent) and ranks fourth on the 2017 Copenhagenize Index. The group cycled with Jean-Marc Biry, director of the local urbanism and architecture agency, discussed transforming Strasbourg’s rivers for leisure with young deputy mayor Jean-Baptiste Gernet, and visited a self-built housing community, Eco-Logis.

LEADERSHIP IN PLACE: GROSVENOR STUDY VISITS The Academy continues its series of learning journeys to provide the Grosvenor team with case studies of examples of effective leadership and good urbanism. In June, the team visited Copenhagen where we learned about the city’s climate adaption strategy and harbour development. The visit consisted of tours of Nordhavn, Superkilen, Amager Vest and an additional visit to Malmö’s Western Habour. In Milton Keynes, the group learned about local governance and civic leadership, and visited the new town’s housing regeneration areas and commercial centre. The group ventured to Bilbao, in October, where they studied the transformation of the city and its waterfront, before visiting the Zorrotzaurre regeneration zone.

BRISTOL SHORT TALKS SERIES Bristol is a great place to encourage debates about urban issues. There are many people engaged and interested in what is happening to urban areas in the South West and there is a high concentration of professionals for such a small city.

A small team of Academicians, including Andrew Gibbins AoU and Richard Guise AoU, was brought together by myself as regional convenor. During a free-ranging discussion we managed to produce a wide-ranging list of urban issues to attract our keen audience.

The topics included: ‘Liveable neighbourhoods’ with Richard Guise speaking about his work with communities in preparing character assessments and Alice Ferguson, founder and director of ‘Playing Out’.

‘Shared-space places: and driverless transport; the future’ with Ben Hamilton-Baillie of H-B Associates and Phil Parker AoU of Transport Planning Associates who gave contrasting talks about future transport challenges and practical schemes implemented in the region that go some way to address these challenges.

‘Small-scale urbanism; post-industrial towns in the South West’ involved Emeritus Professor Hugh Barton AoU speaking from a planner’s viewpoint about the key moves in the regeneration of Stroud, and Pippa Goldfinger AoU, a town councillor, speaking about the wide range of rapid changes being implemented in Frome.

Both towns are former Great Town Award recipients.

‘Meanwhile uses: Catalysts for change’ heard Shankari Raj of Nudge Group speaking about her architectural work in temporary workplaces and other significant interventions; Ruth Essex, a former city council officer, spoke about the acceleration of positive change brought about mainly by arts interventions such as ‘See No Evil’, the street art festival that put Bristol on the world map in the field.

Grosvenor Study visits to Copenhagen and Milton Keynes

‘Coastal towns in the 21st century’ will take place on 3 December with speakers from Penzance and Westonsuper-Mare.

Geoff Haslam AoU, South West convenor

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action 7

Resourcing smarter housing growth in the UK The profusion of reports and recommendations on how to ‘fix’ the UK’s broken housing market, and double housing output makes it hard to see a practical solution.

Following up The Academy of Urbanism’s response to the Housing White Paper, which focuses on improving quality, Nicholas Falk AoU illustrates what is possible, given the will1 .

Trumpington , Cambridge

The idea for ‘Smarter Urbanisation’ is to develop places that are readily connected without a car, with a diverse community, a distinctive character, and measures for climate-proofing.

These are the four themes of the Cambridgeshire Quality Charter for Growth, and the results are now visible in the Southern Fringe of Cambridge around Trumpington, or the stunning development by the University at Eddington.

But how do we replicate quality beyond isolated experiments and go to scale, especially in areas where the housing market is far from buoyant, such as Stoke or Wisbech, and what should the government be focusing on?

Inspiration Many of the most inspiring solutions have been documented in The Academy of Urbanism’s European City of the Year award. They include not only German speaking cities such as Aspern Seesdadt in Vienna or Rieselfeld in Freiburg (near the border with Basle in Switzerland), which draw many visitors, but also the hundred or so urban extensions developed in the Dutch VINEX programme such as in Eindhoven (the site of the 2019 AoU Congress).

Then there are the Southern French ‘stars’ such as Montpellier or Bordeaux, and the extraordinary regeneration successes of the Basque cities of Bilbao and San Sebastián in Northern Spain.

But we could also learn from ‘smart’

cities elsewhere such as Singapore or Portland, Oregon. The challenge in all cases is to redirect the economic forces that have produced unacceptable disparities of wealth, congestion, and incidentally made England one of the fattest countries in Europe, to create smarter or more intelligent forms of growth.

The technical solutions are quite easy to specify. What is difficult is securing collaboration between different professions and sectors over time. I have called this the ABC of Smarter Growth – Ambition, Brokerage and, above all, Continuity – over the 15 or 20 years it takes to build new settlements in a report based on case studies2.

The secret is finding fresh sources of money or capital by unlocking neglected assets, such as waterways or old buildings and joining forces with others, such as universities or community initiatives.

2. How to assemble and prepare land in locations where there is both the potential demand and infrastructure capacity, existing or planned (as in Warrington and Ancoats in the North, or Peterborough and London Docklands in the South)?

3. How to mobilise long-term and patient finance to install the local infrastructure that would open up sites for a diversity of builders (as local authorities, such as Barking, are starting to do again)?

4. How to fund and organise the stewardship that is essential to creating and maintaining communities with a mix of people of all ages, incomes and ethnic backgrounds (as in Letchworth Garden City and some development trusts, such as Coin Street)?

Better pathways

Unresolved issues What the success stories have in common, and what we in the UK have largely lost, comes down to four politically contentious but vital issues where new capacity and institutions are required: 1. How to revive strategic planning to determine where, and where not, growth (or regeneration) should be focused? The UK did this after the Second World War with New Towns and Comprehensive Development Areas.

8 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 8 | | Autumn Winter 2018 2016

We can learn most from the European cities that have largely avoided house price inflation, as the following examples illustrate: • In Germany you can learn not just from leading university cities, such as Freiburg and Tubingen that have pioneered cooperative approaches to development (BauGruppen), but also from the cities that have suffered most from industrial decline, such as Dortmund (with the restoration of damaged land in Emscher Park), or in the East German city Leipzig

Top: Ørestad, Copenhagen © News Oresund / Flickr Right: Port Marianne, Montpellier

(through its policy of Integrated Urban Development and the Leipzig Charter published in 2007). There, local authorities, not private landowners or developers, take the lead in almost all cases, pooling land in multiple ownerships and even flooding former open cast coal mines to create a lake district.

• In The Netherlands you can see how the aims of Labour’s Sustainable Communities Plan were successfully implemented in building almost a hundred VINEX extensions to existing towns with populations of over 100,000. The Dutch Building Rights or First Choice system enabled local authorities to pool land and then secure a diversity of house builders, including around 30% affordable housing, some of which is for sale on condition that any uplift in values is shared with the local authority. Again, control over land has been key.

• In France a straightforward planning system enables cities to grow around rapid transit lines, as in Port Marianne in Montpellier, or to regenerate under-used areas, using ZACs (Zones d’Aménagement Concerté). Local authorities are backed up by the huge state investment bank, Caisse des Dépôts, which employs some 33,000 experts and finances much of France’s social housing. Interestingly deposits for buying a house help provide the bank’s capital. French cities also benefit from the Aménagement

Transport, a charge on the payrolls of those employing more than ten. This helps explain why so many towns and cities have built trams and, as in Nantes, used them as the spines of new urban extensions.

• In Scandinavia many of the best examples of saving energy and water are due to local authority leadership, which includes acquiring land on the edge, as in Aarhus in Denmark or former military land as in Ørestad in Copenhagen. Old estates and new settlements have been developed at the same time, as in the port city of Malmö in Sweden. Cooperatives play a major role in managing ‘intentional communities’, as those who went to the AoU Congress in Aarhus may have experienced, and are particularly important in overcoming isolation among older people or new immigrants.

All the examples mentioned here have had to reinvent themselves.

For example, people forget that Copenhagen lost industry and suffered high unemployment before a farsighted municipal engineer started to take space away from cars, and restore civic pride. Where over a third of people cycle to work, people are not only happier and healthier, but they save money too. As Britain starts to rethink its role in the world economy, smarter urbanisation could hold the key.

Regaining our common wealth Progress should be judged not by a few architectural icons but by the transformation of whole areas, attracting people to live in areas that were once scorned and abandoned.

This is the true story of Bilbao’s renaissance, in which the Guggenheim Editor’s Resourcing introduction smarter| housing AoU in Action growth 9

was an incidental act on a stage set by the city council taking over the redundant shipyards for not paying their taxes. Equally important, the city invested in building a high quality transit system, all funded with loans that are being repaid out from rising property values and taxes. The contrast with much of South Wales or even Bristol is disturbing, as is the role played by the cooperative group Mondragon in creating good jobs out of existing industries like the railway manufacturer CAF (now supplying trams to English cities).

While there is no simple solution, local authorities need to take four steps to rebuild our ‘common wealth’: •

Spatial growth plans: Instead of scattering planning permissions around, investment needs to be concentrated where there is both potential demand and infrastructure capacity, while avoiding floodplains and areas of natural beauty. The process can be assisted through GIS-based mapping, as for example URBED did to win the 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize by showing how to double the size of Oxford as Uxcester Garden City. Once property values are mapped it is quite easy to show areas of land that are under or poorly used.

•

Land assembly powers: Plans are worth nothing without the capacity to implement them. A good start can be made by pooling public land. In Capital Gains: a better land assembly model for London3, we show how compulsory purchase powers should be used to assemble sites in advance of the uplift in land values from improving infrastructure.

Councils could make major advances simply by joining up development with transport. Of course it would help to revise The Compensation Code, but a start could be made right away.

• Cheap finance for infrastructure: Once land values are harnessed, it becomes feasible to borrow the funds needed to upgrade local infrastructure, installing the roads and services, and building the schools and services up front. Private finance could be raised through bonds, incentivised by grants or soft loans. The debt can be serviced and repaid by selling off plots for development within an agreed framework.

•

development frameworks that set the basic rules that fix land values.

These include plot ratios and coverage, as well as the ratio of affordable and social to market housing. The ratios should reflect local circumstances, not national policies, and should precede masterplans. For Uxcester Garden City, David Rudlin AoU and I proposed allocating half the land to a community foundation, which in turn could develop and manage country parks, or lakes to hold flood water. Milton Keynes Parks Trust provides a good example.

The tide of interest in tackling land values should be used not only to build new settlements in growing areas but also to give communities a stake in areas that need regeneration.

Hopefully the experience of the Academy’s Urbanism Award winners can plant the seeds for a fresh crop of winning schemes.

Dr Nicholas Falk AoU is executive director of the URBED Trust

Frameworks for balanced incremental development: Finally, to make sure the process is equitable, efficient and effective, local authorities need to agree 1. Jon Rowland et al, Going to Scale, The Academy of Urbanism, 2018 2. Barry Munday and Nicholas Falk, The ABC of Housing Growth and Infrastructure, The Housing Forum, 2014

URBED’s triple helix model

3. Nicholas Falk (with Pete Redman, Dentons and Gerald Eve Capital Gains: a better land assembly

Physical

model for London, GLA 2018

Growth over time

Economic

Social

Investment

Uxcester Garden City, Oxford which shows how the city would grow at the edge around an upgraded transit system, avoiding areas of natural beauty or floodplains

10 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 8 12 | | Autumn Winter 2018 2016

Isolating loneliness and what to do about it The number of lonely people has grown in the UK, but as Harry Knibb AoU argues, urbanism may have the solution.

Over nine million people in the UK currently experience loneliness. This is a huge number and, if they all stood arms outstretched with fingertips touching, they’d span the distance from Land’s End to John O’Groats more than six times.

our doctors who train for a minimum of seven years in medicine but report spending almost a fifth of their time on social issues that are not principally about medicine.

This is problematic for many reasons – here are two:

It’s clear that anyone, at any point in their lives, can become isolated or lonely. Typically, the elderly are the most researched group and have the most resources dedicated to them in terms of mitigation. This is because as people age, the risk factors leading to isolation and loneliness increase and converge. As a result, NGO and third sector organisations such as Age UK have specific programmes to help people in need. But, as we’re

• Being isolated and/or lonely impacts our physical health – one study found that being chronically lonely was as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, whilst another found them to increase the likelihood of mortality by 26 per cent (a similar impact to that of obesity).

The state we’re in

finding out, it isn’t just the stereotypical grandmother or grandfather, alone with their TV for company in a terrace house who are the only high-risk individuals in society. There are swaths of the population at risk including minorities, those with disabilities and illnesses, the less affluent, those living alone, those reliant on public transport, carers and the recently bereaved. Interestingly, working age individuals are rarely considered as a direct group which appears odd as this accounts for around 50 per cent of the UK’s population.

A simple, yet powerful, finding in loneliness research, is that while it’s an affliction that can strike anyone at any time, it tends to happen during times of change – for example, moving to a new

• Being isolated and/or lonely impacts our mental health – when we are isolated and/or lonely we experience high levels of stress hormones, can suffer from disrupted sleep which can increase cognitive deterioration, leading to depression and in some cases suicide.

Obviously, the moral case for action is strong, but so too is the economic case.

One argument currently used in the private sector office industry driving uptake of healthy buildings is around productivity. Figures from the Office of National Statistics in 2011 show 131 million work days were lost in the UK due to sickness absence, and over 180,000 of these were due to depression attributed to loneliness. The public sector is also suffering, according to the Campaign to End Loneliness, three out of five GPs say that between one and five patients visit a day because they are lonely. This is a significant cost (estimated in the billions) falling on

© Garry Davies / Flickr

Resourcing smarter housing Editor’sgrowth introduction | Isolating | AoU loneliness in Action 11

house, town, city or country; or after retirement or losing a job.

Looking to understand the apparent paradox that as cities densify we remain or become increasingly lonely and isolated, in early 2017 we asked 1,000 Londoners how they felt about their lives, how regularly they socialised, and how well they knew their neighbours. Two key findings were that: •

75 per cent of people don’t know more than three of their neighbours with younger people knowing less names than older people

•

74 per cent have not borrowed anything from their neighbours in the past year (NB. borrowing items is a good indicator of trust)

These are damming figures. To understand the root of this we need to explore the reasons why – the drivers.

There are of course many reasons why a person may become lonely or a community isolated. Some of these are personal, for example, your age and gender, the size and quality of your social network, and if you have recently experienced a change in circumstance.

But there are also a healthy number of ‘built environment factors’ that can increase your risk of isolation or loneliness. For example: • Safety: according to one GoWell study, residents who reported more antisocial behaviour problems within their area, who thought it unlikely that neighbours would act in an instance of antisocial behaviour and who felt unsafe walking alone at night, were between 30 per cent and 50 per cent more likely to report that they are lonely.

•

© Eneas De Troya / Flickr

12 Here Here& &Now Now || AoU AoUJournal JournalNo. No.12 8 || Autumn Winter 2018 2016

Urban accessibility: According to the World Health Organisation an age friendly city encourages active aging by optimising opportunities for health, participation, and security to enhance quality of life as people age.

In practical terms this city adapts its structures and services to be accessible for older people with varying needs and capacities.

• Mobility: Transport can be both a solution to, and a reason for, isolation and loneliness. This is intuitive as being able to get out and about efficiently would directly impact my desire to leave my home or neighbourhood. Appleyard’s seminal study in 1970s, compared the

behaviour of similar populations in three American streets with low, medium, and high traffic levels and found that higher flows of traffic lead to much less social interaction among neighbours.

•

Social opportunity: One of the most effective ways to combat loneliness is to combat isolation. It is therefore no surprise that the role of local amenities in supporting social contact is well documented, but numbers of our post offices, libraries and pubs are on the decline.

• Scale/density: High density is often considered an integral component of the compact (sustainable) city.

While evidence exists of environmental benefits of compaction, less evidence exists of the societal benefits or disbenefits.

Whether the benefits increase, decrease, or hold another arrangement with density is unclear.

An Age UK report in 2016 found the size of a household inversely affects how you feel – the smaller the household, the lonelier it tends to be. And people who rent or own a home are lonelier than those with a mortgage, perhaps because cities with lots of renters (such as London, which is expected to have 60 per cent of residents renting by 2025) have greater transience Technology can also play a part.

Ironically in an increasingly hyperdigitally connected age, as individuals

we appear to be drifting apart. This has been coined the 21st Century Paradox: that while we continue to live more connected lives, we feel further apart from each other. Commentators have suggested structural changes are driving this trend – that we use our cars rather than the bus, or we now watch a film on YouTube rather than going to the cinema, and that internet usage increases feelings of loneliness as it disconnects us from the real world.

There are ongoing debates.

So, what can (and is) being done?

Typically, solutions are split into four groups: Structural

Social

• Buildings • Infrastructure • Transport

• Befriending schemes

Technological

Planning

• Bluetooth beacons

• Changes to local plans • Design guides

We see some focus around the globe on solving isolation and loneliness, and while cities and their politics place a different focus on social issues, here are half a dozen leading-edge urban solutions (see table below).

a leading developer talk of the shift occurring from ‘place-making’ to ‘placekeeping’, emphasising the increasing importance of good management of space as well as design. It’s the WeWork effect. I work in Devonshire Square a campus of offices in east London. Over the past four months or so, our public realm has been transformed with a carpet of fake grass, hammocks, beanbags, sheds and other meeting rooms, but also free breakfasts and even a festival! It’s brought a buzz to the place and people out of their buildings – low cost solutions do work.

Ultimately, we need to take this seriously for the betterment of society.

The good news is that through the activities we undertake on a daily basis designing, planning and managing new buildings, streets, neighbourhoods, and cities, we can have a huge impact on how isolated or lonely residents may be.

Harry Knibb AoU is a principal sustainability and wellbeing consultant for WSP and is currently providing strategic advice for two significant new settlements within the UK amongst other things. Harry has a background in development from both the private and public sectors and seeks to bring social science research techniques into his field of work.

What is interesting is that not all solutions are structural. I’ve heard

Issue

Project

Description

Accessible mobility

Washing Metro

Dubbed the “world’s most accessible Metro” as all 91 stations are fully accessible along with all rail carriages and bus fleet

Alternative financing

Social Impact Bonds

Reconnections Ltd was the first social impact bond designed to help 3,000 people overcome loneliness in Worcestershire

Quality public realm

Tokyo

Currently experiencing a drive to reduce the ‘boringness’ of the city through micro-parks, small roads and local shops

Co-housing

Saettedemmen

The world’s first co-housing scheme in Denmark. Built in 1972 and consisting of 27 houses around a common building

Amenities

Carmel Place, New York

Designed to accommodate the city’s growing small household population – Carmel Places provides 55 loft-like apartments, ranging in size from 260sqft to 360sqft (NIA) and complimented by generous shared amenities

Design toolkits

Happy Homes Toolkit

Toolkit for building sociability through multi-family housing design, by identifying strategies and action that boost social wellbeing.

Solutions include: doing things together, tenure, social group size, feeling safe, participation, walkability, nature, comfort, and culture

Isolating Editor’s introduction | AoUloneliness in Action 13

Housing: Let’s learn from Europe Tony Reddy AoU argues that we should look at European solutions to address the housing crisis that both the UK and Ireland could adopt.

Open a copy of The Times, The Irish Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The New York Times or the Toronto Star and the ‘Housing Crisis’ would appear to be a feature of life in cities across the globe. While at a superficial level, this may seem to be true it is worthwhile looking to another shared experience of these far-flung metropolises – The English language.

Interestingly, many of our experts and commentators on this shared predicament rarely look beyond the countries of the English speaking world. One of the foremost experts, the urbanist and economist Richard Florida, whose latest book The New Urban Crisis addresses the phenomenon, focuses his analysis almost entirely on the experience of the United States and United Kingdom.

The reality is that cities are more affordable and function better in countries where people respect each other more, and where human values are embodied in legislation. The countries of northern Europe and Japan exemplify these values and, as a result, don’t experience housing crises on the scale being experienced in the English speaking world.

So, as we contemplate the enormity of this shortage, we must reflect on the policies which over the past 40 years have led us to this common catastrophe. It is no small irony that from the 1920s until 1980 the United States, Britain, Ireland ,Canada and Australia were among the pioneering nations in ensuring that society provided adequate housing across the social spectrum.

In the UK leaders from across the political spectrum, including Lloyd George, Attlee, Churchill, MacMillan,

Wilson and Callaghan, were committed to ensuring building targets for public and private housing were met.

In the United States, a succession of presidents including Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Forde and Carter implemented government programmes to promote housing provision.

However from the 1980s onwards there has been a decided change in the direction of housing policies. In the UK and Ireland, public housing ‘Right to Buy’ policies of the 1980s were a major privatisation programme that was ultimately worth some €50bn over 25 years. However, the money earned from selling national social housing assets was not replaced. Similar policy initiatives were implemented in the United States, Canada and Australia. Local authorities weren’t encouraged to spend the money they earned to substitute the homes they sold, and central government funding for housing was significantly reduced over time.

The benign view of these policies is that their promotors believed that supply and demand was a straightforward elastic law, and that the market would take up the slack; private housebuilders would build more homes, for both sale and rent, as the number of new council houses being built waned.

The initiative was accompanied by a concurrent policy in relation to the sale of local authority and state lands that, in general, it should be sold to the highest bidder. As our planning system became more complex and as the demographics of our society evolved during the succeeding period these separate policies had a significant impact on land and housing affordability.

14 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 8 | | Autumn Winter 2018 2016

Freiburg

The combined effect of these and other measures is that public and private land became an expensive and limited commodity. Land prices have increased enormously in value which has meant that constructing housing, where it is most needed and wanted, has become prohibitive to all but a limited number of specialist, and well-funded, developers.

The overall result is that house prices in Britain and Ireland have risen significantly over the past 40 years whereas during the same period the European average has risen only by a modest rates.

Need for new solutions to housing provision In Britain and Ireland we are experiencing a number of major housing challenges: • •

•

•

•

We are not building enough homes We are not building enough affordable and social homes We are not building enough of the types of homes needed We are not building homes in the areas where they are needed We are not making enough land available at reasonable prices

The current British and Irish models of housing provision and city regeneration and growth are simply not achieving development of the right quantity and quality.

A major underlying constraint on the provision of affordable housing is the

supply of land at reasonable rates.

This is exacerbated by the planning system, the difficulty of making zoned land viable for development and the increasingly complex nature of development.

A more effective planning system would respond to market signals and demands, allow for decision making to account for wider costs, and would provide the necessary infrastructure to support development.

While English speaking politicians, economists, urban administrators and planners attempt to solve the urban housing crisis, the solutions to many of our problems already exist in the policies being implemented in many European countries. These countries, including Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, offer exemplary lessons for the future: residential developments that are leading the rest of the world in creating more sustainable and equitable patterns of urban life and work.

European models So, how can we develop new and innovative policies to replace the outdated and inadequate methodologies of the past?

Let us look to Freiburg, Berlin, Hamburg, Malmö, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. These cities are among Europe’s best exemplars of new urban development integrated with high quality public transport. Crucially, they all benefit from different types of housing – private, cooperative and social – integrated into high quality developments.

Here we may find the answers to our housing, planning and development problems. What initiatives might the government take to the British situation?

New initiatives and recommendations The following are a series of reforms and initiatives which UK and Irish governments could implement to alleviate the current situation by improving the supply and reducing the cost of serviced residential land: •

Recognise the increase in land value created by the grant of planning permission on land and put in place mechanisms for local authorities to make use of this uplift

Copenhagen

to provide serviced residential development sites •

Introduce a definition for Affordable Housing as residential development which is constructed for sale or rent within the means of key workers e.g. teachers, doctors, police, nurses etc.

•

Introduce legislation requiring that all future planning permissions on government and local authority land disposals be conditional on minimum of 35 per cent of the completed development being Affordable Housing

•

Encourage larger local authorities to establish development departments to assemble land and provide advance infrastructure as well as serviced sites for a range of residential developers

•

Empower new urban development corporations and/or a national regeneration agency to embark on a programme of land assembly of and infrastructure and services installation on publicly owned land in order to ensure that an adequate supply of serviced land at reasonable cost is available to a range of residential developers

represent the opportunity to decommodify our relationship with land and property to restore some balance to a society increasingly divided along economic fault-lines.

These proven models of residential and community development of our European neighbours have stood the test of time. They offer the opportunity for the UK and Ireland to finally make inroads to our current broken housing market and provide a basis to deliver better housing and communities for the 21st century.

Tony Reddy AoU is a director of The Academy of Urbanism

Malmö

The Academy of Urbanism’s response to the UK government housing white paper Better Housing for the 21st Century addresses many of these issues and provides examples which, when complemented by the best exemplars from the UK, Ireland and Europe,

Housing: Let’s learn from Europe 15

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Find out more www.uandiplc.com 16 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 10 | Autumn 2017

Designing for urban childhoods “Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people” said Enrique Peñalosa, Mayor of Bogotá.

Samuel Williams describes the workshop he ran at the AoU Congress this year on designing cities for children.

The theme for The Academy of Urbanism’s 2018 Congress, Cities on the Rise, focused on the many challenges faced by next-tier cities such as Aarhus, Marseille and Cork, where the event was held. I was invited with Timothy Duin to run a workshop based on our recent publication, Cities Alive: Designing for Urban Childhoods.

Cities Alive is our series of research on how to create liveable, sustainable cities. Previous reports have tackled topics such as green infrastructure, walkability and lighting. This instalment, which opens with Peñalosa’s quote above, looks at how and why we should be creating childfriendly cities1, and proposes that such a place is one which works well for everyone, young and old.

The reasons for needing to write this report are simple. Children are not as free to enjoy the outside world as much as they were previously. At the same time, we are seeing levels of non-communicable diseases, such as

obesity among children, rising to such levels that it is now widely agreed that this could be the first generation not to outlive their parents, and for entirely preventable reasons.

As designers, policymakers and developers we have a duty to see that children can enjoy their right to play, as recognised in Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child2. By failing to do so we deny them the opportunity of a healthy, active life as part of their community.

The declining levels of play and health that we are witnessing are shocking, but our research tells us clearly that anyone shaping the built environment has an opportunity to reverse these trends, for the benefit of the whole of society.

Not only should we be providing this improved environment, we should be working with children to achieve it.

Children are powerful agents of change, and know their neighbourhoods in ways that are almost invisible to grownups. Given a voice and a meaningful platform they are more than capable of both engaging with the complex challenges that cities face and offering up creative solutions.

“If children are not designed into our cities, they are designed out. This means that they are deprived of contact with the material world, with nature, with civic life and with their own capacities.”

– George Monbiot, writer

Through tangible best practice case studies and recommended actions, we demonstrate that positioning themselves as places where children can thrive is a simple, but highly effective way that cities can attract and retain both families and skilled workers, and avoid the negative economic and cultural consequences of them moving away.

One such city on the rise, Rotterdam, was an early adopter of this approach, demonstrating the value of incorporating child-friendly interventions to make itself more attractive and competitive.

In 2006, it found itself voted the worst place in the Netherlands to raise a child. Rotterdam’s response was to set out on an ambitious €20m childfriendly city improvement scheme.

Through initiatives such as Building Blocks3, they reconsidered aspects such as housing, local public space for play, the location of amenities and networks of safe routes (see Here & Now no.5, p31). It has been highly successful in turning perceptions around and ending the migration of families4, and provides several case studies featured in our report.

We started our workshop with a small exercise. We asked the participants to think back to a place from their childhood where they fondly remembered playing. They each then drew the place on a postcard and discussed the memory with the others at their table.

It was clear that the majority recalled a place outside, often in nature. They also mostly remembered being there without parents or other adults.

Editor’sDesigning introduction for urban | AoUchildhoods in Action 17 17

Cities alive: Designing for urban childhoods We went on to discuss the book’s two main concepts, which are everyday freedoms and children’s infrastructure.

Everyday freedoms are those things that a child should be able to enjoy doing in their neighbourhood. It combines both the ability to play spontaneously whenever and wherever, in a self-directed manner, and the independence to move around without any imposed adult agenda or schedule. Children’s infrastructure is everything which supports those freedoms: open space, safe streets, clean air, nature.

The relationship between these two ideas is illustrated in this diagram, based on the work of Finnish academic, Marketta Kyttä.

When there is nothing to do, and no freedom to do it we have a condition similar to being trapped in a cell. Its opposite, many things to do and the freedom to do them, is characteristic of how we would experience the childfriendly city. It is important to spell out that there is a clear distinction between a “childish” city and a child-friendly one. We are not advocating for a world filled with colourful plastic junk.

“The amount of time children spend playing outdoors, their ability to get around independently, and their levels of contact with nature are strong indicators of how a city is performing, not just for children, but for all generations of city dwellers.

A child-friendly approach to urban planning is a vital part of creating inclusive cities that work better for everyone.” +

Children’s independent mobility

While it was in no way a scientifically meaningful sample, the results clearly contrasted with children’s experience today, where we are seeing drastic reductions in the amount of time spent outside and the freedom to explore.

Wasteland

Child-friendly city

Cell

Glasshouse

-

18 Here Here& &Now Now || AoU AoUJournal JournalNo. No.12 8 || Autumn Winter 2018 2016

Things to do

+ © Arup

Along with children’s independent mobility it is essential to consider their dependent mobility. That is the early period of their lives when they are dependent upon caregivers, either to be fed, changed or taken from one place to another in a buggy. Do caregivers have access to the services they need?

Are new parents feeling connected to or isolated from their support networks?5 In each city around the world these ideas would play out in different ways and for different reasons. Uniquely though, concern for children’s wellbeing and children’s impulse to play are universal, making this a globally relevant approach.

We were fortunate that Arup’s Cork office had previously engaged teenagers in identifying locations around the city as places they could imagine benefiting from some kind of design intervention, as part of an educational programme.

While some of the final suggestions might have been wildly impractical, they demonstrated the key message of the book; that designing a place well for children means designing a place well for everyone.

Our audience divided themselves up into teams and each team took one of the locations as a starting point to explore how they would go about creating a more child-friendly Cork.

Sam Williams is a consultant at Arup.

It was a highly creative session with lots of ideas and drawing. It seemed to me at least that the memory game at the start of the workshop had put this room of mostly adult town planners and architects in the mind of designing for themselves as children, as opposed to that of adults designing for children, with all the concerns that brings.

For this workshop though we were concerned with what it could mean for Cork. We would only have with limited time with this diverse group of experts, enthusiasts, students and others, all willing to give it their attention. How could we make it relevant? How could we have local children’s opinions guide the process with none (well, maybe one) present?

He initiated and co-authored the recent Arup report Cities Alive: Designing for Urban Childhoods. This publication supports the idea that cities which work well for children – by focusing on everyday freedoms and children’s infrastructure – can work well for everyone, young and old. @play_future

Instead we were seeing zip lines across roads and rivers, raft building, beach parties, and more, mixed with community facilities, safe road crossings and planting, all being scribbled down in happy frenzy of ideas.

Opportunities to shape child-friendly cities

15 14 Design walkable and green environments

1

Recommend evidence-based policies, guidelines and indicators

Appoint a child friendly champion

2 Simplify requirements and regulations

13

Look beyond the basic design function

CITY LE AD ER

Y MAKERS OLIC DP AN

11

Explore innovative and creative approaches to playable spaces

ALS ION SS E F O

Actions and opportunities

DE

VE

LO

PER

Integrate child-friendly criteria into procurement processes

1. Based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, we define children as people aged 0 to 17 years.

S A N D INVE

ST

OR

Implement a children’s infrastructure policy

4

Enhance construction phases of development

S

angle-view-are-key

5 4. It has not been without criticism, with some calling it gentrification. The city has however focused much of its efforts on improving the lives of less affluent residents and minorities. For an excellent overview please see Tim Gill’s website,

6

Explore funding through CSR requirements

Rethinking Childhood: rethinkingchildhood. com/2018/04/26/rotterdam-child-friendly-cityurban-planning-gentrification/#more-6722

7

9

aspx

rotterdam-child-friendly-cooperation-and-a-wide-

Adopt inclusive and flexible management strategies Look beyond the development boundary

2. ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.

3. bernardvanleer.org/ecm-article/2010/makingMap, monitor and measure everyday freedoms

Incorporate temporary events

10

3

S

12

T ENVIRONM BUIL EN TP R

Transform outdoor institutional settings

8

5. The Bernard van Leer Foundation’s Urban95 challenge asks us if we could experience a city from 95cm – the height of a 3-year-old – what would you change? https://bernardvanleer.org/ © Arup

solutions/urban95

for urban childhoods Editor’sDesigning introduction | AoU in Action 19

Golden Lane Estate: A Great Neighbourhood under pressure Golden Lane Estate was one of this year’s finalists for The Academy of Urbanism’s Great Neighbourhood Award and narrowly missed first place. Jacqueline Swanson looks at the future of this iconic estate.

Benefitting significantly from its location in the heart of the City of London and a Grade II and II* listing, the estate is in many ways blessed.

Ultimately the Urbanism Awards’ judges felt that Byker, in Newcastle, in having to surmount tougher challenges was a most worthy winner of the prize, with Golden Lane a very close second.

However, since the sunny day of the AoU assessment there have been clouds gathering on the horizon. At the time the AoU assessor remarked, “The generous and innovative design is still relevant and it has retained the social principles that it was built for.” 60 years ago, the City created a thriving community and the municipal dream of an urban village has been an extraordinary success. Today, the estate feels under threat from both inside and out…

would have appeared truly futuristic among the surrounding bomb sites and rubble, from which would eventually rise the companion Barbican estate.

Following the advent of Right to Buy in the early 1980s the mix of residents has radically diversified with, unsurprisingly, a good number of architects and other creatives choosing to make Golden Lane their home.

Whilst some tenants who exercised their right to buy still live on the estate, many have sold on. A two bedroom maisonette will now cost in the region of £700k; a City of London tenant will pay around £530 a month for a studio

With massive damage caused during the blitz, the post-war population of the City had declined from 130,000 to 5,000. With an urgent need to repopulate the area, particularly with essential key workers, the Corporation of London launched an architectural design competition. The brief required provision of mainly two- and threeroom flats in various types, intended for single people and couples, including doctors, nurses, caretakers, police officers and secretaries.

The design of the estate by architects Chamberlain, Powell and Bon, later of Barbican fame, was strongly influenced by the work of Le Corbusier and the initial phases, with their boldly colourful glazed curtainwall panels, 20 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

apartment in Crescent House, a private sector tenant around £1,300. Qualifying for a council flat is no longer an option for most key workers – new tenants on the estate tend to be the most vulnerable residents.

The current 50/50 mix of tenants and leaseholders is therefore unlikely to change significantly. However, the tendency for owners to let, particularly short term is on the increase and will naturally affect community cohesion, although the City is trying to crack down on AirBnB lets. It would also be unrealistic to not recognise tensions that can arise through the differences

inherent in leaseholder and tenant relationships with the City as landlord.

Like many other estates of its period, Golden Lane had been allowed to fall in to a state of disrepair, through insufficient maintenance combined with some failure of the original ambitious construction technology.

However its heritage status ultimately led to the preparation of Listed Building Management Guidelines in 2006/7.

A programme of major works has been in the pipeline for well over a decade, finally embarked upon in 2016 when John Robertson Architects was tasked with the design of replacement curtainwalling, rectifying the technical failings while carefully respecting the appearance to Great Arthur House, the estate’s landmark tall building and at the time of building, the tallest residential block in Britain.

But all is not sunshine yellow – the revitalised beauty of the tower hides a number of problems for the tower’s residents. There are still interior issues particularly for tenants with lesser resources and leaseholders are faced with bills that have increased by around £30k from the original estimate.

Whilst maintaining a listed estate obviously brings additional costs and challenges, along with the requirement to meet Decent Home Standard and alleviate fuel poverty (a real issue for some residents), these kinds of spiralling costs are clearly contentious.

Top: Crescent House before commencement of repairs

The rest of the works programme is finally rolling out across the estate and although very welcome is disruptive and can seem relentless. There are also well substantiated fears around escalating costs. Unfortunately unlike a private management company, local authorities are not permitted to accumulate sinking funds; service charge bills are adjusted and presented to residents as and when costs are incurred.

Without its listing would Golden Lane Estate be now benefiting from the much needed investment or would it instead be up for grabs to the richest developer? The harsh reality is that the soaring value of real estate in London threatens much of our unlisted post war architectural heritage.

Whilst Golden Lane Estate itself stays relatively safe from these fiscal realities there is pressure bearing down in the surrounding areas.

Earlier this year, Bernard Morgan House, the neighbouring police section house, a sensitively scaled and

Bottom: Golden Lane Estate allotments (the Golden Baggers) in front of Hatfield House Opposite: Golden Lane community centre, and Great Arthur House whilst undergoing recladding © Steve Smith

aesthetically compatible modernist structure, was flattened to make way for The Denizen, a 10-storey luxury apartment block. Campaigners against the scheme argued that the planners had failed to properly assess the damage caused to the heritage of the area, particularly neighbouring blocks on Golden Lane Estate, the Grade II Cripplegate Institute and the Jewin Welsh Church.

The ungainly bulky massing of this block will severely overshadow adjacent buildings and the scrap of green which is Fortune Street Park.

With the local school emptying onto this park it is a vital heart to the neighbourhood where children can play together after school and parents catch up, encouraging walking to and from school. Very sadly considering Bernard Morgan House’s history, the scheme contains no social housing at

all, and having been marketed primarily in the Far East is likely to result in a lifeless building of zombie investment flats.

Residents and supporters mounted a heartfelt campaign to stop the development backed by local MPs with national media picking up on the installation from Spectres of Modernism which saw banners hanging from the balconies of Bowater house emblazoned with pithy slogans from leading artists and writers.

A CrowdJustice fundraiser paid for legal advice and an expert analysis of the overshadowing report.

Unfortunately, days before a hearing for permission to proceed to Judicial Review, it became clear that a Protective Cost Order, capping costs at £10,000, had not been secured. The case was dropped and campaigners Golden Lane Estate 21

Banner protest / art installation by Spectres of Modernism on Bowater House © Charles Humphries

came away feeling that the system was heavily weighted against them.

This has understandably fuelled a siege mentality, particularly in the light of the most recent City of London Primary Academy Islington (CoLPAI) development on the other side of the estate.

Here, arguably in breach of London Plan policy guidance, monies from The Denizen for off-site affordable homes have been used to fund a City of London and London Borough of Islington development for a 14-storey social housing tower block, a two form entry primary academy and large sports hall on the site of the former Richard Cloudesley school.

The scheme is incredibly dense and despite being rejected five times by the Islington Design Review Panel and recognition by Islington’s own planning officer of the harm caused to the listed Golden Lane Estate, the scheme was deemed justifiable on the basis of need and gained planning permission earlier this year. Ideologically this was a much harder campaign for residents, neighbours and supporters to mount – there is an inarguably desperate need for social housing in both Islington and the City. However their fight, fuelled by passionate belief in the estate’s heritage, its original urban village objectives and ideals of social integration, was for a more considered scheme that respected the inherent qualities of the estate, its scale, urban grain and intelligent planning and that responded in a less aggressive and damaging manner.

The planning was granted with numerous conditions attached (after much lobbying from the residents’ association) and residents now find themselves with the prospect of having to track their proper discharge.

A recent campaign to save the trees adjoining the estate allotments was understood to be successful but now risks back tracking. Other troubling developments are being pushed through planning despite opposition, including redevelopment of the ground floor of Great Arthur House. There is a palpable sense of despondency coupled with the stress and health issues associated with the constant noise and air pollution from building works which are only set to increase.

Despite all these pressures Golden Lane is exceptional in its neighbourliness. One of its most successful resident initiatives is the Golden Baggers, an allotment group started in 2010 with 20 industrial size rubble bags on a disused playground which has since grown to 42 permanent wooden boxes bringing together residents of all ages and backgrounds to cultivate vegetables and get to know each other. It is now the focus of much community activity, including Open Garden Squares weekend, days out, social Sundays, an annual Christmas Market and other events.

Recently, considerable resident lobbying has led to the restoration of the community centre. The work undertaken by Studio Partington was completed in May this year and to celebrate its reopening, residents

22 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 8 | Winter 2018

registered it for Open House London, bringing visitors, architects and residents together with an offering of resident led tours of the estate, talks from the architects involved in recent developments, pop up community café and archive. Residents have also worked closely in consultation with the City of London and muf architecture/ art in the redesign of the children’s playground.

Golden Lane is not faced with either demolition or rebuilding, in fact it is being restored. It has a very engaged community and is well supported by a committed estate management team.

It also has architecture that might be a model for the way in which other parts of the capital are developed, and it has demonstrated community action which might also be an inspiration to others. Certainly as London tackles the complexity of Brexit, regeneration and a considerable fight against the housing crisis, Golden Lane is place where the dilemmas of community, architecture and housing are well worth tackling.

Jacqueline Swanson lives on Golden Lane Estate. She works for the Urban Design Group and in her spare time is current editor of the community website and newsletter - goldenlaneestate.org

Retrofitting the Khruschevka: Rethinking a Soviet housing typology The Kruschevkas, Soviet pre-frabricated mass housing, have dominated the skyline of Russian cities since the 1950s. Lucy Wallwork and Nazaket Azimli ask whether they need to be destroyed. wandered through the neighbourhoods ourselves, and asked former residents who had ‘upgraded’ to a modern highrise about their views on what is lost when this discredited urban fabric is torn up and started over.

The result led us to question the conventional wisdom – are khruschevkas beyond redemption? Or could they instead be retrofitted for a new age?

The birth of the ‘khruschevka’ and the mikro-rayon

A typical ‘khruschevka’ in the industrial city of Sumgait, in Azerbaijan

The greatest spikes in attention Soviet architecture tends to get are from ‘ruin porn’ hunters looking for romantic shells of buildings to photograph. But while the socialist realist and Constructivist flights of fancy can dominate attention, they overlook the less glamorous buildings and neighbourhoods where the vast majority of Soviet citizens spent their lives, and where the majority still live – all the way from East Berlin to Tashkent. These spaces, more than anything, mediate the experience of living in a post-socialist city.

The Soviet urban planning experiment can be divided into a number of typologies, each accompanied by its own distinctive urban grain.

The prefab, post-war ‘khruschevka’ remains, like the UK’s Victorian terrace, the dominant one. Like the Victorian terrace, it began as the solution to a housing shortage during the Soviet Union’s own Industrial Revolution following the Second World War.

Now (in another echo of the fate of many Victorian terraces in the ‘slum clearances’ of the 1960s) the future of the ‘khruschevka’ and the neighbourhoods they sit in are under threat.

Across the cities of the former Soviet Union, we have begun to see moves towards a great ‘bonfire of the khruschevkas’. As these cities emerge from the chaos of the 1990s, and began to reimagine and rebuild themselves, leaders have begun to announce ambitious plans to wipe out the nowunfashionable blocks as a building typology all together. The most radical moves are Moscow’s plans to wholesale demolish ten per cent of its housing stock. In their dizzy quest for ‘progress’, are these cities repeating our mistakes?

Over the summer we – two Young Urbanists from the UK and Azerbaijan – roamed the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, asking people their thoughts about the homes they grew up in. We

The era of the ‘khruschevka’ was ushered in during a famous speech in 1954 by newly appointed leader of the USSR Nikita Khruschev, who decried the ornamentation and excessive expense of the architecture of his more famous predecessor – known as ‘Stalinkas’. This new vision of mass housing was a truly colossal social project, that transformed the urban fabric of the Union and brought with it a new and distinctive social world.

The ‘khruschevka’ template is a five-storey block that contains various configurations of small, onefamily apartments that replaced the communal apartments of the early Soviet years. In 1957 a nationwide competition was held for the design of a prefabricated residential buildings to be used throughout the USSR. However despite criticism of the ‘one size fits all’ approach, the designs authorised centrally by ‘Gosstroi’ were in fact adapted to different urban spaces by region-specific design institutes. In the Caucasus region and Central Asia, facades were often adorned with Islamic patterns.

But more important than their individual form was the impact of this new approach at the neighbourhood

Golden Lane Estate | Retrofitting the ‘Kruschevka’ 23

scale. The advent of the ‘khruschevka’ era replaced the traditionalist courtyard blocks of the Stalinist era with what would become the new building block of the socialist city, the mikro-rayon. While these mikrorayons were generally laid out along modernist lines as ‘blocks in space’, there was a very deliberate structure.

Uses were clearly delineated, but the mikro-rayon was designed as a compact and walkable self-contained neighbourhood providing easy access to the metro network, schools and local shops. That continues today, with ground floor frontages often taken up by small businesses. Some other Soviet-style ‘third places’ such as cultural or sport centres, or libraries, also survive. If you look behind the dilapidated appearance, they conform to many of the principles that makes urbanists and transit-oriented development advocates today drool.

thrives in the spaces between buildings - one spoke of how not a mulberry or fig tree would be left heavy with fruit due to children climbing trees, and how the flexibility of the spaces allowed children to shape their own playgrounds.

One thing that the Soviets were not so good at planning for were technological changes, and lifestyle choices that diverged from the socialist norm. As a result, much public space between blocks is now taken up by cars and makeshift garages to keep them in.

Cars overtake the public spaces

However the stories of former residents also contest notions that Soviet planning produced ‘nondefensible spaces’. These spaces were and are full of ‘eyes on the street’ that deter crime. Sometimes to an oppressive degree – your business is everyone’s business…

Carpet washing in the neighbourhood

Early evening in a khruschevka neighbourhood - children play in the courtyard and vegetables are sold by

The ‘Neftciler’ (‘oil workers’) neighbourhood in

a roving trader

Baku - a ‘khrushevka’ neighbourhood flanked by new ‘novostroika’ high-rise developments

Memories of Khruschevki

2. Carpets and donkey stones

While these neighbourhoods don’t conform to all of the values promoted by the AoU (particularly those promoting bottom-up and participative planning), they do tick a few boxes.

The analogy between working class Victorian terraced neighbourhoods and ‘khruschevki’ is a rich one. One motif of these neighbourhoods is the communal washing of carpets in the public areas.

As a Salfordian, I couldn’t help but notice the parallel with the tradition of ‘donkey stones’ in working class terraced neighbourhoods of northern England, where the scouring of stone doorsteps served as the focal point for neighbourhood socialising and gossip.

1. Public space and ‘eyes on the street’ One common critique of Soviet planning is that it lacks the ‘human scale’ that has been revalued by urbanists since the days of Jane Jacobs.

But the community life that emerges in these residential neighbourhoods is undeniable.

The planners here were generous with green space and former residents spoke of the vibrant social life that still

3. Connectivity Crucially, mikro-rayons were explicitly planned to sprout up along transit lines.

In particular the ‘palaces for the people’ metro lines and tram lines. While the

24 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

Typical ‘novostroika’ blocks in the Neftciler neighbourhood

tram infrastructure is now sadly gone, the proximity to the metro means these places are knitted into the rest of the city, more than can be said for the more recent developments scattered haphazardly along heavily congested road infrastructure.

Perhaps people are finally escaping the ‘eyes on the street’ of claustrophobic communities? But stories abound of the more atomised way of life these buildings cultivate, which can be particularly hard on older members of the community who rely on local support networks.

Epilogue to the khruschevka: the high-rise dream

Retrofitting the khruschevka

Today, ‘progress’ for the post-Soviet Bakuvian has come to be represented by the ‘novostroika’, or new-built high-rise blocks that now dot the city’s skyline. Residents generally say they move out of the postwar blocks because of their small size. But what is gained in private space is often lost in public space.

It is commonly contested that, as an emergency measure, these buildings were designed to stand for only 25 years. However, the conditions for their replacement never arrived, and by the 1980s the Soviet Union was going through an identity crisis that led to its ultimate dissolution. Are these buildings really beyond saving?

Amid a highly speculative development industry, an emasculated planning system has struggled to regain authority since the 1990s. As a result, public space in new developments often consists of token gestures of plastic childrens’ play areas, frequently absent of children. The difference in community life walking through these neighbourhoods is clear to see.

Prefab does not necessarily mean temporary, not poor quality. Prefab modular housing is enjoying a comeback in the 21st century, and is used widely in countries like Sweden and Japan. In Baku, these ‘khruschevkas’ survived a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in 2001, and many expressed how they would rather find themselves in one of these

‘Pimp my khruschevka’ - many attempts to update khruschevka have focused on superficial facades facing major roads rather than attempting to address the grain of the neighbourhood

postwar buildings than the flimsy new ‘novostroiki’, should another happen.

All of this led us to wonder what a process of ‘retrofitting the khruschevka’ might look like?

The only attempts in Baku have been the coating of the most visually prominent blocks in the city’s ubiquitous ‘facades’. More ambitiously, Moscow-based practice FORM Bureau have come up with intriguing plans for a glamorously reimagined ‘khruschevka-palazzo’, complete with roof gardens, in an echo of the work that has been done to reimagine the 1960s Park Hill estate in Sheffield by Urban Splash. Could ‘khruschevkas’ not, as Urban Splash attempted in Sheffield, ‘put on a new frock’ and come back to life?

But more than a new frock, any attempts to update these neighbourhoods requires a revisiting of their urban fabric and what value we can find in it.

In the context of Baku, doing so is likely to require going beyond design considerations into readjusting the ‘software’ of how these buildings are managed. One of the key contributing factors to the lack of popularity of khruschevki is their shabby appearance due to lack of maintenance.

Responsibility for the upkeep of public spaces has been left in a vacuum that was once filled by the Soviet state. The low levels of social capital in modern Baku are likely to be a barrier, but a pilot based on the cooperative model of the Carbon Coop in the UK might be a good place to start experimenting.

This is a reminder that while urban space can encourage collective action, it can also fail to do so if the wider environment does not support it.

The retrofit is a challenge to be taken up by local architects, and we would love these thoughts to start a debate, or open competition, to make more visible the alternatives to demolition.

Lucy Wallwork is a recently graduated planner who has spent a lot of time living in and researching post-Soviet cities she has a particular soft spot for Baku and the Caucasus.

Nazaket Azimli is a Baku-based urbanist, who is part of the team behind the local PILLE urbanist initiative.

Lucy and Nazaket organised the first Baku Urban Agenda event in Azerbaijan.

Retrofitting the ‘Kruschevka’ 25

Cities: does size matter?

In Focus There is a tendency to think that ‘bigger is better!’, but is this really true? That some cities are successful – whether that be economically, more environmentally friendly, child friendly – while others have high inequality and greater levels of pollution, doesn’t seem to be a function of size or where it is. The relationship is far more complex than simply size.

While there does seem to be evidence that larger cities provide more job opportunities, there is also evidence of increased inequality. The OECD’s report The Metropolitan Century notes that wage inequality in larger cities is bound to increase more strongly than in smaller cities or rural places. The same report notes that, on average, the positive impact of larger cities on productivity is neutralised by an accompanying increase in price levels, whether that is the cost of living or cost of access to amenities. There is also good evidence that larger cities bring with them other problems. For example, data from the EU’s 2015 survey into the quality of life in European cities suggests that people in larger cities suffer more from air pollution and noise pollution. So bigger may not be better.

In this section, Tony Reddy AoU (p39) reminds us in his overview of Congress, that the success of cities has become central to national economies and culture.

They are the drivers of investment, tourism and migration – the young, the educated, the creative and the rich are once again being drawn to live and work in urban areas across the globe. However, Francis Clay (p36) questions whether debating the advantages or disadvantages between big and small cities is fruitless, and points out that “What we do know is that, right now, big cities are where people are going, and it is the task of planners to make them happy and healthy.”

Our interview with Imandeep Kaur (p42), co-founder of Impact Hub Birmingham, shows how initiatives from individuals can contribute hugely to the success of cities, whether through improving civic engagement or making them just and fairer places, whatever their size.

26 Here Here&&Now Now | | AoU AoUJournal JournalNo. No.812| |Autumn Winter2016 2018

Contemporary sustainable urbanism: An outward looking exchange in Scotland Husam Al Waer AoU et al reports on a seminar that brought together representatives from Bilbao, Aarhus, Ljubljana, Freiburg, and the Scottish Government’s chief architect to exchange their experiences.

In searching for key lessons on contemporary sustainable urbanism, a good starting point for Scotland’s cities involves looking to the European comparative cities of Bilbao, Aarhus, Freiburg and Ljubljana. These leading European City of the Year finalists have grappled with challenges, developed effective approaches and delivered successful transformation each within their own specific urban contexts. The collective wealth of their experiences, coupled with Scotland’s own initiatives creates a powerful, outward looking exchange within the contemporary discourse of Scottish policy and practice on how to deliver sustainable cities.

In September 2018, over 280 of the UK’s urban policy makers, academics and practitioners assembled in Dundee – a city on its own trajectory of contemporary urbanism – to attend an afternoon seminar on ‘Contemporary Approaches to Sustainability in European Cities’. Hosted by the University of Dundee and The Academy of Urbanism, key city representatives shared their experience in this arena.

With a common set of growing urban concerns to address, including urbanisation, globalisation and climate change, and a diverse range of successful strategies deployed by each city, the contents of their exchanges have been examined within the context of (1) city challenges; (2) city initiatives and approaches; and (3) wider lessons for contemporary sustainable urbanism. A key output of this city-to-city session has been the specification of a set of broad principles to consider on the route towards a more sustainable future for cities.

City challenges The stimuli leading these four cities to shift towards a more sustainable approach to urbanism, were identified as a combination of historic events, political contexts, global pressures and local issues.

In the case of Bilbao, for instance, their driver came in the nexus between industrial crisis and a major city flood in 1983. Both these destroyed much of the central part of the city, leaving it fragmented, with polluted waterbodies and unemployment levels of around 30 per cent. For Ljubljana, a city of Roman origin, it was an earthquake in 1895 which destroyed the majority of the city. Repaired and re-planned in the 20th century, it remained as a green ‘sleeping beauty’ during its Communist era.

Denmark’s second city Aarhus, had urban challenges shared with many other cities. In 1901, the city had a population of 100,000. By 2050, this is projected to reach over 450,000 inhabitants. A key challenge for Aarhus is to create employment opportunities and develop a liveable, inclusive and compact city form. Stephen Willacy AoU, city architect of Aarhus, highlighted significant socio-economic issues in the city, manifested in high levels of homelessness and several areas with challenged housing districts.

The city also has to respond to climate change, particularly increased flooding and surface water management.

Freiburg is famed for developing the Freiburg Charter of 2012. Prof Wulf Daseking AoU, the city’s former head of urban planning, acknowledged that the world is rapidly changing and Europe only constitutes 10 per cent of the global population.

In the arena of international planning for sustainable urbanism, religion and the mentality of cities are important factors. Variations in culture mean addressing universal issues like global warming is complex. Freiburg acknowledges that social aspects of climate change are important and that, with raising water levels and population mobility, there will ultimately be winners and losers. Prof Daseking remarked on the challenge of “how do you turn your citizens into sustainable cities?”

Editor’s introduction | Contemporary sustainable urbanism 27

Bilbao

Aarhus

In the Scottish context, Prof Ian Gilzean AoU, chief architect of the Scottish Government, highlighted the historic challenge of city development as one of landscape, as signalled in Patrick Geddes’ 1915 book, Cities in Evolution. The east coast of Scotland has seen the most urban growth due to its geography, landscape and geology. With two-thirds of Scotland’s economy tied up in its cities and with only 11 per cent of its land urbanised, there is the challenge of integrating its landscape with a sustainable built environment.

reconnect public areas at ground level. The heart of each neighbourhood was renewed to increase the quality of lives of their communities. Thirty elevators now connect hilltop neighbourhoods with the city centre, with six additional elevators planned. A modal shift of around 64 per cent of internal journeys in the city by foot has been achieved. Another key was establishing a cross-governmental governance group.

“Public-private cooperation on projects is easy to get if there is a reasonable benefit. The real challenge is to build the public-public collaboration”, Abaunza expressed. Bilbao has employed a 30-year planning strategy and is currently working on a plan for the next 20 years in which more than 4,000 citizens are involved in shaping, including over 1,000 young people.

City initiatives and approaches Sustainable urbanism is complex, multi-layered and multi-themed. Each of these leading European cities presented its own blend of strategic, tactical and operational strategies and actions to have a transformative impact on their cities.

In Bilbao, the core of their approach has been centred on restoration of the waterfront, through the relocation of the docks and reconfiguring the city to face the water. Extensive investment was made in cleaning up the waterway. Over three decades, €1bn has been invested in improving the city’s drainage system and river water quality. “Most of the people think that Bilbao has transformed because of the Guggenheim Museum”, explained Asier Abaunza AoU, councillor and city planner of Bilbao City Council. “It has not.

That is just the tip of the iceberg”. Eight times more investment has been contributed toward drainage and river restoration than to the cultural attraction.

The city has also sub-surfaced its transport infrastructure – both train and road network – to 28 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

In Aarhus, the focus of its comprehensive city plan has been creating a compact city form structured around its transport network. A new rail line introduced last year facilitated opportunities for positive growth, including the creation of a new town with a planned population of 25,000. Another strategy has been the densification of its 29 brownfield sites, which are being masterplanned as new sustainable mixed neighbourhoods. Aarhus has aligned its urban thinking with the Sustainable Development Goals, reflecting its commitment to placing people at the heart of its transformation process, including its marginalised homeless community. Creating incubator spaces for creative enterprise in key regeneration areas, such as the ‘Gazelle Farm’, has also been successful. Another cornerstone of the city’s development has been landscape and biodiversity with creation of over 500 hectares of forest in the public realm and future plans to plant over 10,000 trees throughout the city. District

Freiburg

Ljubljana

heating forms a prominent component within the city’s approach to climate mitigation. Currently 98 per cent of Aarhus’ homes are heated in this way, halving their carbon footprint in one go. Aarhus’ approach to sustainable urbanism is distinctly holistic, with the city architect playing a key role in ensuring urban design quality.

the city. Initiatives have reduced energy consumption by 20.6 per cent. Key sustainability rules were adhered to when developing new areas of Freiburg. These included requiring developers to contribute to the tram network and expansion of the city’s cycle network, giving a sustainable backbone to the city’s mobility.

The city was also able to retain influence on the land and keep key areas and assets within public ownership.

It recognised that introducing higher density requires good quality design. In Vauban, Freiburg’s exemplar of sustainable development, it has delivered a variety of housing types and tenures such as co-ops and self-builds along with new shops and civic facilities.

Prof Daseking emphasised that ultimately it is “the bitterness of poor quality that remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten”.

Since 2007, Ljubljana has been working on its 2025 vision and plan for the city, with a strategy for encouraging responsible behaviour, promoting safety and respecting diversity. Safeguarding and expanding its green networks has formed the core of its approach, with five green verges transecting the city. Its exemplar approach to green city planning resulted in Ljubljana being named European Green Capital for 2016. Over the last ten years, it has implemented an initiative to expand its pedestrian areas, using features like riverbanks, bridges, streets, squares and city parks.

The transformation of Congress Square in the heart of the city centre from a car park to a public space successfully illustrates Ljubljana’s approach. The city has also capitalised on its flat topography and mild climate by extending its cycling infrastructure.

It now ranks eighth on the Copenhagenize BicycleFriendly Cities Index. Whilst Ljubljana has never been industrial, key business zones have been established to generate employment with mixed use facilities, delivered through the Smartinska Regeneration Partnership.

Freiburg has long been recognised as a role model in contemporary approaches to sustainable urbanism.

Its city plan established the concept of green fingers to connect surrounding areas of nature with the heart of

In Scotland, there has been a clear national planning focus on sustainable development integrated through policies on housing, transport and communities.

Additionally, there has been extensive government support to encourage the use of policy tools, such as the planning charrettes and the Place Standard, to facilitate more meaningful conversations on place. Prof Gilzean suggested that examples of successful housing-led sustainable urbanism can be found in Glasgow’s Gorbals redevelopment, in Dalmarnock Village and in the emerging Port Dundas neighbourhood alongside the Canal. This has included the integration of custom-build typology within the Dundashill masterplan. Communityled neighbourhood development has also been successfully supported. Glasgow’s Stalled Space initiative has led to the temporary development of stalled sites and under-utilised open spaces as, for Contemporary sustainable urbanism

29

example, pop-up gardens, wildlife areas, and urban gyms or natural play spaces. In Edinburgh, examples of community driven projects include those the redevelopment of Bellfield Church and Bath Street in Portobello.

Wider lessons Drawing on their experiences, each of these leading cities provided sage advice to Scotland about pursuing successful contemporary sustainable urbanism policies and practices.

For Bilbao, the focus on long-term planning and city ambition has been critical. In Aarhus, a strong commitment has put people at the heart of city transformation where continual questioning of ‘what does your development contribute to the city?’ resonates. In Ljubljana, the introduction of pedestrianisation in the city centre has been critical to generating greater social and economic prosperity.

And, in Freiburg, the importance of the organisational structure of planning departments for delivering higher quality of places has been recognised. These experiences highlighted that planning partnerships require four pillars - leadership, vision and power, citizen participation and trust. Finally, Prof Daseking suggested that, to move forward, it is necessary to recognise that the “the time of bosses is over – the time of leaders has come”.

City representatives from Ljubljana, Freiburg, Bilbao and Scottish government

Drawing conclusions From considering the different contemporary approaches available to make Scotland’s cities more sustainable in environmental, socio-economic and cultural terms, the AoU’s exchange in Dundee generated the following set of eight key principles for cities: 1.

Stephen Willacy AoU, city architect of Aarhus

Focus on delivering a long-term planning vision and strategy

2. Develop strong place leadership and governance

3. Drive city transformation through co-production processes 4. Ensure city planning and development is inclusive and intergenerational

5. Embed climate adaption and mitigation actions in to quality placemaking strategies

6. Create a framework for a compact city using transport, green and nature corridors

7. Operate a multi-scalar approach, from the regional to micro

8. Remain ambitious because sustainability is longterm, challenging and complex

30 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

Husam Al Waer AoU is a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee.

Other contributers to this article were: Heather Claridge, Glasgow City Council Ian Cooper, Eclipse Research Cathel De Lima Hutchison, University of Dundee Martin Fleischmann, University of Strathclyde Kevin Murray AoU, The Academy of Urbanism Julie Plichon, The Academy of Urbanism

We’re expanding

We’re building an exciting new cultural venue for Milton Keynes, designed by awardwinning 6a architects.

Design for Living: The role of design in building one million homes in the CaMKOx corridor 23 May 2019 In autumn 2019, Milton Keynes will deliver the inaugural Festival of Creative Urban Living, exploring how to live well in cities now and in the future. In the lead up, Milton Keynes Council, The Academy of Urbanism and MK Gallery are collaborating to deliver this conference to feed into the debate on the Cambridge-MK-Oxford corridor and the implications of its plans for building one million homes by 2050.

Full conference details to be released late 2018. To register interest in attending and receive updates, please email: info@mkgallery.org

900 Midsummer Blvd Milton Keynes MK9 3QA mkgallery.org

CGI of MK Gallery expansion, 6a architects with Gareth Jones and Nils Norman

Including larger exhibition spaces, a stunning auditorium, learning and community spaces, and an independent café, bar and gift shop.

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action 31

From Auckland to Busan George Weeks compares the second cities of South Korea and New Zealand.

A trip to South Korea last month gave me an opportunity to think about the relative characteristics of mid-sized cities in different countries.

My visit was at the invitation of the Seoul Metropolitan Government, which organises an annual conference on universal design. Having spoken at the recent Auckland Universal Design Conference (presentation topic: Disabled Cycling and Universal Design), I was invited to Seoul to provide a planner’s perspective on this subject.

The sixth Seoul Seminar on Universal Design took place on a Friday; this gave me a chance to travel south and visit Busan, South Korea’s second city, earlier in the week. This was more than a case of simple seethe-other-end-of-the-country curiosity. It was an opportunity to tell Auckland’s urban design story to Busan Metropolitan Government, strengthening the links between two sister cities Busan and Auckland.

Busan (population 3.5 million) sits at the southeasternmost corner of the Korean Peninsula. Closer to Japan than it is to Seoul, Busan is a major port; by far the biggest in South Korea. It also holds the distinction of being the only Korean city to avoid capture by North Korean forces during the Korean War. Auckland and Busan signed a sister city agreement in 1996. This agreement acknowledges their synergies in film, trade, marine industries, culture and tourism.

Arriving in Busan by KTX high-speed rail (2.5 hours from Seoul), the geographical similarities with Auckland were immediately apparent. Both cities are characterised by a relatively small amount of (generally reclaimed) flat land near the sea, with the city surrounded by lush green hills and sandy beaches.

From Auckland to Busan 33

Both have major ports developed near the city centre.

At the same time, Busan has over twice the population of Auckland and its port is the ninth busiest in the world. South Korea’s second city is far bigger than New Zealand’s world city.

New Zealand has always depended on the sea for trade and transport. In South Korea, the presence of the Korean Demilitarised Zone has made this true since 1953, turning the peninsula into a de facto island. In the 1950s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. Its considerable economic growth (more than 5 per cent annual average since the 1960s) has led to commensurate scale of investment in infrastructure.

Busan New Port is built on a vast stretch of reclaimed land on the edge of the city. With 30 container ship berths, it is far larger than anything that would exist in New Zealand.

South Korea has one of the highest population densities in the world, with over 50 million people living in an area smaller than New Zealand’s North Island. This density is reflected in its cities, which bear little resemblance to the relaxed single-storey urban form that characterises New Zealand. Traditional Korean architecture is based on dense courtyard housing. Modern Korean cities see high-rise buildings nestling in the flatter parts of cities, generally flanked by green hills.

New Zealand’s urban geography is focused on a few main centres; Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton and Tauranga account for about half the population. This seems like a remarkably high concentration…until you look at South Korea, where 25 million people (half of the country’s population) choose to live in the Seoul Capital Region. Young South Koreans overwhelmingly want move to Seoul; it has the country’s top universities, best jobs, most exciting lifestyle and best international connections.

Just like New Zealand, the largest city has steadily grown larger. In 1950, one in seven New Zealanders lived in Auckland. The figure now is nearer to one in three and Auckland’s share of the country’s population is rising steadily.

34 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

Auckland and Busan are both at the opposite ends of their respective landmass to their nation’s capital; the difference of course being the Wellington region’s modest population of 450,000. Despite its small size, Wellington’s status as New Zealand’s capital earns it a place as a GaWC Gamma city.

Busan is arguably a more ‘classic’ second city precisely because it isn’t the capital. In this respect, Wellington is harder to pigeonhole – it is certainly the centre of political power in New Zealand, but the economic weight sits firmly in the Upper North Island.

On a global scale, Auckland is undoubtedly New Zealand’s most influential and best connected city. It competes with the likes of Melbourne and Brisbane for talent and investment. For other cities in New Zealand, their point of difference is arguably the fact that they are not Auckland – this is associated with lower living costs and easier commutes.

This perhaps raises a wider question: Do second cities do best on the basis of acknowledging their status?

Why focus on trying to usurp the bigger neighbour up the road?

Busan appears to have taken this approach, focusing on its many inherent strengths and not trying to be Seoul, Busan is well-placed to prosper. While Seoul looks across the world, Busan focuses on its neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region. This in turn leads to links with global cities. When an Auckland Mayoral delegation visited Fukuoka in Japan, they were joined by representatives from Busan Metropolitan Government. Busan’s strengths as a secondary city enable it to shine on a global stage.

George Weeks is a specialist urban designer in the city centre unit at the Auckland Council Design Office in New Zealand. He is an MRTPI Chartered Planner and a Young Urbanist.

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The town and the city: Can big cities be happier and healthier?

Francis Clay questions the meaning of the term ‘big city’ and whether ‘mid-sized cites’ would be any better.

It’s a trope as old as time itself. Cities, so it goes, are ‘big and dirty’. A city might offer you a livelihood and access to the world’s biggest cultural hubs, but they do so at the price of breathing dirty air and becoming another ‘face in the crowd’. In other words, we tell ourselves that by moving to a city, we must trade our happiness and health for the chance of wealth and excitement. This has led some urban commentators to declare that the city of the future should look more like Berlin than Beijing; large enough to reap the benefits that density provides, but small enough to not be a sprawling, polluted, yet glimmering megalopolis of the sort predicted by Fritz Lang.

For this reason, the timing of this year’s AoU Congress on ‘mid-sized’ cities coincides with increasing interest in the term. But, in the 21st century, is it necessary or

even possible to call for us to move from big cities to ‘mid-sized’ ones? Arguably, the trope of the ‘big dirty city’ doesn’t have much of a shelf life left in the 21st century. With smart tech and sustainability on the lips of every urban leader from Stuttgart to Seoul, Durban to Delhi, Mexico City to Montreal, density, mass-transit, and ‘smart’ solutions are the hot tickets for urban development. Does size really matter when it comes to making ‘happy cities’? Or is this suggestion just tinkering at the edges of the problems in cities that make people unhappy in the first place?

However, the ‘big dirty city’ is ultimately a trope, one that paints all places across the world with a single brush. Mexico City is more comparable to Los Angeles than Tokyo, for example, in terms of pollution. Nor is it so simple a case that bigger means worse for health and well-being. Big cities often dwarf smaller urban areas in terms of access to healthcare, and so offer higher life expectancies. Hong Kong, despite being one of the worlds largest and densest cities, is one of the world’s healthiest. A quick, highly unscientific glance at the world’s healthiest places shows little correlation between city size and life expectancy; you’re much more likely to die young in Sheffield than London, yet more likely still to die young in Rio. Even then, such indicators fluctuate wildly between different districts of a given city. In other words, it’s not so simple to say we’d be happier if we just all shirked mega-cities for their middling neighbours.

Full disclosure: the, albeit romanticised, size, vibrancy and grit of cities is exactly what I, along with so many others, love about them in the first place.

That said, as a millennial struggling with seemingly endlessly spiralling rent costs in cities that are starting to function better as hedge-fund investment opportunities than actual liveable spaces, I also sympathise with the argument for down-sizing. The argument for mid-sized cities as being better for our well-being tends to be one driven by a single statistic: today’s young professionals are, for the first time, shunning the Londons and New Yorks of the world in favour of smaller pastures. Simply put, big cities across the world now have consistently staggering costs of living; the bigger the city, the bigger the cost, and no longer is this a global-north exclusive phenomenon. Relatively speaking, you’re just as likely to be priced out of Nairobi as you are Chicago. But it’s not just money that’s turning people away; people consistently cite dissatisfaction with life in big cities due to their pollution and alienating crowdedness.

Once upon a time, failing health, physical and mental, might have been worth it for the chance to live in the great metropoles, but skyrocketing financial costs are making a new generation think again.

Likewise, the bright future promised by urbanists is undeniably big, and dense. Cities are increasingly seen as the solutions to pollution, climate change, and even unhealthy lifestyles. However, the key is talking about making cities big and dense; you can make a city as wide as you want, so long as there are enough people to a square mile. In a big dense city you can get more bang for your buck when it comes to mitigating things that reduce our well-being. Public transport can serve people more effectively, reducing cars and giving our lungs a break. While city services such as hospitals and schools have a bad reputation in terms of quality, this tends to reflect trends of wealth as opposed to density. Poor inner-city neighbourhood services tend to be comparable to poor rural services. Hong Kong, for example, is consistently viewed as not only one of the healthiest cities in the world, but one with some of the best services; albeit, not equally accessible to all.

This is mainly because its well-financed hospitals can serve people more efficiently due to the density of the urban fabric. People spread out across many smaller settlements, or worse, across large, sprawling, scarcely populated suburbs meaning it’s harder to build the kind of city that people can be prosperous and healthy in.

© McKay Savage / Flickr

This argument certainly has at least one foot in reality, but it isn’t one that is particularly new. The notion that big cities require us to pay for prosperity with health and happiness is long standing. From Dickens’ poverty stricken London, to the electric pull of Kerouac’s American metropolises, to the desperate loneliness of Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong, cities are interpreted in many ways, but nearly always along the lines of them being big and dirty, but also exciting and offering at least the chance of a living. Big cities are, indeed, the most polluted places on the planet. They often see staggering wealth inequality, community segregation, high rates of crime, and human isolation. Hardly a cocktail for health and well-being. Indeed, it is this long-standing interpretation of our cities, whether driven by quantitative data or cultural understandings, that led to urbanists of the 20th century calling for us to abandon the city altogether in favour of sprawling suburbs. Ironically, it is this drive to ‘de-densify’ urban centres that has caused many of the problems cities face today including congestion and the isolating effects of urban sprawl. This might be why 21st century critics of big cities are calling for a simple down-sizing, rather than a full retreat from the big city.

That said, this doesn’t mean we should all pack our bags for Shanghai in the hopes of a happier, healthier life. For one, there is a limit to the logic that we can make cities infinitely more populous without harming people’s health. No matter how densely packed into cleverly designed urban plans, more people inevitably means more waste, more pollution, and if the numbers are anything to go by, higher levels of isolation.

Likewise, the mega-cities of today may simply be untenable for all but the world’s most privileged.

Worryingly, where city government’s have sought to implement contemporary trends in urban design, neighbourhoods have gentrified rapidly. This can be seen from Seoul to San Francisco; neighbourhoods made more appealing under the mantra of less pollution, better transit, and smarter design have seen rents skyrocket. Perhaps, then, smaller cities are appealing not because they are small, but because they are all people can afford.

The town and the city 37

Likewise, we must recognise that the theory behind designing a healthy city isn’t a science. After all, the modernist, car-oriented utopia envisaged by the planners of the 20th century was sold as a step forwards from perceived unhealthy crowdedness disease ridden cities of the old world. Those same designs replaced one set of problems with another, demolishing swathes of urban cores across the world to make room for highways and driving people into suburban developments. This, of course, does not mean that density and smart designs are therefore doomed to fail. But, a quick glance at the world’s premier ‘smart’ and ’green’ cities of the past 20 years shows some recurring themes. Low take up, wealth segregation, massive inefficiencies in construction methods are seen from Mazdar to Shanghai’s shortlived eco-city project. This is before we factor in some of the creepy implications of, for example, Google’s proposed ‘green’ and ‘smart’ neighbourhood, or Singapore’s heavy use of ‘smart’ sensors; there is something rather dystopian about paving the road out of our current urban problems with big-brother-esque solutions.

Ultimately, when it comes to trying to address wellbeing, looking at city size might be a fruitless pursuit.

There is as much of a case to say we could be happier in big cities as there is to say we could be happier in smaller cities. However, to trot out a much over-used and somewhat dubious statistic, by 2050 humanity will be a predominantly urban species, and there is no particularly pleasant way to dictate where people

should live. Cities and their design are not primarily governed by needs and desires of human well-being.

Cities rise and fall by merit of their capacity to offer livelihoods and thrive on the sheer vibrancy of humans being human beings. People are drawn ever more to cities, usually for work, sometimes for pleasure.

Perhaps in the future, the need for dense proximity to work will be eliminated for many by changing technologies and working habits, and the draw of big cities will partially vanish. Perhaps it won’t; who’s to say, other than naval-gazing futurologists. What we do know is that, right now, big cities are where people are going, and it is the task of planners to make them happy and healthy, just as it is their job to make people in town and country happy and healthy as well. I mentioned that there are perhaps better indicators of well-being than size; wealth and its distribution are chief amongst them. To make a case for city downsizing along these lines is ultimately a misguided argument of tropes, grounded in that age old notion; cities are ’big’, and cities are ’dirty’.

Francis Clay is a recent MA graduate in urban planning and international development from the Unversity of Sheffield, currently working as a project assistant for Habitat International Coalition and undertaking an urban response internship for ODI’s ALNAP.

© Ninara / Flickr

38 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

© David Kennedy A oU – placeimages.co.uk

Cities on the rise A postcard from Congress

Inclusive city growth The Academy of Urbanism’s international Congress took place in Cork, Ireland from 27-30 June. The Congress continued the Academy’s traditional format of using the event as a forum to learn from and promote great places. Immersing themselves in the city and its hinterland were a host of international experts, who blended global and local solutions to housing, transport, economic, inclusion and design problems within growing cities, demonstrating that it is possible to both grow and take care of your citizens.

The success of cities has become central to national economies and culture. They are the drivers of investment, tourism and migration – the young, the educated, the creative and the rich are once again being drawn to live and work in urban areas across the globe.

The Academy of Urbanism’s Congresses are important for bringing together diverse opinion and experience whether local or international. Tony Reddy AoU explores the lessons and success of this year’s Congress in Cork, Ireland.

This is not just true of capital cities like London, Dublin or Paris, but the next tier all across Europe including Aarhus, Bilbao, Marseille, Rotterdam and Cork. It is in these places where the biggest and most exciting recent transformations are taking place, giving space for new ideas, new enterprise and new investment.

The town and the city | Cities on the rise 39

Cork The emergent success of Cork is reflected in the progressive regeneration of its city centre, the vibrancy of its streets, and the growth of population and employment. All of this is both putting pressure and creating opportunity for the city and the surrounding county towns. Success can bring its own problems in terms of affordability, the preservation of local character, congestion and social inequality.

Simon Coveney TD, Tánaiste and minister for foreign affairs & trade

Designing for urban childhoods workshop

It was an opportune time for the Academy to visit Cork, Ireland’s second city, as it embarks on an anticipated period of growth and addresses the delicate balancing act of ensuring inclusive city growth. The Congress addressed the issue of positive growth and whether it must come at the expense of what made cities attractive in the first place: their identity, community and the very distinctiveness that set them apart. It also examined how cities can grow and retain a distinctive physical place identity. In addition to learning from other cities, the delegates also took in key areas of Cork City on foot and by bicycle.

In recent years Cork County has been one of the most successful Irish entrants for the Academy’s Urbanism Awards, having received several for the quality of its streets, neighbourhoods and towns. Previous award recipients have included Oliver Plunkett Street, St Patricks Street and most recently Clonakilty, which won The Great Town award in 2017 and was visited by delegates for a workshop after the Congress.

The Congress events were held in a number the city’s most unique and interesting spaces. These included O’Donnell + Tuomey’s St Angela’s College, a building sensitively integrated into a urban hillside site, Murray O’Laoire’s School of Music, Jack Coughlan’s expertly renovated and renewed Nano Nagle Place and the Crawford Gallery.

Ireland 2040

Exchanging learning session at Crawford Art Gallery

40 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

All images credited to David Kennedy AoU – placeimages.co.uk

Richard Florida, urbanist and author

Ireland’s foreign affairs minister and TD (member of parliament), Simon Coveney, provided the audience with an overview of Cork’s future that is both ambitious and visionary. He explained this vision in the context of the government’s Project Ireland 2040 Plan which anticipates significant growth for a number of Irish cities including Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford. With the city boundaries expanding to increase the population from 130,000 to 220,000 and an anticipated need to accommodate a further 130,000 extra inhabitants he emphasised that “we need to plan for what Cork should look like in 2040 to ensure a better quality of life.” He explained to the audience that investment in Cork is “starting with a canvas that has so much to offer”. He indicated that there was government commitment to providing the significant infrastructural investment the city now needs to address these issues: a strong focus on inner city living, a transportation system providing alternatives to car based travel and “more options for the city”. He posed

the question “whether you are better off living in the city, dropping your kids to school locally and walking to work or commuting for three hours each day and missing time with your family.” This is a question which applies to all our cities and towns. The challenge is to overcome the problems that growth and success can bring in terms of affordability, preservation of local character and social inequality. We need to ensure that we nurture and preserve the delicate social balance upon which success is based.

is a key lesson for all our cities if the Ireland 2040 programme is to be successful. Perhaps the National Regeneration and Development Agency could be such a catalyst to assist special purpose regeneration companies in our key urban local authorities.

The Congress also examined some of the trends that are set to sweep through our cities in the near future.

Jeffrey Tumlin AoU, a city planning strategist from San Francisco, took issue with the inevitable roll out of autonomous vehicles which is at odds with our right to privacy and freedom.

He finished his presentation by confirming the government’s “determination, for the sake of Dublin, to provide real alternatives to urban scale in our other cities” and “to avoid the mistakes of the past.”

The great achievement of Academy Congresses is that they encourage a blending of local and international knowledge on a range of topics. This was particularly the case in the lectures and workshops on housing and residential community. These explored local and international ideas and solutions to housing – a pressing issue for almost all of Europe – so that ideas, concepts and policies are pooled and shared.

International Exemplars The Congress cast was international and included a wide range of speakers and topics. Delegates were briefed on the struggles and successes involved in encouraging growth in historic cities in particular in the areas of port redevelopment and regeneration of neighbourhoods.

Richard Florida The keynote speaker of the Congress was Richard Florida who, in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, was one of the first commentators to chronicle the back-to-the-city movement of the young, educated and affluent into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight. He spoke about his latest book, The New Urban Crisis, and provided an insightful analysis of this crisis which has emerged in today’s urbanised knowledge economy as a result of this movement. He also put forward a prescription for more inclusive cities capable of ensuring growth and prosperity for all. Interestingly he provided an explanation, during the question and answer session, as to why his new book predominantly focusses on the Anglo-American world. He explained that it’s because his publisher did not believe that his audience would be interested in lessons from Europe!

Susana Ruiz Fernandez AoU, architect at Bilbao’s urban planning office, spoke about equitable growth and neighbourhood regeneration in Bilbao. She told the story of the city’s transformation following the collapse of its traditional industrial model in the 1980s.

She explained the various initiatives including the move and extension of the port, the regeneration of the Abandoibarra and Zorrotzaure, the environmental regeneration of the River Nervión. She described that the ‘Bilbao Effect’, where an iconic building becomes the image of the city’s regeneration, as being similar to a glacier, where the support systems are less visible than what appears at first sight. Memorably, she described the Guggenheim Building as being “the cherry on the cake, but not the cake.”

Philip Preuner from HafenCity, in Hamburg, spoke about the transformation of its inner city port and the steps the city took to create a sustainable, accessible and attractive mixed-use neighbourhood on the waterfront. He explained that the 157 hectare site, similar in size to Cork’s Docklands, had a wide environmental, regeneration, social and cultural agenda.

The Congress provided the opportunity for delegates to understand how cities such as Aarhus, Bilbao, Cork and Hamburg avoid such risks. It demonstrated that these nimble, energetic smaller cities provide a positive template for urban futures, combining inclusion and identity alongside economic prosperity.

The range of national and international speakers addressing the Congress provided the delegates, including architects, planners and all the major players involved in designing and managing our urban environment, with well researched insights into the issues involved, ensuring the success and sustainability of our towns and cities in the 21st century.

Imandeep Kaur, the lynchpin of Birmingham’s entrepreneurial talent with a conscience, and Riccardo Marini, formerly with Gehl Architects, demonstrated that streets should be designed first with people in mind, not cars. This proved to be a lively topic – relevant to both Cork and all European cities and towns.

Tony Reddy AoU is a director of The Academy of Urbanism

The key lesson of the Bilbao and Hamburg presentations is their demonstration of the effectiveness of a single purpose agency with wide powers and a focus on a specific programme delivering successful regeneration over a wide period. This

Cities on the rise 41

In conversation with...

Imandeep Kaur Co-founder of Impact Hub Birmingham

The Academy’s encouragement and promotion of better urbanism, seeking out the places and people that accept the challenge and potential in urban complexity, continually draws our attention to the relationship between civic authority and individual citizens.

Imandeep ‘Immy’ Kaur is the founder of the Birmingham Impact Hub, part of a global network of such initiatives promoting inclusive community access. Her aim is to improve access to civic resources for citizens with great aspirations but little current influence.

Her inspirational talk at the Academy’s Congress in June drew on her experience of introducing such initiatives in her home city of Birmingham. She explained these in their local and global context, and how they could be applied in Cork and elsewhere. Steven Bee AoU caught up with Immy after the Congress to find out more about how the circumstances of Birmingham, England’s second city and Britain’s largest local authority, had motivated and energised her and her associates.

42 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

Imandeep ‘Immy’ Kaur

Here & Now (H&N): Could you outline briefly how you became involved in the Birmingham Impact Hub and Mission Birmingham?

Imandeep Kaur (IK): With a Masters in International Development I worked first in large organisations with national or global perspectives. It became apparent to me that there was a disconnect between the good intentions of such organisations and their ability to cover the ‘last mile’ in implementing local initiatives that were responsive to local needs. I also found that the championing of local initiatives remained compromised by traditional, patriarchal, cultures of public authorities, however hard individuals working within them try to bring new ways. Having moved back from London to my home city of Birmingham to work for a large housing association, I was familiar with the local community circumstances and felt I had better chance of getting enough people interested in a different approach to civic engagement outside the established governmental system.

I started TEDx Brum in 2011 to promote fresh ideas and establish a community of people with similar ideas. We started with around 100 people in a local arts centre and ended up with 1,900 in the Birmingham Hippodrome.

People were engaged in the discussions that these events

Impact Hub Birmingham © Chris Sadler

generated but were soon saying ‘what’s next? How do we make use of this momentum?’ Many were, like me, frustrated by the lack of progress made by traditional organisations. In 2013 we invited people, via Twitter, to share ideas. The first meeting attracted 20-30 people and we started collectively to work up our ideas for the sort of city we wanted to live in, and how it should grow.

We were helped at the outset by Indy Johar, at that time a director of the Global Impact Hub Association, and we visited Hubs in Islington, London, and overseas before establishing the Birmingham Hub.

start up enterprises, but beyond there is still scope.

We found it easy to bring together people who want to explore approaches to property development different from those pursued by established public and private organisations.

We could see that what was really needed was space for people with new social and commercial projects to work together with minimal overheads; something that the established agencies seemed to find particularly difficult. That led to the creation of Mission Birmingham – a movement for a fairer and more just city that could use the Impact Hub model as a new real estate model for Birmingham. Our aim was to find meanwhile spaces and properties that we could collectively repair and make useable at minimal cost.

IK: As I said, Mission Birmingham is a movement for a fairer and more just city. Our aim is to build on the momentum generated by our Impact Hub and provide more accommodation in more locations for new businesses and social initiatives. We want to provide an alternative to the broken real estate model that dominates the city today. We haven’t found community asset transfer initiatives to be reaching the communities that really need them, and our radical approach doesn’t fit neatly into the criteria that currently have to be satisfied. We don’t want to be seen as a threat to those who have to make the most of methods we feel are outdated, but we have found it difficult to engage.

H&N: So you see great potential in Birmingham’s youthful population and the availability of sites suitable for community-led development. Tell us more about Mission Birmingham and how the Impact Hub has been developed.

H&N: I’d like to know more about how you went about it but first, you talked at our Congress about your love for your city. Can you explain what you think it is about Birmingham that makes it special, and different from other places?

We found it difficult to get public sector support when we were setting up the Impact Hub. So we followed the example of the Oakland (California) Impact Hub and sought crowd-funding for our first space. In 2014, with an initial target of £50k, we pretty quickly raised £65k.

With match-funding from the Cadbury Foundation and some directors loans we created a fund of £150k that enabled us to enter into a commercial lease on space at the Walker Building in Digbeth. This is not a conventional co-working space as we do not insist on a commercial rent from those who use it. Those who

IK: Birmingham is an eclectic city. It has one of the youngest and most diverse populations in Europe with 40 per cent under 35. The variety of nationalities and ethnicity is energising and, compared with London at least, there is still space and property to accommodate and grow new activities. The area immediately around the city centre – locations like the Jewellery Quarter and Digbeth – are already beyond the reach of most

In conversation with... Imandeep Kaur 43

Black Lives Matter UK brunch as part of Mission Birmingham © Paul Stringer

can pay help to support those who can’t yet. There is no distinction between them however, and the allocation of space is ‘tenure-blind’.

We are treating this as a five-year research and development programme, aiming for a model of a ‘collaborative town hall’ that can generate sufficient income to remain viable while independent of charitable support. We work as a collective community – social action on top of co-working. In our second year we prepared a business plan aimed at securing a suitable building or meanwhile space. That’s proving a real challenge, and our efforts were repeatedly blocked by advice that ‘it doesn’t work like that’. We want to demonstrate that it should and could; that commercial rents are the single biggest obstacle to making workspaces available to young people and we have to find new ways of making such projects viable.

H&N: You were critical in your Congress presentation of the patriarchal nature of civic governance and ownership in Birmingham that had led to catastrophic decisions in the past and required a counter-movement to achieve broader democratic control. Within the global context of the Impact Hub network, it would be interesting to know how this approach to ‘community entrepreneurship’ is tuned to local circumstances in Birmingham.

IK: Yes – local authorities remain hampered by deeprooted paternalistic political culture and organisational structures. However much they would wish to change, they claim to be hampered by successive funding cuts – that are about to get worse. Our direct appeal to individuals through social media has connected people with ideas and idealism uninhibited by the conventional constraints of existing public agencies.

44 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

H&N: What do you think is most distinctive about the space you have created at Impact Hub Birmingham?

IK: Our open door approach is different from established co-working spaces in that we do not insist on a commercial rent. Co-working is fine for independent professionals with the business potential to pay a commercial rent, but we want to encourage those to whom such a burden, at least at the outset, would crush any social or entrepreneurial potential. We expect those who can pay to do so, but those who can’t – third sector organisations and business ideas yet to achieve the status of a ‘start-up’ – will be supported by those who can. We accept payment in time as well as money.

Our current space was repaired and fitted out by our partners, including the design and manufacture of all the furniture.

H&N: You mentioned in your talk the changes coming with the introduction of the Birmingham Combined Authority. Do you think this will provide a better governance context for community entrepreneurship?

Are there any signs of improvement?

IK: Yes – the creation of a new authority is a great opportunity to move away from the old ways and the Combined Authority does seem able and willing to work with us. It is attracting some of the best politicians and professionals from within its supporting authorities – enabling them to display skills that might otherwise remain hidden.

H&N: The Impact Hub and Mission Birmingham may have to be promoted as a counter-movement at present, in order to overcome outdated attitudes, but how do you see it achieving the transformation of its principles to become the mainstream?

projects like Mission Birmingham, a large urban area is more likely to have the sorts of properties and sites that we seek to develop – vacant, underused or neglected – as a consequence of the economic cycles that larger places experience.

H&N: The global Impact Hub network works within many different political and economic contexts – does this offer insight into the optimum conditions for achievement of your objectives?

IK: We are able to engage with groups in many different circumstances and different stages of development. This provides us with examples of what can work to overcome the resistance of those who insist that ‘it won’t work here’. The mutual support and encouragement we get from others, and the opportunity to share our successes is really energising. Our digital furniture design and manufacturing initiative for example is now being replicated in Impact Hubs across the world, helping to build our self-confidence and local credibility.

DemoDev

IK: It’s true that we have had to make some big compromises in order to get our initiatives going. Without public sector support in securing accommodation, we had to accept a five-year commercial lease. Our presence is already attracting other activities and raising the rental value. If we were to stay for a further period our rent would be likely to double. We hope that the success we have achieved will attract better support in future, not just from public agencies, but from landlords who recognise the commercial value of socially responsible development.

We are currently discussing with enlightened developers opportunities for us to introduce community infrastructure around a civic square within residential development in currently deprived parts of Birmingham.

We have also established DemoDev to enable local communities to identify sites throughout the Greater Birmingham area that could be brought forward for community-based housing development, using Wiki House methods. Our aim is to harness the energy and enthusiasm of those sharing our interest in new ways of achieving urban development to push these into the mainstream and attract public and private sector support.

H&N: You talked at the Congress about the ‘new democratic city’ – led by human emancipation rather than transactional economics, seeing citizens as a source of creative value rather than a financial overhead. You gave a number of examples of initiatives – in Bristol, Detroit, London, and your own DemoDev in Birmingham. Do you think these, and in particular DemoDev, have the potential to become mainstream activities? If so what is it about Birmingham’s circumstances that might help to realise this potential?

IK: Yes of course – it’s what drives us on. It’s proving difficult and we’ve had to take a pragmatic approach, but as we see it, the old ways of civic management and urban development are obsolete. A new economic paradigm will have to be adopted sooner or later. The longer we leave it, the more difficult it will be. Our research and development work will offer a model that urban communities can use to force the change that is necessary if civic society is to be truly sustainable.

Steven Bee AoU is a director of The Academy of Urbanism Visit birmingham.impacthub.net for more information

H&N: Do you think the potential of your ideas is influenced by the scale of the urban population in which it is promoted?

IK: To some extent. Initiatives like Impact Hub start from the most local and small scale context, but if this is within a larger urban setting then the potential market – economic or social – for new enterprises is much greater. This means that further hubs may be created, building more easily on the success of the first. With

In conversation with... Imandeep Kaur 45

My Place

People with places that are significant in their lives

If you would like to take part in MY PLACE, simply email your photo and a text of up to 250 words to johnbrucemullin@hotmail.com

Museum Gardens Alison Pringle, Head gardener

What is the city but the people?

- Shakespeare In this edition of Here & Now, MY PLACE concentrates on one city, York, formerly Jorvik, formerly Eoforwyck, formerly Eboracum. Generation upon generation of people have contributed to the development of this beautiful city. We can pick out significant figures – Septimus Severus who made Eboracum a colonia: Halfdan who turned the Vikings from raiders to settlers and administrators; Walter de Grey who started the building of the largest cathedral in England, George Hudson who made the city a hub of rail transport; Joseph Rowntree, who was pivotal in the development of the garden city and social housing.

But the city is not only its great monuments or its famous inhabitants, for everyone who has ever lived or worked in York has played their part, for ‘true, the people are the city’ and who knows how significant will be the contributions of those who live there now? These are the stories of some of those people.

John Mullin AoU

This has only been my place for five years, but what a place it is! I am surrounded by history, with stories layered beneath my feet. People have shaped it for over 2,000 years and every generation has made its mark.

The Romans left the Multangular Tower – corner point of the fortress of Eboracum, medieval monks established the wealthy St Mary’s Abbey enclosed by strong walls that survive today, and in 1830 philanthropists of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society created the landscaped garden you see surrounding the Yorkshire Museum.

This history impacts directly on my day to day activities. Buried archaeology and Scheduled Ancient Monument designation limit how deep I can dig and where I can plant trees.

Ground penetrating work requires an archaeologist to study the trenches, ensuring nothing important is being disturbed. These challenges make it a stimulating place to work.

I’m originally from Tyneside and my love of gardening stems from helping my dad as a child. The path to my present career wasn’t straightforward; I studied Fine Art and fell into horticulture when doing botanical illustrations. My previous job was as head gardener at Cragside, Northumberland; another amazing place. I was lured south by the opportunity to create a new garden alongside the historic Museum Garden site – the first significant change since the 1830s. The design of the Edible Wood took inspiration from the past without seeking to re-create it. It is important to reflect our own time period, adding a new layer to the strata of the site.

As a gardener I am always aware of being a temporary custodian of my piece of earth but here that feeling is amplified by knowledge of all the people who have shaped this place before me and the hope that many more will follow after. It gives me perspective.

46 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 8 12 | | Autumn Winter 2018 2016

Spark:York John Gardham, Director I’m a York lad. I love this city, and I’m doing my best to turn it into the kind of place I want it to be for my own kids. Having grown up in a low-income family, I want to create equal access to everything in a city where tourists outnumber locals 35 to one.

When I came up with the idea for Spark:York everyone except my codirectors, thought I was mad, and when we pitched it to the planners, they said we had a one per cent chance of getting the council to agree to shipping containers inside the city walls.

The whole Piccadilly area needs regeneration and it has huge potential, with a river frontage, major transport hubs and views over to the Castle Museum and Clifford’s Tower. It is suffering from a lack of vision and collective ownership, and needs a ‘meanwhile’ operation like ours to kickstart development.

So Spark:York is a vital project, offering opportunities for start-up businesses and community organisations in our converted shipping containers. We have 24 independent businesses at Spark:York, including street food, bars, restaurants and retailers; alongside community space, a co-working hub, and private offices. All tenants must be local and have a community purpose – offering employment and opportunities to disadvantaged people.

The Eye of York Reyahn King Chief executive, York Museums Trust My parents wanted me to study Law. My mother had not been able to finish her schooling in South Africa because of apartheid, so she was very proud that I got into Oxford University at a time when most Cape Malays in South Africa couldn’t go to University at all.

I wanted to study History of Art but she saw that as a frivolous waste of the opportunities in front of me. As a compromise I studied history but working in museums remained my ambition. I went on later to do a MA in Art History.

Now here I am in a wonderful neoclassical building by John Carr, responsible for York Museums Trust with its beautiful art gallery, historic Yorkshire Museum and the amazing heritage of this Castle Museum site in the Eye of York. York Castle Museum is home to the much loved Kirkgate Victorian Street and a nationally important museum collection of everyday life.

Bishopthorpe Palace

Monk Gate Bar

John Sentamu

Chantelle Williams

Archbishop of York

Customer operations manager

I was born in a little village called Masoli in Uganda. The word means ‘place of maize’, so called because the soil was so fertile and the water and sunshine so plentiful that we always had abundant harvests. My dad was headmaster of the school in Masoli and so I knew everybody in the village and they all knew me. It was a wonderfully close-knit community.

My favourite place is the Richard III Experience at Monk Bar where I am responsible for the smooth running of the museum on behalf of the York Archaeological Trust.

They say you can be born in a garage but that does not make you into a motor mechanic, and although I came from a Christian family it wasn’t until my 10th birthday that I realised that all I needed was to invite Christ into my life as Lord and Saviour!

Dad had invited an English missionary to our house for my birthday party, along with all my friends from school.

I remember the missionary telling me that there would be an even bigger celebration in Heaven that day if I gave my life to Jesus. So I did. And the following morning I awoke with a joy in my heart that has never left me.

Now I live in an ancient palace with more rooms than I can count, but it goes with the job so I have no choice.

But is it really my place? I do think often of that little house in Masoli, but yes, York is my place because it is where the Lord has brought me to pass on the same simple message that I heard as a child – that there will be a great celebration in Heaven when you give your life to Jesus, and that there will be joy in your life henceforth.

The building itself of Monk Bar is visually stunning and, being the north gateway to the city as well as its most fortified gateway, it is of tremendous historical importance. Built in the 14th century, Monk Bar is a self-contained fortress, with each floor capable of being defended. Monk Bar has the city’s only working portcullis with the windlass on the middle floor which you can see behind me in the photo.

The rooms either side of me have had various uses over the years but most notoriously as a jail for rebellious Catholics in the 16th century.

Not only is the building fascinating but the subject matter is close to my heart – having been a Ricardian since the age of 14 (coming up to 20 years!), my work at the Richard III Experience here in York is a dream come true! So if you are ever in York, do drop in and let me introduce you to my friend Richard.

This place has been a Castle, a prison and a place of public protest. Decisions made here had life-changing impacts for people right across the North of England. As a site of judgement and punishment, people were imprisoned, executed and transported. There are amazing stories to tell about people and events here. Yet this understanding of the place is currently hidden.

Over the next few years we shall be creating an architectural and landscape intervention that will rejuvenate this end of York and will deliver a renewed world class visitor attraction. So keep your eyes on the ‘Eye of York’!

My place 47

Fulford Flowers, High St., Fulford

Stonebow House

Sheryl Popplewell

Architect

Owner

I came to Yorkshire in 1979 to study for a degree in three-dimensional design, reasoning that this course would provide me with practical, as well as academic know-how. The highlight was sharing a birthday (and a few pints in the Student’s Union bar) with an amazing tutor, Wilf Franks, who had studied and worked at the Bauhaus in his youth.

I dreamed of being a ballet dancer when I was at school, and I won a place at the Royal Ballet but my parents couldn’t afford the fees. I was completely lost.

I hadn’t tried at school and knew of nothing else I wanted to do. I left at 16 and tried lots of jobs, from working in restaurants to hairdressing and beauty, but was never really happy.

Bishopthorpe Road Johnny Hayes Councillor This is my place, Bishopthorpe Road, or Bishy Rue as we dubbed it when the Tour de France came to town. We were going to be properly French and call it Rue Bishy, but then it would have been ‘rubbishy’ and this street is anything but that. Indeed, we were named last year as the best high street in Britain in the competition run by the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Now I find myself in local government as an independent councillor and as a champion of the silent majority in a legal battle over the heritage of my adopted city of York, and it all started with going out to buy a tin of paint and coming back with an ironmonger’s shop.

Actually, I did build a career in hairdressing. I had a few shops but the recession took the feet from under it.

I was always interested in flowers. I thought: ‘everyone likes flowers’ so I opened a shop on a whim!

When the Barbican Centre opened in York, I approached them about providing flowers for artists in their dressing rooms. They thought it was a great idea. This summer we toured with Elton John, putting fresh flowers in his dressing room every day. He had 20 big plants and lots of flowers – he hates twigs and fillers – it has to be all flowers.

Outsiders think it is all very glamorous but it is hard work on the road. We get invited to all sorts of events. Often I have to get dressed in the back of the van, but I always enjoy myself and I’m often the first on the dance floor. But then we have to clear everything away and sometimes finish at 5am after working a 23-hour day.

I had been a teacher for 20 years and was thoroughly fed up with all the bureaucracy which had taken all the joy out of the job. I’d always enjoyed woodwork and metalwork and thought an ironmonger’s shop would be just right for me. What I didn’t bargain for was the closure of the nearby chocolate factory which took away all our passing trade, and the financial crash, which closed down most of the businesses on the parade.

I realised that the only way out of the mess was for all the local traders to get together and make a plan. I went on the internet to find out how to write a constitution, called a meeting to sign everyone up, and set up a kitty. We bought some bunting, had a street party and the rest is history.

48 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

John Orrell AoU

Following a series of jobs in Yorkshire and Saudi Arabia, I was employed by a small architectural practice in Wakefield. The thought of training as an architect had never occurred to me. However, with the help of the practice I returned to my studies, first in Leeds and then at the Architectural Association in London.

By the time I’d finally qualified, the practice principal, David Lyons, had decided to retire and I joined a management buyout team that created DLA Design. The practice has grown to over 100 people with offices in Leeds, Manchester and London.

We work across a wide range of architectural sectors on new build and refurbishment projects. Stonebow House is one of our recent challenges.

The building was completed in 1965 at the height of the post-war commercial boom. It is widely considered to have been designed by Wells, Hickman and Partners in response to a City of York Council design competition.

The building has attracted widespread public and press criticism over the years, considered by many to be a ‘concrete monstrosity’ that should be demolished. In our opinion it is York’s only example of what Reyner Banham described as New Brutalism, and as such, is an important part of the city’s rich built heritage. We have retained and refurbished Stonebow House, working with the existing building fabric to emphasise the original solid and dependable structural aesthetic.

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 abstract 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 dbs@academyofurbanism.org.uk

Coulee verte René Dumont Fanny Blanc

Before New York’s High Line, there was the Coulée Verte! Opened in 1993, the Coulée verte René Dumont, also called ‘promenade plantée’, is a three-mile elevated linear park following old rail tracks from the 12th arrondissement in Paris. It goes from Opera Bastille to the Boulevard Périphérique, allowing pedestrians to discover this section of Paris, 10 metres over the ground. This is the perfect spot to step back from Paris’ vibrancy on a spring day.

© Guilhem Vellut / Flickr

My Place 49

Metropol Parasol Karla Santos Zambrano Located amidst the historic old quarter of Seville, and designed by Jürgen Mayer H., you will find the iconic wooden structure also known as ‘Las Setas de la Encarnación’.

It houses a museum, a market, a public plaza and panoramic terraces which offer magnificent views of the Sevillan skyline, not to mention the city’s colourful sunsets. Perhaps its peculiar design could be seen slightly out of place, given its location, but the parasol features are what make the place unique; its connectivity and ability to serve multiple uses while bringing locals and tourists together make it a great urban place.

50 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 10 8 | | Autumn Autumn2016 2017

Faneromeni, Nicosia Ioanna Nicolaou This historical school of Faneromeni, whose students are getting less and less year by year due to its position next to the bisecting border of the capital, now serves more as a social facade overlooking a church yard. As Europe is slowly trying to tackle the integration of migrants, I’ve always found this area very captivating as all sorts of people from different backgrounds come together and enjoy their mornings or afternoons, while the large space in front – the entrance steps to the school acting as seats – is ideal for outdoor events and gatherings. Cafés and local shops surround the pedestrian streets where locals enjoy walking within the old neighborhoods of the city, with the potential of encouraging daily interactions in shared space.

Dublin Canal Gael Welstead The canal in south Dublin is a beautiful spot in the city. It attracts people young and old, dog walkers, cyclists, kayakers, swans and all sorts. It is a good place to feel near the elements – an important thing in the inner city – and it provides this for many Dubliners, particularly with the uneven spread of green space in the city and the dual carriagewaybound Liffey.

The canal makes you feel close to the city and far away at the same time. During the summer months it is constantly crowded with swarms of young people enjoying a good time in the sun. Often a lot of mess is left behind and it’s easy to judge those who litter but also there are poor waste facilities provided, which I believe is due to the fragmentation of responsibility in council and services.

Even so, on occasion volunteers will make sure it is spick and span; much appreciated by everyone. Ultimately it proves to be a very popular place for many Dubliners.

Riverfront in Bristol Brian Deegan AoU

Gallery 51

City No.3 South William Street, Dublin

by Turlough O’Donnell 52 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 10 8 | | Autumn Autumn2016 2017

Urban idiocy

Brilliant ideas that ruined our cities Part nine – Nothing to see here The urban idiot was once involved in a masterplan for an area that was around five miles away from a world heritage site. The planning authority asked us to submit with the planning application an assessment of the visual impact of the scheme on the world heritage site. Our response, which the idiot is still proud of, was an email that read ‘we are unable to count the number of angels on the head of a pin with sufficient accuracy to determine the impact of our scheme in the views from the world heritage site’. Nevertheless they insisted and our client was forced to appoint a landscape and visual impact assessment consultant to stand on top of the tallest mill in the heritage site and to search the hills on the distant horizon to work out which one, if any, included our site. They took photographs and eventually worked out that the top part of our scheme would just be visible in one part of the view, it would literally change a handful of pixels on the photo. Triumphant, the planners asked us to reduce development in that part of the site, to plant trees, create a bund, anything to make sure that those 20 or so pixels would remain the same forever.

There was a time when we were proud of what we built. Had we been Victorians we would have built our scheme on top of that distant hill crowning it with a fine church spire just to make sure it could be seen from a distance. Previous generations were concerned too that everyone would see what they had built – the above world heritage site being a case in point, with its grand mills and finely wrought chimneys dominating the surrounding countryside. The buildings were placed as prominently as possible with turrets and spires just so that you couldn’t miss them as they poked out through the tree cover. Today it seems that to get planning permission you need to prove that your development will be invisible.

That it will be bunkered and shielded so that it doesn’t intrude into urban views that are protected for their heritage value, or countryside vistas that are to be left pristine and unsullied (except of course for the electricity pylons, the motorways and the silage towers). It

is as if new development is something shameful that needs to be hidden away, and it is based on the assumption that all new development will be pretty crap. The idiocy of this approach is that in trying to hide away the crap we create the conditions in which it becomes inevitable.

The urban idiocy that is the subject of this column almost always starts with good intentions. Such is the case with environmental impact assessments and their little sister environmental assessments. These started in the 1960s and the intention was to objectively assess the impact of a new development, and to amend the design of the scheme to minimise these impacts. This makes good sense for a nuclear power station, an off-shore wind farm or a large distribution depot.

It even makes sense for a new housing development which will have a range of environmental impacts including not just the visual impact on views but the effects on local ecology, the water runoff and its impact on flooding, the traffic generation and its impact on roads and air pollution, the loss of archaeology, the effect on local schools and facilities etc.

The basis of any environmental assessment is the identification of a baseline condition setting out the current situation, followed by an assessment of how the scheme will impact this. The next step is to identify all of the environmental impacts and their receptors, which means the people who will experience the impacts. Each of these impacts and receptors are graded to assess their impact; for example, a large impact may be less of an issue if it only affects a small number of people etc. Finally a set of measures are suggested to mitigate these impacts. It is all very logical except that it has been weaponised by lawyers and turned into an industry by consultants who make their living from churning out meaningless reports. These are often the size of old telephone directories that no one reads and have no impact what-so-ever on the final scheme.

Never mind, everyone is happy, they have ticked the boxes and covered their arses in case of legal challenge.

To put this into context, on a reasonably large urban extension, the masterplanning fee will be say £100-150,000 while the fee for the environmental assessment will be at least twice this. Not that we are bitter, you understand! The first step will be a screening opinion (30 pages) to confirm that an EA is required, the next step is a scoping report (100 pages) to determine the issues that the EA should cover, and finally the EA itself with each chapter prepared by specialist consultants and running to many hundreds of pages and often many volumes. One of the idiocies built into the system is the fact that case law says that if the scheme being assessed changes significantly then the EA might be invalidated and the whole process will need to be redone. The main part of the EA cannot therefore be started until the scheme has been frozen. It doesn’t take more than a moment to realise that this invalidates the entire process – so much for the EA as an iterative design tool.

There is an entire industry that has grown up to undertake these assessments; ecological consultants whose job it is to justify the destruction of ecology, archaeologists who write reports to excuse the loss of archaeology, sustainability consultants who argue that sustainability measures are just not possible to implement. It creates a defensive design mentality where the scheme is designed to get through the system with as few impacts as possible.

Forget the idea that we might create something beautiful, that we might enrich local ecosystems or build a neighbourhood that fosters a strong community, or even somewhere with a mix of uses and an economic rationale.

There is no place in an EA for beauty, community or economy. There is no way to argue that yes this scheme has an an impact, but it is one that is positive – to justify that spire on the top of a hill proclaiming that we are proud of what we have built. No, this just makes the EA more problematic and no one wants that.

The Urban Idiot

Gallery | Urban idiocy 53

IMAGE

54 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Autumn 2018

My own view is...

Urban development doesn’t need to cost the earth

by Claudia Murray AoU

In many cities across the globe population growth, housing deficit and urban expansion seem to be in conflict with the natural environment.

Nothing exemplifies this better than the poor condition of our rivers in most parts of the world. It has been reported that 44 per cent of estuaries fail even the minimum recognised safety levels to fish or swim due to heavy industrial pollution – for example, the Mississippi in the US – while others are unrecognisable due to the amount of detritus floating on the water, like the Citarum in West Java, Indonesia.

© Yoly Gutierrez, CIFOR / Flickr

In Latin America, where one-third of the world’s fresh water reserves are held, the scenario is not dissimilar.

Indeed many countries in the region suffer the consequences of unplanned development which has sadly left them with an inherited stock of informal housing and insufficient infrastructure to support extremely polluting industries (such as mineral extraction and raw material processing), which are on the other hand, the bread and butter of many local economies.

Undoubtedly, local governments agree that the situation in their rivers needs reversing. Their concern is evident in the signing of the Paris Agreement and the confirmations of their pledges to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda. It is also evident in the numerous national court orders that hang upon the recently formed river authorities that have the task of restoring water basins and their ecosystems, like the MatanzaRiachuelo in Argentina or the Bogota River in Colombia.

Still, despite these pressing factors, the meagre progress achieved thus far is not sufficient enough to deliver the transformative change that the rivers need at the speed that is required in line with the SDGs commitments and pledges, let alone build on

the recent report provided by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).

The University of Reading and The Academy of Urbanism have organised workshops and conducted site visits across Latin America to discuss river degradation in urban environments with an array of different stakeholders.

In these sessions, it became evident that there is a need for co-management techniques in order to improve urban green-blue ecosystems. Europe is demonstrating that collaboration is possible not only at regional level but also across country borders; the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine is just one example. This level of governance was also possible via the regulation agreed by the European Union, such as the European Water Framework Directive.

It is difficult to envisage such a high level of international cooperation in developing regions. However, small nature-based solutions with high levels of community participation can slowly make a difference while river basin populations wait for cross-boundaries umbrella agreements and large humanmade (and long overdue) infrastructure projects.

Europe is again a basket of good initiatives that can be followed. For example, urban green infrastructure was extensively used in Bilbao’s regeneration project alongside the Nervión River, to reduce urban pollution and CO2 emissions. Further examples also included the use of green pavements, walls and roof gardens alongside the river bank. Other countries, such as the Netherlands, are implementing systems to support water treatment and reduce storm water runoff. A noteworthy project is the town of Culemborg which hosts the largest green reed filter in Europe.

Wetlands are also used to mitigate the

impact of polluted storm water runoff and wastewater across Europe, with the UK taking a leading role in making space for water storage with the River Loddon in Berkshire and Hampshire being an excellent example.

The potential of nature-based solutions for risk reduction in regions affected by drastic climatic changes related to El Niño in Latin America are significant.

The cost of human tragedies due to preventable floods and droughts can be considerably diminished by letting nature help and deliver services to urban environments. This is not to say that nature-based solutions will solve the entire problem of soil degradation and water contamination currently affecting many rivers in the region.

These solutions can be a complement to grey infrastructure, but they need to be taken more seriously by local governments. States have a tendency to rely on grey infrastructure, perhaps because these are accompanied by large investment instruments and an array of service providers to support them and generate much needed employment. My view is that in the not too distant future, as is the case for renewables, more governments will learn to see the benefits of nature-based solutions that can offer opportunities for green investment and for collective management by local communities and relevant stakeholders operating on affected estuaries. The intangible benefits this can bring in sharing responsibility for the caring of natural resources, building community cohesion and for teaching future generations the benefits of working together with nature, are all added values that grey infrastructure alone cannot deliver.

Claudia Murray AoU is a research fellow at the school of real estate and planning, University of Reading and the Latin American regional convenor for The Academy of Urbanism Editor’s introduction My | AoU owninview Action is... 55

CITY TOWN NEIGHBOURHOOD STREET PLACE

Poetry Ian McMillan Drawings David Rudlin AoU Figure grounds

Words City Kerri Farnsworth AoU Nicholas Falk AoU Town Michele Grant AoU Neighbourhood Tim Challans AoU Street Alistair Barr AoU Place Francis Newton AoU

This year sees another strong list of 15 places shortlisted for the Urbanism Awards. People tell us that we must eventually run out of great places to study and celebrate, but the opposite seems to be the case. True, we have moved away from the pretty, heritage, middle-class sort of places that may have featured in the past (although there were never as many of these as our critics suggested). We have instead, a set of real places struggling with contemporary issues like struggling retail, economic restructuring and traffic congestion and still thriving.

The theme for this year’s awards has been ‘post-industrial’ places. The shortlist is full of places that have had to reinvent themselves. They include Swansea’s former docks, the Kings Cross Goods yard and a new civic space in Dublin. The neighbourhoods include the place where Sheffield’s steel industry started, the quarter containing Manchester’s original cotton mills and one of London’s last creative enclaves on the edge of the Olympic Park. The three streets are all places struggling with traffic and congestion while fostering a diverse local business community and street life.

Of the three towns, Barnsley is the most obviously post-industrial, although its strategy draws more on its roots as a market town and its new market hall.

Chelmsford’s industrial heritage is based around Marconi and the birth of radio while Paisley’s wealth was built on textiles (including of course the Paisley Pattern).

The European cities all also have a post-industrial story to tell. Leipzig has seen its open cast mines turned into lakes and its largest spinning mill turned into a creative hub. Nantes has recovered from the loss of its ship building industry and even Zurich, which one doesn’t think of as an industrial city, has recovered from the loss of 40,000 jobs in its engineering and rail industries.

All of these places have at sometime in their history suffered decline and have lost industries and the employment that goes with them. Each has been reinvented and this is all the more impressive when you know how bad things once were. Each story is different but there is inspiration to be found in all 15 finalists that are an important addition to our Learning From Place archive.

David Rudlin AoU Chair

CITY

LEIPZIG Here, let me show you my Leipzig videos: Moving pictures of a city always on the move A city younger than history and that really shows On the streets in the evening, the endless groove Of confidence, of rhythm, of the kind of sound That crosses through Connewitz, Platwitz, To the centre after midnight, then turns around, Plunges back to the laughter. Leipzig really fits Itself like a glove, a place where rivers meet, Artists meet, and flow like water, reflecting light From the canvas to the eyes, then to the street Then back to the canvas in a dance of sheer delight.

Close your eyes and open them: everything has changed In a moment. Leipzig’s constantly reshaped and rearranged.

Leipzig went from being one of the richest cities in 1900 to one of the poorest after reunification in 1989.

With so many leaving the ‘Shrinking City’, the first priority was to stabilise the housing, enabling people to take over vacant houses as ‘guardians’.

The splendid turn-of-the-century shops have been restored and some 30

passageways reopened. An economic development strategy, drawn up with the university, focused efforts on five clusters. Actions included attracting the assembly plants of both Porsche and BMW to factories provided by the city, as well as modernising the airport and exhibition centre. The tram system, one of the world’s

largest, was modernised and five new suburban railway lines were opened up in a tunnel under the city centre. An innovative strategy for sustainability included turning former open cast coal mines into a lake district and private initiatives converted the Spinnerei, the largest cotton-spinning mill, into a hundred art galleries and studios.

CITY

NANTES Here is a living machine that works so well You wish you could bottle it and have a drink; Then the things you’d see, the tales you’d tell A Nantes narrative of a city lifted back from the brink By creation, by looking and seeing and thinking And a place that lives at ease with itself.

Lift the streets to your lips and keep on drinking Deep of Nantes, where art’s not on a shelf But it’s here, on a trail, here to see and to touch And fill you with wonder and make you take stock Of how a city can change you profoundly, so much You’re not the same you were before. Nantes can unlock Your mind, hold it up to the light and let it fly; Drink deep of Nantes. You’ll never drink it dry!

Located on the Loire River estuary, Nantes was an important port from classical antiquity, and a Breton stronghold. Originally a series of small islands, the filling of channels to prevent flooding and create city expansion space, plus natural factors such as silting have left only one island, the former industrial hub and port of Ile

de Nantes. Continued silting led to the port’s decline and global restructuring saw it close in 1986.The city was forced to reinvent itself, and has done so impressively, focused on huge investment in culture as a driver for social and economic change. It now has the second-fastest job creation rate in France. It has a relaxed and playful air,

with an attractive built environment enhanced by new and old greenspaces.

European Green Capital in 2014, the redevelopment of the Ile de Nantes as a new city ‘eco-neighbourhood’ is a fantastic example of the city’s ‘jeu a la Nantaise’ and determination to be an exemplar in social and economic equality.

CITY

ZURICH If a city could be built from thinking, this is it; Ideas seem to float from the busy streets and fly.

Here by reflective water where lake and river meet Underneath the changing palette of the shifting sky.

See the words I used there: reflective, busy, drifting; If Zurich’s made of language those are words to choose And here are others: celebration, art and breakthrough, Because this is a city that knows just how to use Its wealth and space and people in an equation: 2+2 Makes five and six and more. Zurich does heavy lifting To construct a magic of the mind that’s also very real Wide sky, deep water: here comes the reveal‌

Regularly ranked one of the best places in the world to live and work in, Zurich has had to tackle a number of challenges, not least its high prices.

The closure of traditional engineering industries in the 1990s, with the loss of some 40,000 jobs, left behind empty factories. However there is a tradition of innovation, from Zwingli

to Einstein, as well as collaboration.

So the belt along the river and main railway has been transformed with high quality new buildings as well as retaining much of its heritage. Disused railway lines have been turned into an attractive walkway over specialist shops, and people swim in the canals at lunchtime. Some 25 per cent of people

already live in cooperative housing, and a referendum committed the city to achieving 33 per cent, largely through densification. On the site of a former cement factory, the cooperative Mehr als Wohnen (more than living) provides 380 new apartments plus workspaces, while another has built over an active tram depot.

TOWN

BARNSLEY Daniel Defoe; well, he wasn’t too keen George Orwell regretted his time here But this is a town where, as we’ve seen The future can be made quite clear By reinvention, joined-up thinking Commitment and big ideas; Museums galleries and parklands linking Past to future; time to grab the ears Of George and Daniel and the others who See this place as flat caps, mines A post-industrial half-heated stew Well, give those doubters a hundred lines!

This is a town where all can thrive in And say what a town to be alive in!

Barnsley is a town with a city mindset that has set high aspirations for the quality of the public realm and the amenities it offers residents. The vision of the council is driven by a set of values – showing pride in the town, being honest to its residents, striving for excellence and working as a team. Those four values shape the priorities and the approach to

developing and managing the place.

They underpin how the council works as an organisation and with community groups. Delivering Barnsley as a market town for the 21st century has been a strong focus resulting in a welldesigned quality new market; designed to connect the town’s districts with a new public square and the transport interchange. Businesses are looking for

quality town centres in which to locate and Barnsley’s investment in heritage, the public realm and the town centre, including a proposed new digital campus, means the town is currently experiencing a period of growth.

TOWN

CHELMSFORD A ball is bowled at the County Ground; it’s hit high Over Chelmsford, high over the streets Across the upturned bowl of the endless Essex sky And it will see so many things before it completes Its journey. Here, they say, is the county’s only city But this ball is flying over many cities at once A city that’s a mixture of the urban and the pretty A city with history, a city with a kind of silence At the heart of Admiral’s Park, a silence that’s broken After a moment by the laughter of children; the ball Flies over real and lasting change, not just token Gestures: new housing, communities, new jobs for all.

Chelmsford’s catching the future like this pair of hands Catch and hold the ball. There’s so much this place understands.

Chelmsford is a cathedral and university town, granted city status in 2012 and perhaps best known for Marconi and its role in communications. Today the city manufactures imaging sensors and sub-systems for NASA space exploration, and has developed a strong office base that means as many

people travel to Chelmsford to work as residents commute into London.

Despite its proximity to the capital, Chelmsford has not only achieved a thriving local economy, but is developing a rich local arts and culture scene and has a strong retail centre.

An energetic, creative and ‘can do’ council creates good governance,

supported by a wealth of interconnected effective community groups and empowered cultural groups.

Together these factors are enabling Chelmsford’s achievement and keep it on its journey to become the ‘capital of Essex’.

TOWN

PAISLEY Here is place where, as my dad used to say You can learn something different every single day.

And he would have loved this: Paisley on the rise!

He always thought of Paisley as a shining location On a golden hill, every street a new surprise; And now, cleansed by the sunlight of regeneration, There’s a future for the past in the renewed museum A future for the present in the old Town Hall And futures for the future; come along and see ‘em As through the walkways of the town we weave Past culture and learning and housing and shops Where the weavers used to work and now we all believe As my dad used to say ‘Paisley’s where the penny drops!’

Paisley is Scotland’s largest town, on the doorstep of Glasgow but with a distinct identity. It was once a mass producer of thread, home to Coates and Clarks, and most famously, the Paisley pattern. The grand civic buildings reflect that heritage. But today Paisley faces multiple social challenges. The council’s response is a strong vision with long-term ‘step change’ targets.

That vision is supported by targeted interventions to grow Paisley’s economy, tackle poverty and transform the built heritage and reputation of the place. The council has developed strong partnerships with communities and national agencies. There is much to learn from Paisley, from the creative repurposing of disused buildings to delivering the social housing that

communities want. Their approach to regeneration and addressing social deprivation is delivering impressive deep-rooted change. There is an energy and belief in the town which is widely evident, impressive and infectious.

NEIGHBOURHOOD

ANCOATS, MANCHESTER Just listen to the sound of light rain on city streets, Then listen to the unsound of rain that stops And Ancoats sun breaks out. Laugh if you like But this is a place where anything’s possible, Where history goes for a rhythmic walk and meets The future strolling beside a canal to the shops Passing a Halle ‘cellist with a basket on their bike To keep the music in. Ancoats: nothing’s impossible In this stretch of the city that’s like a basket to keep Ideas in, to keep shapeshifting in, to keep the morning In until it breaks out. Here is city music; no sleep Until next week in Ancoats and no time for yawning!

Ancoats played a significant part in Manchester’s role as a leading world industrial city during and post the Industrial Revolution. The area went into decline when companies closed down and production moved elsewhere. It was always a tough area and for many years during and post its decline it was a ‘no go’ part of

Manchester city centre. The speed of the regeneration of Ancoats is very impressive, largely enabled by significant up front investment and the rapid acquisition of sites and buildings. This has enabled the agency Manchester Life and its partners to work on six sites at once, thus avoiding the delays and

long-term uncertainties of more typical piecemeal development. It is almost an instant redevelopment with bars and restaurants which are now an important addition to central Manchester’s night time economy.

It is still at an early stage, however, in time it will mature and become an established neighbourhood.

NEIGHBOURHOOD

HACKNEY WICK, LONDON On a clear city day the canal water gleams Reflecting changing realities, growing dreams That Further Out can become the new Further In, As the centre shifts to the places where Reinvention can take a chance and begin To electrify the here that formerly was there.

On a warm city evening the artists frame the streets And today meets tomorrow meets next year meets A borough packed with people moving to a tune Pounding the pavements and pounding them hard Hackney Wick is on the way, it’s arriving soon With stories by the people and theatre by The Yard.

Hackney Wick is an area of former East End industries that have either collapsed or vacated the area, creating the opportunity for artists, makers, designers and media industries to take advantage of relatively low rents and large and adaptable industrial buildings. It also contains part of the 2012 Olympic site. As London land and

property values have increased, small creative industries have been forced further and further to the margins of the city. It is currently a strong neighbourhood, which has a really exciting buzz about it. The speed of change and growth in London means the area could change very rapidly in the next five years. Great cities need

areas like Hackney Wick where the creative and cultural industries can develop and thrive and, hopefully, the impressive strategic approach being undertaken by the two local authorities and the London Legacy Development Corporation will ensure that this is not just a neighbourhood in transition.

NEIGHBOURHOOD

KELHAM ISLAND, SHEFFIELD This island floats on a sea of ideas This island glows as the city is sleeping This island floats on a river of beers This island shows that the past is worth keeping ‘Tell ‘em it’s Kelham’ they shout from the bus ‘That’s worth all the plaudits and worth all the fuss!

Tell ‘em it’s Kelham for leisure and more Lit by the glow from an open pub door!’

That glow matching the glow from the past That glow from the foundry’s window of light That glow showing what was made to last That glow from the grins that spill into delight Tell ‘em it’s Kelham where making and craft Combine in an island of skill and hard graft.

The regeneration of Kelham Island is a successful combination of local authority and local residential and business communities working together with enlightened developers for the common good of the area. Its identity lies in its industrial roots, from the Norman construction of an island in the River Don, through to the Industrial

Revolution when larger enterprises started, including silk and cotton mills, and the city’s internationally renowned quality steel manufacturers. Back-toback terraces and courts were hastily built to serve the area’s industrial workers but underwent slum clearance, depopulating the area in favour of industrial and commercial uses. Its

regeneration is based on the reuse of its distinctive industrial buildings and spaces, and focuses on the retention of the area’s industrial heritage either through retaining existing uses or the introduction of cultural industries.

With the addition of innovative housing it is developing into a thriving and close-knit neighbourhood.

STREET

ARGYLE STREET, GLASGOW More than a street, this: an almanac, a carnival A market, a place to stroll; a tea-dance, a musical, A theatre of anecdote where it takes you so long To wander from one to the other you need strong Coffee or something stronger afterwards. Well, you met All those people you know, those you haven’t seen For years and those you saw yesterday. Just forget What you came for and wander around and in between And you can hear the rumble of the trains and you can See the gleaming of the diamonds in the jeweller’s shop And the sky is as blue as only an Argyle Street blue can Be; you want to live here, you never want this street to stop.

This street has recently woken up and is crackling with creative energy. It was voted the ‘hippest place to live’ by The Times in 2016. The two ends of the street have undergone massive change resulting fearless planning policies. To the east the 1960’s housing schemes were demolished in the teeth of strong opposition. The replacement housing is humane, sustainable and it brings back a section of Argyle Street which was

demolished. To the west, Kelvingrove Museum and sports centre are a triumph of culture, leisure and sport.

Between these bookends, button up adaptive change has encouraged bars, restaurants and shops to spring up. A balanced mix of social housing for rent, private for rent and private ownership has created a well-mixed community with great future potential.

STREET

KIRKGATE, LEEDS I like to think of streets as theatres, where things Happen and happen again. Someone laughs or sings Or shouts or sells you something and that’s how Kirkgate Has always been for me, a matinee and, when it’s late, A show that never seems to end. And now change is afoot And a yard and in the distance between ‘Why not?’ and ‘But…’ Things are happening. Here on the oldest street in Leeds There’s something in the air, and I hope it succeeds Like it already is; we can go for some art or a haircut, a drink Or an amble through history; Kirkgate makes me think That anything’s possible, and the First White Cloth Hall Will light up the streetscape as the street has a ball So we’re back to the theatre, and on with the play About a place in a city with plenty to say!

The lower end of this ancient street has been a no go area for 40 years. You would only visit if you were foolhardy or looking for trouble. The street is emerging from this darkness. It is still blinking but it is ready to transform into a lively and welcoming street. The Townscape Heritage Initiative grants have helped rebuild derelict buildings that seemed beyond saving. Local owners are making brave bets on future changes by intelligent renovations. The conservation team is knowledgeable and flexible. This combination of enterprise and sensitivity has great promise for the future. The Leeds Civic Trust are passionate about the history of the area and this has created a strong heritage-based response to new trends in shopping, eating and drinking. This is a street were the owners and the city are working together to achieve massive change by small, intelligent steps.

STREET

SOUTH WILLIAM STREET, DUBLIN Think of this as a washing line across the city air Hung with coffee cups and wine glasses clinking In a Dublin breeze that plays poetic havoc with the hair Of the crowds of people talking, laughing, drinking.

Think of this as a washing line across this city day Hung with all the treasures that we have come to buy, All the layered anecdotes you hear the strollers say All the welcome kisses, and, yes, all the fond goodbyes But think of this as a washing line that hauls you back To a street that’s always different every time you look Built from language, built from music, from light and craic; Here is past and shining future right beneath your feet Here is the dance from A to B that is South William Street!

This is a great example of an elegant Georgian Street which has embraced change in a creative way. Every change has added to the richness and vitality of this place which welcomes residents, workers and visitors. Powerscourt Townhouse faces the entrance to Castle Market with a fine raised granite pavement between as a centre point.

The Georgian party house became a dramatic shopping area in the 1990s as an early example of creative reuse.

When the fashion and textile business left 10 years ago, the street offered low rents, strong footfall and small, cheap low units for innovative retailers to occupy. The diversity and vitality of the street is demonstrated by the

enthusiasm and creativity of all the occupiers. Georgian elegance has been overlaid with funky shops and restaurants to prove that style is timeless.

PLACE

GRANARY SQUARE, LONDON I arrive in this place often, dusty with travel With crowds who move through a space so changed And I feel that I can sit back and unravel Myself, shake the day off, feel my soul rearranged By the confidence of water, the canal’s long song That sings in the sunlight, reflecting the sky.

I feel as I sit here it would not be wrong To splash in the fountains: my life is too dry Not to soak it and soothe it in Granary Square In the trickle of history, turned to a flood That we call the future. So I walk in, feet bare And the day is so hot and the coolness feels good.

I’ll stay here so long that I might miss my train: I don’t care. Let’s live life in the Granary Lane.

Granary Square is a new pedestrian piazza at the heart of the King’s Cross regeneration project in central London. Considerable effort has been made to retain elements of the area’s former industrial character as part of the public realm design, with adjacent historic structures sensitively restored and successfully repurposed.

Elaborate fountains form the central element to the design approach, making a significant contribution to the animation of the square. The square is owned and managed by the developer who organises a varied programme of events including concerts, cinema screenings and the twice-weekly ‘Kerb’ street food stalls, although a policy

does exist to influence what events can take place. Almost without question, this place is already highly successful but it has also has enjoyed the right ingredients to prosper – a committed developer and investors, carefully conceived high quality design and proximity to one of the most accessible transport interchanges in London.

PLACE

KILMAINHAM CIVIC SPACE, DUBLIN This is a phrase that rings like a bell: A Civic Space is a space for us all, Full of possibility, deep as a well Echoes of laughter bounce like a ball.

Here was the jail that kept people in, Here’s the museum that sings their story Here is a place to walk and begin To understand history’s unending glory Of rethinking, repurposing, pausing to look Beyond for a moment, take in the scene, Read Kilmainham like you’d read a book The longer you read it the more it can mean.

In 1916 Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin was the scene of the execution of 14 Irish Republican leaders following the crushing of the Easter Rising. It was used in 2016 to commemorate the centenary of the Easter Rising and preparation for this event saw the creation of a new civic space in front of the historic Gaol and Court House.

The design approach has sought to reconcile differing roles and needs. The remodelled area of public realm allows for a well organised flow of people through the space, enhancing the visitor experience to one of the most popular tourist destinations in Dublin.

As a traffic calming measure, both traffic volumes and speeds have

been reduced and there has been a significant shift towards walking and cycling. The space has been warmly adopted by local residents providing a focal point for the Kilmainham/ Inchicore community. It is most successful as a location of national identity; a sensitive commemoration of the painful birth of the Republic.

PLACE

MARITIME QUARTER, SWANSEA Breathe deeply here. Go on, breathe in sunshine.

This is Swansea and water; this is sky.

Watch the gulls rise like a Dylan Thomas line Rises from the page. Watch how they fly Over houses and boats, museums and art And fine new development seen from above.

This is a place that touches the heart This is a place built with skill, sweat and love.

Maritime is a word that marries time and space Here space is developed and Time takes its time To redevelop and transform a place Until it all fits together and clicks like a rhyme.

A gull turns to Dylan’s hawk, hanging in light Over streets not going gentle into any good night!

The Maritime Quarter represents an exemplar of post-industrial regeneration noteworthy for the cohesive sense of place and distinctive character achieved through a sustained vision and strong political leadership.

Through its beach, promenades and Marina, the Quarter forms a major asset to the city, offering a richness

and eclecticism which captures the very essence, history and psyche of Swansea. The area has emerged as a popular residential district and destination for both locals and visitors bolstered by the excellent museums,heritage and leisure attractions. A permeable pedestrian network has evolved to provide a

walkable neighbourhood and the majority of spaces fronting the Marina and the seafront promenade present an attractive traffic-free environment. The strength of local political ambition and entrepreneurial spirit is admirable and there remains an enthusiasm is about what is yet to happen.

Academicians

DIRECTORS From top left to right Jas Atwal Andrew Burrell Prof Kevin Murray Henk Bouwman Janet Sutherland John Thompson (Honorary President) David Rudlin (Chair) Steven Bee Dr Deb Upadhyaya Tony Reddy Biljana Savic Tim Stonor Alistair Barr

ACADEMICIANS Asier Abaunza Arthur Acheson Prof Robert Adam Marcus Adams Lisa Addiscott Dr Husam Al Waer Pam Alexander OBE Malcolm Allan Joanna Allen Ben Allgood Charles Anderson Ewan Anderson Kathryn Anderson Nigel Anderson Simon Andrew Catton Debbie Aplin Judith Armitt George Arvanitis Jamie Ashmore Thom Aussems Jeff Austin Jeanette Baartman Prof Samer Bagaeen Jamie Baker Prof Chris Balch Yolande Barnes Prof Lawrence Barth Prof Hugh Barton

John Baulch Marga Bauza Will Bax Alan Baxter CBE Simon Bayliss Ian Beaumont Andrew Beharrell Neil Bennett Robert Bennett Duncan Berntsen John Best David Bishop Deirdre Black Philip Black Adam Blacker Alastair Blyth Christian Bocci Martin Boddy Nicholas Boys Smith Rosemary Bradley Angela Brady OBE Torben Brandi Nielsen Chris Brett Eddie Bridgeman Mark Brierley Patricia Brown Craige Burden Mark Burgess Sarah Burgess Jonathan Burroughs Richard Burton Prof Georgia Butina Watson Peter Butter Karen Cadell Bruce Calton Fiona Campbell Charles Campion Steve Canadine Ian Cansfield Esther Caplin Fredrik Carlsson Matthew Carmona Peter Carr Sam Cassels Philip Cave Prof Nikola Cekic Tim Challans Joanna Chambers Dominic Chapman Alain Chiaradia

Nick Childs Dominic Church Shane Clarke Clare Coats Dr Jim Coleman Robert Coles Sarah Collicott Simon Collier Paul Collins Martin Colreavy Max Comfort Brian Condon Karen Cooksley Prof Rachel Cooper OBE Ian Corner Cara Courage Will Cousins Rob Cowan David Cowans Michael Cowdy Timothy Crawshaw Toby Crayden Paul Cureton Linda Curr Peter Cusdin Jennie Daly Jane Dann Prof Wulf Daseking Alex Davey Philip Davies James de Havilland Neil de Prez Sophia de Sousa Ian Deans Brian Deegan Ioanni Delsante Toby Denham Guy Denton Nick Dermott Andrew Dixon Prof John Drever Eugene Dreyer Craig Driver Tony Duggan Alex Dutton John Dyke Nigel Dyke Richard Eastham David Edwards Stephanie Edwards Elad Eisenstein

72 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 12 | Winter 2018

Joanna Eley Gavin Erasmus Karen Escott Roger Estop Prof Brian Evans Martyn Evans Roger Evans Wyn Evans Dr Nicholas Falk Kerri Farnsworth Max Farrell Ian Fenn Jaimie Ferguson George Ferguson CBE Kathryn Firth Stephanie Fischer Andrew Fisher Sue Flack David Flannery Bernie Foulkes Jane Fowles Simon Foxell Edward Frampton Alan Francis Peter Frankum Daisy Froud Sandra Fryer Catherine Gallagher Carole Garfield Tim Garratt John Geeson Jan Gehl Peter Geraghty Lia Ghilardi Andy Gibbins Ian Gilzean Menelaos Gkartzios Stephen Gleave Dick Gleeson Pippa Goldfinger Guy Goodman Keith Gowenlock Marcus Grant Michele Grant Mark Greaves David Green Ali Grehan James Gross Richard Guise Paul Hackett Stephen Haines Andrew Haley Leo Hammond Tim Hancock Stephen Handley Philip Harcourt Geoff Haslam Roger Hawkins John Haxworth Michael Hayes CBE Peter Heath Tina Heathcote John Hegarty David Height Russell Henderson Simon Henley James Hennessey Roger Hepher Paul Hildreth

Colin Hill Steve Hilton Stephen Hinsley Eric Holding Peter Hollis Stephen Hollowood Glenn Howells Jun Huang Lewis Hubbard Simon Hubbard Anthony Hudson Kay Hughes Nigel Hughes Michael Hurlow John Hyland Tony Ingram David Jackson Julian Jackson Philip Jackson Timothy Jemison Cathy Johnston Eleri Jones Gregory Jones Howard Jones Peter Jones Rory Joyce Claudia Juhre Gesine Junker Rikke Juul Gram Martina Juvara Dr Kari Kankaala Dr Kayvan Karimi Philip Kassanis Daniel Kaye Steve Kemp Jonathan Kendall David Kennedy Angus Kennedy OBE Justin Kenworthy Anne Kerr Ros Kerslake OBE Anne Kiernan Graham King Martyn Kingsford OBE Harry Knibb Angela Koch Chris Lamb Charles Landry Christer Larsson Richard Latcham Derek Latham Diarmaid Lawlor Michael Leahy Emilie Leclercq Prof Steffen Lehmann John Letherland Ning Liu Fred London John Lord Mark Lucas Aylin Ludwig David Lumb Nikolas Lyzba Kirsty Macari Carol MacBain Robin Machell David Mahony Keiji Makino Lee Mallett

Andreas Markides Christopher Martin Paul Martin Andrew Matthews Bob May Steve McAdam John McAslan Declan McCafferty John McCall Frank McDonald Kevin McGeough Martin McKay Craig McLaren Craig McWilliam Alessandro Melis Joel Mills Dr Negin Minaei Shane Mitchell Lucy Montague Dr John Montgomery Rob Moore John Moreland Paul Morsley Richard Motley John Muir Ronnie Muir John Mullin Neil Murphy Allan Murray Dr Claudia Murray Deborah Murray Prof Gordon Murray Peter Murray Stephen Neal Jon Neale Katy Neaves Marko Neskovic Francis Newton Victor Nicholls Dr Olli Niemi Ross Nimmo Malcolm Noble Hugo Nowell Richard Nunes Craig O’Brien Calbhac O’Carroll Killian O’Higgins Stephen O’Malley Emmet O’Sullivan Stephen O’Malley Dr Dellé Odeleye Simon Ogden Tiago Oliveira John Orrell Emeka Osaji Trevor Osborne Paul Ostergaard Erik Pagano Chris Pagdin Kevin Parker Phil Parker Michael Parkinson Fiona Parry Sowmya Parthasarathy James Patterson Waterston Richard Pearce Adam Peavoy Russell Pedley

Ross Peedle Prof Alan Penn Hugh Petter Alex Phillips Graeme Phillips Justin Phillips Jon Phipps Karen Phull James Pike Nick Pollock Prof Sergio Porta Sunand Prasad John Prevc Paul Prichard John Pringle Stephen Proctor Steve Quartermain CBE Helen Quigley Shane Quinn Colin Rae Christian Rapp Andrew Raven Mike Rawlinson Layton Reid Stephan Reinke Elizabeth Reynolds Eric Reynolds Christopher Rhodes Patrick Richard Sue Riddlestone OBE Antony Rifkin David Roberts Prof Peter Roberts OBE Steve Robins Dickon Robinson Dr Rick Robinson Sandy Robinson Tom Robinson Bryan Roe Nick Rogers Angela Rolfe Anna Rose Graham Ross Jon Rowland David Rudlin Susana Ruiz Fernandez Dr Andrew Ryder Robert Sakula Manuel Salgado John Sampson Prof Flora Samuel Clare San Martin Ryan Sandwick Hilary Satchwell Arno Schmickler Dominic Scott Sharon Scott Symon Sentain Chris Sharpe Cath Shaw Richard Shaw Keith Shearer Yihan Shen Michael Short Paul Simkins Erin Simmons Dr Richard Simmons Andrew Simpson Anette Simpson Alan Simson Anna Sinnott Ann Skippers Dave Smith Jef Smith Malcolm Smith Roger Smith Austin Smyth Carol Somper Carole Souter CBE Adrian Spawforth Ben Spencer Catherine Stevenson Alan Stewart Peter Stewart

Susan Stirling Rosslyn Stuart Peter Studdert Nicholas Sweet Seiji Takamatsu Ian Tant Jonathan Tarbatt David Taylor Ed Taylor Nick Taylor Rebecca Taylor Sandy Taylor Nicholas Temple Ivan Tennant Alison Tero Prof Mark Tewdwr Jones Gary Thomason Alan Thompson Matt Thompson Rob Thompson Dale Thomson Julia Thrift Dr Ying Ying Tian Niall Tipping Damian Tissier Andrea Titterington Eime Tobari Ian Tod Paul Tostevin Robert Townshend Rob Tranmer Stephen Tucker Neil Tully Jeffrey Tumlin Jonathan Turner Stuart Turner Roger Tustain Nick Tyler CBE Julia Unwin Richard Upton Giulia Vallone Hans van Bommel Mattijs Van Ruijven Atam Verdi Jonathan Vining Andy von Bradsky Tom Walker Julia Wallace Ann Wallis Alan Wann Andy Ward Nathan Ward Elanor Warwick David Waterhouse Stuart Watson Camilla Ween Oliver Weindling Dr Michael Wells Allison Westray Chapman Pam Wharfe Peter Wheelhouse Victoria Whenray Lindsey Whitelaw Stephen Willacy Martin Williams Peter Williams Patricia Willoughby Richard Wolfstrome Nick Woolley Gary Worsfold John Worthington MBE Tony Wyatt Wei Yang Bob Young Paul Zara

YOUNG URBANISTS Khalifa Abubakar Alexandros Achniotis Sidra Ahmed

Eva Aitsam Amer Alwarea Patrick Andison Ben Angus Jennifer Angus Kinda Ayoub Nouha Ayoub Simon Banfield Sangeetha Banner Jacqueline Barrett Laura Bartle Tom Barton Chris Bate Hafsa Bell Jordan Benson Sarah Birt Fanny Blanc Mark Bori Mark Boyd Michael Bredin Lucy Bretelle Ciaran Brown Laura Burnett Matthew Carreau Cath Carver Jasmine Ceccarelli Drewry Chow Chun Chi Cecil Nairita Chakraborty Victor Chamberlain Roland Chanin-Morris Simon Chinn Heather Claridge Francis Clay Ian Collier Alison Collins Lydia Collis Saul Collyns Lindsay Conn Nicola Contarin John Cooney Jonathan Couturier Rebecca Cox Robert Cox Charles Critchell Hugh D’Alton Lilly Dai Dan Daley Hanaa Dasan Sean Davey Annika Davies Aaron Davis Vito De Bellis Felix de Gray Constance Desenfant Odysseas Diakakis Aya Dibsi Amy Dickens Ina Dimireva Karl Diskin Aaron Doidge Louise Dredge Isabelle Dupraz Adam Dyer Paul Ede Akrem el Athram Ben Eley Alexander Evans Nadia Everard Alexander Farr Hannah Fasching Valerie Fenton Tobias Fett Alisha Fisher Diana Fjodorova Martin Fleischmann Andrea Forsberg Hannah Fox Anna Freiesleben Matthew Gamboa Joel Gandhi Rebecca Gibson Ross Gilbert Nicholas Goddard

James Goodsell Katsushi Goto Emily Greenaway Amanda Gregor Dimitrios Grozopoulos Julie Guilhem Anastassia. Gusseinova Zarreen Hadadi Kheder Hajir Danny Harris Rosie Haslem Ines Hassen Luwen He Francesca Heathcote Sapey Laura Heinritz Patrick Hennessey Simon Hicks Alan Higgins Sarah Hill Merwa Himrane Marie Hintz Dominik Hoehn Sinead Holmes Lidija Mirella Honegger Hasanul Hoque Louise Houston Saskia Huizinga Henry Hunter Geraldine Hurley Julia Hurley Emma Hutton Loukia Iliopoulou Ross Irvine Omar Islam Fred Jerrome Alice Johnson Jennifer Johnson Foteini Kanellopoulou Georgios Kapraras Charlotte Kemp David Kemp Maxine Kennedy Robert Kerr Isobel Knapp Anna Kravec Melissa Lacide Tatum Lao Alexander Lauschke Will Lawton Yeonhwa Lee Alex Lee-Bull Anna Saskia Leggett Mark Leitner-Murphy Niamh Lenihan Michela Leoni Philip Liu Iacovos Loizou Stephen Lovejoy Tierney Lovell Laetitia Lucy Alina Ludviga Madeleine Lundholm Ava Lynam Richard MacCowan Belinda Mackay Wendy Maden Giacomo Magnani ahmed mahgoub Claire Malaika Tunnacliffe Theo Malzieu Nick Mann Peter Mansbridge Ryan Manton William Marr-Heenan Patricia Martin del Guayo John Mason Greg Maya Carl McConnell Chloe McFarlane Duncan McNaughton Shawn Meyers

Aleksandra Milentijevic Darcy Millar David Milner Jose Monroy Lily Moodey Graeme Moore Lucy Moore Tristan More Antonia Morgan Monika Mosiej Cathe Desiree Nadal Katerina Nagnopol Ioanna Nicolaou Louisa Nie Pauline Niesseron Jim Nightingale Bobby Nisha Szymon Nogalski Nicole Norman Marketa Nosalova Alex O’Hare Killian O’Sullivan Eleana Orr Floriane Ortega Benedict Pagani Pradumn Pamidighantam Laura Parker-Tong Sejal Patel Victoria Payne Claudia Penaranda Fuentes Francesca Perry Tom Pinder Victoria Pinoncely Emma Pitt Kerstin Plain Julie Plichon Tessel Pool Alice Preston-Jones Bright Pryde-Saha Kseniia Pundyk Longning Qi Mura Quigley Cristina Racsko Emma Rainoldi Dinar Ramadhani Ronald Riviere Reuben Ross Megan Rourke Jonah Rudlin Rebekah Russell Mar Lluch Salvador Karla Santos Zambrano Renelle Sarjeant Giulia Sarmenghi Alice Saunders Charlotte Savage Ross Schaffer Alexei Schwab Shane Scollard Alec Scragg Eleftherios Sergios Genevieve Shaun Amanda Sheppard Safeer Shersad Shreya Shetty Matthew Sims Claudia Sinatra Rebecca Sladen Roxana Slavcheva Emilia Smeds Andy Smith Henry Smith Tom Smith Alan Smithies Rihards Sobols Bethania Soriano Emma Spierin Matthew Spurway Mark Stewart Catherine Street Rebecca Sumerling Lucy Sykes

Charlotte Tate Tracey Taylor Jerome Thibault Gideon Thomas Natalie Thomas Gavin Thomson Kieran Toms John Townsend Jasmine Tredget Yoana Tulumbadzhieva Joanna Turner Gozde Uyar Emilie Walker Christopher Waller Lucy Wallwork Michelle Wang Tim Warin George Weeks Dr Frederik Weissenborn Robert Wellburn Gael Welstead Matthew Whaley Roger White Tim White Jennifer Wiles Niall Williams Derek Wilson Chris Witter Evelyn Wong Nicola Wood Mengqian Wu Timothy Wu Mirjam Wurtz Jieling Xiao Haibo Xu Armando Zappala Lea Zeitoun Yigong Zhang Maria Zouroudi

GROUP MEMBERS Beam Clarion Housing Group GreenBlue Urban Ltd Milton Keynes City Council PDP London Scott Tallon Walker thinking place U+I URBED

HONORARY ACADEMICIANS Prof Wulf Daseking Jan Gehl George Ferguson CBE Christer Larsson Tina Saaby Manuel Salgado John Worthington MBE

IN-RESIDENCE David Rudlin AoU Artist Frank McDonald AoU Writer Ian McMillan Poet

Academicians and Young Urbanists

Integrated Urban Model of Milton Keynes, combining data on spatial layout, land use & public transport accessibility.

Models like this are being used to address the risks of car-dependence, isolation & loneliness throughout the UK.

Social.

Digital.

Design.

These three words underpin Space Syntax’s approach to architecture and urban planning. First, our focus is always on people - we study how they move and interact in buildings and urban places, undertaking surveys to identify their patterns and preferences.

Second, we use data modelling techniques to generate insights about existing circumstances and simulate the impacts of change on social, economic and environmental performance. Third, we create plans for the future at every scale, from national infrastructure strategies to city masterplans, public spaces and individual buildings.

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