Yourspace - Urban Design 2.0, Alastair Donald
Party Wall Street by mae architects
YourSpace – Urban Design2.0
Alastair Donald describes an initiative to promote self-build neighbourhoods
Introduction
With the growing popularity of user content generated websites such as YouTube, OurSpace and Wikipedia, the phrase Web2.0 has seeped into common usage. Although the creative merits of Web2.0 are often greatly overplayed, in terms of providing a useful platform for the co-ordination of previously disparate activities, there is little doubt that there are interesting possibilities to be explored.
ESP-sim
Over the past year or so, Slider Studio (a computational design consultancy) in partnership with University of East London has received Government funding through UrbanBuzz to explore how the principles of Web2.0 might be applied to urban development and in particular how residents interested in building or commissioning their own homes might come together to shape their neighbourhood. The aim of the project known as ESP-sim – Enabled Self Procurement Simulation - is to develop software that can model alternative procurement and design processes to today’s speculative development model.
The project has therefore addressed a broad range of issues. With partners from the private and public sectors such as mæ architects, audacity.org and BURA, ESP has been grappling with how pattern books might be employed to expand the housing options available to future residents, while addressing some of the quality standards demanded by the Code for Sustainable Homes.
At an urban scale, I have been working with the partners to address how user-generated site planning can be dovetailed with design and planning processes, such as design codes and Local Development Orders, to offer a more direct and democratic route through the complexities of the planning system.
The tradition of self-build
There is a significant history of self-build housing in the UK, for example the plot lands developments of pre-war coastal England. Operating without restrictions, employing catalogue housing and a DIY spirit, these makeshift landscapes were loved by those who lived there, and detested by an architectural and planning elite who frowned upon the access that the working classes had to the countryside.
The nationalisation of development rights under the 1947 Planning Act killed these off, but self-build and self-commissioned housing did not disappear entirely. Today, at around 10-12 per cent of new housing in the UK, it is a significant (but rarely acknowledged) source of new housing. Yet compared with Germany, where self-procured housing is estimated to be around 55 per cent of the total new-build housing market, the sector remains small.
The search for new housing solutions
Now however, not only are around 70 per cent of homeowners reported to be interested in commissioning their own home, but dissatisfaction with traditional house-builder models and the current shortfall in home-building numbers has triggered interest in alternative methods of design, development and procurement. Importantly, within the architecture profession, there has been renewed interest in a typological approach to housing through the use of pattern books. Adaptable to a variety of sites and capable of being updated, the versatility and economy of this form of building is becoming appreciated once more.
Recently, there have been some interesting projects. The flatpack house has returned as IKEA entered the UK housing market for the first time in Felling, Gateshead. Across the water in the West End of Newcastle, Urban Initiatives have programmed a Housing Expo into their Scotswood masterplan (see p38) which promotes the idea of a ‘New Norm’ based around customisable and upgradeable shell space, and an extendable footprint. Urban Splash include serviced plots along a canal-side street within their New Islington development - a project that marries the one-off commissions of Amsterdam’s Borneo Sporenburg with ‘Grand Designs’ style mass appeal.
ESP-Sim innovations
The above schemes combine elements of innovation with some familiar processes. However, to address how self-commissioned housing might move from being one-off design commissions, or singular projects on isolated sites, to development on a neighbourhood scale, ESP-sim has grappled with the innovations required to handle an entire design, procurement and planning process. Effectively, the question it seeks to address is: how to co-ordinate a planning permission for about 150 homes where each resident is an individual developer, decision maker and partial designer of their property?There are three important areas of consideration:
- Developing Youcanplan, the ESP software that defines and illustrates the procurement process;
- Co-ordinating the development of menus of type approved, site specific patterns, with the complex site-based requirements of the regulatory systems; and
- Understanding how the menu of patterns and urban codes might be embedded within Local Development Orders, to create an ‘operating system’ for neighbourhood assembly.
Youcanplan
ESP operates on the basis that neighbourhood planning can encompass both the professional and lay worlds, bringing together an ‘enabling developer’ (public or private) with the future residents. To maximise control and choice over their housing options, ESP allows future residents to come forward early in the development cycle, not only to select and customise their choice of house, but to have a say in shaping their neighbourhood.
This whole process is co-ordinated through Youcanplan, multi-user online software which simulates the consumer experience of entering an enabled self-procured project. Initiated by professionals, but completed by future residents, it takes all parties through the development process including site planning and consultation. In a 3D virtual environment, a choice of plots within a neighbourhood are offered, and with a design code, a range of pre-approved house design choices can be selected and customised to the owner’s specification.
Modelling the end-to-end process helps improve the coordination between different partners such as masterplanners, local authority planners, finance companies, enabling developer and future residents. By linking the choices of future occupants into the supply chain, it should help create significant efficiencies.
Pattern Books
Key to making ESP work is the use of contemporary pattern book housing. While architects (and urban designers) have tended to scoff at pattern books, they represent an excellent opportunity for good architects to develop well designed housing.
For some, a contentious aspect of pattern books is that they are not designed for a specific site. Instead they capture the design information of a basic type and allow others (individuals or builders) to adapt the design for a particular site. This brings significant advantages as customers gain from the cost efficiencies of a repeatable, but customised product. A key benefit is that repeatable building enables investment in research and development, to address the next generation of environmental regulations in the Code for Sustainable Homes. With strict energy, waste and acoustic standards, and the need for advances in services and envelope engineering, this represents a considerable advantage. Innovations might include introducing built-in flexibility that make patterns adaptable to changing needs, and enabling elements with shorter lifecycles (e.g. kitchens and bathrooms) to be easily upgraded.
In order to improve understanding of the pattern book approach, ESP joined with the RIBA and Design for Homes to run a ‘Pattern Book’ competition to find a range of flexible house types to be built into the Youcanplan software. Architects submitted their patterns which were judged online through an innovative voting mechanism. The five designs judged to work within the ESP context will be built into the software patterns menu, and received £1,500 of prize money.
The key to making such an approach successful is to create greater levels of certainty at the interface between pattern designers, building regulations and planning. It is only then that designers can proceed with the knowledge of how far they can develop a typology’s design, without having their work undone to secure a site-specific planning consent. If basic patterns can be ‘type approved’, customisation can take place later. For the consumer an early indication of what will be consented will allow them to plan their own house and their neighbourhood.
Urban Codes and Local Development Orders
It is currently difficult to co-ordinate the interfaces and planning permissions for large numbers of individual ‘developers’, especially while the planning system remains predominately regulatory and reactive. Creating greater certainty might be possible by using design codes to specify important urban parameters for the site, and embedding the code and an agreed menu of site-specific patterns within a Local Development Order (LDO). Once approved, an LDO effectively extends General Permitted Development Rights across the area, and all development that meets the provisions of the Order becomes permitted development. Consequently it need not go through a formal planning application process.
So how might this work in practice? Before an LDO can be consulted on, and subsequently adopted, it must contain a description of the development that the order would permit, and a plan identifying the area. Effectively this requires the preparation of a design code - as a record of the agreed urban parameters of a master plan, translated into a set of technical specifications.
Taken together, these represent an ‘operating system’, i.e. the democratically agreed instructions for neighbourhood assembly. When formalised or adopted, the code provides clear direction for all those who wish to build. All parties understand that as long as a house type is selected from the approved menu of site specific patterns, and that they meet with the criteria for the urban code, then development is consented. For those that want to build outside the terms of the order, the option remains of going through the normal process to secure permission.
Conclusion and next steps
The aim of ESP is to introduce a new housing procurement model and to create links across the various consent regimes and into the new environmental standards regime. Given the instability of the UK regulatory systems it is an ambitious project. However in its testing so far, it shows promising results. The project now needs to move to the next stage - with the search for an ambitious local authority to join the experiment - anyone interested should get in touch. With household formation still on the increase despite the ‘sub-prime blues’ curtailing the already inadequate rate of building, it seems a chance worth taking?
Alastair Donald Further details can be found at www.esp-sim.org
