Urban design and the British urban renaissance, John Punter
Cardiff Bay: The Bay Pointe scheme on city-owned land, cross-subsidising commercial leisure, but negotiations are seeking to remove one tower.
Nottingham Market Square: an enlarged pedestrian area with a water feature has the new Metro running on two sides
Bristol Harbourside: the new pedestrian street connects its retail area to the Floating Harbour and protects a key view of the Cathedral
Urban Design and the British Urban Renaissance: comparing Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff and Nottingham
John Punter reports from an ongoing comparative ESRC Seminar series
It is ten years since the publication of Towards an Urban Renaissance, and while a variety of reviews are being conducted of its achievements, none have focused on urban design (though see Urban Design 103 for Core Cities). An ESRC sponsored seminar series is providing an unprecedented opportunity for sixteen senior British urban design/planning academics, their colleagues and doctoral students, to meet with local authority officers and practitioners in an extended evaluation of design achievements in the UK’s major cities, with four Celtic cities serving as comparators for the English cities’ renaissance.
Four seminars are being held, each of which is structured to compare and contrast the outcomes of the urban renaissance of four cities (or four districts in the case of London). In each case an academic evaluation is preceded by an explanation of the local corporate governance and planning practice context (presented by the local authority), then interrogated by selected local activists, practitioners and designers in both the public and private sectors, and finally debated by the wider audience. The first of the four conferences, co-sponsored by the Design Commission for Wales, was held in Cardiff in November 2007. It focused on the cities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff and Nottingham. Subsequent issues of Urban Design will report on future conferences in Manchester (January 2008), Glasgow (March) and London (July). The programme is co-sponsored by CABE and Architecture and Design Scotland, and the case studies will be published in spring 2009.
Research questions
The seminar series attempts a broad evaluation of the urban renaissance and the emerging quality of urban design. Five general questions were posed:
- Has a qualitatively different built environment begun to emerge?
- Is this promoting a deeper urban renaissance - creating more positive experiences and perceptions of urban living?
- Is urban design quality being compromised by the strong market orientation of the competitive city ethos?
- Are globalisation, privatisation, gentrification, and consumerism driving urban design and delivering less cohesive and sustainable cities as a legacy?
- How are new plan-making processes and policy instruments being deployed to promote longer-lasting renaissance and environmental sustainability?
The launch seminar went well with lively and provocative debate, and opinions on progress were often sharply divided. This short article cannot convey the richness of two days of highly-informed presentations, responses, counter-arguments and intense debate. Nor can it capture the very distinctive differences in each city’s corporate strategy, planning frameworks, design outcomes, local response and local critique. But it can highlight the broad similarities and contrasting local experiences of renaissance. The inclusion of the Cardiff case study demonstrated that similar market pressures and local authority agendas prevail outside the English ‘Core Cities’.
A qualitatively different built environment?
The short answer is ‘yes’. All four city centres have dramatically improved and significant tracts of the inner city are benefiting from residential investment. The significant repopulation of city centres has delivered more activity, animation and vitality if also an excess of café and binge culture. Major improvements have been effected in the public realm (many initiated prior to the Task Force Report); traffic calming and road space reclamation for pedestrians being widely welcomed. Where Birmingham led in the early 1990s, Nottingham has followed, removing subways and the inner ring road. The latter’s particular achievement, unique within these four cities, has been to take advantage of its new unitary status and the resources of the Local Transport Plan to fund major improvements in public transport. This is notable particularly in its tram project (approved in 2001 and now awaiting further extension) alongside extensive pedestrianisation. By contrast, Bristol has failed to initiate its tram project and significantly improve public transport, but it has taken forward an innovative Legible City initiative, improving pedestrian movement, public space, street furniture and public art, while replacing part of its inner ring road with new pedestrian spaces.
There was persistent criticism in the discussion of how commercial and higher density residential areas relate to the public realm. Too many commercial buildings are designed as freestanding objects (investors preferring them like that) creating discontinuous street enclosure. Nottingham has problems with the detailing of street facades and entrances in residential schemes. Cardiff Bay suffers from large-scale gated projects designed without underground car parking or a commitment to liveable streets.
A debate developed around the notion of ‘urban quarters’ as they were felt to be city marketing devices rather than a mechanism to create functioning communities, united by economic activities or local service centres. In Birmingham where the idea originated, it was argued that only the Jewellery Quarter functioned as a community of interest, and that much more should be done to foster the ‘urban village’ (itself a contested term) as a liveable entity supporting a complex web of activities and communities.
A deeper renaissance promoting urban living?
There was plenty of evidence of dramatic increases in city centre populations and in the central housing stock, but much less evidence of well-designed residential areas that might last. Five thousand units will have been added to Nottingham’s central area stock over the decade to 2008, while Cardiff is constructing over 1,100 apartments annually in the extended city core (twice the rate of Bristol). Shrinking household sizes have driven much of this growth with demand from students particularly important (Nottingham has over 50,000 students, making up a sixth of its population). Specialist student housing suppliers have emerged, but their products are generally felt to be poorly planned and designed, although this may in turn release inner city houses for families.
Of concern has been the monoculture of apartment developments (1 and 2 bed), and this has emerged as a particular issue in Cardiff where densities have been high, and the relationship to the street and waterways poor. All cities need to adopt much more effective design policies and guidance to produce apartment complexes capable of meeting a wider range of housing demand, and which can contribute much more positively to the street and the neighbourhood. A greater mix of uses would be welcome with the provision of commercial and public services, as well as live-work units on ground floors (see Design for London, Recommendations for Living at Superdensity, 2007).
Little was said about suburban intensification though clearly this process is well-advanced in all four cities. At present the more affluent suburbs find it easy to resist both the necessary diversification of the housing stock and the development of walkable sub-centres that could serve ageing populations more effectively. The design of denser forms of low-rise housing needs much more imagination.
Is renaissance compromised by a strong market orientation and the ‘competitive city’ ethos?
The impact of city competition on planning and design practices was also debated. It was most evident in Cardiff where the political agenda over the past decade has been explicitly ‘boosterist’ and marketing-led, relying on retail/leisure and huge sports projects to expand the city’s hinterland, and increasing tourism and providing jobs. The competitive impulse has translated into one-off high profile projects, often cross-subsidised by generous planning permissions on city land disposals. These have driven up residential building heights (41 storeys) and densities (450 dw/ha gross) to levels that are unsustainable and inappropriate in a provincial city. Development controllers insist that they can still add value to projects, despite the absence of statutory policy and design guidance.
Nottingham and Birmingham (with its legacies of the Highbury conferences, Tibbalds/Hildebrand studies and Les Sparks’ design management) offer an alternative strategy of urban competitiveness through quality place-making. But the argument was made that Birmingham’s urban renaissance projects of the 1990s had produced too little ‘trickle down’ of jobs to low income and economically inactive groups and been part-financed from housing and school maintenance budgets - a double deprivation. The most strident community criticisms emerged in Bristol, where the new office quarter of Temple Quay and the mixed use Harbourside scheme, were slated (the latter rather unfairly) for poor public realm planning and building design. There were worries that the single use, new shopping centre in Broadmead would be too introverted and shift the retail centre of gravity too far east.
Common patterns
The seminar identified common patterns: a political and architectural obsession with the iconic in preference to the everyday; the failure of masterplanning to sustain quality urban design; a need for more participative processes (viz. Enquiry by Design) alongside more transparent financial appraisal and investment intentions. More intelligent use of land ownership powers was considered essential, as was the need to forego maximum profits, especially on the first phases of a scheme (see Urban Design Compendium 2).
Of course, urban design does need a strong market orientation, but should not be heavily wedded to large-scale redevelopments driven by major investor-developers and mass house builders. The Custard Factory in Birmingham and the Tobacco Factory in Bedminster, Bristol were celebrated along with other examples of small scale interventions by architects/developers, for being committed to the locality and community enterprise.
Is the urban design renaissance compromised by privatisation, gentrification, and consumerism?
The debates highlighted many instances of market pressures driving development in ways that threaten quality design, an active public realm, social inclusion and more sustainable lifestyles. PFI and design-and-build schemes were unhelpful drivers, so was ‘value-engineering’ (though a good case was put for its potential). As for privatisation, there were quality public realms that were privately owned and managed on a non-exclusionary basis (e.g. Brindley Place), and publicly owned spaces being over-commercialised by catering outlets, giant Ferris wheels, imported Christmas markets and commercial events.
Gentrification is taking new forms not least due to the dramatic increase in student populations but also in the complexities of buy-to-speculate, buy-to-let and short-term (city break) lets. These have significantly increased housing demand while creating conditions of significant under-occupation. Do these apartment schemes contribute adequate affordable housing? Recently approved schemes in Cardiff have yielded less than half of their 30 per cent affordability target.
Central government has recently moved to secure modest increases in the supply of social housing through improved funding, but since 1997 they have prioritized the improvement of the existing stock as part of their Decent Homes programme. In the meantime many local authorities have to fund new council housing through sales of existing stock - a self-defeating process. In Bristol comparisons were drawn between different council estates in terms of the effectiveness and longevity of renewal and regeneration projects, with south Bristol estates faring poorly compared with those in the north (perhaps due to lower job accessibility). Dramatic changes in tenure, layout, form and density are afoot within the Birmingham council housing stock. Housing associations are set to collaborate with housing developers and sitting tenants to create higher density schemes with a more diverse tenancy and owner occupation mix. Cardiff was praised for its neighbourhood renewal programmes. Yet, the disturbing fact is that all of these initiatives do not seem to alter long-term deprivation and social exclusion levels.
There was little evidence of the greater sustainability of the compact city; concerns in Cardiff remain that new city residents might have an eco-footprint significantly higher than the UK average through their continued car dependence, high energy use, and a lifestyle that includes a significant amount of drinking and eating out. Without improvements in the energy efficiency and tenure diversity of apartments, more walking and use of public transport, better community and public services, the so-called compact city will not deliver more sustainable lifestyles and cohesive communities. A tourist or sports strategy is similarly unsustainable (Cardiff visitors have an average footprint of 8.7 global hectares: residents average 5.6). There were hopes that such issues might be addressed in Birmingham through another Highbury convention, this time on sustainable urban design.
The success of new planning frameworks and policy instruments?
There were repeated references to a planning system being under severe strain and failing to respond to the rigours of the Local Development Framework process. Bristol’s Core Strategy had been torpedoed by a successful community challenge to its Statement of Community Involvement. Architect-activists in Bristol argued forcefully for more democratisation of planning processes; the Civic Society (who had built up a Federation of Neighbourhood groups) thought that a new process of collaborative urban management should be developed through active networks of councillors, officers, academics and citizens, coordinating initiatives and practices, and learning from successes and failures. Bristol’s activists had a much greater presence and higher design aspirations than their nearly invisible counterparts in the other cities. However, doubts remain over levels of public participation in all facets of current planning practice.
Much was heard much about the parlous state of design skills and control expertise in the four local planning authorities. A frequent comment was the lack of institutional memory as a result of senior retirements and the high staff turnover. Doubts were raised about planners’ education and lack of design literacy, and the emphasis on the speed of decisions rather than the value-added was lamented. Both Bristol and Birmingham observers considered that good design and regeneration were more difficult to achieve now than in the recent past, due to skills/staff shortages, councils maximising land disposal receipts, political uncertainties and more pressing economic imperatives.
The debate in Cardiff has hinged around the Council’s claim for a track record in “innovative architecture and iconic urban design”. It was argued that innovation had to address sustainable construction and energy efficiency objectives not just architectural features, while iconic urban design was a contradiction in terms. This debate sparked a lively exchange about the ‘Puritanism’ of much urban design thought with its insistence on good background buildings, and the current vogue for freestanding ‘look at me’ buildings breaking both street wall and skyline.
Nottingham was addressing many of these issues by embarking upon a Sustainable Design Nottingham 07 initiative with the support of CABE (see Urban Design 103, 34-5). At its heart was an attempt to address the poor performance in the East Midlands on housing design quality and incorporating Building for Life criteria into project assessment (with shades of the recent Callcutt recommendations). A design review had been established, a city centre design strategy commissioned, and 3D briefs established for more than 70 sites to put the local authority on the front foot. Workshops and training programmes had also been developed for local authority planners, and sustainability guidance drafted.
Overall, there was relatively little discussion of other policy instruments complementary to planning, such as:
- additional guidance (e.g. Bristol’s Sustainable development construction guide)
- public procurement strategies explicitly requiring high standards of design
- the judicious use of EU funds for regeneration or for sharing good practice with other European cities; or,
- relatively recent additions to the tool kit, such as Local Area Agreements or the power of wellbeing (as established in the Local Government Act 2000).
Conclusions
From an urban design perspective, the urban renaissance remains largely city centre focused despite its irrelevance to large sections of the population. What is happening across cities in terms of suburban intensification, sub-centre development, private and council estate renewal and green space/ecology maintenance remains under-explored and often under-resourced. City centres still embody municipal pride and collective memory, but the ‘municipal’ has itself been eroded by central government, with many functions transferred to non-elected agencies, and fewer resources and powers to encourage local government initiative. Meanwhile the ‘balkanised’ political structure of some built-up areas encourages asset-stripping within cities and allows ‘edge cities’ on their peripheries to perpetuate unsustainable behaviour.
The next seminar focuses the northern cities of Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle-Gateshead and will be reported on in the summer issue of Urban Design (Issue 107).
Professor John Punter is at the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University and a Director of the Design Commission for Wales
