Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape. In body and in mind he is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but has made his home in every continent. Jacob Bronowski 1973: The Ascent of Man The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is man the builder. Ibid.

Planning is about determining the future environment and looking after our heritage. Market forces and free enterprise would not give high priority to either of those activities - and why should they? They are primarily concerned with the private rather than the public realm. We have a planning system quite simply because it is difficult for fragmented private interests to care for the public realm - whether that be the provision of a major piece of infrastructure or the protection of a beautiful rural area or a historic town centre, or deciding where is the best place to locate major new development. How can disparate private interests ensure that resources are invested to maximum effect and benefit? There are now dozens of examples of overseas aid programmes where huge investment in capital development has resulted in all manner of white elephants, because nobody thought it necessary to carry out a little planning first - quite ironic, when the cost of this is so negligible when set against construction and implementation costs. Planning, then, can be cost-effective - good value for money.

Both new buildings and refurbished buildings can contribute to an enhanced public realm. Fantastic viewing opportunities are provided from the top of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, while space for all manner of public outdoor theatre now exists in front of Covent Garden's remodelled Market Hall.

If we want a vision of what happens with little or no planning - to see the inevitable environments of private affluence and public squalor - there are many places we can go - the Middle East, the United States, many Third World countries (try Lagos for starters!) - and, I dare to ask, is the London Docklands area going the same way? There is an example of a free market environment - are the banal Canary Wharf and surrounding mess of superficial Legoland buildings on the Isle of Dogs really what we want? Fortunately the Royal Docks area may be better as the Development Corporation is now subscribing to a bit more planning and urban design.

By contrast, I have had the fascinating experience of taking a helicopter trip over a large part of Holland. I couldn’t have had a more cogent physical demonstration of successful urban planning - clearly defined towns, well-located new settlements, a very comprehensive transport and infrastructure system and a protected Green Heart for agriculture and recreation. It can be done. Planning achievements are achieved over long time spans. Short-term cycles in the development market, coupled with the relatively short-term periods of office of central and local governments, do not provide the best context for the achievement of long-term visions. A coalition of interests is required, subscribing to an agreed vision and committed to making it happen over a potentially very long time scale. The vision will be multi-faceted and undoubtedly beset by many ifs and buts. Out of the complexity will need to come one or two, key, simple, cogent ideas which are easy to grasp and capture the imagination of the city’s administrative, business and residential community. It is vital, particularly at times of recession and a slowing down of development activity, that cities hold out for what is right in the longer term. Compromise, poor quality, ‘development at any price’ will cause long-lasting damage and quickly be bitterly resented.

The skyline of a city is an expression of the public realm, in which culture, commerce, entertainment and living come together for the good of the inhabitants - the skyline of the City of London seen from the west.

Recessions in the construction industry actually provide wonderful opportunities to sort out some of the problems of the past, to take stock of the town or city and decide what is best for its future. It is a chance, not to make imprudent concessions to developers, but to retain low-cost, smaller uses, while preparing for a future up-turn.

There is the need to take a twenty to fifty year view of a city’s future: not a three or four year one. It is vital to look beyond what is politically expedient in the short term. Ideally there should be multi-partisan commitment to explicit strategic goals as a better framework for making business and other decisions about the future of the city. Commitment to good ideas is vital, so that politicians are able to carry forward their implementation beyond three to five year governmental cycles.

Towns and cities can learn from each other. Their inhabitants and administrators need to be ever watchful that they do not make the same mistakes as other cities around the world - particularly vis a vis private cars, single-use monolithic development, elevated pedestrian decks and bridges, internal retail malls and a hands-off approach to planning. Mixed uses are important, not just to create an interesting, lively city. Wealth, of ideas as well as capital, is created by putting different disciplines, people and activities, cheek-by-jowl. New ideas are born as they are sparked off one another. There is the need for like-minded people to work in close association with each other, collegiate-style, not in separate organizations or Ministries. They need direct access to decision-makers and those who control the city’s resources. Strong, single-minded leadership is vital.

New buildings are getting friendlier in their mass and detailing - inventive windows at Robinson College, Cambridge and mellow dockside housing at the new Maritime Quarter in Swansea, Wales. Great care is still needed not to squeeze out marginally economic uses - like this umbrella shop in a side street off London's Charing Cross Road - which, though small, make a disproportionately high contribution to the public life of a city.

The British planning system has actually secured many worthwhile achievements - protection of rural areas, planned growth in urban areas, conservation of our heritage, protection to old buildings, planned new towns and cities, urban regeneration and sensitive re-structuring of existing towns to accommodate new uses, to mitigate the effects of traffic and to create new pedestrian areas. Although, for the most part, it totally failed to stop the devastation wreaked on many town and city centres by the comprehensive redevelopment schemes of the 1950s and 1960s - now hated and reviled by the community and today’s professionals - we can all think of dreadful proposals which have been stopped by the British development control system.

As an urban designer, I am less interested in wringing hands about past mistakes by architects and planners - anybody can criticize. What is more important is to cultivate a new spirit of collaboration between architects, planners, developers and the community. Where this is happening, it is bringing a wholly better approach to our work.

In Britain, another favourable sign is the quality of results in fairly run-of-the-mill developments in our towns and cities. Buildings are on the whole friendlier. New buildings are increasingly respecting their context and are developing on a human scale which is concerned with pedestrian comfort and involves areas of mixed land use. I welcome unreservedly today’s more humble approach throughout the development professions and the industry. The arrogance of the past made for a lot of friction, but now at least some professionals are listening properly to what people have to say. Even developers and their agents are getting the message. They are generally prepared to go out to public discussion on schemes at an earlier stage than hitherto. They are finding that good design pays. It is popular and good value for money. It matters to some of them that people like what they are producing.

One cannot ignore the profit motive in the stimulation of development and the need for patrons. Even Florence needed its patrons to achieve its superb townscape, in the form of the Church and the great banking families. However, it is quite wrong for buildings or whole towns to be viewed simply as vehicles for making money for a limited number of people. Architecture and town planning are amongst the most public of the arts - they cannot be switched off like music or put down like literature - they are there for the enjoyment of the public at large, as users, visitors or just passers-by. It is high time we started giving our towns and cities back to people.

	Do not neglect the value of a little 'urban fun' - Terry Farrell's Egyptian-style railway station at East Putney and an ingenious water sculpture over the whole front of a shop in Covent Garden, London - or 'escapism', like these buildings and landscaping dripping exuberantly down the hillside in a Canary Islands tropical tourist paradise.

It is not part of my argument that we should ignore the needs of modern living or the economic advantages that may be conferred by new development. What I do believe is that planning applications should be refused over and over again until a result is secured which will make a demonstrable and positive contribution to the quality of the built urban environment and the quality of life to be enjoyed by the people who use it. We should not be bullied by developers, even where a town or city is desperate for development. Let the poor and insensitive ones go away in frustration and bad grace and let them go out of business. There are, fortunately, always a few developers with a much more sensitive and caring approach to the places in which they operate. They will be helped to stay in business if they do good work. We are the consumers. Our views are sovereign.

Similarly, unless something fairly radical is done about traffic in our towns and cities - particularly the unchecked reliance on private cars - our town centres and city centres are, quite simply, going to die.

Many town centres are a mess because there is nobody who cares about them as a whole. They suffer from organizational neglect. In some places Town Centre Managers have been successfully introduced to cut through the diffused, uncoordinated control exercised by existing local authority departments. They have a janitorial role (similar to the Manager of a Shopping Centre); a responsibility for promoting and developing the town centre; and, handling day-to-day management. It requires commitment and a low-key, persistent individual with access to decision-makers.

Small initiatives are important, such as moving obstacles on the pavement or cutting down the noise and pollution for those who like to eat outside. Experiment is important. Successful results can be used to assemble a coalition of interests to push worthwhile initiatives in the right direction.

A good environment and an attractive public realm are not just created by professional specialists - architects, town planners, engineers, landscape architects and so on - or even just by the patrons of those professionals. They are created and maintained by the love and care of the people who live and work in a town or city. The individual contribution may be quite modest - the shopkeeper who not only makes attractive window dressings, but also arranges decorative wares on the pavement; the owner who keeps to local colour themes in painting and decorating the exterior of his or her building; or, the resident who lovingly arranges colourful tiers of potted plants where they can be enjoyed by passers-by or encourages creepers to enrich an otherwise bland or unattractive facade (see Chapter 5).

In France, culture and pride in one’s surroundings are vote winners. In England, Ministers still regard the same things as vote losers, in the context that the majority of people view decay, litter and urban squalor as someone else’s problem. Look how the British Government’s own Time for Design Initiative and its subsequent monitoring were starved of resources. The me first ethos of the so-called Enterprise Culture has contributed to an unhealthy public attitude to such problems. Actually what we urgently need is a renaissance of our once strong civic pride.

 

 

Simple rules or principles for the design and management of the public realm can be very effective. Many countries have such codes and these appear not to inhibit the good designer from producing wholly original, modern designs, which are appropriate to the context. It must surely be preferable to have such guidance spelled out at the briefing stage, before the architect has become wedded to a particular solution, than afterwards to subject a design to interference and arbitrary compromise on the basis of the subjective judgements of officials and politicians. Good architects should not fear such guidance which would seek not only to prevent the poor and mediocre but also to encourage excellence and innovation.

 

A society that lists buildings for preservation, designates conservation areas and selects other areas as being of outstanding natural beauty, is clearly declaring its belief in objective standards (Lord St John of Fawsley, Foreword to 'Planning for Beauty').

 

Planning authorities need to draw up local design guidelines and use them sensibly - as a checklist to encourage good design, not as a straightjacket to stifle creativity or original thought. This has been done successfully in other places around the world. The cities of Washington and San Francisco have established height guidelines. Bologna insists on arcades. Lanzarote insists on low rise development in white and dark green. Most United States cities have planning codes which consider the critical variables of use, bulk, height, density, building lines.

 

Local urban design guide-lines can be devised and are useful, as this selection from London and Birmingham, Melbourne, San Francisco and Lanzarote shows: ...work with the local topography ... design the skyline ...make it obvious when a river or canal is being crossed ...design street frontages and corners ... design shopfronts as part of the whole building ...make enclosed outdoor rooms ...design visual markers into the corners and tops of buildings ...mark the entrances to urban centres ...give tall buildings distinctive profiles, especially the tops ...where important, insist on consistency of scale and colour.

 

San Francisco has been particularly farsighted in stipulating appropriate colours - basically pastel shades - for tall buildings, banning mirror glass and prohibiting the overshadowing of public spaces. Street lines are maintained and tall buildings have proper tops. Commercial developers must contribute, in cash or kind, 1 square foot of open space (public square, arcade, atrium, park or garden) for every 50 square feet of built development - not in return for more floorspace, but because, without it, planning permission will not be forthcoming.

It is, perhaps, most sensible that national governments should set down urban design guidelines appropriate for the country as a whole, to be used as a checklist. Local planning authorities should then develop, refine and adapt these to suit local circumstances, having regard to variations of topography, heritage, climate, history and culture, the existing context and local colours, materials and decoration.

 

Design must be a material consideration, in both the popular and legal senses of the word, in assessing all proposals for urban development. Designers and developers should be invited to submit short design statements with their proposals. For example, why is the corner of this new Belfast departmental store, in Northern Ireland, curved? Is the entrance clear? Is it the right height and form for this particular street? Are the materials appropriate? Does it provide a pedestrian-friendly frontage? ...and so on. If this book gives encouragement to ask these and other questions about proposals which will change the face of our towns and cities throughout the world, then it will have succeeded in its purpose.

 

What needs to happen to secure the renaissance of the public realm? I have five suggestions.

Firstly, we need greater commitment from national governments - and the responsible environmental Ministers. They need to take a greater interest in the design of the public realm. It is not enough to grumble about litter. Litter is a symptom of decay in a public environment which is being starved both of expenditure and imagination. We are drifting towards an environment of private affluence and public squalor.

It is difficult to legislate for good design. That doesn’t mean that we mustn’t try. For example, in the United Kingdom, I would like to see the Secretary of State for the Environment promulgate a forceful piece of advice to planning authorities which can be given considerable weight in deciding planning and development applications. A suggested text for this is given at the end of this book. As a minimum, design must become a material consideration in determining planning applications. The hands-off brigade have failed totally to demonstrate that the public environment is safe in their hands in the absence of planning control and design guidance.

Secondly, some radical changes are needed in the training of the professions concerned with the design of the urban environment - architects, town planners, landscape architects, engineers, surveyors, estate managers and so on. The gaps between them have got to be closed. It is all too often in the Schools that the rot sets in. What is needed is joint training at every opportunity - shared foundation courses, interdisciplinary projects and staff-swapping between departments.

Thirdly, urban design needs to be properly recognized within local planning authority structures. It is more than a tame architect giving, on a part-time basis, design observations on never-ending piles of mediocre planning applications. It is about caring for the physical quality of the area as a whole - looking after its past and designing its future. It is about making good things happen.

Fourthly, what can the professional institutions do? They should be aiming to draw into the professions people with the right capabilities to improve the urban environment. Design skills are important. But so is a sensitive approach to the after-care and management of places, an understanding of the economic and social dynamics of change and the ability to seize opportunities as they are presented.

Fifthly and finally, community and professionals must always be thinking good design. Good design means added value. It also means caring about the community and their physical environment.

What is required to achieve the vision of towns and cities which are more people-friendly is not head-on confrontation - usually messy and unsuccessful - but, instead, the reinforcement of existing worthwhile initiatives and momentum and the abandonment of the detrimental ones. The trick is, judo style, to give a good push to everything which is going in the right direction. At the same time we must stop accepting the mediocre and second best in town design.

 

It is easy for everyone to love townscape like this - around Lincoln Cathedral, England. At the end of the day, what matters most is that we try to understand why we like what has succeeded in the past. Such an understanding can, and must, inform the way in which we design and manage new, innovative environments. It will also help us to stem the drift into universal, anonymous mediocrity. Then, once again, perhaps we can create more people-friendly towns and cities.

 

Recommendations / action checklist
To everyone:
1	Look at every proposal again and again. How can it be made better? How does it square up to the axioms in the preceding ten Chapters of this book?
2	We must all care more about the physical environment and believe in good design.
3	We need to foster a more open, collaborative approach amongst all participants in the development process.
4	We need to identify leaders who will look after our towns and cities, encourage the right things to happen and stop the bad things.
To central government:
1	Give greater priority to the physical environment and the long-term future.
2	Promulgate clear design advice in ministerial circulars and policy statements.
To local planning authorities:
1	Recognize the importance of urban design.
2	Appoint appropriate personnel at all levels of seniority to handle urban design tasks.
To the professional institutions:
1	Break down professional demarcations. The environmental professions should all be natural allies, working together for the good of the environment.
2	Encourage, in particular, the training of people with urban design skills.
To the academic institutions:
1	Break down narrow, insular teaching practices.
2	Encourage multi-disciplinary working and studying at staff and student level.