Moves towards retail-led, ‘theme park’ development and the transfer of power from civic authorities to developers is impacting negatively on the design and function of cities such as Cardiff, says John Punter, Professor of Planning at Cardiff UniversityUsing Cardiff as a case study, he explains:
- how and why this is happening
- how and why this will have a negative impact on Cardiff
- what urban designers can and should do in response
With new mega-cities and sub-cities in the Middle East, China and even India seemingly thriving on a shopping mall/convention/tourism/leisure model, more and more developers and civic authorities in other parts of the world are smelling a recipe for success and following suit. We know the story of the somewhat scary, futuristic cities of Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore… but surely they’re all somehow different? So what about Cardiff, Liverpool and Manchester?
According to many urbanists, and to John Punter in particular, Cardiff is getting the mega-project treatment and it’s not at all in its best interests. The trials, tribulations and triumphs of Dubai are well-documented (see RUDI’s resources on Dubai and links to further information).
What’s not so well-known is the message that’s coming from respected urban designers and architects like Reiner de Graaf from OMA who are warning us that we must take note of what is happening in these new Middle Eastern and Asian development arenas. In many cases inappropriately, they are fast becoming the preferred models for an urbanising and regenerating world.
Bus shelters are public space that have been sold off toAdshel or JCDecaux…many residents are reclaiming these spaces.The power of an ‘amended ad’ can be considerable, says Punter
In other cities, such an ‘agit prop’ approach to reclaiming spacehas been successful.
Cardiff: a development critique. How and why is this happening?
Professor Punter framed his analysis of Cardiff in the context of New Babylon, a 1960s urbanism movement that questioned many of the commonly held assumptions of planners, designers and architects and the role of the public in successful city life. This is just, he suggested, what we need to be doing now, especially in the context of city development plans like Cardiff’s.
Cardiff’s claims and plans for delivery the wrongs – and how to put them right
Recognise each city’s unique identity
Theme park urbanism is now so mainstream that we may not even recognise it as such, says Punter. Such plans are now the only alternatives in urban policy. The urban policy of Cardiff, for example, is exactly the same as that of Liverpool even though they are completely different cities with different needs. The problem of the ‘serial repetition’ of regeneration solutions is a serious one.
Embrace mixed use
Often, urban designers are on a quest for vital cities redolent with mixed uses: cities that are daring, imaginative and thrilling. But this is not easy to achieve, and most often neither developers nor planners have any such schemes in mind. Planners are too tidy-minded and tend to create over-sanitised cities that serve to destroy variety and diversity. And can we create such vital urban centres in the UK with its essentially suburban nature?
Insist on political engagement
For urban design to be successful, it needs to be politically engaged. Cardiff needs to be a city beyond commodification where residents have ongoing involvement and engagement with its urban design and urban policy, and are not treated as passive consumers.
Take back control over public space
Urbanists and the public need to wrest back some degree of control for our spaces. Successful cities are authenticated by history and material production and have had their spaces moulded and shaped by people. What they don’t need is passive observers or spectators
Where, asks Professor Punter, is the quality, scale andreinforcement of the public realm?
Cardiff 2005: hype and lack of realism. Why this will have a negative impact on the city
The New Vision of Cardiff (pdf, 1.5mb), written in 2005, is a development and marketing plan that is seemingly aimed squarely at the business community. The way the Cardiff Vision document reads positions it as a city branding exercise based on retail and leisure. ‘Cardiff will become a world-class centre of arts and performance, building on events like the Singer of the World Competition and the Welsh Proms’, ‘Cardiff will be a ‘major visitor destination’: these are its key statements.
Residents and city visitors should, says Punter, be worried about this ‘disturbing document’, and calls for debate about its intentions.
Competitive football analogies are used to describe the city’s transformation (…moving out of the ‘British First Division and into the Premier League’). The document states that ‘small is beautiful, but that ‘big (as in the positioning of Cardiff as a city-region in South-East Wales) is better’. It refers constantly to the major retail, leisure and sports developments that are underpinning the city’s regeneration.
The retail agenda
A central project in the Cardiff scheme is St David’s 2, a joint development between Land Securities and Capital Shopping Centres. Together, as St David's Partnership, they are to spearhead this £535 million, 967,500 sq ft (89,891 sq m) development in the heart of the city. Project masterplans can be accessed here.
Files on St Davids 2 can be accessed here.
Plans for the new St David's 2 shopping mall
Plans for The Hayes, city centre
Building on existing assets within Cardiff including the St David's Shopping Centre and much of The Hayes, the Partnership is working with Cardiff County Council to develop the scheme.
Cardiff’s sports city projects are a bigger worry, according to Punter – particularly in the use of retail space to subsidise development.
The sports agenda
The cricket club want to build a test stadium in Sophia Park, a well-used public park, to host a mere two major events a year – is this good value?
Cardiff City FC has been ‘Wal-marted’ and its project will include 40,000 sq m of retail to subsidise a new stadium complex led by a company called Cardiff City Stadium Ltd. Punter acknowledges that shopping is an important pastime for many, but regrets the fact that Cardiff’s main developer, Land Securites, has so much clout in the development process that it is allowing the branding of its flagship projects to become both the branding and, increasingly, the actual corporate policy for the entire city.
Cricket club plans
International Sports Village (ISV) plans
ISV masterplan
Cardiff International Sports Village is, says Punter, one of the most worrying development plans. It is dependent on the development of the Regional Casino, a crucial element of the International Sports Village (ISV). Access more information on the ISV here.
The Regional Casino is a new concept for the UK. The recently passed Gambling Act will allow three new types of casino to operate in Britain. Gaming machines in regional casinos are not limited on stakes or payouts.
The masterplan for the ISV includes a swimming pool, snowdome, an ice rink, a convention centre and 37,000 sq m of retail to subsidise. Its footprint is massive in urban design terms.
Corrections to the New Vision
He suggests putting planning and urbanism principles (and suburbanism) back to centre stage in urban policy. Urban designers must not be pushed towards consumerism as a design solution.
As a small city of 330,000, Cardiff should recognise that it has great potential for the development of a new, sustainable kind of urbanism, and put in place the kinds of economic growth that can support such sustainability. This requires responsive local governance and programmes that create social cohesion and educate developers and citizens as to sustainable behaviours.
Cardiff University has recently carried out aneco footprint study for the city. Studies have shown that our real 'earthshare' – how much resource there is to go around – is 2.18 gha per person on the planet, but national footprints show that western lifestyles are unsustainable. A citizen of the USA has a footprint of 9.6 gha. For Wales, the figure is 5.25 gha, but in India it is just 1 gha. The study revealed that Wales’ eco footprint is already higher than the UK average. New housing has not addressed carbon reduction or environmental concerns at all, and encouraging tourism and leisure will simply make the situation much worse.
Roath Basin plans
Footprint of the new retail-led centre
New housing lies behind gates and fences
The suspension of urban governance
While this New Vision may worry Punter, the manner in which it impacts on urban governance worries him much more. The city’s development is being led by the marketing of Cardiff Bay, spearheaded by Land Securities and its retail partners, and by a transport partnership of construction interests, together with the private sector.
The city is being driven into hands of the private sector as the public sector is short of funds. While this may be a self-evident truth, the questions of what scrutiny there is, and whose interests are really being served in this situation, must be debated. As far as community consultation goes, the Council has a strong council record, but Punter fears that any consultation is increasingly taking place after the fact and that the public can only react to a fait accompli.
The public’s ability to intervene in the city’s development has been whittled away and needs to be restored.
Cardiff Bay: success or problematic?
Hailed as a success with Cardiff, Punter sees many problems with the Cardiff Bay redevelopment. Firstly, the £500m public investment attracted only £1billion in private investment, a poor leverage of 2.1. He points out that CBAT, Cardiff’s independent public art consultancy working on regeneration projects, managed a leverage of 10.1 in terms of private/public funding on most of its schemes.
Plans reveal artificial, cocooned, indoor spaces
New developments, dead space
One problem is that the market always tries to capture life and vitality in one space, instead of trying to spread it around the city. Cardiff Bay’s Mermaid Quay and the Brewery area is home to 40 bars and restaurants, with another 20 close by.
This area of the city is busy at night but is, says Punter, responsible for the lack of life in other city areas. The Cardiff Bay area is an isolated island of life, with no safe, walkable route to connect it with the city centre.
This skewed development illustrates how careful we need – this has happened because developer Land Securities has been put in a position where it can essentially control development in many of the city’s central public spaces.
Traditional islands of life in other areas of the city are being neglected.
Punter recognises that the issues of economics and planning are highly complex. Yet this does not mean that we don’t try and tackle the issues.
Punter cites Cardiff’s latest consultancy work as support for his concerns. The key points of the research suggest that:
- Cardiff needs to move up the economic activity value chain in terms of jobs, skills and training This means developing quality projects like Farrells’ Roath Basin bioscience park which will act as a major attractor for new research and knowledge-based institutions, and become an economic catalyst for the city and the region. Urban regeneration fund Igloo Regeneration Partnership has been chosen as the private sector development partner for the £200 million redevelopment.
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The Cardiff Bay area and city centre need connecting Punter comments on Cardiff’s planned Ultra transport system, a futuristic ultra light rail system that is currently being trailed in Cardiff Bay. But, says Punter, a city of 350,000 like Cardiff simply doesn’t have the density and could not realistically support such a system, however popular and well-designed it may be.
- Cardiff has prestige projects but no infrastructure
- The city centre public realm looks tired
- There is little or no affordable housing
- There are problems of civic culture and education
Each of these criticisms relates to the fact that the development plan of opting for the high-profile, ‘theme’ developments. This means that many core areas are not getting the attention they need.
Moving forward: what urban designers can and should do in response
Develop the city’s knowledge economy, as with the Roath Basin development
Promote social cohesion: watch out for the negative effects of gentrification and lack of affordable and social housing. Standards need to be set so that every development must build both as part of every project.
Push for more inclusive government
For Punter, this means giving a more proactive role to civic bodies such as the Cardiff Futures Forum, an independent body supported by Cardiff Council which analyses the best way to take Cardiff forward over the next ten to 15 years, and the Design Commission of Wales. The latter, laments Punter, has so far done little or nothing to address public and professional concerns over ISV, the casino project or the retail-dominated theme of the city’s development. However, the current set-up will not allow them to take a full role. Neither the Design Commission or the Cardiff Futures Forum is politically accountable, and therefore and has no decision-making powers. The market, concludes Punter, has effectively corrupted our ability to influence urban governance.
Get the academic institutions on board
Punter suggested that academic institutions such as Cardiff University, which owns a sizable part of the city’s estate, ought to be much more proactive – especially through its expert centres. Instead, he says, even new university accommodation is of a poor standard and the University plays no civic role.
The role of urban design professionals
Urban design policy is not a basis for radical change, but it is important as a tool of urban policy. The principal responsibility of urban designers and planners is to create, reinforce and civilise the public realm. Punter considers ‘intelligent and iconic urban design’ to be rather a contradiction in terms, viewing successful urban design as background utility, not as a series 'look-at-me' buildings or projects.
Some of Cardiff’s new architecture may be innovative, but its urban design is poor in terms of connectivity and the provision of usable public spaces. Only one new development has adequate public space, which is unusable due to its orientation above pavement level. There is too much over-exited architecture in terms of add-ons and clip-ons.
The focus on channelling investment into residential projects since 1996 has led to the building of a series of gated communities and gated spaces – effectively housing built in car parks. The new public realm of the waterfront has become a set of carparking grilles. It is unsafe, unattractive, and reminds us strongly of the suburbs. We see miles of fences, no mixed use, no affordable homes and precious little amenity space.
The real attractiveness of Cardiff is its small scale, its mixed use, its good background buildings and its suburbs. Essentially, it’s the Victorian planning ethos, from which the new developments can learn much.
The role of urban design in urban governance
Punter refers to a recent publication, People makes places, from Demos, which is available on RUDI and which outlines a practical approach to putting people first in placemaking.
He also recommends Jan Gehl’s classic Life between buildings (available on RUDI), which stresses that life, spaces and buildings should be approached in that order.
Conclusion: imperatives for the design agenda
- Civil commitment to public realm
- Traffic calming schemes for suburban high streets, reduction of street furniture and signage clutter, leading to the intensification of public use
- Development of public transport
- More attention to environmental issues, and a greening project for the city.
- A much stronger development control system. A new breed of ‘responsible’ developers such as Igloo have recognised the economic benefit of lasting quality – others may need to be educated on this point
- Recognition that quality equals value. Developers such as Land Securities in Cardiff have at least partially recognised the self-interest and economic need for quality development (even if we don’t agree with their retail-led objectives), as they will have a long-term (50-year) stake in their investment and need to protect this
- The problem is the majority of the volume housebuilders. Many are simply socially irresponsible in terms of environmental concerns and car-parking planning
- The public sector can no longer be a ‘partner in crime’ to such development and must say no to projects that don’t have affordable housing, mixed use, and public realm usage built in.
- This will mean saying no to some of the mega projects that are proposing own goals in terms of sustainability and design
- Commitment to a public art strategy – Cardiff has a public art strategy, but is currently neglecting to implement it
A way forward
There will always be trade-offs between economic drivers and successful city development – although technically, giving people what they actually want and need should be a money-spinner.
Economics and sensible development plans don’t need to be mutually exclusive – and can longer be so.
Cardiff is currently turning its one-time Unitary Development Plan into a Local Development Plan and attention needs to be paid to this. Progress so far is detailed online.
Cardiff city planner Gareth Harkoum, responding to Punter’s comments, said that Cardiff planners always ask for 20 per cent affordable residential housing in new developments, but admits that this request is frequently traded or negotiated away in deals with developers. The complexity of situation is immense, says Harkoum, and a major part of a planner’s job these days is to deal with this complexity, especially in less wealthy cities like Cardiff.
Developers always have their own agenda and elected members frequently wish to make their mark in wise or unwise ways – they should be challenged. Punter concedes that planners are not at fault in Cardiff. The blame, he says, lies with the civic authorities and the politicians. If they don’t raise their game, then none of us can.
A dire prognosis indeed.
