RUDI's third annual Remaking Places Conference, called Places In Transition was held in the German Gymnasium on the edge of the King’s Cross redevelopment site in central London in January. Roger Madelin, chief executive of property company Argent, which is leading the 8million sq ft mixed use scheme, described how the new and refurbished existing buildings would fit around and integrate with a revamped King’s Cross mainline station creating a new leisure and residential quarter.
View the presentation slides with audio
Richard Rees: The Individual, Nature and Society in City Design click here
Robin Hambleton: Place-based leadership: Spurring local innovation click here
Stephen Hill: Messy Design - A new framework for citizen investment in green and social infrastructure click here
Stephen Neal: Placemaking and the changing nature of development click here
Joost Beunderman: How to design the happy city - community generative urbanism click here
Simon Davis: From inception to delivery: 'The key to successful projects' click here
Jerry Spencer: Public space MOT click here
Jon Harris: Tackling 'smarter choices': Better transport planning opens up places for walking, cycling & play click here
Karl Friedhelm Fischer: Reconstructing lost buildings and spaces in Germany click here
Liz kessler: Transforming an inner city area of multi deprivation - EC1 New Deal for Communities click here
Rudi.net’s third annual Remaking Places Conference, called Places In Transition was held in the German Gymnasium on the edge of the King’s Cross redevelopment site in central London in January. Roger Madelin, chief executive of property company Argent, which is leading the 8million sq ft mixed use scheme, described how the new and refurbished existing buildings would fit around and integrate with a revamped King’s Cross mainline station creating a new leisure and residential quarter.
Richard Rees, urbanism director at BDP, taking his theme as sustainability, emphasized the importance of urban design reconnecting the individual with society and nature. “The worst cities remind us of our overcrowded population and our insulation from both nature and society.” He said that we needed to accept nature and insist that it is part of the city. Nature should also be an emphatic part of the dwelling. Cities should be created as settings for celebration and festivals. Environments should be designed that encourage human interaction. The flexibility of the city environment needed also to be recognized and new modes of using it developed with neighbourhoods that are truly local but are connected to the global information system.
Professor of City Leadership at the University of the West of England, Robin Hambleton described major changes at local government level, which affected the urban environment. He pointed to new relationships that were evolving between councilors and officers and local communities. He highlighted the need for local government to have greater autonomy from Whitehall, particularly in the current economic climate of public spending cuts. He said that the Government’s Total Place initiative offered new opportunities for urban planners. Currently being piloted in 13 areas, it is developing a ‘whole area’ approach to public services, seeking to identify and avoid overlap and duplication between service providers and was intended to lead to more effective neighborhood management. Urban designers and planners have not yet engaged with this process, he said.
Stephen Hill, director of C20 futureplanners, highlighted the ‘messiness’ of modern living and the radical political, social and economic changes required to take account of climate change and the need to achieve zero carbon emissions. He set out a radical, perhaps utopian, process to change society, which would be led by a government of national unity. It would introduce personal carbon accounts, national land-use management plans and carbon free zones. Car parks would be turned into sports fields. Fences would be ripped down and public space used for food growing. The Highways Agency and Network Rail would be merged to provide smarter travel choices. The built environment professions would be integrated so that a comprehensive approach was promoted to reducing carbon emissions.
Joost Beunderman, Demos associate and project manager at Urhahn Urban Design, questioned planner’s current fixation with maximizing housing density in new development and was concerned that ‘ghost’ and ‘clone’ towns were being created. He suggested that new developments should seek to repair local social capital rather than increase segregation. Development should be ‘public value’ led with extensive input from local communities. He cited the example of the Hub development at King’s Cross, which was funded by public bonds. It provides flexible space, which can be hired by its members by the hour. The use of the space is far more important than the building itself.
Land Securities senior development manager Stephen Neal used the analogy of a simple vanilla ice cream and ice cream sundaes to contrast the traditional operation of developers taking on individual schemes and the enhanced role, which his company and others were now playing in creating places. They were taking on the long-term responsibilities for an area and looking for long-term returns. At Victoria in London’s West End, his company’s scheme had stitched the area together. As part of the new town it was building at Ebbsfleet in Kent, the company was overseeing the provision of social and community facilities including a district heating system. This project is likely to take at least 20 years. He urged the planning system to be flexible to allow uses to be amended as demands changed.
Simon Davis, director of Urban Delivery, emphasized the importance of property values being considered as an integral part of masterplans. He urged that masterplans should not just include design and planning concepts but should take in implementation issues. All parts of the public sector needed to be engaged in preparing masterplans and subsequent delivery following an agreed timetable. He was working on a project in Towcester in Northamptonshire which involved redeveloping a backlands site to enable town centre expansion as new housing was built in the town. The scheme included a wide range of uses including specialist retail, offices, housing, recreation and leisure and community facilities. The local Council had recently committed to moving its offices there and a new library was planned which would give an anchor to the new private development.
Urban designer Jerry Spencer suggested that it was important to repair and make better use of poor public spaces and reestablish their functionality. Major projects to redevelop public spaces were in danger of harming local communities, he warned. His practice Jerry Spencer Associates had developed a toolkit to assess the effectiveness of public spaces. Its MOT (Movement, opportunities and terrain) assessment process was developed on the building for life model. It scored spaces against a checklist of 20 questions, which measured their connections, size and scale, their use, character, sustainability and involvement of local communities.
Jon Harris, technical director of smarter choices, Mouchel, suggested that transport issues should be subservient to lifestyle choices and should be considered early in the planning process and part of the planning application. He pointed out that transport choices are decided by occupiers early on when choosing a home – and the smarter transport links have to be put in place very early in a development to ensure maximum usage. He highlighted examples where councils had been persuaded to reduce their car parking requirements on the basis of the provision of smarter transport choices with a plan for walking and cycling routes into the town centre.
Karl Friedhelm Fisher from the University of Kassel School of Architecture raised the question about the extent to which lost buildings and neighbourhoods should be reconstructed in their original form. He warned against creating ‘disneylands’ which might please the tourists but was artificial. He cited the example in Berlin where the original City Palace was to be recreated on the site of the Palast der Republik, which the East German government had built. The city authorities did not have clear drawings for the original palace, nor did they have a clear use for it. The royal palace of Braunschweig (Brunswick) was bombed in World War II and demolished in 1960. The exterior was rebuilt to contain a palace museum and shopping centre. In some places in Germany, contemporary architecture was successfully being introduced into historic neighbourhoods but it respected the original structures.
Liz Kessler, the former public space coordinator at EC1 New Deal for Communities highlighted the need for detailed work at a neighbourhood level to make parks and streets attractive. They are the front doors to homes, shops, schools and work. The New Deal invested #6m in projects, which was supplemented by contributions from English Heritage and Transport for London. Projects included widening pavements, removing car parking and bringing new life to the streets. The New Deal had helped to reestablish a market and bring new life to five parks. She emphasized the importance of cross-disciplinary teams and working with the local community.
Robert Rummey, managing director of Rummey Design Associates, emphasized the importance of connecting places. He had prepared a new vision for Dover, which sought to reconnect the seafront with the rest of the town. Major new investment was going into the port. His masterplan, prepared for the Dover Pride Partnership, and the Local and County Councils, sought to capture some of the benefits of the millions of travelers going through it for the town. His proposals included an inhabited bridge with cafes, bars and shops over the dock road and a cable car, which linked the seafront to Dover castle and possibly on to Western Heights. He cited the example of Coventry, where Rummey’s masterplan had created a sequence of parks and spaces through the city.
