Overviews of Igloo's development projects are available online Placemaking guides and academics often seem to suggest that the basics of what people want, in terms of places, don’t really change. They want ‘identifiable character’, facilities and amenities, they want accessible green space and good connections; they want to feel safe. On a general level, this may well be true. But Chris Brown, chief executive of developer Igloo Regeneration, is sure that people also want other, less definable, things. ‘In property, where people want to live is the crucial thing,’ he says. ‘There is nothing more important than geography. And this has changed enormously over the last 15 years. Security may well be important to people, but in my experience it doesn’t come very high up the list. I get very annoyed at people saying, in the face of evidence, that what people want doesn’t change. It does. It changes constantly as new things become available.’
This issue of where people want to live, and why, is a complex one. Take the recent influx of inner city dwellers. Long term inner urban dwellers who may be suffering significant increases in crime in deprived, frequently local authority-maintained inner urban neighbourhoods, are a completely different group of people to the group of people Chris is talking about. ‘Our clients were the urban pioneers who are looking to move into town from the suburbs. And this is what I’m saying about the complexity of the market. There are so many different groups of people,’ he says.
Wimpey created the first few UK city developments, says Chris, but most of the city living explosion of the past 10 years has been due to the Urban Splash effect. ‘The majority of the big house builders couldn’t respond for a long time. They didn’t know how to and that’s all about people being entrepreneurial. I think it is something that can be taught actually, but it’s definitely something that a lot of people either have or don’t have.’
Giving the people what they want is never easy. ‘Marketeers for a long time have divided people up by socio-demographics, which actually I think is increasingly less useful. Much more these days, particularly in the market I operate in, it’s all about aspiration. You can get people at the bottom of the income scale and people at the top of the income scale who share identical aspirations for lifestyle and location,’ says Chris. ‘We were talking the other day about a couple of hotels, one in Amsterdam and one in New York who provide rooms over a huge income range so you can get a room with two bunks and a shared bathroom and you can get a duplex suite in the same building. But the key to it is that the building appeals to people who share an aspiration, and when they meet in the bar they get on together.’
Marketing in the house building industry has been, until recently, ‘prehistoric’, he adds. ‘Now, markets appear to change really quickly for city dwellings. Yet in the suburbs the market probably is changing a lot less quickly – although I’m absolutely fascinated by what I call creative suburbs. You get places like Chorlton in Manchester and Mosely in Birmingham which have been changing quite quickly as the economy is changing. Local industries in these regions are are fast growing, and these suburbs are becoming hotbeds of creative industries.’
Urban design in the equation
What do we mean by urban design? Clearly, it’s about creating quality streetscapes in housing and other developments and communities, but getting it right in terms of creating places involves much more than that. ‘The reasons that people like places relate to aspiration. It’s about psychology, it’s about how people feel and how they relate to the space they live in, and they don’t just relate to its physicality. It’s not just about how creating a space that works.’
Looking at the bigger picture, suggests Chris, placemaking is not even primarily about these things. One problem is that a clear evidence base for’successful places’ is lacking. Successful for whom, for example, and judged by what criteria? Certain academic studies, urban morphology, for example, are identifying what makes people feel better about spaces, at least in terms of heights and horizons. ‘I can buy that,’ says Chris, ‘it’s quite an interesting theory, and I can understand why that would be logical. I would just turn the thing upside down and say it’s not about what spaces make people feel good, it’s about what makes people feel good first. So rather than the space first, it’s the people first. I would put community as right up there at the top of the list. The dimensions of the space, it seems to me, is quite a long way down people’s wishlist.’
At Igloo we work out, says Chris, through wind analysis, sun analysis and micro climate analysis generally – and then through the process of detailed design – how we can make people feel comfortable outside of buildings for the longest periods of time. What makes people want to sit outside a café, what makes people want to just stop and watch people go by ? ‘Jan Gehl is the master of this. He calls himself an architect, but he’s a behavioural psychologist really. His work about how people behave in public spaces and it’s absolutely fascinating.’ Jan Gehl's work is available on RUDI
Gehl’s approach is mainly from the psychology and behaviour of the individual, adds Chris. There is also some very interesting work on community networks and community connectivity, for example, what type of place encourages connections and contacts between individuals. Such geographically-based communities tend to have a number of advantages in terms of lower crime and better health. ‘That’s an area we’re interested in in terms of the apartment block, which is actually quite an isolating form of development. Compared with a street, you can’t identify your neighbour with where they live very easily. Design can influence cerrtainly help to influence community in this way,’ says Chris.
Along with many others, Chris suspects that attitude is at the root of our problems. ‘If you have the highway engineers saying I’m a highway engineer, that’s the root of the problem. If he said, "I’m an urbanist", then he starts off in the right place. If I defined myself so narrowly, I would become ineffective. The key to this has to be better education. Sadly, the system we have now thrusts people into silos, even new silos like urban design.’
The real key to designing successful places is about change management, says Chris. ‘I fall back on things like the Urban Taskforce Report. You’ve got to put in place levers that change behaviours. I’m a great advocate of public sector ownership of land in the development process, so at a point in the process (albeit not for very long) the public sector holds on to the land. 'The developers only get to develop when they’ve shown themselves capable of delivering social environmental and economic objectives in addition to their own profit. And it’s levers like that that start to change behaviours. So you look at the housing industry, and many of the volume housebuilders, they have actually changed what they do enormously over the last four or five years. They used to churn out loads and loads of rubbish, but now some of their schemes are quite acceptable. The reason they’ve changed is because they’ve realised that in order to secure land that’s coming through the public sector pipeline, they’ve got to be able to do things differently. They’ve got to have better designed schemes; they’ve got to engage with the local community. This is almost a political agenda at the moment.’
At the same time, says Chris, the quality of masterplanning in this country is ‘abysmal’. ‘The planning system is a rule-based system. But these areas are too subtle for a rule-based system. All the participants in the process get to understand the rules and play by the rules, but the rules don’t give you the best outcome. The rules give you an outcome and the rule might be that if you can’t do affordable housing on the site, you’ll give the local authority some money. That rule, because of this loophole, means a developer will give the local authority money and build a wealthy ghetto.
‘A rule-based system will never create a perfect result. It can improve the lowest common denominator, it can improve the worst scheme, in the same way that coding in urban design can. It can improve the worst schemes but it won’t give you really good schemes.’
To deliver really good schemes, says Chris, we need to develop other incentives. We need to reform the planning systems ; look at land ownership processes ; look at people having the right skills. And at a whole raft of incentives like financial incentives – incentives to develop land to produce environmentally sustainable schemes rather than non-environmentally sustainable schemes.
Few of these incentives are already in place, says Chris. ‘Looking at the Urban Taskforce recommendations, the majority of them have not been implemented. There were a number of steps forward, minimum housing densities brought in under planning regulations, and we also got the target of developing 60 per cent of new housing on brownfield sites. And, thanks to organisations like Cabe, urban design is much higher up the agenda now. But the vast bulk of housing development is poor. Now that, politically, this is becoming a priority, perhaps the politicans will give this area the priority it deserves.’ |
