Coffee in the Square

Britain's Wet Weekend

Were the Jubilee Celebrations a success? How significant was the bad weather?

Canaletto's famous paqinting of the Thames on Lord Mayors Day

Now that we're all back to work, the barriers have been cleared away and the Union Jack bunting are beginning to look a bit tattered, I decided to ruminate on how successful the whole event was and to ask a few wider questions about public events and urban design.
It's a sad fact that more regimented states tend to do pageants rather better than we do. When Haussmann designed Paris, he prescribed wide boulevards to facilitate the charge of a brigade of cavalry at angry demonstrators. Red Square in Moscow was safeguarded from development because of its use as a suitably broad canvas for the mighty USSR to display its hardwear. We did have HMS Belfast boom out a couple of shots, but unless you count a very warlike canoo of Maoris, most of the flotilla displayed a peaceful nation.
Firstly, I think the river was a great idea, but the Thames is a rough, windy, tidal estury, not a litling backwater like the Venetian lagoons.  Secondly, it is very large and very wide, so even quite big ships look a bit puny.  I think that even the famous Canaletto painting enlarged the boats for picturesque effect. 

 

People who queued in the rain, watched in the rain and walked home in the rain might have been able to congratulate themselves on their British bulldog grit. But if we do it agin what changes should we make?

The real lesson is that large spaces do not make the best arenas for pagents.  The most exciting parade I've ever witnessed is the Semana Santa in Lorca, in the south of Spain.  This runs for about a kilometre or two along the narrow main street of the city, which is flanked on both sides by appartment blocks, each side being about eight stories high.  They place temporary seating on each side of the street, and you have to get tickets to view. However thousands of people can get a seat, and of course every balcony of the appartments is packed.  (There's no queuing needed.  it's just like getting a ticket to the opera.)

As this image so colourfully demonstrates, they race down the street in dangerous horse drawn carriages, parade racheros on dancing steeds and massed bands of hooded monks, throng to the sound of horns, antique blunderbusses and drums.  The buildings ricochet with the sound.  You are right in the thick of the parade, almost swept up by the throng and definitely frightened when the dancing horses goes through their paces. 

What makes it all work so well,  is the constraint of the space.  That is, I think, why the Mall concert worked so well.  Someone actually sat down and designed the Buck House Arena - a chap called Robbie Williams I gather - who cut his teeth designing stage sets for pop bands.  What he realised is that external space seems smaller than internal space.  So that when you want to stage any sort of performance out of doors you have to constrain the space, not expand it.

Just think of the most famous public spectacle of all, the Palio, that surges through the narrow streets of  Siena every summer.   Its fast, its constrained, its colourful, noisy and it's a horse race.  Perhaps Her Majesty, with her well known penchance for the sport of kings, might have preferred something like that?

 

The Race for a Local Plan

Even though the NPPF has been diluted a bit, any Local Authority which still lacks a local plan must be scrambling to produce one.
The NPPF still states that where a plan is silent, or absent, then the presumption in favour of sustainable development will apply.
But I'm berry worried that these hastily constructed Local Plans may be very poorly specimens, when they are published.
It is still far too early for us to gauge just how draconian appeal decisions might be. But this is not the time for an authority to stick its neck out.
Sustainability is said to run through the NPPF like a golden thread. But how far any authority might want to go down the route of specifying really sustainable development, I'd any bodies guess.
For example, how many authorities would specify car-free development or demand higher levels of public transport, when maximum parking standards have just been scrapped?
The sustainable rhetoric is admirable, but the reality if policies issuing from this government tells quite another story.
However, I do hope that some authorities will take the opportunity of greater autonomy to try a more radical approach.
The duty to co-operate could be interpreted as a duty for tiered authorities to become unitary. The localism agenda might just get some interesting schemes off the ground somewhere. The whole country can't be NIMBY's ... or can they?

Weeds, Weeds, Weeds

I never thought that the humble nettle, or the straggly rose bay willow herb could look so beautiful. But on a wet afternoon the other day, as I was scurrying to a meeting I discovered this gem of a garden just a stones throw from Edgeware Road.
Broadly street gardens has received a makeover from Westminster City Council's Parks Dept. and the result is stunning. The secret, wild plants chosen with sensitivity and all combining beautifully. Now I don't know what this garden will look like in Winter, but in the fulll flush of spring it looks wonderful.
What really struck me was the vigour of the whole thing.
Was it just a coincidence if, despite torrential rain, that the park was really quite busy?

The NPPF - The PPS is dead - Long live the PPS

It's just a few weeks since Government published their National Planning Policy. Local Planning Authorities are still taking stock. Developers are waiting to find out what the upshot is likely to be on the ground.
Are the planning barristers still rubbing their hands with glee? Has the scrapping of hundreds of pages of national policy really freed up our planning system and heralded a new era of localism?
I'm not so sure that it has.
The first thing to realise is that our planning system is a big ship to turn Unlike any other form of statutory legislation, planning has always relied very heavily on local policies. The local plan remains the most important document on the table. These local plans are different in each authority, they take a long time to produce and once published they have a shelf life of 10 to 15 years.
No amount of national posturing is going to change these leviathans in short order.
Before NPPF all these plans based their policies on PPS's, the old and now defunct national planning policies. After NPPF, the local plans still base their policies on the old PPS's. Nothing has changed.
Over time, maybe say the next five years, new and revised local plans will come out which will tweak these old policies. But I'm pessimistic that cash strapped authorities will have the capacity to rethink many of them from first principles.
Some of the old PPS's still provide the meat to the bones of the new national policies.
For example, there used to be a whole national policy document devoted to town centres. It brought in the concept of sequential testing, i.e. that retail development should be located as close to the town centre as possible. The policy went into great detail to describe how this concept should be used to assess applications. The new national policy says the same sort of thing, but collapses the whole, quite complex process, into a few short sentences.
We all know what sequential testing is now. An industry of consultants has grown up who can run this test.
So even though the PPS has been scrapped, the details of its policy and it's effect on the consideration of a retail planning application still stands.
Woe betide any local authority that decided to throw out that old policy document last month when government announced that all the old policies were withdrawn. The methodology PPS established still looks as if it's going to endure for a long time yet.
But, I hear you cry, I thought this was all about local authorities making up their own minds. It's true that a local authority could decide to go it alone and redefine the process for a sequential test. Now here is where I can see the planning barristers rubbing their hands with glee. Most local authorities just don't have the will to change the goalposts.
However I do see some of the big retailers might get very interested in pushing boundaries on these types of issues. They have the money, and the incentive, to try to find gaps between local and national policies. These gaps might just allow that cheap, out of centre site, to be re-born as the perfect location for shopping.
The PPS is dead - long live the PPS!
In my next blog, I shall look at the whole question of the relationship between local plans and neighbourhood plans.

Eco-build

Another year and another Eco-build. It seemed a little quieter than before? But then Excel is so much more spacious than Olympia.
Is it me or do I detect he Eco-ness slipping a bit. Apart from a sea of solar panels I saw many products that didn't look atall Eco.
However I did like the wood burner back boilers I saw. In British homes, where heat requirements are minimal this back boiler and highly controlled log burning stove does seem to economically hit a lot of buttons. I think I'm like everyone else in preferring a log burner - with a cosy window to some monster pellet burner in a cupboard somewhere. Pellet burners are often far too high an output for even a spacious domestic home - especially if it's well insulated and well orientated.
I was there to give a talk proposing a new take on the economics of large scale green development.
You can download the slides and the podcast here.

Powerpoint

Download Mediacast make do and mend pdf

Podcast (Audio only)

to view a minicast (on desk-tops only) follow this link http://coffeeinthesquare.podomatic.com/entry/2012-03-30T08_41_21-07_00

What size is sustainable?

Image courtesy gen.ecovillage.org

Yesterday I took part in an interesting debate at the Town and Country Planning Association, ( TCPA ) as a member of the Garden Cities and Suburbs Expert Group.  There's a publication planned later in the year and I'll include a link in this blog as soon as the results are published.  The aim of the exercise is to identify ways of bringing forward new 21st century garden cities, which are green, comprehensively planned and high quality.

The discussion got me thinking about the size of such settlements.  Is there a sustainable size?

The eco-towns initiative selected 5,000 homes - about 12,000 population - as the minimum sustainable size.  The programme also recommended that some settlements could be as large as 10,000 - 15,000 homes, which would equate to a maximum population of about 40,000 people - the same size as Canterbury.  I understand that this scale was fixed becasue it was considered size enough to create the economies of scale needed to finance new infrastructure.

Similarly the New Towns Programme sought to develop new settelements of approximately 50,000 people over ten years.  In spite of extraordinary powers of land assembly and development, and in spite of continuous large scale public funding through the recessions of the 70's, the final population growth attributable to the New Towns Programme was less than planned (and achieved more slowly than planned.) By 1991 the actual growth was about 1.4million as opposed to the target of 2m. ( Transferable Lessons from New Towns Programme)

However amongst the new towns generated by the programme are winners and losers.  Failing estates in Cumbernauld near Glasgow have since been largely demolished, while Milton Keynes has expanded to become a successful city and a unitary authority with a population of over 200,000.  There were about 50,000 population within the original 89km2 of designated land.

Looking back its easy to see why Milton Keynes, less than 50 miles from London, on a motorway and on main line rail link would do better at attracting development than Cumbernauld. Having said that Cumbernauld did continue to grow and now has almost reached the planned population of 50,000. In fact it's become quite succesful on its own terms, benfiting fin recent years from a surge of new businesses including Isola-Werke, OKI, Yaskawa Electronics and the worldwide HQ of AG Barr, who make the popular soft drink Irn-Bru.

So it would be too simplistic to conclude that size is the only thing that matters in developing sustainable locations.

It is often an accident of fate that creates the conditions for sustainable growth.  Montpellier in France grew first as a result of an influx of North Africans, who were dispossessed by the Algerian wars.  Instead of seeing this influx negatively, the city fathers of Montpellier started an ambitious growth programme which has seen the Agglomeration (the wider regional area) grow to a population of over 500,000.  A city of this size is large enough to have developed a tram system, an opera house and can boast a glittering array of first division sports teams including League 1 football, rugby, hand-ball, ice hockey and even water polo.  Sports are important for a young city like Montpellier.

In the 80's Montpellier was able to create a whole new central district with shops, offices, a swimming pool, mediatheque and a new 2000 seat opera house, funded on the back of its meteoric expansion.  Designed mainly by RIcardo Bofil in a post modern style it has now blended well.  The area is mainly pedestrianised, designed on a grand scale and fed by trams which form a web which now links all the suburbs to the centre.  Photo Wendy Shillam

In considering the options, I can't think of many functions that are essential for an eco-development.  Good communications are important - but there are hundreds of village railway stations all over the country, where expansions might take place. There are hundreds of suburbs with already good public transport that could be extended.  There are hundreds of towns and villages which might link very well to a nearby centre of industry or commerce.  In these locations a little ingenuity could improve the access with a bus, a water bus or even - as in Portland Oregon - with a cable car.

 
The futuristic cable car which connects an existing employment area on the hillside to Portland Oregon's new riverside development area.  Photo Wendy Shillam

 There are suggestions that district heating or vacuum recycling systems are essential elements and these rely not just on quantity, but also on density.  But I would argue that they are not essential and do not form part of the critical considerations. In fact the more I look into the benefits of district wide systems them more concerned I am that they might not add to sustainability, but in fact reduce it.

Masdar, the Norman Foster designed eco-city in UAE is only going to be 40,000 population, we understand.  (I'm not sure if that includesthe student population of the planned university.)   They envisage a very high density walled city and underneath a mass of infrastructure. However the city is only 17 air conditioned tram miles away from Abu Dhabi, so the eco-city itself need not be self sustaining - it has a capital city on its doorstep.

 Masdar city - courtesy of masdar city website
Something in this image reminds me of the miss guided pedestrian separated designs for Cumbernauld, where underpasses and streets in the sky had eventually to be demolished.  Even in Milton Keynes the designers carefully separated cycles, cars and buses,making it now almost impossible to provide the city with an efficient public transport system.

The antithesis of these mega cities (in population but not in ambition) is the host of self starting eco-villages that have begun to grow up all over the world.

One of the new eco-houses in abundance Iowa.  Courtesy abundance eco-village.com

The eco-village of Abundance is planned for a population, not of 70,000 but for barely 70 souls who have elected to live off grid and in much smaller houses, in the wilds of Iowa.  "Their beer is cold; their showers are hot," says eco entrepreneur Ken Walton, who started the village.  But these houses use a tenth of the fuel of conventional US housing.  Abundance Eco-village

If you look on the internet, you will find hundreds of these small communities trying to do their own thing, all over the world. (Though few can boast such sophisticated house designs as Abundance.)  LIke all early adopters they are fueled as much by religious or ecological fervour as by gas or electricity.  But they are solving problems, designing solutions and living much more simply than the rest of us. International directory of eco-villages

So perhaps we should not become obsessed by relationships between size and sustainability.   A small hamlet can survive off grid, on an agro-economy, a medium sized development can run a district heating system and survive on local businesses and its agricultural hinterland and larger towns, say over 50,000 can be more independent.  But from my experience even the larger towns work better if there is already some local advantage, be it a rail link, a large existing employer some natural benefit, like availability of hydro-electricity, abundant sunshine or geo-thermal potential. 

But there is another question more difficult to answer.  Montpellier's example shows that continued growth is good for a local economy. So how fast should we develop and once commenced, is there a governing maximum size for a city?   THat will be the subject of a future post, but in the mean time if you want more ideas I can recommend, http://gen.ecovillage.org/ecovillages/4pillarsofsustainability.html which has a very good article on the wider (social, cultural and economic) dimensions of an eco-village.

The High Street - Adapt or Die

This is a picture of Lucca in Italy.  It is one of the most perfect examples of a preserved medieval town centre.  Urban planners love it because its almost archetypal in layout.  There is a central square with a church, a tight network of (we hope) busy streets and a 'cordon sanitaire' of parkland around the edge, which was once protection against invaders and now demarcates very precisely the area that tourists visit.

Its still a charming town today - for tourists.  But how economically successful is it?  

I was reminded of Lucca when I read about the furore that has been caused by the recent suggestions, not least by TV guru, Mary Portas, that the High Street is dead.   The suggestion is that the retail area should contract and the rest should be given over to housing - relaxing planning codes and getting life into the town centres.  I don't wholly disagree with the suggestion.  Portas recognises that Town Centres are about more than shopping.  It is the prevailing assumption that town centre = retail, and nothing else, that worries me. 

 Mary Portas High Street Review

Traditionally town centres were the centre of all types of commerce, and I use that word in its widest sense.  Commerce isn't just buying and selling goods.  Commerce should also be about the exchange of ideas, cultures, rumours, favours and - most importantly - employment.  That is why the out of town shopping centre, or even the town centre shopping mall is almost always a mind-numbingly dull experience.  Yes you can buy clothes and shoes, but is there a place to sit and chat with your neighbours, is there a theatre or even a bookshop? 

All the other town centre functions like civic management, offices, theatres, education - you name it - they've moved to the bypass.  Even Cambridge University has been steadily developing out of town for the last twenty years, to such an extent that the bicycle clutter is disappearing.  Students need cars, like everybody else now, if they are to get to their labs several miles outside town.

One of the reasons that I call my blog coffee in the square is because of a realisation that town centres are as much about meeting your friends and colleagues over coffee than they are about shopping.  In fact, in a bid to reduce my consumption I rarely frequent the high street these days - even though I live five minutes from Oxford Street.  I'd much prefer to mooch around Soho, with its independent shops, galleries, cafes and studios than slog through the crowds visiting the high street chains. 

The simplification of high street commerce has got to such a point that very few towns have independant retailers anymore.Yet, all the great high street brands that we know and love started off somewhere as independants.  It's a fact of life that the vast majority of our consumption is with the high street retailers.  If you don't believe me just look at what you are wearing today - I'll bet most of you will be wearing high street brands, down to your socks!

But is it chicken or egg?  Do we buy from the high street because they have pushed out all the other functions, or have we only got high street brands because we never shopped anywhere else? 

A friend of mine went out for lunch is Phoenix the other day.  He related his dismay when, instead of stopping at some down-town haunt their hosts car drew up at a mall.  They were pleased to get a window seat at the restaurant, the food was excellent, the company stimulating.  But what was the window view?  It was the car park!  (So much for cultural richness.)

Travelling everywhere by car isn't just costly in carbon terms.  A car based society is socially divided.  It is in walkable city centres that rich and poor, foreign and native meet on equal terms.   I would maintain that the ability to meet your fellow citizens on equal terms is one of the tenets of civilisation.  How else do ideas travel; how else do people learn to empathise with those less or more fortunate than themselves?

We all understand that a car based society excludes the underprivileged.  But I would question whether this hatred of bankers, this suspicion of politicians isn't also because we just never meet them face to face.  How often do we see snippets of TV news footage of the privileged speeding away from the camera inside a nice car? John Major is credited in winning the 1992 election because he got up on a soap box, to deliver his speeches.  But the real benefit to his campaign was that he got down amongst ordinary people, who responded by believing in him as an ordinary human being and not a party grandee.

So I would advise town centres to be cautious of heeding Mary Portas's advice, to turn those secondary shopping streets into housing.  I think, even though she mentions them in her report,  she's forgotten all the other reasons for town centres to exist.  Her twenty eight recommendations are very retailer focused. Of course we should be looking at widening the retail offer, but Local Authorities should be more pro-active in introducing offices, studies, cafes, pubs, theaters, libraries, colleges and civic centres.  The real win would be for one of the favoured pilot towns to move its offices from the ring road, back into the town centre.

 

I needed to go to the city today and enjoyed the splendid experience of seeing St Paul's Cathedral as clean and spruce as the day it was consecrated.
The building sits in a strange relationship to Ludgate Hill, possibly because Wren did not get his way to redesign and straighten out the ancient City street pattern. So there is nowhere that you can stand back and view the West front on axis.
But I think that makes the whole composition far more dynamic. As you walk by there is an ever changing ballet of turrets, spires and domes. This changing juxtaposition is actually far more thrilling that the much more static axial approach to St Peter's in Rome, which was Wren's inspiration.

Eco Bos Cornwall

I have just spent an enjoyable and sunny day as a guest of the Cornwall Eco-town in St. Austell. The sites are not often shown together on one map. So I have reproduced this map from the new update brochure.

What interests me is how these sites could work in concert with existing villages and St Austell to form a small "garden city" by the sea.
The only thing that is missing is a good non car method of transport between the villages. In fact even an electric car and electro-cycle network would do it.
The potential to get the whole thing working as one unit is great.

I gather they have embryonic plans for a cable car to link the rail station with the shopping centre. That's the stuff!

They are rightly concerned to ensure economic sustainability which is a huge challenge for the whole of Cornwall. What might be the economic drivers?
• Tourism (A definite)
• Education (Imperative)
• Wi-fi (A no brainer for so remote a location)
• Construction (Good but is is sustainable)
Now all the Eco-towns have these. What interests me is the question, "What is this towns USP?".
Is it the topography, the china clay pits. Or is it the clay itself. Is it the sea? It did look very beautiful today. Or is it some new technology that we have not yet heard about. My worry for green jobs is the remoteness of supplies and markets as well as the potential for competition from abroad.

What is heartening is the enthusiasm with which the whole team approaches the issues.

You can get more info at

www.eco-bos.com

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Happy New Year from COFFEEINTHESQUARE

How nice to wake up on New Years Day to find a crystal blue sky and the Post Office Tower, which hovers over our flat, sporting a new years message.
This is perhaps just a little reminder about the importance of iconography to urban design. But mainly it's to wish all our readers good luck in the 'tens.

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