Staying in the city

Recent responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have suggested a flight from the city to the suburbs and beyond. A landscape architect from The Landscape Partnership and an architect from Marks Barfield Architects outline reasons to be optimistic.

Oliver Lee

Oliver Lee is a landscape architect and Director at The Landscape Partnership

The impact of COVID-19 has brought about many changes in the way we are currently living, working, and moving about our towns, cities, and the world. These may be temporary, but hopefully some of the changes and opportunities for living differently will bring about a better way of life and response to the climate and biodiversity challenges we face.

At the Landscape Partnership, we have been working with Marks Barfield Architects (MBA) on a mixeduse scheme, Stephenson House in the London Borough of Camden since before the current pandemic crisis. Here, we had already started to consider new ways of working, providing people greater contact with plants, nature and outdoor space, with a series of accessible roof terraces across several floors.

Looking forward to the next ten years, we have started to consider how the new demands created by the pandemic might change the workspaces we are creating. To ensure they remain a safe and attractive environment to collaborate and meet people, they will perhaps require more space, including outdoor space, and need to be spatially flexible and diverse to meet fluctuating demands for density (a permanent or occasional increase in working from home) whilst still being financially viable.

Stephenson House – accessible roof terraces and atrium gardens – planting within and on the building reflects natural environments.

© Visual by Cityscape Digital

These forced changes to our patterns of lifestyle also put additional pressures and demands on our existing open spaces and public realm to provide safe space to maintain socially distanced leisure and journeys. With temporary road closures and pavement widening, it has given us a taste of what is possible. If this does not bring about permanent change then at least we should be looking at designing flexible and adaptable streets and spaces that can be used differently when the cars and traffic have gone, or are at least restricted to the hours they can use the space.

Stephenson House, Euston – creates new ways of working.

© Visual by Cityscape Digital

Creating a series of connected open spaces, from the smallest balcony, garden or terrace to streets, parks and the wider countryside, will help us cope with urban density increase and social distancing to make better use of the open spaces we have, and increase their value and role as accessible open space, connecting habitats and creating opportunities for food production. A changing climate provides us a reason to reduce areas of hard surfacing and create a network of ‘cool streets’ to navigate in the heat and increase the opportunity for greater connectivity for all species. Through our work in North Lewisham over the years, we have seen the benefits of having a public realm and open space ‘links strategy’, looking strategically at an urban area in order to plan and realise the opportunities of well-connected places and spaces and to deliver a larger area of open space accessible to the community over time. In order to be meaningful on a wider scale, this strategic connectivity must go beyond the Borough boundary and reach out to the wider countryside, to help create a network of connected spaces forming a city-wide strategic park. Strangely, lower density suburbs today offer the city a chance to provide a new opportunity for a live work relationship with open space, and provide important green infrastructure links from countryside to city centre.

North Lewisham Links Strategy project – identified a strategic and local network of open space and public realm projects to connect people and places.

© The Landscape Partnership

Ian Rudolph

Ian Rudolph is an architect and Practice Director at Marks Barfield Architects

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an opportunity for architects to rethink cities from the inside out. They need to attract workers back to city centres and allow neighbourhoods to thrive while addressing the climate change crisis.

At Marks Barfield Architects, our latest workplace-driven, mixed use scheme Stephenson House (currently under construction in Euston) uses many of the International Well Building Institute principles to enhance the environment. With the help of The Landscape Partnership, our use of biophilic design enhances not only the interior atrium but also the exterior roof terraces – the hidden public realm.

Stephenson House – planting and seating create multifunctional outdoor spaces for working, relaxing and events.

© Visual by Cityscape Digital

Positive greening of the inner-city environment will encourage people to come to work where they can interact in a healthy urban location. Throughout the building, there is natural daylight and views to nature through the use of planting at different levels. To encourage exercise, a feature staircase emerges from a sunken garden, inviting people to bypass the lifts and climb over six stories. Double-height pocket gardens link niche gardens on the external façade, with double-height internal workspaces extending to roof terraces at the rear. The pocket gardens are adaptable internal workspaces with the potential to double up as places for additional staircases to connect, giving maximum flexibility for improved commercial benefit.

Stephenson House – pocket gardens on front elevation link through internal workspace to roof terraces at the rear.

© Marks Barfield Architects

In the context of COVID-19, there is an obvious drive towards living a healthier life. Lower pollution levels (due to reduced traffic) and a reluctance to use public transport has lead people to choose cycling as their main mode of travel. The public realm and office buildings have to adjust to this. Our Euston project reuses the underground car park by transforming it into a cycle hub; a new front door to the office connects directly to the central atrium. At ground level, retail units offer sustainable business opportunities for cycle and repair shops, which will perhaps gradually replace the currently ubiquitous fast food outlets. We have seen growing public concern about food shortages during a pandemic. Many city dwellers have become more self-sufficient, turning their gardens or kitchen window sills into edible gardens. In my local area of Hackney, neighbours are interacting more, sharing excess fruit and vegetables, along with occasional recipes. Increased social interaction and development of informal food networks creates more cohesive and happier communities. Future design of the public realm can foster this.

Stephenson House – cross section through pocket garden, internal office, and roof terraces.

© Marks Barfield Architects

In Hackney, some council-owned spaces have been allowed to become community maintained for the greater good. The Dalston Eastern Curve Garden is a good example of this. With its allotment-style edible gardens, outdoor seating, play and entertainment spaces, bar and pizza oven, this brownfield site has become a much-loved community asset. It is a positive example of how the future public realm could be designed at low cost with the engagement and support of local people at its heart.

Stephenson House – section through pocket gardens linking four office floors.

© Marks Barfield Architects

Cities and towns are, arguably, developed and adapted around food with market squares, supermarkets and (more recently) farmers’ markets and pop-ups for urban foodies. During the recent lockdown, MBA have worked with a multidisciplinary team to create a sustainable urban masterplan with a “food cathedral” and park at its heart. We are designing a large, controlled indoor urban farm that occupies the central part of a mixed-use city block. Above this is a park, surrounded by Passivhaus mansion blocks, all sitting above localised retail, bike hubs, repair shops, workshops, and intergenerational social and educational spaces. Edible gardens provide fresh food, renewable energy is integrated, and waste is reused and recycled. Here, at a car-free neighbourhood level, parts of a city can become self-sufficient, creating safe, healthy and desirable places to live and work. We are aiming to help local authorities act as the developer, to realise zero-carbon and sustainable communities that are regenerative by design, creating jobs within a local circular economy.

We at MBA believe there should be no concern about an exodus from the city to the counties. As architects, we have an exciting opportunity to work with local authorities and private sector developers to design thriving city and town centres that have sustainable public realm at their heart. It is conceivable that, in the future, Stephenson House in Euston will allow occupiers to turn the roof terraces into edible gardens and grow their own produce for the workplace. In parallel, and on a civic level, improved green pathways and cycle connections linking to other green spaces and public realm feels like a natural outcome, encouraging nature back into the city. It all feels achievable in, say, the next ten years.