9 minute read
Mobility and masterplanning
Periscope founder and landscape architect Daniel Rea looks at the critical role of mobility in the spatial design agency’s masterplan approach for The Phoenix, a progressive new sustainable development which recently gained planning permission in Lewes.
In February 2024, after four years of work, The Phoenix in Lewes gained planning consent. The project isn’t expressly ‘anti-car’: you can own one, live there and drive to and from the site, but that’s where things stop in terms of business as usual.
At The Phoenix, other forms of mobility are prime, and we believe the approach has the potential to transform spatial and urban planning in the UK. This article is about the catalytic impact of an integrated, progressive approach to mobility as the cornerstone of mixed-use masterplans.
The developer, Human Nature (HN) is a different breed of organisation. As much campaigner as developer, the founders cut their teeth at Greenpeace, going on to found Beyond Green (advising developers on sustainability) before founding HN to enact system change ‘from the front’, by being better than the market. Their latest project is The Phoenix, a brownfield regeneration project on the former site of John Every’s Ironworks in Lewes within the South Downs National Park. A challenging site on which to promote a new paradigm for low-carbon, regenerative development, but it is through this struggle that the client and team have managed to free themselves from the straitjacket of traditional development approaches and look to the future.
Periscope has a long-standing relationship with HN. The practice understands how to work in deep collaboration – a term borrowed from Apple CEO Jonathan Smales, who uses it to describe a process of co-locating designers (physically) and adopting a ‘fail fast’ iterative approach to design. Sketches and discursive critique run thick and fast; drawing in front of each other, listening to people who are not designers, throwing out established norms and regular killing of darlings. It is not a process that comes naturally to everyone. However, it works quickly and yields results much faster than more traditional, plodding processes of ‘draw, issue, coordinate’, while adding an energy and a spirit of adventure. Working across disciplines, our team is diverse with varied skills, allowing us to work at a scale from regional masterplanning to small community projects.
We identify as a spatial design agency, are mission led and use landscape architecture, architecture and urban design to bring humans and non-humans into balance through regenerative practice. Periscope’s role on The Phoenix is the Masterplan Design Lead, coordinating the Integrated Design Team. The practice has also designed the public realm and landscape, the adaptive reuse of two heritage structures and the Co-Mobility Hub. We coordinated the work of twelve architects together with the engineering teams, including the transport engineers.
HN came to their design team with a visual and philosophical blueprint for The Phoenix; this included requirements for low-car, playable streets with ‘wit and mess’ (informality), ‘bike culture’, ‘life between buildings’, ‘super green’ and a host of other components for making streets pedestrian and cycle first, with cars being seen as guests. There are many possible design outcomes to service such ambitions but all of them will fall short without a more fundamental approach to the motor car – this really comes down to the question ‘how can there be fewer and where should we put them?’ The answer could lie in a consolidated, centralised approach to parking with the consequential reduction in car movements. With this in our minds, the design team set about proving this spatially and technically. Happily, a local vernacular of Lewes is narrow streets, in this part of the world called ‘twittens’, which often feature little or controlled vehicle access with low-car parking numbers. As ever, looking back is helpful to move forward.
The transport planning work for The Phoenix was led by WSP and Urban Movement with the former providing the modelling, detailed design and transport assessment. As part of the baseline studies, WSP provided customer journey modelling in which they case-studied user journey profiles from different demographics. These studies illustrated how lives could be lived well without multiple or in fact any privately owned cars. Aside from private car parking, planning policy required the reprovision of an ‘appropriate’ level of the site’s extant public parking. To support a lower level of reprovision, Urban Movement gathered evidence over the utilisation of the other town car parks which were not reaching capacity even in peak hours.
This work on justifying contemporary mobility and understanding existing provision fed into the Environmental Assessment, the evidence for which required National Highways approval (a process which is not yet complete) given its departure from sole reliance on more traditional transport modelling. The result of this evidenced ‘decide and provide’ approach will be significantly lower traffic streets and one car parking space for every 6.85 homes against a 1:1 ratio in local policy.
Low-car neighbourhoods make streets safer, more pleasant and healthier for residents. Lewes town centre has been plagued by unacceptable air quality for years, so reduced traffic will have a significant positive impact on air quality, felt much more widely than within the project site. Another key driver for The Phoenix is flood water management; low-car streets allow space for integrated, above-ground sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDS) with large tree pits and best- practice soil volumes (30m³+ for the larger trees).
Traditional levels of on-street parking compromise the spatial requirements for green and blue infrastructure, whereas reducing the number of cars improves resilient street design. Setting aside the qualitative benefits, consolidating private parking unlocks residential density and project viability without excessive building height or basements. The previous consent for the site proposed two-to-three-storey buildings on top of a significant basement car park – this was never viable. Human Nature understood that lesson when they bought the site in 2020. Our team also knew that height in the National Park and Conservation Areas would be a challenge; we had to treat cars differently to make the project finances stack up.
Cars will be captured at the edge of The Phoenix, on their way into Lewes, reducing vehicle movements on site, but also in the town centre’s gyratory system (perhaps offering the local highways authority the opportunity to rethink this in the future). Public and private parking will be mainly provided in a mobility building – a ‘CoMobility Hub’ – with street access for vehicles within the site limited to bulky deliveries, maintenance, waste and removals, and accessible parking bays provided for those that need them.
CoMobility refers to a shared approach to mobility; it is critical to understand this as a service and not just a building.
CoMobility refers to a shared approach to mobility; it is critical to understand this as a service and not just a building. The CoMobility Hub at The Phoenix facilitates interchange between cars, local buses and more active modes such as walking and cycling; services offered will include e-bike and e-cargo bike hire, a car club (fully electric) and last mile delivery (avoiding endless streams of delivery drivers bringing white vans into the site). This strategy provides choice for residents – it’s about making the alternative to ‘on-plot’ private cars easy and attractive; all residents will be within a five-minute walk of CoMobility services. Mobility services and buildings are commonplace in Scandinavia but in the UK they are often scoped out of masterplans on the basis of viability or the need to sell homes with parking spaces outside. Most developers might baulk at not being able to sell homes with adjacent parking spaces, but Human Nature has actively sought the benefits of this approach. They see the risk as an opportunity but also have accepted a lower profit level when compared to more mainstream developers, which helps them make bolder choices. Mobility services will have to be offered from day one, and Human Nature recognises that if people come with their cars, even in the first phase, then they will never leave them. The most important aspect to consider is the service itself (the building itself is secondary), so because the CoMobility building will only be delivered later in the programme, for the first few years the services will be offered through adaptive reuse of some of the existing sheds and hardstanding on site. This is a practical solution which also helps to lower initial infrastructure costs; however, when looking to CoMobility as a model, it is important to acknowledge that not all sites can be phased in this way. In addition to offering incentives to get people out of their cars, the need to manage streets effectively is recognised within the proposals.
Municipal parking enforcement isn’t going to work at The Phoenix, as it doesn’t fit within traditional operational models for Controlled Parking Zones, so the preferred answer is Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR). Most of the team share concerns over the Orwellian nature of our CCTV monitored public realm, but this trade-off allows for a low-car approach with minimal infrastructure cost, reduced operational cost and less street clutter.
So, is this really the answer? Proving the concept will only be possible through successful detailed design, delivery and operation. The hard work has just begun, but as HN tend to say, ‘There is a better way’, and maybe it can look like The Phoenix.
Daniel Rea is a landscape architect, masterplanner and Founding Director of Periscope.
