Agenda for the future of urbanism
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FOREWORD
Agenda for the Future
Over its first 10 years The Academy of Urbanism has explored and celebrated over 150 great places across the UK and Ireland and, in our great cities category, the whole of Europe. These successful urban places illustrate our collective capability in creating great urbanism. Many of the lessons we have learned are universally applicable, but our examples tend to be exceptional. Unfortunately most urban areas are still mediocre to poor. The Academy now appreciates that celebrating great places is not sufficient to secure the application of good urbanism more widely. The trickle-down effect of publicising the success of great places is not sufficient – we have to understand how all places can improve. The problem is not that we disagree about what makes a great place. Most people, and all urbanists, would agree that the places shortlisted by the Academy are indeed great places. Some might argue that it is no longer possible to recreate the mature urban environments that tend to be nominated by the Academy, but this ignores the fact that a significant number of nominations are either new places or newly regenerated places. The reality is that we consistently celebrate one type of place and yet in our personal and professional lives we put up with, allow or even design very different places. So looking forward, three areas in which we believe should be the focus for The Academy of Urbanism in its next ten years: 1.
Fixing what we have: Exploring how we can reform our existing towns and cities. 2. Planning for the future: Understanding how we apply the principles of urbanism in new development. 3. Making it happen: Focusing on how we bring about change. David Rudlin, Incoming chair The Academy of Urbanism
CONTENTS
1. Fixing what we have: 5 Exploring how we can reform our existing towns and cities 2. Planning for the future: 9 Understanding how we apply the principles of urbanism in new development 3. Making it happen: 13 Focusing on how we bring about change
Fixing what we have Exploring how we can reform our existing towns and cities
Here is an experiment that you might try. Go to the most successful city, town, neighbourhood, street or place nominated by the Academy, close your eyes, turn around three times and walk in that direction for 15 minutes (remembering to open your eyes). It is almost certain that the place you will end up will be terrible! You may find yourself trying to cross a ring road, or in an area of industrial dereliction, perhaps a run-down housing estate or a maze of cul-de-sacs, or a new but soulless office scheme. The urban streets where you started, lined with shops and full of life will have been replaced with formless space around object buildings with surface car parking and the occasional tree. Walk for a further 15 minutes and the neighbourhoods will become more affluent and well-tended, but unless you are lucky enough to come across a good local centre, the quality of the urban environment will be ordinary at best. The task of reforming these huge tracts of our towns and cities may seem huge, however, as the saying goes, the longest journey starts with a single step, so the priority just needs to be working out what those first steps should be. We can also be encouraged by the progress made in many of the continental cities that we have nominated such as Copenhagen, Marseille and San Sebastiรกn, all of which have dealt with similar problems. From these we can maybe suggest the following itinerary for our journey:
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URBAN STRUCTURE
We need to reinstate the hierarchy of city, town and district centres
DIVERSITY OF USES AND PEOPLE
Healthy towns and cities contain a rich mix of uses and types of housing
STREET BASED URBANISM
The street is the element that unites all successful urban areas
SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT
Successful cities have efficient public transport systems and at least a quarter of journeys are made by bicycle
BLUE GREEN NETWORKS
Successful cities integrate green space and water into their urban structure, promoting quality of life
SUSTAINABILITY
Cities have a responsibility for resource consumption, carbon emissions and improvements in air quality
In Focus
Integrating the green and the blue An extract from Congress 2016
Fixing what we have
7
Herbert Dreiseitl Director of Ramboll’s Liveable Cities Lab
When you look at our planet, in the long term it has been shaped by water; the infrastructure of waterflow, sedimentation and erosion. What can we learn from water and how can we transform it for cities? All cities rely on water. In fact, most beautiful cities have a waterfront – it’s popular, trendy and can add different perspectives to a place. For example, seeing London from the Thames will give you a totally different viewpoint. It’s fair to say however that most places don’t look like the trendy work water-on-rooftop vision that comes to mind as water is often in the background of places following the urbanisation of our environment and changed water regime, and this is something that needs to change. We know temperatures are changing, and this is creating extremes. We have either too much water or too little causing dust pollution, bad air pollution and this is all, I believe, directly related to our failure to successfully consider and integrate our blue and green infrastructure. So what’s the solution? Of course it will be contextdependent, but in general we need decentralised, multifunctional solutions that are combined to slow down, evaporate and cleanse water supply as well as underground solutions which store and recycle. We can also harvest it from the sky and use it as a way of cooling and heating buildings. Going forwards, I also firmly believe that we will develop
more and more solutions for recycling water, that we can’t even imagine today. Water can also be about beauty. It reflects light and gives atmosphere which makes it a fantastic artistic element. There are many ways of ranking liveability and more important than the hard facts are the soft components – not just physical conditions. It’s this social side and identity which is the driver for the next generation. Blue and green schemes are always about public realm and as such their development needs to include public involvement, so we are able to respond to and integrate knowledge and emotions into a proposal and deliver real social value. So what do we recommend for change? Leadership, financing and good arguments are needed to bring blue/green back into cities. Successful schemes have strong visions driven by communities and led by skilled and knowledgeable professionals. The resultant solutions can be really quite bold, such as controlled flood areas within public spaces, which transform a green space to blue. As such it is important that everyone is on board. Shared values are essential, and these are delivered through dialogue. There also needs to be structural capacity and multidisciplinary working. Finally, there needs to be opportunity – natural disasters and extreme events give us a window of opportunity for response, but this window is short lived and must be seized quickly if change is to be brought about.
Planning for the Future Understanding how we apply the principles of urbanism in new development
If we are no good at reforming existing urban areas, we are even worse at creating new ones. This is perhaps the most troubling element of the urban agenda because, in creating new places, we have control of all the elements – there is no excuse for getting it wrong even though we often do. Sure, there are developers who are not interested and architects and urban designers who don’t fully understand urbanism. However, even the best developers and designers tend to produce results that fall short of a longestablished street, town or neighbourhood. It is true that like good whisky, urbanism needs time to mature. Freshly minted urban form can be a bit soulless, but come back in 20 years and it will have mellowed and become more diverse. However, there are many new urban areas, whether they be city centre masterplans, new urban neighbourhoods or suburban extensions where no amount of time will make them into the type of place that might win an Academy Award in the future. We are doing something wrong and The Academy of Urbanism should be trying to work out what. Many of the suggested principles emerging from the Congress overlap with those for existing urban areas but they have a particular spin when applied to new places:
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FORGET UTOPIA
Don’t try and second-guess the future. Any technology we can imagine will be obsolete in the lifetime of the place we are designing
UNDERSTANDING PLACE
We need to develop places that fit into their context, from their role in the wider urban structure to the grain of the local area
MIX OF USES
New urban places should not be mono-anything. There should always be a mix of uses and housing to foster strong, diverse and resilient communities
STREETS AND PERMEABILITY
The predominant means of structuring new urban areas should be a permeable network of streets
WALKABLE SCALE
New urban areas should be walkable in terms of the distances to facilities and public transport with quality pedestrian realm
PLOT-BASED URBANISM
Many plans are undermined because they are developed with buildings that are too large or by too few developers
FLEXIBLE AND LOOSE FIT
As we don’t know what the future holds, masterplans and buildings need to be able to flex and evolve to meet changing circumstances
In Focus
The Innovation Ecosystem
Planning for the future
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Lisa Addiscott & Steve Robins Barton Willmore
The trend over the past 50 years, in the innovation sector, has been set by places like Silicon Valley – suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing and recreation.
Innovation requires a symbiotic environment to thrive, it takes place where people come together, not in isolated spaces. Innovation Districts are where ideas are shared in coffee shops and hubs, rather than traditional offices, and businesses share ideas in communal spaces.
A new contemporary urban model is now emerging, giving rise to what the Brookings Institution is calling ‘innovation districts or villages’ which by the Institution’s definition are;
All innovation districts or villages contain economic, physical, and networking assets.
“Geographic areas where leading edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators and accelerators. They are also physically compact, transit accessible, and technically wired and offer mixed use housing, office and retail. Innovation districts are the manifestation of mega-trends altering the location preferences of people and firms and, in the process, re-conceiving the very link between economy shaping, place making and social networking.”
When these three assets combine with a supportive, risk-taking culture they create an innovation ecosystem — a synergistic relationship between people, firms, and place (the physical geography of the area) that facilitates idea generation. These multifacetted truly mixed-use areas, when combined with innovative residential typologies, should be considered more often to help regenerate and revitalise urban and suburban areas.
Making it happen Focusing on how we bring about change
Even when we know what good urbanism looks and feels like, we are still often incapable of creating it in the planning of existing urban areas or the creation of new ones. The Academy of Urbanism has always done more than just celebrate great places. Through our assessment visits, reports and subsequent publications we seek to understand the processes by which they are created. This involves an interplay of local authorities, community groups and business, all of whom need to work together to create a really good place. We are often drawn to the strong charismatic mayors of many European cities. Their leadership, combined with a clear strategy, seems to be the common factor in successful cities. However, for every great mayor who transforms their city there is probably another ineffective mayor who we never get to hear about. We need to be careful not to seize on simplistic solutions; city leadership is complicated and can only have a marginal impact in the face of wider market forces. We therefore believe that we need to set leadership into a broader set of measures to reform the way that we plan our towns and cities:
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REGIONAL POLICY
There is an important role for regional planning to support urban growth, ensuring that development can be co-ordinated across administrative boundaries
LOCAL AUTONOMY
Successful cities tend to be those that can control their own destiny, retain local taxes and decide how this money is spent
STRONG CITY LEADERSHIP
Annual elections make strategic decisions almost impossible. Cities need mayors elected for at least five years
BOLD STRATEGIES
It is important to concentrate on a realisable number of strategic developments while creating the conditions to allow the market to create good urbanism
PLANNING REFORM
Continental European cities have a planning system that allows them to masterplan and control the way that sites are developed and to capture the uplift in land value to spend on infrastructure
PARTICIPATORY PLANNING
There need to be mechanisms to allow conversations about planning and design at the city and local level to build a consensus about city development
CROSS-DISCIPLINARY WORKING
Good urbanism is a collaborative process involving all urban disciplines
In Focus
Local Interest vs Global Capital An extract from Congress 2016
Making it happen
15
Jennifer Keesmaat Chief Planner, City of Toronto
A key issue for Canada’s larger cities, and in particular for Toronto and Vancouver is that the interests of the local population are frequently in conflict with those of a business or the global capital. In Toronto, we have entire buildings that are sitting empty as investors use them as a place to park capital. In Vancouver properties will be marketed first in Asia and investors will buy twenty units off plan. I know you have a similar issue in London at present. Government can put in place policies which ensures only five percent of a building can be sold to investors and one investor can own no more than one or two units. With this policy we are able to cut the problem at its knees. Personally I feel those in power must call out these type of issues and intervene; it’s an absurdity that an asset is under-utilised while at the same time there are residents who are under-housed. We need the private sector to build out our cities using a model which all of us are working within. But there is a natural tension between the role of private capital, the private sector and the role of government, which is representing different broader interests. In the city of Vancouver, the former Chief Planner Larry Beasley had a wonderful, really philosophical approach to this conversation which was that coming into our city is
a privilege, not a right. You’re welcome to be a part of our vision, but if you’re not a part of our vision then we don’t want you. I face this tension every day. We have many excellent developers going well beyond what we’ve asked of them in terms of thinking about social equity and creating a community that lifts people out of out of poverty. But then we have a whole other tier of developers who are consuming a tremendous amount of our time bringing forward proposals, who are in it to make a quick buck. So how do you finance public infrastructure like parks and schools? Because the risk – and I understand that London is experiencing this – is that if you see the development industry as a partner in delivering your public infrastructure, because the government has withdrawn from delivering it, then you become much more beholden to the project that is being proposed. It’s then far harder to negotiate better design because the politicians are saying ‘hey I need this project – if I don’t get this project I don’t get my subway station built’. As the Government has retracted a very tangled web has been woven. Knowing that we can’t call the shots as much as we would like to, we now must focus on collaboration and the development of a shared vision to grow our cities.
About The academy of urbanism The Academy of Urbanism is a politically independent, not-for-profit organisation that brings together both the current and next generation of urban leaders, thinkers and practitioners. We work with places to identify and reinforce their strengths, and help them recognise and overcome obstacles to greater success. Through our events, activities and programmes we draw out and disseminate examples and lessons of good urbanism. We use the evidence we gather to promote better understanding of how the development and management of the urban realm can provide a better quality of living for all.
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