AoU Journal 6: Health, Happiness and Wellbeing

Here & Now

AoU Journal No. 6 Autumn 2015

In focus: health, happiness & wellbeing Happy City Cities and our mental health London going Dutch on the bicycle‌ Designing healthy behaviours

Contents

Front cover: City Park, Bradford, winner of the The Great Place Award 2013, ph. Tim Green

1 Welcome 2 Editorial 3 The Academy in action 6

Governing the city: lessons for would-be urbanists Nicholas Falk AoU reviews the recent OECD report on good governance

The Academy of Urbanism 70 Cowcross Street London EC1M 6EJ United Kingdom +44 (0) 20 7251 8777 academyofurbanism.org.uk @TheAoU Join The Academy of Urbanism on LinkedIn, Facebook and Flickr Editorial team Alastair Blyth Stephen Gallagher David Rudlin Editorial panel Steven Bee Kevin Murray David Porter Dr James White Saffron Woodcraft Design Richard Wolfströme Advertise in this Journal!

If you would like to reach our broad and active audience, speak to Stephen Gallagher on sg@academyofurbanism.org.uk or +44 (0) 20 7251 8777

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Detroit – too different for dialogue?

Gareth Potts looks at what the UK’s older cities can learn from this American example

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Middle City Passages: an international competition exploring urban movement Chris Sharp AoU reflects on the process and outcome of a recent design competition to smooth the interface between large and small infrastructure

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Josep Lluís Sert and the Havana Plan Tony Reddy AoU looks back at what might have been had Castro’s revolution not stalled Sert’s plan for Havana

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Cities Alive: Rethinking green infrastructure Arup’s recently published report charts the way forward for landscape architecture.

Kieran Toms YU talks to its authors

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A place for everyone Lucia das Neves shares her ambitions for The GlassHouse 2015/16 debate series

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Health, happiness and wellbeing in focus

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Happy City Simon Hicks YU relives Charles Montgomery’s keynote talk at the AoU Congress in Birmingham

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Cities and our mental health Are cities good for our mental health? David Rudlin AoU reviews the assumptions

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London going Dutch on a bicycle…

As London experiments with ‘Mini Hollands’, Henk Bouwman AoU and Anita Dirix look at other ways the UK can learn from the Dutch

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Have you ever wanted to devise a bulletproof, empirical justification for creating genuinely urban places?

George Weeks YU investigates

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Designing healthy behaviours Stephen Gallagher speaks to Rachel Toms to find out how we can make better places that encourage healthier lives

44 Space for great places!

A gallery of ideas and

reflections on great places 49

My own view is…

We must empower collaborative people to act!, says Jane Briginshaw AoU

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Urban idiocy Brilliant but flawed ideas for the city

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Academicians and Young Urbanists Who we are

Back cover …And a final thought…

Back to the future,

by Yolande Barnes AoU

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.

Welcome

Our mission is to recognise, encourage and celebrate great places across the UK, Europe and beyond, and the people and organisations that create and sustain them.

Join the Academy Find out more about becoming an Academician, Young Urbanist or Friend at academyofurbanism.org.uk/ membership Support the Academy Sponsor one or more of our programmes of developing, learning, partnering and disseminating. Please contact Linda Gledstone for more information on +44 (0) 20 7251 8777.

Sponsors* Alan Baxter Barton Willmore Birmingham City Council Crest Nicholson plc Glenn Howells Architects Grosvenor LCR Muir Group Peter Brett Associates Savills Space Syntax URBED Supporters in kind* BDP Custard Factory Design Council Cabe Fazeley Studios Gillespies Jas Atwal Associates John Thompson & Partners Lathams Prentis & Co. Space Syntax URBED Winckworth Sherwood Wolfströme * Autumn 2015 Academy Team Linda Gledstone Director of Operations Stephen Gallagher Deputy Director of Operations Zarreen Hadadi Membership Executive Dogan Behic Accounts

‘Health, happiness and wellbeing’ are features of our individual and collective lives that we probably recognise more by their absence than their presence.

For most of us, with the good fortune of security in the essentials necessary for life, the opportunity to pursue these elements to enhance our existence is something to which we devote much time and energy.

It is worth remembering that for many people and communities, survival and security are not guaranteed. The values that we use to evaluate the quality of urban life should be universally applicable, so although happiness, etcetera are important, they are not the starting point for improving urban places worldwide.

Good urbanism is also probably recognised more in its absence.

The places that we visit through our Urbanism Awards selection process are often surprised by their nomination. The people responsible for creating and sustaining great places do what feels natural and inevitable. They don’t (generally) seek recognition but are (usually) delighted and surprised to find that what they are doing is exceptional.

The Academy’s Awards are the apotheosis of our existential purpose of learning from place. Our structured evaluation and recording of the ways in which places achieve good urbanism is a way of stimulating active awareness, and raising public expectations of how places should be.

At the heart of a community’s self-image, what Maslow termed ‘selfactualisation’ at the apex of his hierarchy of needs, are the tangible and intangible assets that they share. At our Spring Debate on the nature and purpose of public space, Nicholas Falk AoU referred to the importance of ‘common-wealth’. Equality of access to that commonwealth is an essential component of great places, and health and welfare are at least as important components of that wealth as economic and material assets.

There was a lot of happiness and wellbeing evident at our Birmingham Congress, although the fringe activity might not have been a model, as a regular routine, for healthy living. A major component of upbeat mood was the palpable sense of belonging – another of Maslow’s criteria for a fulfilled existence.

The Academy of Urbanism is a home for those who share an interest in understanding and celebrating great places. Over the past decade we have grown in number, in experience and in influence. As we develop our plans for the future, we must embrace the broadest conception of urbanism and of the common-wealth we share.

And be happy doing it.

Steven Bee AoU Chairman

Bright Pryde-Saha Young Urbanist Co-ordinator

Chairman’s introduction

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Editorial

That bottom-up community-led initiatives are important in creating better, workable cities is not a new idea. Indeed, it is one that we have often picked up in these pages and this issue is no exception. Yet the more we report on what is happening in towns and cities in the UK and Ireland, and importantly around the world, the clearer the message becomes.

What is also clear is that such initiatives do not happen in a vacuum. Nicholas Falk AoU picks up on this in his review of another OECD report published earlier this year, Governing the City, which although looks at cities by population size, notes that success is not only measured by numbers of people but also by income levels and job creation. To create a strong local economy, cities need to find ways of mobilising private investment. An important contributor to creating great towns and cities is finding ways of harnessing both knowledge and energy bottom-up. Gareth Potts also notes this in his riposte to the idea that England’s North might be comparable with the US city of Detroit only because of decline and not, as Potts argues, because the city actually has a lot to teach us, one lesson being the importance of leveraging initiatives that swell from the ground up.

Along similar lines Kieran Toms YU points to the High Line, a community-led regeneration project in New York, in his interview with Arup’s Tom Armour and George Arvanitis AoU on their Cities Alive report. Clearly then as Lucia das Neves suggests in her review of the 2015/16 Glass-House debate series, it is not just resources of capital and land that are important, it is the resource within the community itself, particularly people and their relationships.

The In Focus section takes a specific look at health, happiness and wellbeing in cities. While there are things that we can do to improve people’s sense of health, happiness and wellbeing in towns and cities, in the end, as David Rudlin AoU points out when he questions whether cities are good for us, environments need to be flexible and responsive to community needs and controllable in part by local people.

Alastair Blyth AoU Editor

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The Academy in action!

In this issue we cover some of our recent events that have taken place in Ireland, Manchester, Birmingham, London and the Netherlands. If this inspires you to hold an event or meeting of Academicians or Young Urbanists near you, contact: sg@academyofurbanism.org.uk

Background image: Cairns Street, Liverpool, finalist in The Great Street Award

Editorial | AoU in Action

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4X4 MANCHESTER May 2015

On four consecutive weeks, four speakers were invited to tell the stories of regeneration in four areas of Manchester: Hulme, Sportcity, Salford and the Cultural Quarter. This series, titled ‘The Reunion’, was a chance to revisit the projects from a different perspective, reviewing process and outcomes, the successes and failures, as well as give an idea of what the pressures were at the time of designing and building.

Speaking about his time as a tenant leader during the redevelopment of Hulme in the 1990s, Peter Marcus reflected on how the community was being influenced. “A lot of people had accepted rehousing offers from the council housing department. ‘You live in a one-bedroom flat that is going to be knocked down, we’re giving you a three-bedroom house in Chorlton. Do you fancy that?’ Now, only an idiot is going to say no, but we were the idiots because we said no. Some people said yes, but you were left with a small group of people who said ‘we do want to stay, we want to stick around, we want to get involved in designing new homes’,” said Marcus.

View the talks at 4x4manchester.com

GETTING READY FOR TOMORROW’S HOME May 2015

Lily Bernheimer of Space Works Consulting presented the findings of the research ‘Tomorrow’s Home: Emerging social trends and their impact on the built environment’, which was commissioned by ADAM Urbanism and Grainger Plc. The wide-ranging and comprehensive research looks into emerging social trends within the 18-34 age group – the ‘Millennials’ – in England and Wales and how these will affect the built environment. Covering topics from employment and tenure to travel and leisure, the report reveals how technology, education, wealth and personal relationships are changing the life-styles of the up-and-coming generation. The Millennials age group represent 25 per cent of the population and their needs and wants are bound to have a profound impact on the built environment in the near future.

Among the significant findings, the report identifies several key topics.

There is an increase in the concept

of a new ‘individual collectivism’ incorporating city living, sharing and renting. The Millennial Generation will demand increased facilities in cities and smaller towns resulting in ‘downloadable lifestyles’. New working conditions are already changing travel patterns with a concept of ‘mega/micro commuting’, where more Millennials are both working from home and also commuting longer distances, suggesting that we are seeing ‘the end of the dormitory suburb’. All this will lead to ‘new housing ladders’ that will transform our towns, cities and countryside. A discussion followed with questions to understand what impacts these lifestyle changes will have, or should have, on the homes that are being designed today.

View the presentation at academyofurbanism.org.uk/reporttomorrows-home-summary-report To request a copy of the full research report go to adamurbanism.com/ tomorrows-home-research

WINDMILLS AND WHEELS: CYCLING THE NETHERLANDS May-June 2015

Cycling is an increasingly prominent feature of UK transport and planning policy, and the bicycle is widely recognised as an inherently urban tool for creating liveable cities. In light of this, the Young Urbanists embarked on a transport-and-urbanism cycling study tour to the Netherlands to experience, first-hand, the quality of life that comes from bicycle-centric transport. It also allowed participants to see some of the excellent recent examples of architecture and urbanism in the Netherlands, such as IJburg.

Lewis Hubbard, a participant on the trip, reflected on what he saw. “It’s hard to pick a best bit. Clearly the infrastructure is world-class. It was interesting to see how they dealt with some classic cycling infrastructure conflicts: bus stops, delivery bays, roundabouts which are particularly challenging in dense urban environments.”

Diego Marando considered how cycling fits with other modes of transport.

“Integration into other transport systems, especially trains stations, are incredibly well designed, with attention to detail. From how to use the system to how to find your bike ... all was designed to create a pleasant and easy experience for the user.”

For the full report visit academy ofurbanism.org.uk/young-urbanists

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THE ACADEMY CONGRESS: HEALTH, HAPPINESS AND WELLBEING June 2015, Birmingham

Congress this year explored the role of health, happiness and wellbeing in the context of placemaking. Health policy, high-speed rail implementation, the structural qualities of the planning system itself, and more were debated by over 150 urbanists over three days in Birmingham. Boat, bus and walking tours, workshops, dinner at the Town Hall and a fantastic BBQ complimented a local, national and international speaker line-up.

Dr Adrian Phillips, director of Public Health Birmingham, perhaps best reflected the diversity of views in the room. In his talk titled ‘Are cities costing us our lives?’, he cut through the professions and spoke passionately about how we make people happier through the design of our cities.

“It should not be the approach of ‘you’ve got a problem’, but rather ‘how do we help you achieve your potential?’ I think that is what public health is about, and I think that is what urbanism is about – how do we help people achieve their potential? And yes, cities intensify inequality; but our job is to mitigate that,” said Phillips.

To mark the Academy’s 10th Anniversary in 2016, next year’s Congress is due to be held in London.

Get in touch with congress@academyofurbanism.org.uk if you would like to support this event.

TOWARDS A REGIONAL URBANISM COLLOQUIUM, KILKENNY June 2015

Over 70 urbanists took part in this joint event between The Academy of Urbanism and the RIAI at Kilkenny Castle. A number of perspectives were offered from different sectors and backgrounds about the process of urbanism, from cartoonists to academics, city managers to architects.

However, each ‘process’ reinforced the need for collective efforts to be made to ensure good urbanism. The Academy’s Tony Reddy AoU, for example, explained the adaptive process to masterplanning the regeneration of the city’s 12-acre Brewery Quarter, which had to respond to archaeological and historic discoveries made during site investigations. Owen O’Doherty, deputy architect at Dublin City

Council, talked about the research that has taken place on design process, which has informed the approach used by the council to encourage public awareness in design.

These presentations, together with others about the creative economy, digital urbanism, movement and more, led to a discussion on whether a city ‘design champion’ is essential. The consensus was yes, but so long as it involves collaboration between people and disciplines over an extended period of time.

The event was extremely productive in revealing the underlying issues that need to be considered to achieve a high-quality urban living environment, something of great importance to both the Irish and other economies.

Appetite remains for future events, possibly in Cork and Dublin, over the next two years.

For the full report by Philip Jackson AoU search ‘Kilkenny’ at academyofurbanism.org.uk

DESIGNING CITY RESILIENCE June 2015

The Academy supported this RIBA two-day summit which aimed to “foster and support an international exchange of ideas between organisations, professions, sectors and city leaders to bring world-class thinking to the current and future challenges faced by cities around the world”.

Many of the speakers tried to define resilience. Dr Nancy Kete, managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation, spoke about her work over the past 10 years with the Resilient Cities Network that looked at how towns and cities can absorb shock or stress within an inclusive framework. Resilience, she said, is not about controlling things but rather about “embracing the mess”.

This creative vision set the scene for the remainder of the summit. Jo Da Silva, director of International Development at Arup, continued with this definition and suggested that resilience provokes a proactive attitude for facing natural disasters and is part of the risk management paradigm. Yet risk and crisis can be considered in a positive way for urban design: they are opportunities for structural change as they have always shaped cities, illustrated perfectly by the Blitz in London.

Each of the speakers provided their own explanations of how we can

promote resilience within our cities.

Saskia Sassen, professor of sociology at Columbia University, identified the environment as an opportunity to help foster resilient cities. She pointed out the inherent risk to this approach posed by private corporations owning more and more of our cities.

This summit was inspiring and allowed a diverse range of speakers to take position and reinforce the theoretical and practical framework of resilience.

This is an edited version of the report

by Julie Plichon YU, available at academyofurbanism.org.uk/reports

THE CITY AS MASTER DEVELOPER July 2015

This event sought to challenge the notion that development within towns and cities should rest squarely with the private sector. Chaired by John Worthington AoU, former Academy director and guest editor of edition 135 of Urban Design, it featured a number of speakers that advocated and critiqued the call for the cities – both city hall and civil society – to play a bigger part in determining their own futures.

Worthington gave a rapid history of cities in the UK, including the post Second World War era, where a development system emerged that was deeply adversarial, with little sense of civic pride and a welfare state creating a sense of dependency. It was at this time that the UK became very centralised, with typically 85 per cent of local authority funds coming from central government.

Peter Bishop echoed many of the issues raised when he praised local authorities and their importance in city government. However, there were problems with local authorities being parochial and not addressing issues outside their boundaries, and with councillors being good at dealing with local issues but being challenged by the complexity involved in running a city.

City government is all to do with long-term stewardship, and in his view 25 years was not long in the life of a city.

The ensuing discussion rapidly developed into a debate on how to think and work long-term, or at least a period longer than the four-year electoral cycle, ideally spanning a generation or two of property cycles.

Development corporations were another model which clearly some

of the audience liked, and some didn’t.

One questioner asked whether city mayors were the answer. The answer was simple: ‘good mayors were a good thing, but bad mayors were a very bad thing’ and could potentially spell disaster for a city.

For the full report by Robert Huxford, director of the UDG, search ‘City as Master Developer’ at academyofurbanism.org.uk

YOUNG URBANISTS’ SMALL GRANTS SCHEME Keen to generate perspectives on learning from place, the Young Urbanists invited members to apply for a small amount of funding to carry out projects that would deliver tangible outputs and benefits to the YU network within the subject of urbanism. Charlie Critchell, Claire Malaika Tunnacliffe, and Tracey Taylor and Szu An Yu were the deserving recipients.

SECOND CITIES: MANCHESTER TO MARSEILLE CHARLIE CRITCHELL Second Cities aims to travel from Manchester, aspiring to be the UK’s second city, down to France’s established second city, Marseille, via a series of consecutive rail journeys.

As the future of Britain’s role within a European Union pushing for greater integration is no longer just a theoretical question, surely transport and rail infrastructure can lead the way? This project aimed to reveal three fundamental themes: the level of connectivity to conventional and high-speed rail infrastructure, the interdependence of rail infrastructure and city regions, and the devolution of power between a country’s capital and second city.

Visit academyofurbanism.org.uk/ young-urbanists to learn more about the other two projects

THE URBANISM AWARDS ASSESSMENT VISITS Academy assessment teams visited 15 places in countries including Spain, Sweden and Italy, as well as Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland and England. On page 3, assessors are in Cairns Street, Liverpool, looking at the resident-led rejuvenation of a street slated for demolition.

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action

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Governing the city: lessons for would-be urbanists Understanding what constitutes good governance arrangements for metropolitan areas is only the first step. It is equally important to know how to get there.

So writes Rolf Alter, director of the OECD’s Public Governance and Territorial Development Directorate in his forward to the OECD report Governing the City.

For Here & Now Nicholas Falk AoU considers the importance of this report.

This review, which follows up my article on assessing great places, draws on another splendid OECD report, Governing the City1, based on a massive cross-national Metropolitan Governance survey, and six in-depth case studies. The task for all of us who want to make cities better places involves understanding how to effect a transformation, and the Academy is now in an excellent position to start drawing some practical lessons from its award winners. I have also been reading another OECD report, Local Economic Leadership, which identifies some useful models, including Manchester2.

Identifying what is wrong with a place, or why another is much better is comparatively easy compared with showing how to get there from here.

The process of transformation inevitably takes time and investment from a multiplicity of sources, which is not easy in a ‘stop-start’ economy that also swings from left to right. As Peter Hall and I tried to show in Good Cities, Better Lives, the issue is not so much ‘what’ as ‘how?’3 In practice, there are remarkable similarities in cities that have transformed their position, such as Kassel and Leipzig in Germany or Montpellier and Lille in France, which the OECD study brings out very well.

Leipzig skyline ph. Mattias X

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Of course, as creative cities expert Charles Landry AoU illustrates so well, you first need ambition, and there are plenty of inspiring examples to learn from4. Many, like Copenhagen and Malmö, Rotterdam and Freiburg, have been recognised in the Academy’s Urbanism Awards process, and draw a mass of interested visitors to admire their fine waterfronts, restored buildings, integrated transport systems, and attractive extensions. British examples still seem rare, though cities such as Manchester and Sheffield have achieved a renaissance in their city centres, attracting people back to live in areas that were formerly shunned.

As Landry points out, the greatest challenges are the ‘third tier’ cities that are not well known internationally, and yet can still turn themselves round, for example Einhoven in the Netherlands, by making the most of their assets and taking a creative approach. His slogan is ‘think big and start small’.

A report produced by URBED with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for an Urban Summit, working with 24 towns and cities, found there was a simple ladder, with five steps5: 5 Maintaining the momentum 4 Orchestrating investment 3 Carrying out a phased strategy 2 Agreeing the concordat 1 Developing the vision

Leipzig Plagwitz ph. Heribert Pohl

Unfortunately, interest in ‘urban renaissance’ soon waned, and with it the idea of sharing experience and building capacity. National governments are not very good at implementing complex policies. Yet the current organisational turmoil, as cities start to combine with each other to bid for ever-decreasing amounts of public money, could be key to going beyond iconic projects, what some Americans call ‘stadia and Starbucks’.

The solutions lie in adopting a longer-term change programme, and here the OECD provides a fully evidenced case for moving beyond visions or ambition.

Findings from Governing the City The OECD report contains such a wealth of case studies and useful facts that is hard to summarise, yet the main messages are simple enough. Again they comprise five steps, but ones which are very much more specific than the Academy could be, and based on ample evidence to confound the sceptics: 1. Motivate collaboration by identifying concrete metropolitan projects 2. Build metropolitan ownership among key stakeholders 3. Tailor reliable sources of metropolitan financing 4. Design incentives and compensation for metropolitan compromise 5. Implement a long-term process of metropolitan monitoring and evaluation

The survey, which covered 263 areas with at least 500,000 inhabitants, discovered a variety of methods of co-ordination, and more than half were using informal methods. So perhaps we spend too much time trying to get the structures right. Access to national finance is a key incentive, which is why France, with 36,000 municipalities, still works remarkably well. The case study of the Lille Métropole is particularly inspiring, as Lille has fought back from a position of industrial decline to receive the award of 2004 European Capital of Culture, in part a result of getting on the ‘European map’. In 2008, it formed the Lille-Kortijk-Tournai Eurometrolis, extending into Belgium to form a group of 147 municipalities with a combined population of 2.1 million. Marseille has done something similar.

Most of the structures are effectively federations with no popular mandate, but there are three directly elected metropolitan authorities – Portland Oregon, Stuttgart Baden-Württemberg, and London – which have all done particularly well. The report has a whole chapter looking at transport and spatial planning, which is the area where a metropolitan focus is most essential. It turns out that a single authority in charge of transport and spatial planning is quite rare. In emerging economies such as China, the search for economic growth provides the driving force. In others, competition between provinces or regions and cities can result in power struggles.

It is significant that the Netherlands, probably the best-planned country in Europe, has dropped city regions in favour of cities combining with their

neighbours, except in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. This example shows the danger of imposing reform from above.

There are now only 403 authorities compared with 1,209 in 1850, but they play much larger roles than their British equivalents.

The most interesting examples for urbanists are probably cities such as Copenhagen and Frankfurt, which score highest in surveys of the best places to live and work. Having recently spent a week travelling from Mainz down to Karlsruhe, and Stuttgart and the historic university town of Tüebingen, I was fascinated to find out how the German public transport system works so well. It turns out that Stuttgart, which raises the highest proportion of travel expenditure from the ‘fare box’, still relies on 43% of the cost being subsidised, largely by the federal government. Fast, frequent and cheap trains are packed out, thus taking some pressure off the roads.

Political power is divided between the Regional Board of Frankfurt am Main, (with a population of 5.5 million), and the State of Hesse, (with 3.7 million in the Southern District). Transport is provided by the Rhine-Main Transport Association with representative of the various authorities on it. Conflicts do arise, and here use is made of mediation. For example, a 21-member group was used to resolve the future of Frankfurt Airport, the busiest in Europe, up until 2008, resulting in agreement on a new runway.

Success is not just measured by population growth, but also by job creation and income levels.

Governing the Editor’s city: lessons introduction for would-be | AoUurbanists in Action

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Lille ph. Ana

Here the OECD’s comparative study of Amsterdam, Hamburg, Manchester and Stockholm highlights the role local leadership plays in building collaborative partnerships through what Sir Howard Bernstein, chief executive of Manchester City Council, calls ‘patience and long-term perspective’ which requires ‘relationship management.’ Manchester has succeeded in clawing back control over local investment, but significantly, public spending of £22bn exceeds taxes generated of £17bn by nearly £5bn a year. The examples of cities such as Turin, which has rebuilt its economy after the loss of employment in the automobile sector, or Vienna, where the city council competes with the private sector to keep down rents by selling land to co-operatives, shows how cities can innovate even when they only control a fraction of what is provided. The importance of a strong local economy in creating great places reinforces the importance of understanding how cities use their influence to mobilise private investment.

What is to be done?

Differences in history, geography and culture make it very difficult to copy models or even apply lessons, but the messages from the OECD studies are fairly clear. There is no point searching for some kind of

organisational ‘Holy Grail’, as perhaps was attempted with the Maud Commission on Local Government, which recommended fewer than a hundred unitary authorities. Instead, we should seek to harness the energy and knowledge of those closest to the ground, rather than over-constraining them with financial and other rules, as we have done in the UK.

Government, in its enthusiasm for rolling out the City Deal process, should be using these kinds of tests to establish the chance of success.

This means going beyond the Duty to Cooperate or Combined Authorities, and getting into the stuff of strategic decision-making, which in my view is what the Academy’s Awards process should begin to address.

Cities can learn best from those that share common challenges, which is why factors like population size and economic functions or ‘clusters’ are so critical. There is now a wealth of comparative data, for example on how people get to work, which can be used to benchmark performance and set targets for improvement, as well as all kinds of mapping techniques to make complex systems more comprehensible. Better integration of transport and spatial planning ‘can contribute significantly to higher growth and wellbeing’.

Dr Nicholas Falk AoU is founderdirector of URBED, and describes himself an economist, urbanist and strategic planner!

So, is it time to use the Academy’s knowledge of successful places of all shapes and sizes to assist the process of collaboration?

If five steps are too complex, then we could even boil them down to three: Ambition, Brokerage and Continuity, which makes leadership quite a simple, if demanding, process!6

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1. The OECD report Governing the City and The Metropolitan Century are available from OECD publishing: http://dx.doi. org/10.1787/9789264226500-en / http://dx.doi. org/10.1787/9789264228733-en 2. Greg Clark et al, Local Economic Leadership, OECD 2015 3. Peter Hall with Nicholas Falk, Good Cities Better Lives: how Europe rediscovered the lost art of urbanism, Routledge 2014 4. Charles Landry, Cities of Ambition, Comedia 2015 5. URBED, Towns and Cities: partners in urban renaissance, ODPM 2002 6. Barry Munday and Nicholas Falk, The ABC of Housing Growth and Infrastructure, The Housing Forum 2014

Award-winning cultural narrative placemaking and wayfinding design

www.wolfstrome.com howl@wolfi.co.uk @wolfstrome +44 (0) 1273 840989

Detroit – too different for dialogue?

The plight of Detroit is well known, but perhaps less so are the lessons for good urban practice.

Dr Gareth Potts reflects on areas where Detroit and older UK cities might have valuable dialogue.

Last year a Guardian headline asked: “The north-east of England: Britain’s Detroit?” Having lived and studied in both places, I hoped that the article would see some sharing of strategies for older industrial cities. Yet nowhere, in the piece or subsequent debate, was there a sense that the US city might offer lessons or have shared challenges.

Certainly, the differences between Detroit and older UK cities are stark: the nature and scale of problems; racial make-up; the role of charitable foundations (both local and national); and the nature and importance of government (both local and central).

But, there really are areas where UK urbanists can have a good old chat with their Detroit counterparts.

Detroit is now wise to the fact that immigrants often boost local economies – one in three Michigan tech start-ups in the last decade were led by an immigrant. Southwest Detroit, a heavily Latino area, is frequently hailed as the most revitalised working-class neighbourhood in Detroit.

Cities are constrained by national immigration policy but can still make themselves attractive to recent arrivals. The City of Detroit is now a participant in ‘Welcoming Cities and Counties’ – a national programme that works with local governments to create immigrant-friendly environments through measures such as English classes, small business support, and programmes on U.S. culture.

Additionally, a nonprofit, Global Detroit, has helped to launch several initiatives including: an international student retention programme; a programme to integrate skilled immigrants and refugees; an online database and network of organisations and groups serving immigrants; a professional networking programme; and a micro-enterprise development programme (ProsperUS Detroit).

Cities need to show their best side to visitors, prospective inward investors, entrepreneurs, employees and, even, many unaware locals – this means nightlife, sporting, cultural and leisure activities, as well as great places and buildings. Detroit Experience Factory (DXF) is a nonprofit that seeks to do just this – not least through bus and walking tours of the city (which some 12,000 people took in 2014). Set up and led by a local woman who loves the place, this is not your stuffy visitor bureau or place promotion effort.

The founder and CEO of one of the city’s major employers, Quicken Loans, has often stressed the need for the city to attract and retain millennial graduates through downtown offices near good cultural and leisure opportunities. This is true but Detroit and many older UK cities could also focus on attracting groups that are outside of the workforce and generally with a reasonable amount of disposable income – so retirees and students, in particular.

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The metro area is home to one of the U.S.’s largest academic research clusters – dominated by Michigan State, the University of Michigan and Detroit’s Wayne State University (WSU). Efforts are afoot, as in many older UK cities, to ensure that these institutions are plugged into their local economy.

These include the University Research Corridor – a programme that jointly promotes these universities’ impact on the state’s economy and that also supports some joint projects (such as Accelerate Michigan, an alliance with the state’s largest job providers, which focuses on fostering economic innovation and entrepreneurialism).

Michigan State’s Center for Regional Economic Innovation also fosters best local economic development practice around innovation.

Each university also has its own economic development work.

For example, TechTown Detroit, a nonprofit co-founded by WSU in 2000, now includes support for new and existing businesses in under-resourced neighbourhoods and a multi-strand initiative focused on the development of talent, technology, deal flow and innovative startups.

WSU also now has an Office of Economic Development that oversees several business support programmes, including a student entrepreneurship centre and The Front Door for Business Engagement.

WSU’s august ‘Old Main’ Building ph. University Research Corridor

Some key Greenway connections in Detroit image. DGC

Rivard Plaza – the first section of the riverfront that was reclaimed ph. Detroit Riverfront Conservancy

Through the use of public-private partnerships, Detroit has seen the introduction of some terrific public spaces in the last decade or so. These include the (reclaimed) Riverfront and the (rejuvenated) Eastern Market as well as the award-winning Campus Martius Park with its cultural events, urban beach, outdoor seating and ice rink.

As the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan has articulately argued, true public spaces have to permit orderly campaigning and protest. Since the park and Riverfront are managed by nonprofit conservancies whose security is then contracted out, the city (which wholly and partly owns the land, respectively) has now issued guidance (also applicable to city parks) stressing what these constitutional rights must mean in very practical terms.

Place-making is also occurring in the often less affluent neighbourhoods.

These include some bottom-up initiatives such as The Alley Project, which centres on an alley converted into a local meeting space that local kids decorated with street art. There are also schemes generated by Foundation and State competitions, for example, in Brightmoor, in the city’s north west, plans are being put in place for an outdoor learning area featuring native plants, a walking tour, fire pit and seating.

Detroit – too different for dialogue? 11

A tour led by DXF founder Jeanette Pierce takes in the downtown Guardian Building ph. Matt Chung

From top: ProsperUS Detroit ‘graduate’ Omar Gonzalez has a growing lawn-care business with five employees Phelps Park, one of many to be adopted by a local organisation ph. WDET 101.9FM

The other key place-making development is the creation of links between places. This can increase exercise and use of places as well as help limit car use.

Highest profile here is M-1 Rail – a 3.3-mile streetcar system, being delivered by public-private partnership. This will run past the sporting, cultural, higher education and leisure assets between downtown (and its orbital People Mover) and the New Center area (with its links to the rail line to Chicago and the city bus system). The aim is to quickly move large numbers of people along one of the five ‘spine’ roads that radiate from downtown.

There may even be a proper metrowide mass transit system if, late next year, voters across the metro area counties approve some of their property taxes going to support the new Regional Transit Authority’s plans.

Such metro votes, already passed for the Detroit Institute of Arts and Detroit Zoo, are the sort of choice UK metro devolution advocates yearn for!

At an even more affordable level are the many efforts, orchestrated by the nonprofit Detroit Greenways Coalition (DGC), to increase routes for use by cyclists, joggers and walkers. One such route takes in the Riverwalk, Eastern Market, the Dequindre Cut (a 1.4 mile re-purposed rail line that links the two)

and has recently been expanded to Midtown a half-mile to the west and Hamtramck, a town several miles to the north.

The City’s Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA) takes on residential properties where the owners have not paid taxes for several years. It looks to sell the better homes through online auction.

Bids start at $1,000 and a new owner has six months to complete any repairs needed – so some similarities with the ‘homes for a pound’ strategy adopted in several UK cities.

The DLBA engages in demolition where properties are beyond repair. Their efforts to eliminate vacancy are not helped, however, by the fact that, since the 1950s, metro Detroit has consistently seen homebuilding outstrip household growth. Older UK cities are fortunate that Green Belt policy, brownfield incentives and NIMBYism have largely kept such sprawl in check.

The Detroit Future City (DFC) framework, the result of extensive public consultation, includes strategies for Detroit’s transformation – such as focusing residential and economic growth in key locations and outlining potential uses for larger vacant areas (storm-water management; urban agriculture and forestry; recreation; greenways etc.).

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Whilst many UK cities have been hit hard by cuts to the funding they receive from national government, wrestling with austerity has long been the name of the game for the City of Detroit government.

So, for example, 77 of Detroit’s 307 parks are currently ‘adopted’ by churches, community groups, businesses and nonprofits. Adopters agree to keep parks rubbish-free and to mow and weed them every two weeks in summer. A few even put on activities such as ice hockey, baseball and yoga. The city, in addition to maintaining the other parks, monitors quality and installs a sign at each location recognising the adopter.

Whilst Detroit’s plight has been well documented by journalists and filmmakers, it has often consisted of seeing it with detached amazement rather than somewhere that urbanists can exchange good practice with. I hope this piece has encouraged you to see it in a different light, to engage with in some way and maybe even pay a visit!

Dr Gareth Potts, based in Washington D.C., is founder of The New Barn-Raising, an international network to encourage sharing of best practice around ways to sustain community and civic assets thenewbarnraising.com.

Middle City Passages: an international competition exploring urban movement In July, six design teams met in Toronto, Canada, for the final round of an international competition to examine urban movement around a proposed new light rail transit (LRT) route in a north-eastern suburb of the city. The brief was to investigate how this new transport infrastructure could interweave with existing smaller-scale pedestrian networks to improve quality of life. Chris Sharpe AoU describes the approach of one of the finalists – a multi-disciplinary team from the UK led by Matthew Springett Associates.

Parkview Agincourt

Middle City Passages Toronto was a two-stage competition run by Metrolinx (the transportation authority for Greater Toronto) and the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.

It formed part of a wider programme co-ordinated by the Institut pour la Ville en Mouvement looking at the concept of urban passages as connections between two places, but which can also become places in their own right.

The competition brief looked at two sites along the line of a proposed new surface LRT route along Sheppard Avenue East. The sites are Agincourt and Palmdale, both planned to become LRT stations.

Sheppard Avenue East itself is a major route in the northern suburbs of the city, and at the moment is a cardominated dual carriageway. The road has been identified by the city as a route in transition, and recent development proposals have shown an ambition to create an urban frontage along the street and transform it into a multi-role urban street.

Agincourt is a relatively old community which grew in the 19th century before being enveloped by Toronto from the mid-20th century. Today, there is a rail station which is part of the GO Transit network of commuter trains, and so the

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LRT station would serve as an important interchange with that network. The character of the area is incoherent – a mixture of high-rise commercial and residential blocks, car parks and shopping malls.

Palmdale does not have the same historic identity as Agincourt, and the LRT stop is named after the adjacent Palmdale Drive. This is a more typical condition along the LRT route with a simple stop serving communities on either side of the road. The site is characterised by a mixture of commercial developments and high-rise residential blocks set well back from the road and surrounded by car parks. Nearby developments of low-rise detached houses turn their back on the road and are reached through cul-de-sacs and narrow passages.

Before responding architecturally to the brief, our approach was first to engage with the communities in both sites in order to gain a better understanding of the human experience of people living and working in, and passing through the sites.

On Friday, 3 July, our team staged events at several locations using techniques such as creative stringscapes, (responsible) seed bombing raids and picnics in the park.

We met with a large number of people who were proud of their neighbourhood, generous with their

time and insights, and who passed on to us a great deal of knowledge.

In the short time available, our aim was not to create a set-piece masterplan, but to suggest a process where this intelligence from the community could be combined with our own architectural and landscape response in a way that supported and improved the results of the city’s investment.

In this intensive one-day process, we learnt about how people use the spaces around the road and the different and unexpected patterns of movement and waiting around the station and its car parks. Many people expressed a preference for a subway over a surface LRT, which has been an ongoing debate in the city.

Strategy The strategy proposed for each of the sites was a three-part process – short-term, mid-term and long-term.

In the short-term, small-scale interventions such as pop-up events would be staged. These would produce information about the needs and requirements of residents and also give residents an opportunity to engage with the design of their environment.

Secondly, in the mid-term, installations such as a theatre stage, allotments and nature hides would be developed

to promote greater connections with the natural environment, improve new walking and cycling routes, and provide some compensation for the disruption caused during the construction of the LRT. In the long-term, the overall masterplans for each site will be influenced by the engagement and design processes.

In order to demonstrate how the community engagement process could inform the design, we proposed simple, continuous landscapes of public space at both sites into which we could incorporate small, human-scale, cost-effective and community-inspired architectural interventions. These places, or ‘moments’ as we described them, would act as focal points and meeting places, defining new routes and reinforcing existing routes through the area as well as energising specific places.

At both sites, we wanted to support the ambition to transform the road from a car-dominated arterial road into a more attractive urban space which served all road users. We also wanted to reinforce connections with the natural environment – particularly at Agincourt where we envisaged a ‘green interchange’ that would link to the Highland Creek and the wider strategic network of ravines, hydroelectric power line corridors and other green spaces in the city.

Palmdale overview

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Interchanges are traditionally major architectural interventions and we anticipated that the immediate surroundings to the Agincourt site would attract significant development in the coming years. However, at the heart of this site, where people would have to spend time and wait for trains or pickups, we proposed a new type of green interchange to provide a connection to nature.

Sheppard Avenue was recently sunk into an underpass under the GO railway line to ensure that the LRT would not conflict with the train – we proposed to cut back the retaining walls to create a sloping green landscape that would rise up from the road and create a theatrical quality to the space. A park on a new landform will be created to the north of the road. Community-led interventions at this site would include allotment gardens on the slopes, a pop-up winter café near the station and lightweight cycle path structures and hides along the Highland Creek itself.

On the other site at Palmdale, the LRT proposals have already attracted large-scale development proposals along the north side of the road, which will completely transform the area in the coming years.

As a framework for the community-led interventions, we proposed a long continuous public space that crosses Sheppard Avenue, improving

Agincourt overview

connectivity across the road and anticipating large-scale development around its perimeter. The interventions would include an outdoor stage in the park to the south, a leisure area for young people south of the road, an open garden and all-year-round market square to the north, and a nature hide/ fishing hut in the green space to the north of the site.

As development will likely happen in stages over time, we also proposed a system for marking future sites with a line of poplar trees and creating a wild grassed area which could be used by the community in the period before development starts.

What lessons for practitioners?

The importance of movement to the success or failure of cities has long been recognised and many of the concepts that emerged from the competition – improving the quality of movement routes through architectural interventions – will be very familiar in some form.

One interesting aspect of the competition was the workshop format itself. Instead of asking for final entries to be sent in by post or email, the organisers invited the finalists to Toronto and staged a workshop over several days. This ensured that all participants could visit and explore the site in greater depth, but also gave the transportation agency Metrolinx,

as an end client of the process, the opportunity to meet and explore ideas with several smaller design-led practices who may not normally become involved with infrastructure projects of this scale.

Secondly, while most teams created digital models and presented them on screen, the MSA team built a set of large physical models to describe ideas and to analyse the wider urban context.

This was interesting as it demonstrated how powerful physical models can still be in drawing people in and stimulating constructive debate, and how technologies such as 3D printers and laser cutters allow high-quality models to be created very quickly.

At events, these models can remain in place, engaging with people and sparking conversations long after screens and projectors are turned off.

Lastly, the process of community engagement and the history of the LRT proposals was a useful reminder of the importance of politics in improving the quality of design in cities. For something good to get built, there has to be a good design, but there also needs to be people engaged in politics who can persuade everyone of the importance of that design.

Chris Sharpe AoU is a software consultant at Holistic City. For more information on this project, visit: passages-ivm.com/en/demonstrations

Allotments

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Josep Lluís Sert and the Havana Plan It was perhaps a good thing that the plan to reconfigure Cuba’s capital, Havana, was thwarted by Castro’s revolution in 1959.

Nevertheless, Spanish architect and city planner Josep Sert left an impressive legacy as Tony Reddy AoU explains.

Josep Lluís Sert is justifiably regarded as having been one of the key figures in the evolution of the discipline and profession of urban design. However, had his plan for La Habana Vieja (Old Havana) of 1955 been implemented, it is likely that he would have left a very different professional legacy.

Things have changed in Cuba since the Castro Revolution of 1959 but rather more has remained the same. One of the interesting aspects of communist governments is their capacity to make time stand still. Regimes which have wanted to change the world and promote modernism in all its forms, have often remained conservative in practice.

One of the attractions of Cuba, and its capital Havana, is the chance to see the world as it was over half a century ago. Havana remains today much as it was in 1959. The view of the buildings along of the Malecón, the city’s magnificent curved corniche road, overlooking the Florida Straits, is unchanged.

Its great hotels – the Habana Libre, the National and the Parque Central

– and restaurants – the Floridita, La Bodeguita del Medio and Sloppy Joe’s – which before the Revolution played host to American actors, musicians, spies and Mafiosi, and were inundated with real revolutionaries and armchair voyeurs in its aftermath, now play host to European and Canadian tourists. The anticipated arrival of American tourists and businessmen, following the restoration of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba, will be another chapter in their history. The colonial style palazzos of La Habana Vieja and the modernist buildings of the Vedado maintain a faded elegance. Isolated examples where paladares (private restaurants) have opened, and refurbishment and restoration has followed, show the potential of these buildings to contribute to a vibrant city life.

This had not been the future for Havana as envisaged in the late 1950s by the regime of the dictator, Fulgencio Batista. His vision was to remove much of the older building stock and make the city more modern and accessible to traffic.

Sert’s plan for Habana Vieja was

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designed to achieve this objective.

But for the intervention of the Castro Revolution, the fabric of Havana and Habana Vieja, in particular, would have been destroyed in the same manner as that of most Latin American cities.

Havana Pilot Plan 1955 Sert had been forced to leave Spain at the end of the Civil War in 1936 and emigrate to the United States, having been blacklisted by the Francoist regime as a result of having designed exemplary modernist buildings for the democratically elected republican government. Between 1941 and 1959, he and his partner Paul Lester Wiener, as Town Planning Associates, worked in collaboration to produce plans and masterplans for many Latin American cities.

From 1952 until 1958, they developed an array of projects for Cuba culminating in the Pilot Plan for Havana of 1955.

The Pilot Plan addressed the entire metropolitan area of Havana. The plan included recommendations

for the regulated development of unbuilt areas and the distribution of the four functions of the Athens Charter – Le Corbusier’s manifesto for urban planning published in 1943 for the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) – through new zoning. The most important new element in the Pilot Plan was an extensive road system for the city and its environs. The aim of Sert and Wiener’s Pilot Plan was to contain the different grain of the various historic periods within the legible, conceptual order of this network. It would have had its most significant impact on the old city, and its orderly arrangement concealed the insensitivity of cuts through the existing city fabric.

The Sert and Wiener Plan, as with most urban renewal plans of the period, focused on providing improved accessibility for motor vehicles to the heart of the old city. Two major north-south dual carriageways were planned to cut through the centre of the old town on Calle Cuba and Calle Habana.

A further dual carriageway was to cut through the centre on an

east-west axis along Calle Muralla, and alternate streets on the city grid in both directions were to be widened. In true ‘tabula rasa’ fashion the city blocks in the entire area enclosed by these dual carriageways were to be demolished and replaced with a series of classic modernist slab blocks. Each of the remaining city blocks were to be hollowed out to improve car access and parking, and further demolition would have been required to accommodate the widening of other streets. The plan would have resulted in the division of the old city into four quarters separated by major traffic routes, widespread demolition of historic buildings and with the character of remaining city blocks being fundamentally altered.

Havana was planned by the Spanish on the principles of the Leyes de Indias (Laws of the Indies). These laws specified many town planning and design guidelines for configuring a Spanish colonial settlement. Havana now has the largest intact colonial urban core of any city in Latin America.

Had the Sert Wiener Plan been implemented, Havana would have joined Bogota, Medellín, Lima, Mexico City and other Latin American colonial cities in having its historic core destroyed by unsympathetic modernist interventions.

Instead, following a period of neglect, restoration work which started in the late 1970s under the direction of the Historiador de la Ciudad (City Historian) Eusebio, has seen the revival of La Habana Vieja. The historic heart of the city, bounded by the positions of the original city walls, was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1982. It is the largest colonial centre in Latin America.

The restoration programme includes monuments, major civic buildings, convents, churches, palaces, shops and houses. This has had the effect of reviving parts of La Habana Vieja to their former beauty and elegance in addition to contributing to its vitality. It is now an exemplary model of urban repair and ‘acupuncture’, particularly in a Latin American context.

photos. Bryan Ledgard

Josep Lluís Sert and the Havana Plan

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Urban design legacy Sert had been one of the founders of the CIAM and its president from 1947 until 1956. His early publication, Can Our Cities Survive?

(1942), set out the CIAM conception of the problems of the modern city.

It divided the city into a series of discrete categories: dwelling, recreation, work, transportation and large-scale planning. However, over time his views evolved and he began to recognise that successful urban renewal and urban design required a less rigid strategy to develop a more holistic view of the city.

He became dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1953. Almost immediately he set about developing a ‘common ground’ within the school, focusing on the problems of design in the contemporary city. This common ground was a space in which architecture, landscape architecture and planning would operate in the realm of urbanism.

This initiative started as a series of courses taught by Sert and a selection of visiting professors developed through a series of urban design conferences. He organised the first urban design conference at GSD in April 1956. The conference announcement invited participants to explore “the role of the planner, architect and landscape architect in the design and development of cities.”

These courses and conferences ultimately led to the establishment of the urban design programme at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The urban design conferences brought together a collection of mid-century urban thinkers and established new lines of academic and professional endeavour in the field of urban design.

Although there is debate as to how successful Sert’s vision was as executed, his urban design legacy is evident. The GSD programme he started has influenced urban design programmes at universities throughout the world.

Throughout his professional career, Sert concentrated on the development of ideas and themes

related to the improvement of the human environment at a variety of scales. He believed that architecture was not a hermetic pursuit but one that should engage with a range of issues and disciplines. His vision for the potential of urban design impacted directly on the manner in which the discipline evolved.

nature of urban problems and to diversify the range of expertise even further. Urban theorists such as Kevin Lynch, Vincent Scully, Colin Rowe, Aldo Rossi persisted in the search for an appropriate architectural approach to the city, changing the emphasis toward the historical continuity of the city and public participation.

Sert’s thinking on the nature of cities evolved over time. In an interview with the Boston Globe on his retirement as dean of the GSD in 1969, he stressed that “urban consciousness” was a particular element to be stressed in the education of architects and designers. During his time as dean, the GSD had undergone significant growth and changes to its curriculum; one of the most enduring was the introduction of urban design as a new area of study.

He stated that he believed “that people will want to improve their urban surroundings. Call it a basic faith in the improvement of man and a better life.” Sert’s comments on urban consciousness conveyed a level of optimism only a few academics would have shared in 1969.

It is hard to contemplate the utter destruction of the character of Habana Vieja that Sert’s plan would have caused. However, the theories which he and his partners advocated at the time were the prevailing theories of the era. The evolution of his urban theories in the succeeding years had their greatest impact on the generation that followed in the field of urban design. When asked in his retirement interview with the Boston Globe if CIAM principles could help the urban ills of the city, he replied, “Face the fact.

The old formulas no longer apply.”

He recognised that the certainties of the early modernist theories on city planning needed a much more wide-ranging response than he and his CIAM colleagues had originally advocated.

Sert did not address the everchanging professional scope through which urban consciousness could be exercised by designers.

These predicaments would confront urban designers and architects in the decades which followed. They would require new methodologies to deal with evolving patterns of urban growth, the complexities of inner-city renewal and the political mechanisms and social consequences of both. Sert’s faith lay in the ability of designers to constantly develop tools to address these challenges. The platform for such an undertaking would become known as urban design.

Sert’s academic and professional work disseminated his ideas about urban design to many practices and academic institutions. His views would help lay the foundations of the ‘return to the city’ movement at a time of rapid suburbanisation.

The discipline of urban design continued to evolve after Sert had stepped down as dean at Harvard, addressing the ever-changing

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A challenging future Havana and La Habana Vieja, in particular, are fortunate to have remained frozen in time for over half a century. The city now faces new challenges following the recent diplomatic rapprochement agreed between the United States and Cuba. The pressures that the city will face as a result of the investments which are likely to follow this agreement, will be immense. It is to be hoped that the urban designers and architects who contribute to the next phase of growth in the city’s history will demonstrate a greater sensitivity to and respect for the old city core than would have occurred under the Pilot Plan of 1955.

Tony Reddy AoU is a director of The Academy of Urbanism and chairman of Reddy Architecture and Urbanism

Cities Alive: Rethinking green infrastructure The Arup report Cities Alive: Rethinking green infrastructure published in April 2015 charts the way forward for the role of landscape architecture as a key urban design discipline. Kieran Toms talks to its chief author Tom Armour and colleague George Arvanitis AoU at Arup’s London office.

Tom Armour

George Arvanitis

all scales. Cities need to adapt to this, from small-scale interventions such as green roofs or spaces designed to temporarily flood, to larger-scale networks and systems.

As its chief author, and Arup’s Landscape Architecture Group leader, Tom Armour says that the report is a sort of manifesto for the future of landscape architecture. But what does this actually mean in practice? I went to Arup’s office in London, nestled in the pleasant backstreets of Fitzrovia, to meet Armour and Urban Design + Landscape senior associate George Arvanitis AoU to find out more.

Armour is clearly very proud of the report and how it has been received, a consideration deemed important from the start – he points out that they shied away from calling it a manifesto, “because people fall asleep when you say that!” It does seem to have successfully kept its readers awake, as it is on its fifth print run, and it has taken Armour to present its findings at both the European Union, and the

House of Commons All Party Parliamentary group on ecology.

It is even now taught at Leeds Beckett University – the landscape architecture course now boasts a ‘Cities Alive’ module.

Armour explains that this popularity might be because although the report started as a more general landscape architecture study, it soon began to home in on the urban environment specifically, because that is increasingly where you’ll find humans: the urban realm is, of course, where the world’s population is moving, creating greater pressures and challenges on people, systems and the environment, intensifying the problems of climate change. When we consider all of this, Armour points out, we realise that in the city we really do have to build nature into our urban systems at

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Armour explains: “The work I’m dealing with is the human condition: better conditions for people and places, and places that help the environment, and places that drive the economy. The job of a landscape architect is much more complex than many people would say.”

One of the first things that Armour realised was that people take the natural environment for granted. Many of the principles in Cities Alive are common sense – obvious things in some ways, but things that lots of people both in and outside of urban planning often overlook.

Conversation turns to good examples of green infrastructure, and we discuss the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford with its wild flowers and areas off the beaten track that even during the Games felt a long way from the hustle and bustle of the city. Armour highlights the importance of being able to go somewhere quiet. “What is needed are spaces – spaces where you can sit down and be sheltered or shaded, places where you can hear yourself think without road noise,” he says. And the latter, Armour points out, is related to the prevalence of the car, and its relationship to ‘urban green.’ He puts this in context for me. In the urban setting, the natural environment has

not always had an easy ride. “When cities were a lot smaller, people had access to the countryside, but then with the industrial revolution and megacities people were locked in industrial hell,” he says.

Later, the Victorians discovered parks and healthy sanitation systems, and slowly began to realise their value.

But then, Armour tells me, “What happened was that the car got hold of the city!” This had a major impact on the city – both in terms of space for roads but also because, as he points out, “they [cars] occupy space when not used, they’re knocking people over, and they’re polluting the air. So we have to think about cities for people, not cities for cars.”

Armour explains that this all comes down to a consideration of how best to use space. Cities can do a lot to combat the problem of cars, from discouraging

their use, giving over space to cyclists, or even burying entire roads. This last option was chosen by Madrid as part of the Madrid Río Project. Here, next to the Manzanares river, 43km of the M-30 ring road was covered in new parkland, including the Salón de Pinos, a key area with 8,000 pine trees. The whole project, described in the Cities Alive report, opens up Madrid’s major river and gives its citizens access to both green space and a waterfront.

Armour recognises that something like this is very expensive, but argues that it has lasting long-term benefits that will be appreciated long after the city has recouped the economic costs.

As the report explains, projects like this deliver “at a scale that realises substantial city-wide environmental and social benefits.”

However, not all big, bold projects need to be orchestrated from the top down.

No discussion of green infrastructure

would be complete without a mention of the High Line in New York. It is the go-to example of a community-led regenerative project, with every stage being led by the Friends of the High Line, who consulted regularly with residents and business. Its key achievement, of creating dynamic spaces out of abandoned industrial wasteland, has captured the imaginations of countless other cities.

George Arvanitis explains that the High Line, in preserving the memory of the old railway line, exemplifies an increasingly popular style of green urbanism that gives the whole scheme a sense of identity and character, which is an attraction people want.

I mention one point that I really like in the report, the unbelievably low crime figure: the High Line has seen no serious crime and only two complaints (minor graffiti and a lost wallet!).

Armour points out that this is borne

Madrid Rio ph. M Peinado (Flickr)

Cities Alive: Rethinking green infrastructure

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The Olympic Stadium and City Mill River ph. David Jones (Flickr)

out of the protection that can be offered to green space by a tightly-knit community with a sense of ownership.

He tells me how easy and popular it is worldwide for communities to get involved in maintaining green space.

But to see good green infrastructure policy it turns out UK citizens don’t need to travel as far as Madrid or New York. One of the policies used as a case study in the report is the All London Green Grid, a policy framework which aims to promote the design and delivery of green infrastructure across London, and which will in turn create a network of connected green spaces, including features such as street trees and green roofs.

The numerous benefits will include “recreation and amenity, healthy living, reducing flooding, improving air quality, cooling the urban environment, encouraging walking and cycling, and enhancing biodiversity and ecological resilience.” These are benefits any city would desire.

But how do we arrive at these successes? Armour explains that whilst in some cities, such as Copenhagen, the importance of green spaces has long been ingrained in the city’s culture, in others “it often comes down to individuals, who understand

the value of green space and what it means for people. You need a vision!”

Ultimately though, however it is achieved, what really wins the arguments, and what really persuades people, is research and facts. The report is full of these, and Armour shares some of it with me throughout our conversation, such as the fact that if you can see green space from your hospital bed you’ll recover better, or if you can see it from your office space you’ll be more productive. The report also contains a map showing that on a hot summer’s day in London, the temperature in leafy Richmond Park can be a massive 8°C cooler than the West End which has relatively few green spaces.

“These facts are just simple but just stunning!” says Armour. “What we began to realise was that if we can make sure people understand this – many of our people are engineers, and they like facts and figures – then suddenly you have an argument!”

The economic argument can be won by the knock-on effect these benefits have on the rest of the city – Copenhagen estimates savings of $12m in healthcare costs from a 10per cent increase in cyclists, as well as a $31m benefit in increased productivity. These

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benefits can sometimes be hard to tie to one specific development, but add up across a city. Later, Arvanitis shows me round the office, and explains how on a recent visit to Doha, he was shown how buildings were traditionally built with a wind tower above them to move air down into the building, cooling it.

This ingenuous ancient principle is used in Arup’s work there, a simple but effective adaptation to the local environment. I see how a real consideration and understanding of environmental impact is not revolutionary or radical, but is an element so simple and established that its real importance is sometimes underappreciated. Cities Alive makes the strong and effective argument about why green infrastructure should take precedence.

As I leave the offices, I notice that on the streets around Arup’s office there are lots of big green mature trees.

Armour and Arvanitis had pointed them out in our conversation, but I hadn’t really taken stock of them before. I suddenly realise why I earlier described these streets as pleasant.

Kieran Toms YU is a Transport & Public Realm Planner and a Young Urbanist

A place for everyone Creating shared places is the theme of the 2015/16 Glass-House series. Lucia das Neves explores how the debate is taking shape.

The Gamlingay Eco in Bedfordshire

Working together: engaging Hounslow residents in improving the local community centre

At The Glass-House, one of our key aims is to foster discussion and debate about what is happening in our places – how we innovate their design, how we collaborate to make them work better – as well as celebrating the diversity of voices that can make these things happen. Our annual debate series provides a forum for this discussion and as our last series came to a close in March this year, we were struck by how strongly the theme of the commons – of common place, how we share places, of individual rights and common responsibilities – was an undercurrent wherever we went. And this is how our 2015/16 series, A Place for Everyone? was born.

The commons are a place where we can do together what we cannot do alone and a place to bask in that often-searched-for concept of community. They should necessarily be a place of innovation and creativity – how else can we make the most of the inevitable opportunities and challenges that sharing spaces brings?

To paraphrase our 2015 London speaker, Alastair Donald (British Council’s project director for the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture

Cities Alive: Rethinking green infrastructure Editor’s introduction | A place | AoU for everyone in Action

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Biennale), good design enables people to live how they want to. But we do all want to live in places in different ways, don’t we? Our first debate in this series takes us to Edinburgh and asks Place: designed for everyone?

Our speakers may consider how adaptable design can enable us to live the way we want to with others. We can take inspiration from projects like the Gamlingay Eco Hub in Bedfordshire, which through the personal endeavour of local people took once monofunctional sports facility and made it a local hub serving many different needs, which is celebrated as an awardwinning example of environmental excellence. But successful shared spaces might also be as simple as movable benches in a local park.

Sharing spaces creates uncomfortable challenges for inclusive design.

How much should the needs of one group take precedence over another?

Do our spaces reflect the cultural and generational needs of all their users?

If the playground is only designed for up to 12-year-olds, where do the 14-year-olds go to play? What happens if walking my dog makes the park a no-go area for people of a different faith? We must balance our basic needs, what we see as our rights and how we want to live our lives as individuals and communities.

The Glass House Debate Series Debate Series 2015/16

24 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 6 | Autumn 2015

To the mix of rights and needs, we can add the assets and resources that make our places what they are and what they could be. In the context of our second debate city, Manchester, where devolution is and will be the hot topic for some time, Place: the sum of parts? will explore who holds the resources we have in place, who is best placed to mobilise them and how we can orchestrate them to create a great symphony of place.

Asset mapping with the Tidworth mums in Wiltshire

Traditional resources of capital and land have often been a focus, but our resources in the community, in people and relationships, buildings and spaces, often remain undiscovered. We are demanding that we do more for less as a society and, in that context, what could we achieve if we uncovered and mobilised these assets? Can we afford to ignore them?

The value of community knowledge and energy in making change happen was easily demonstrated by a GlassHouse and Open University research project with a group of army families in Tidworth. An asset-based approach, supported by collaboration between the different parties (in this case the local authority, Army Welfare Service and local mums) enabled the community to explore the design of play facilities for children and local families, helped them to identify the assets they could mobilise, build a case for the resources they needed and demonstrate the value they added to their place.

No discussion of assets could ignore the role of digital spaces in place and placemaking. Along with their big data counterparts, these will in many cases mediate an individual’s experience of their physical spaces. What of the role of the many hyperlocal websites and online participation platforms in shaping our places and vice versa?

If we have established our needs and wants and the resources we have to deliver and animate them, who is responsible for making things happen?

We will arrive in Nottingham in February next year, to ask Place: a shared responsibility?

The Glass-House archives are full of stories of communities and people who went out and ‘did something’. Beyond

The Glass-House realms, if you have ever heard Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden speak about their projects (and I’d recommend it), you’ll know how much energy and drive it takes to make things happen, but you’ll also see quite clearly how powerful taking action is. We must surely accept that with rights come responsibilities – if we want change, we must necessarily work for it.

At the other end of the scale, anyone who has worked with developers and housing providers, as we have, knows the headaches and delays a lack of trust can cause to projects. Could partnership and collaboration upfront create a more lasting legacy for communities and places?

We think so, but the barriers sometimes feel insurmountable. In addition to mutual suspicion, we must battle other barriers: the time and resources to participate, the confidence to join in, not to mention the knowledge and skills needed to engage in these often complex processes. These factors make achieving contributions from a range of the population challenging.

It seems that even when so many studies suggest there are great health and social benefits to participation, that even when those of us who have worked on these projects have seen how places can be different – better – it still feels that making the most of our assets, enabling people to take responsibility is still too difficult in too many cases.

Lastly, we come to our final debate in London in March 2016, Place: who belongs here? Surely one of the things that determine whether we feel responsible for what goes on in a place is a sense of belonging. As individuals and communities, we are affected by our places – by their dynamics, their

conflicts and their emotional connections, or absence of connection.

Small things can make you feel like you belong – knowing your local shopkeeper, your children being at a local school or the history you have in a place.

Many among you, however, must have experienced visiting a place and feeling like you didn’t belong. That you were ‘other’ to its community. What is the role of placemaking and placemakers in these emotional responses we have to our places? If good design helps us live the way we want, the way we need to, perhaps belonging is one measure of its success.

We hope to explore these questions and uncover a diversity of opinions, experiences and stories in our debate series, into which we invite speakers, contributors and audience members from across the realm of our lived experience of place – placemakers, leaders, managers, residents and more.

Join us and share your views.

Lucia das Neves is marketing and events manager at The Glass-House Community Led Design

More about the Debate Series In partnership with the Open University and The Academy of Urbanism, The Glass-House Debate Series 2015/16 explores how we design and shape our environment today to create a place for everyone and what that means for concepts like shared assets and common good, alongside individual aspirations, ownership, diversity and, rights and responsibilities. Join us in Edinburgh (21 October 2015), Manchester (11 November 2015), Nottingham (3 February 2016) and London (9 March 2016). theglasshouse.org.uk/upcoming-events

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Health, happiness and wellbeing…

In Focus

Towns and cities are not necessarily places where people feel happy, healthy or have a sense of wellbeing. Indeed, it may be that urban life has become a necessity rather than a dream for many.

In this In Focus, we take a brief look at the issue of health, happiness and wellbeing from different perspectives. Simon Hicks YU reflects on Charles Montgomery’s talk at this year’s Congress in Birmingham (see p.27). The author of the book Happy City gave an optimistic view on how we can achieve greater happiness in the way we create places. As David Rudlin AoU points out (see p.30), a key message seems to be that human wellbeing depends on interaction between people and that we therefore need to create places which foster such interaction.

Cycling is seen by many as the answer to traffic congestion in today’s towns and cities, and so long as it is done in a safe environment, cycling has the added benefit of improving health too. It is this aspect of creating safe environments that Henk Bouwman AoU and Anita Dirix (see p.33) start their article on what London (and other cities) might learn from the Dutch. In reviewing the London Walkability Model (see p.36), George Weeks YU argues that the healthiest urban form is one that contributes to the richness of the urban fabric.

He notes that evidence shows that a walkable environment correlates with people’s propensity to walk. Hopefully they can interact as well.

There is a danger that with good intentions we adopt various strategies because they are good for us humans without really knowing whether they are having any affect at all. It is relatively easy to measure the health of a community either directly or by using indicators such as the purchase of particular medicines. Measuring happiness and wellbeing, however, are harder. As Rachel Toms points out in her interview (see p.44), measuring needs to improve if we are to really design healthy environments.

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Happy City Charles Montgomery, ‘urban experimentalist’ and author of the book Happy City, was keynote speaker at this year’s Academy Congress. Simon Hicks, who was in the audience, reports back on Montgomery’s embracing talk about his recipe for urban happiness.

Charles Montgomery

If you’re looking to hug an urbanist, then Charles Montgomery comes with high recommendation.

Amongst other things, his keynote at The Academy of Urbanism Congress included a critique of the city planning status quo, a hopeful palette of recommendations to reawaken our urban social vitality, and a post-presentation hug for those most seduced by his proclamations that seamlessly melded science and art into our understanding of the city.

To make transparent any potential conflicts of interest, I was certainly one of those who received, and indeed enjoyed, a hug from Charles Montgomery.

feelings of agony with those of trust and happiness.

Yet oxytocin is also an everyday drug. We receive a small dose of it every time we develop feelings of trust with a stranger, and it is exactly this administering of happiness through socio-physical chemistry that Montgomery was hoping to reproduce in his urban laboratory. Montgomery proceeds to build dramatic tension by postponing the results of his experiment, yet his core principles are finally revealed – using design and tools that encourage positive interactions between strangers to meet the ultimate goal of making cities happy places. But rather than regurgitating the significant but repeatedly recycled ‘Jacobean’ school of thought, Montgomery builds density into urbanist thought, offering empirical neurochemical evidence for the values of social interaction and the ways we can facilitate it. Rather than reducing chance interactions to the communitarian-utilitarian ends of expanding one’s sphere of interdependence, life chances, or in summary, ‘social capital’, Montgomery reminds us that meeting people on the street will also simply make us more happy in an everyday sort of way.

Montgomery’s presentation began with a story – a story about an experiment boldly named Love Night.

Part author, part scientist, he tempts the audience into his experiment with atmospheric prose and a clenching hypothesis – in a run-down gritty lot in New York City, can we build a machine that builds trust and conviviality? His presented devices for trust-building include hot chocolate, artistic installations that invite (or more often coerce) strangers into unsolicited social interaction, and clothing that changes colour in response to the heat of human touch. Yet as an eccentric but adept scientist, Montgomery offers a concise justification for his seemingly bizarre human experiment – the secret compound, oxytocin.

Montgomery takes aim at the utilitarians of the past such as Bentham who have argued that we get happy by buying stuff and boosting our personal status.

In turn this has slowly led to a system whereby we predominantly reduce the success of a city to monetary terms. Montgomery instead argues that the ingredients for long-term human happiness are much

Oxytocin, states Montgomery, is the chemical that mothers are flooded with post-birth to override

Happy City

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Charles Montgomery at AoU congress

Montgomery’s audience experiment at Congress ph. Sarah Jackson

less condensable, yet equally attainable. Montgomery’s soup of happiness follows this recipe: feeling healthy is more important than being healthy; feeling wealthy is better than being wealthy; self mastery drives us to get through the day; freedom and autonomy grant satisfaction; meaning and belonging bring contentment; and perhaps most pertinently, social ties benefit happiness.

demonstrate lower levels of social trust in high-rise towers – even the glitzy options. He calls upon the importance of semi-public space – the liminal zones where neighbours can exchange conversation.

Montgomery offers a cascade of evidence to justify his belief in social ties – socially connected individuals are more productive, less likely to check into hospital, live up to 15 years longer and, of course, report themselves to be happier. Montgomery even warns that disconnection can kill, citing a Chicago heatwave in which deaths were significantly reduced by up to 90per cent in fine-grain urban areas with high social connectivity. Montgomery proceeds to outline the basic ingredients for city design that can positively shape our everyday social interactions. Dispersal, he explains, is key for both a pleasant commuting experience and chance encounters with strangers.

In particular, sprawl is an enemy of the happy city.

Montgomery further calls upon a cluster of architectural evidence supporting his hypothesis that cities are happier when people bump into their neighbours. He calls upon reports affirming that people

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Then, in contrast to the isolating effects that technology and densification might have, Montgomery warns that as house sizes become smaller, public spaces play an even bigger role in society. He draws upon another experiment where participants were wired up to machines that measure arousal levels and asked to walk around the Lower East Side of New York City. The findings – that people are most aroused and happy in the jumbled old tenement blocks with small shop frontages and a diverse range of activities.

In contrast, big blocks with giant superstores expectedly provided little arousal.

Montgomery then proceeds to alter his trajectory and moves on to his second key line of argument – that happiness and equality are reciprocal. Like before, Montgomery calls upon sources of evidence that suggest status anxiety – or the perception of being worse off – creates stresses that ultimately lead to shorter, less enjoyable lives. That promoting access to the advantages of urban living is also a fundamental ingredient to the happy city. Drawing examples from urban cycling, public transit in Curitiba (Brazil),

A test group in front of a fine-grained environment that produced more happiness and arousal than a blank street edge ph. Charles Montgomery

Love Night ph. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

or public investment in parks and education in Japan, Montgomery provides precedent to his portable phrase – happy cities are equal cities. Perhaps even more encouragingly, these examples demonstrate a global urban movement, albeit in its early phases, to tackle the ingrained challenges of inequity and unhappiness in our cities.

vote more compassionately for urban policy, with a greater awareness for equality and sustainability.

Participants were asked if they would support raising the minimum wage at the start of the experiment and at the end. Pre-hugging, 80 per cent of participants replied no to raising the minimum wage. Post-hugging 90 per cent of participants answered yes.

Montgomery does offer some suggestions for the ways we might change ourselves and speed up the process of steering our urban policy towards equality and happiness. He invokes some well-known concepts – community-led small projects in combination with good mayors; invoking the help of more children (in a non-exploitative sort of way), and being cautious about the ‘help’ of engineers. Yet saving the best for last, Montgomery concludes by offering the thought that the solution to creating impetus for happy equal cities is in fact to simply begin designing happy equal cities, or that designing for happiness and equality sets into motion a virtuous cycle of more happiness and equality.

Montgomery offers boundless hope for a happy city that is powered by small everyday pleasures of urban living. We might better learn to appreciate the small moments of interaction, enjoyment, and happenstance experience that our modern cities might offer with great abundance. There is a great optimism that it might be through more social contact that we might challenge big societal issues. There is comfort in the notion that something so simple as friendly conversation, or maybe even a hug, with a neighbour may aid us in challenging urban inequality, isolation and unhappiness. In summary, Charles Montgomery’s work gives us the evidence, the trajectory, and tools we need to realise the happy city. And if you’re still unconvinced that the happy city is a necessary aspiration, I can only suggest you hug the happy urbanist – it certainly worked for me.

Montgomery’s finale is the conclusion to the Love Night New York experiment. After all the hot chocolate, heat sensitive clothing, and ultimately what was described as a festival of hug-induced oxytocin highs, the experimental findings report that happy people will

Simon Hicks is a research officer at the London School of Economics and a Young Urbanist

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Cities and our mental health We make the assumption at The Academy of Urbanism that cities are good for us. This was the conclusion of our congress in Birmingham, which focussed on health and wellbeing.

The main session and the workshops included many excellent presentations on the importance of promoting physical and mental health and the vital role that the city has to play in doing this, culminating in Charles Montgomery’s Happy City.

I happen to believe that cities are good for us, but we do sometimes fall into the trap of assuming that all good things point in the same direction. I believe in promoting health and happiness, I am committed to social justice, and am concerned that we need to do more to address sustainability, while also believing in the importance of cities. I therefore assume that urbanism is good for all these things and that the ideal sustainable city that we discussed at last year’s Congress in Bristol is remarkably similar to the healthy city that we discussed in Birmingham. This is lazy, complacent thinking. It was not so long ago that cities were seen as the cause of all of these problems rather than the solution.

Last year, I was asked to give a presentation on the ‘Mentally Healthy City’ to a large group of council officer in Leeds, half of whom were health professionals and half from the built environment.

I was at the disadvantage that most of the people in the room knew more about the subject than I did.

However, at URBED we had been working with developer igloo to incorporate health, happiness and wellbeing into their footprint policy and so we had been thinking about these issues and trying to disentangle some of the assumptions that lie behind the debate about mental health and urban life.

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The parable of the lost mining community I started the presentation with the story of Arkwright Town in Derbyshire1. This mining village of tightly packed terraced houses was condemned in 1988 because of methane seeping into the properties.

The residents were given free reign to design their new homes on a nearby site and inevitably built a suburban housing estate. The sociologist Gerda Speller undertook a long-term study of the community and her work has been widely referenced, particularly in a recent report on social sustainability by the Young Foundation2.

She found that, while people loved their new homes – the space, low heating bills, and gardens – they couldn’t work out what had happened to the village’s community spirit, and why they could no longer support a local shop or a pub. Suburban homes and cul-de-sacs it would seem are not good for community wellbeing. However, the real message of the parable is that there is a difference between what makes you happy in your home and what is good for your community. Ask people what would make them happy and it is not the city they want, the opposite in fact, they want open spaces and gardens, roads with no traffic, semi-detached homes and neighbours who are a bit like them. Do we think that they are wrong to want these things?

The human zoo

in the United States. Researchers found that the isolation and lack of community in these large early suburbs was also pretty bad for mental health – in the UK this is what became known as the New Town Blues.

Researchers found that increased levels of depression were linked to the loss of community and family support as people lived isolated lives in suburbs lacking community life or local facilities (or even a bus route to get to these things).

Much of the research into the subject suggests that the city is in fact bad for our wellbeing. A colleague of mine came across Desmond Morris’ book the Human Zoo, written in 1969 as a follow up to his book the Naked Ape. In this he suggested that humans spent tens of thousands of years living in small hunter-gatherer groups of around 60 people, each occupying an area of about 20 square miles. Today there are cities where the same territory houses six million people – something that he calls the human zoo. He suggests that humans in cities exhibit similar behaviour traits to animals in zoos, obsessive behaviour, violence, sexual perversion etc... He does, however, step back from the brink by suggesting that actually humans have adapted remarkably well to cities and the levels of aberrant behaviour is far less than you might expect.

This idea was developed by Robert Putnan. In his book Bowling Alone he describes how Americans used to belong to bowling clubs whereas now they bowl in small groups of two or three. He documents the decline in all sorts of collective activity, from scout troops and political activity to sports clubs, to map the atomisation of western society. In his congress presentation Charles Montgomery started to pull these strands together to suggest that living communally in diverse mixed-use urban areas is better for our soul than living separately in atomised suburbs. It’s not the noise and the oppression of crowds that is bad for us; we are social creatures and crave human company over greenery and solitude. Desmond Morris thought that, like breeding colonies of sea birds, humans were intellectually stimulated by massing in large numbers.

American behaviourist John Calhoun was less positive about the effects of living in cities. He spent much of his career building a series of large cages that he called ‘heavens‘. These were supplied with plentiful water and into them he placed small colonies of mice. The early days of each colony were good, and the mice did what mice do in such circumstances so that the colony grew rapidly. However, there always came a point when overcrowding caused order to break down despite food and water remaining plentiful. The mice started to exhibit all of the aberrant behavior predicted by Morris. My particular favourite group were the dissolute youth, mice who started sleeping for most of the day, causing trouble and rejecting the life of the colony. Eventually mice society breaks down completely causing the birth rate to crash and numbers to fall. However, significantly, the colony remains dysfunctional and never recovers even when the population falls. Calhoun called this the ‘behavioural sink’, which is where we get the term ‘sink estate’. He believed that the same was true of human society and that inner city problems were the inevitable result of intense urbanisation.

Hedonistic super monkeys A number of commentators have developed the idea that our nature is determined by our origins as social apes. In his book Cities for People, urbanist Jan Gehl suggests that humans are walking, talking monkeys, who feel nervous in large spaces because we can’t distinguish friend or foe more than 100m away. We have large active brains and get bored easily so need stimulation every 20 seconds. Given that we walk at around four miles an hour we require stimulation every 10m which is why we respond well to traditional urban places and hate modernist environments.

Jamie Anderson, who used to work for URBED, became interested in the subject of happiness, going on to do a PhD in the subject at the Martin Centre in Cambridge (UK). However, before that, he wrote an article for our own journal, Urban Scrawl, in which he pointed out that our origins as apes mean that we are not very good at being happy. We are programmed for pleasure seeking as part of our evolutionary nature and while this inbuilt hedonism may explain our success as super apes, it also lies behind many of our weaknesses. There are two problems that mean that we are prone to being disappointed. The first is that we are tuned to negatives. You can walk down a street for 10 years and never have any problems but if you are mugged just once that negative will change forever your attitude towards that street and maybe the whole city – we take good things for granted and notice only the problems.

The second problem is ‘hedonistic adaption’ which means that when something good happens it makes us happy for a short time, then we get used to it and it becomes the new normal. I noticed this a few years ago

Modern academic research generally doesn’t go this far. However the research community is far from united in believing that cities are good for us. Dr Tim Townshend from the Global Research Unit at Newcastle University3 has been researching the impact of cities on the heath of children. He has shown unsurprisingly that noise, lack of greenery and air pollution are all really bad for us as well as what he calls ‘toxic high streets’ full of betting shops, pawn brokers, tanning salons and takeaways. The issue is whether the response to this is to make a better city, free from these evils, or to escape the city altogether.

The suburban jungle There is also a body of research about the damaging effects of suburbia on mental and physical health.

This started as far back as the 1950s with the studies of Levittown4, one of the iconic early mass suburbs

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when I made the mistake of taking two teenage boys to buy a television. The monster that we brought home felt like a cinema for a few weeks but in a surprisingly short period of time felt just the same as the old TV. This is why reported levels of happiness and wellbeing do not improve over time despite huge improvements in our quality of life and indeed our cities.

So what sort of city should we be building?

So many articles urge us to consider wellbeing and mental health when planning our cities. But what are we supposed to do? Despite our view that cities are good for us, it is the case that most of the research and guidance in this area is decidedly anti-urban. We are told that to improve wellbeing we should be reducing densities, noise and congestion while increasing the amount of open space and generally creating far more greenery. Indeed the theory of biophillia suggests that as a species that grew up in forests we are programmed to respond positively to greenery. The problem is that these are the same issues that drove the planners of the 1960s and 70s to depopulate cities and to build suburbs and new towns. This takes us back to the parable of Arkwright – in addressing people’s immediate needs we risk undermining their quality of life in the wider community.

Social sustainability Which brings us back to The Young Foundation report on Social Sustainability. This defines social sustainability as: “A process for creating sustainable, successful places that promote wellbeing, by understanding what people need from the places they live and work. Social sustainability combines design of the physical realm with design of the social world – infrastructure to support social and cultural life, social amenities, systems for citizen engagement and space for people and places to evolve.” The report paints a practical picture of what such a neighbourhood might be like. This includes social infrastructure to bring the community together, both physical spaces and voluntary organisations. It relates to the community life of the neighbourhood, the extent to which people have contact with others, the life of the street, communal areas, etc... It includes the extent to which people have control over their lives and their community, and finally it relates to the quality of the physical environment. In the case of the latter, the suggestion is not that one type of environment is better than another, but that environments need to be flexible and responsive to community needs and controllable in part by local people.

So is the city good for us?

The New Economics Foundation’s recipe for wellbeing is based on five issues: The ability to connect with family, friends and the wider community; opportunities to be active, in terms of physical exercise; the propensity to take notice and be curious; the desire to keep learning and the chance to give, to do something nice for a friend or indeed a stranger.

This ‘five a day’ recipe for wellbeing has been widely accepted by health professionals, but its impact on the way we plan cities is difficult to pin down. Sure, we can say that the ‘keep active’ heading means more parks, sports facilities as well as opportunities for walking and cycling. But what of connecting, noticing, learning and giving? Certainly Jan Gehl’s city with stimuli every 20 seconds is going to be better than a modernist housing estate (or indeed an empty field).

However, it seems that the key message is that mental wellbeing depends on interaction with other people.

Of course the anonymity of city crowds can be as isolating and lonely as any rural area, even in very good cities. What we need to focus on is the creation of urban neighbourhoods and communities where human interactions are fostered.

Well yes and no. We need to be careful of the easy assumptions that say cities are good for wellbeing and sustainability. For some people even very good cities are not good for their wellbeing and bad cities are certainly terrible for everyone’s health. The wellbeing agenda is not a flag that we can wave to say that cities are better than suburbs or rural areas. It is a tool that we should use to make cities better. The suggestions of the Young Foundation may apply to the village and suburb as much as they do the city. However, they still provide importance guidance for those of us involved in the planning of urban areas.

David Rudlin AoU is a director of URBED and of The Academy of Urbanism

1. Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood: Building the 21st Century Home – David Rudlin and Nicholas Falk, Routledge 2009 2. Design for Social Sustainability: A Framework for creating thriving new communities – Young Foundation, 2012 3. Exploring the relationship between prevalence of overweight and obesity in 10-11 year olds and the outdoor physical environment, North East England – Tim Townshend, Director of Planning and Urban Design, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University 4. Community in History: Levittown and the Decline of a Postwar American Dream: A sociological perspective on the 50-year-old faded American “suburban legend” – Chad M. Kimmel, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania

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London going Dutch on a bicycle…

The Netherlands has long been hailed as the prime example for safe and easy cycling. Henk Bouwman, urbanist and AoU director, and Anita Dirix, a specialist on the integration of bicycle infrastructure, draw on experience within their native country to suggest how London might benefit from a cycling renaissance.

As Dutch urbanists who work regularly in London, we are impressed that it has become a city of opportunity for our pedalled friends. Rather surprisingly to us, with mayor Boris Johnson an avid cyclist, the term ‘Dutch’ has apparently become something positive as opposed to ‘going Dutch’, a ‘Dutch treat’ or ‘Dutch courage’. Things have changed and London wants to go Dutch in cycling, turning three outer-London boroughs – Enfield, Kingston and Waltham Forrest – into Mini Hollands. Over £900m will be spent on this programme over the next decade, which TfL says will “transform local cycling facilities and encourage people to take to two wheels”.

“We discovered the importance of this ambition by making the classic mistake: how stupid we were, running out of time to get to the next interview, jumping into a cab and getting stuck in Oxford Street, instead of using our Dutch reflex by jumping on a Boris-bike. Our only excuse was we were not familiar enough with the London streets to find our way. But we should have known better: the bicycle would have been the perfect choice…” Anita Dirix

Cycling has therefore become a serious business.

Serious enough for us to go out and meet people on the ground and see how London is turning Dutch.

We started by talking to representatives from the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, one of the authorities rolling out the Mini-Holland concept. Next, we met notorious cyclist and chair of New London Architecture Peter Murray, who expressed the benefits of integrating cycling into urban planning practice and the importance of behavioural aspects that influence safety. Finally, we talked to Sustrans, a sustainable transport charity that is putting planning into practice by designing and constructing routes and ‘quietways’.

of cyclists in 10 years. By 2026, this will equate to 5% of all travel taking place on two wheels. From our experience in the Netherlands, we know that if this target is met, it will have a positive impact on mobility and will help turn London into a more liveable city.

But how do you get more Londoners on to a bicycle?

The targets for London, as envisaged by Boris Johnson in The Mayor’s Vision for Cycling in London; An Olympic Legacy for all Londoners (2013), are very impressive.

The London metropolitan area is over 12 million people, two-thirds of the size of the total Dutch population, and growing. Consequently, the need for transport is growing with it. One of the solutions to tackle this growing demand is to double the number

For a minute, let’s try to understand why the Dutch cycle so much. The Netherlands is after all a cycling nation where almost everyone owns at least one bike.

We cycle a lot – albeit maybe for obvious reasons: a flat landscape, short distances, excellent facilities and networks. But it’s not always been like this.

Sometime during the ‘70s we started to realise that within our very compact and densely populated cities, the growing use of the car was causing problems.

Not only was traffic – and the huge amount of space required for parking – dominating our streets, but it was also beginning to dominate our planning policies.

The kickback started in the neighbourhood of Nieuwmarkt in Amsterdam, where a movement

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launched by citizens sought to ‘claim the streets back for pedestrians and cyclists’ and turn the area into a more liveable place. A few decades later, and with a stiff and sometimes overbearing presence from the anti-car lobby, there is now a balance between different modes of transport, including the use of bicycles. This is illustrated by the latest data on the modal split in transportation in the Netherlands: 27 per cent of all journeys and up to 34 per cent of short journeys (max. 7.5km) are done by bicycle.

Over time we started to understand the need for this variety in transport modes. With the correct balance, they keep our cities liveable, accessible and clean, and attractive places for business and living. All this has shaped our attitude to cyclists in the streets (car drivers are by and large cyclists as well), our planning practice and, importantly, the formal position of a cyclist’s safety within the public domain. Our cycle infrastructure is widely considered exemplary, but it’s worth noting that this is the result of a half-century of investment – there are rarely any quick fixes.

Cycling has become an integrated part of our urban planning policies and practice. The overall benefits of cycling have been recognised not only by the government, but also by the general public. It is a great way of moving around in the city and positive for business as well, both in terms of accessibility in and around town and for the ‘bicycle industry’.

But back to London, where cycling is now widely considered to be an integral mechanism to cope with future growth. In a city this big, and with a population and subsequent travel demand both growing, the restrictions in car usage introduced by the previous mayor were clearly not enough. Despite a very well

developed public transport network, the city centre is still jammed with cars, causing both stress and pollution.

The most obvious difference with the Dutch situation and perhaps a pointer as to why car travel is still so prevalent is London’s size – not just in terms of population, but scale. As a result of this, we would expect that the majority of distances being covered are much longer than in the Netherlands, preventing people from exploring other modes of transport.

However, we were surprised to learn that almost two-thirds of car journeys in London are fewer than five miles. The fact that only 1 per cent of these are by bicycle demonstrates the huge potential of ‘going Dutch’.

In supporting London cycling we noticed three major issues that are barely addressed: safety in a wider perspective; the facilities required for cycle parking; and the lack of integration of urban planning and mobility. It is these issues that London will need to conquer to become a city for the cyclist.

First, the strategy of going Dutch seems strongly focussed on creating a safe infrastructure by separating cyclists from cars through segregated cycle paths. However, what we have learned in the Netherlands is that safety is by and large a result of behaviour, not infrastructure. Dutch car drivers are also cyclists so they know how to anticipate a cyclist’s behaviour. So when London succeeds in boosting its bicycle infrastructure, it should also speed up a change in behaviour as well. We’re not talking about cycling lessons here. Rather, we suggest focussing on the other end. Make drivers experience cycling as

Bike culture

“For me, cycling saves time and money and it keeps me healthy. It is certainly not seen primarily as something that makes the world a better place. Cycling to my work at the centre of the city is simply the quickest way to get there. It also enables me to do some shopping on my way home and picking up my children from school at the same time. If I would like to do the same by car, it would cost me a lot more time, and a fortune on parking fees. Cycling is also easier than using public transport.

It makes me more flexible. So I am a happy cyclist. I’m happy as cycling creates easy access to all the things I do and use in daily life”. Anita Dirix 34 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 6 | Autumn 2015

part of their test to make them more aware of cyclists, and intensify the current training on anticipation for lorry-drivers.

seen, no serious answers are given to this issue.

There seems to be a tendency to address this point only after the problem arises. But a lot can be learnt from the Dutch situation, where ‘oceans of bikes’ around major railway stations have finally been neatly ordered. In Delft station, for example, a two-tier indoor storage system neatly stores up to 5,000 bikes. London should act now to integrate cycle parking into its urban planning policies and plans. That way, not only will poor safety no longer be an excuse to not travel by bike, but nor will inadequate parking.

But, most importantly, work needs to be done to encourage a behavioural shift amongst cyclists themselves to become more aware of other people on and around the road. Speeding men in Lycra still represent the majority and encouraging them through the roll out of cycle super highways only exasperates the challenge to transform cycling from a sport to transport. This shift in behavioural attitudes is so important that we believe it should be funded on par with infrastructure.

The third issue we would like to see addressed is the integration of mobility within the strategy of urban planning. There should be no urban plan approved without all modes of mobility being taking into account, including cycling, and vice versa. Here, the boroughs that aspire to become Mini Hollands have a big advantage because they are administered by one organisation, which should make the integration of such policies easier. Since the boroughs are relatively compact areas, they are in the best position to make cycling the main mode of local transport, with all the benefits that cycling has to offer, like easy access to shops, schools and work. Whatever you want to do in your own neighbourhood you should be able to do it on a bicycle.

Another aspect of safety is the legal position of the cyclist within road traffic law. All of our interviews indicated that cyclists are treated like outlaws. But traffic law should protect the most vulnerable, starting with pedestrians and then encompassing cyclists. In the Netherlands, blame is first of all directed at the driver when there is an accident involving a cyclist or pedestrian; the reasoning is that they should have better anticipated. In the UK, this seems to be the opposite as cyclists seem to be the ones on the receiving end of first-blame. This is not a pleasant position for cyclists as this clears the path for irresponsible driving and tends to make drivers unaccountable.

So, it’s great that London is going Dutch, but beware of Dutch courage as well!

The second issue we feel is lacking in the Mayor’s Vision strategy is the focus on creating sufficient bicycle parking facilities, especially in line with the city’s ambition of doubling the number of cyclists.

Since all the cycling paths will lead to the centre of London, a huge task awaits. In all the plans we have

Henk Bouwman is director Urban-imPulse.eu and a director of The Academy of Urbanism and Anita Dirix is an expert on integrating bicycle parking

Bloomsbury bikeparking

Utrecht station bike parking ph. Fietsberaad

London Londongoing goingDutch Dutchon onaabicycle... bicycle... 35

Have you ever wanted to devise a bulletproof, empirical justification for creating genuinely urban places?

Walking is good for us, so cities need to be more walkable. George Weeks explains why walking is at the centre of Transport for London’s thinking and how using walkability models can make for better urban planning.

Transport for London’s Health Action Plan1 emphasises the centrality of walking to public health. This may, at first glance, seem like an error. Why should such a mundane transport mode be at the centre of public health innovation? More to the point, what is an article on public health doing in an AoU publication? “Get back to the British Medical Journal” I hear you cry.

It would be erroneous to dismiss TfL’s health pronouncements because urban design, walking and health are inextricably linked. Recent developments at University College London (UCL) have shone an unprecedented light on this relationship. This has the potential to reshape towns and cities decisively in favour of high-density, walkable urbanism.

To understand this relationship more fully, we need to step back a million years or so, to the emergence of Homo sapiens. The evolution of human physiology reflects the conditions of a hunter-gatherer existence.

Our bodies are designed to expend large amounts of energy in pursuit of food. For 99 per cent of human history, this was inherent to our existence. Even the invention of farming in about 10,000BC did little to alter this. It has required the post-industrial society to bring humanity to a new (unprecedented) sedentary state.

Since the 1970s, medical geographers have referred to the epidemiological transition of public health.

It is worth providing some more detail on this.

An age of pestilence and famine accounted for the vast majority of human history. With the industrial revolution came the age of receding pandemics, generally associated with overcrowding and widespread infectious diseases. Following improvements to sanitation and urban planning, this has (at least

36 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 6 | Autumn 2015

in OECD countries2) given way to the Age of Degenerative and Man-Made Diseases where lifestyle, broadly speaking, has the greatest modifiable bearing on health.

In contrast to our hunting-and-gathering forebears, inactivity (i.e. less than 30 minutes moderate exercise per week) is the biggest cause of preventable death in the UK across the population. While smoking causes a similar number of annual deaths, only about 20 per cent of UK adults smoke and this rate is falling. By contrast, the majority of adults in the UK do not meet the minimum threshold for activity (150 minutes moderate activity per week) and it is a worsening trend (Fig 1).

Dr Joanna Manson of Harvard Medical School states: “Despite all the technological advances in modern medicine, regular physical activity is as close as we’ve come to a magic bullet for good health.” With such an endorsement, it is clearly in everyone’s interests to exercise regularly. So where does urban design come in? Before we go any further, an important distinction has to be made. Broadly speaking, there are two types of physical activity: • Recreational activity: playing a sport, climbing a mountain, going kayaking; all of these are recreational activities. People choose to do them for their own enjoyment.

• Utilitarian activity: this occurs as a result of some other activity, such as walking to a railway station or cycling to work that would be undertaken anyway.

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Fig 1. Ng SW & Popkin BM (2012).

Time use and physical activity: a shift away from movement across the globe. Obesity Reviews 13(8):659-680

Fig 2. The lower set of bars show the percentage of adults in London who currently meet their physical activity needs through walking and cycling.

The higher set shows the percentage that could achieve this if all walkable / bikeable journeys were made by active modes

This distinction is crucial, explains TfL and Greater London Authority public health specialist Lucy Saunders. Out of any given population, we see a drop-off in recreational activity as people get older.

This is largely due to the necessity of completing other tasks in former ‘leisure’ time, such as childcare, commuting, etc. No amount of sports ‘promotion’ will alter the number of hours in a day. For all its virtue, sport only brings benefits to the people who have the time, money and willingness to play it.

than two-thirds if the shortest motorised trips were switched to walking and cycling (Fig 2).

In short, the more a city can be designed to prioritise walking and cycling, ceteris paribus, the healthier its population will be. The question then becomes, what does ‘walkable’ look like? And can it be measured objectively? Both of these questions can be answered via the London Walkability Model, developed by Dr Ashley Dhanani at the Space Syntax Laboratory, University College London4.

Public health, like any public policy, should aim to deliver population-wide benefits to all of society, based upon objective analysis of all available evidence.

The overall aims of public health policy are as follows:

The London Walkability Model (LWM) is a sophisticated analytical tool that uses approximately 9 million data objects to model how conducive the environment is to pedestrian activity across the capital. This goes some way towards putting walkability on an equal footing with traffic engineering, which has traditionally been backed up with enormous quantitative models. This has implications for policy.

• Reduce health inequalities • Improve overall health levels TfL’s Health Action Plan3 has identified the areas in which London’s transport system has an impact on public health. The most significant of these is active travel. It is very valuable in public health terms because of its population-wide impact and because (unlike sport) people stick to it daily, for their entire lives. Everyone needs to undertake utilitarian trips as part of their day-to-day existence.

The LWM has been developed from earlier work in North America. With its complicated street network and generally high walkability5, London requires a particular approach to measuring its walkability.

The LWM uses the following four components: i. Land use diversity ii. Public transport accessibility iii. Street network accessibility (space syntax configuration) iv. Residential density

People are more likely to travel via active means (i.e. by foot or bicycle for part or all of the trip) if the environment is optimised for walking and cycling.

At present, about a quarter of adult Londoners meet all their activity needs solely through walking and cycling. This could potentially increase to more

When these are combined, a 3D map is generated, reminiscent of a relief map of the Himalayas. The higher the peak, the higher the level of walkability.

Walking is good for us

37

of Urbanism’s emphasis on multidisciplinarianism for the delivery of successful urban places. There is simply no way that a single point of view/approach can encompass all the pertinent issues. Public policy practitioners need to engage outside their immediate professional spheres. Transport and health professionals need to collaborate and understand how each other works. TfL’s Health Action Plan is a good example of this; more examples are needed.

Fig 3. 3D visualisation of London’s varying walkability

When tested against TfL’s Pedestrian Dataset (obtained from six years of London Travel Demand Survey (LTDS) data), there was a significant correlation between the walkability level as measured by the LWM Index and the reported walking levels (Fig 3.).

Of the four factors that make up the Walkability Index, the two most important are public transport and street network structure, as measured by space syntax analysis. If a place possesses high-quality public transport, well-connected streets and (importantly) reasons to go there, walking levels will increase. Thus we see an objective set of ingredients for walkability.

The LWM is a tool to aid decision-making. Here are some examples: 1) It produces London-wide predictions for walking levels. This data can be compared with empirical observations to identify opportunity areas where there are lower or higher levels of walking than would be predicted by the model. An urban designer can then identify appropriate interventions.

2) For boroughs, the Walkability Model can contribute to sub-regional plans. It can identify the peak areas for walkability for each borough, and identify where the greatest disparities between predicted and actual walking levels occur. This can then feed into joined-up strategies for increasing the levels of walking in the borough and allow interventions on a targeted basis.

3) It can be used to estimate the effects of public transport investment, such as Crossrail or the 24-hour Tube on an area’s likely change in walking activity.

4) It can be used for planning active transport networks (both walking and cycling) that work with the grain of the city’s streets, and provide insight into the optimal routes that would be potentially most useful and used.

On a broader level, emphasises Dhanani, the LWM shows that a multidisciplinary approach to policymaking is vital. This reflects The Academy

38 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 6 | Autumn 2015

It is important to remember that the LWN is a model.

It is not an oracle. It is a starting point for a site visit by a trained professional with a specific set of objectives. Dhanani also emphasises the importance of site visits and understanding local issues. One important determinant of pedestrian movement in a street is the amount of motor traffic; an increase in a street’s walkability may depend on there being fewer cars6.

To conclude, we have seen that public policy should aim to bring about population-wide benefits. Those arising from regular physical activity are substantial.

Recent advances have allowed us to show robustly that the walkable environment correlates with people’s propensity to walk.

It is therefore possible to show objectively that the healthiest urban form is one with high residential density, a well-connected street network, a rich mix of land uses and high quality public transport. All of these characteristics contribute decisively to the richness of the urban fabric; they also reflect much of the AoU’s Manifesto. This in turn reflects the multidisciplinary approach that has to underpin successful city-making.

In direct contrast to the superficial (and highly flawed) rationalism of the likes of Le Corbusier, this is a truly objective approach to urban design and planning.

This article was written by George Weeks, Urban Designer at TfL and Young Urbanist, assisted by Dr Ashley Dhanani, Research Associate at the Space Syntax Laboratory, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and Lucy Saunders, a Consultant in Public Health at the Greater London Authority and TfL. 1. tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/improving-the-health-oflondoners-transport-action-plan.pdf 2. Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities, Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank, Richard J. Jackson; (2004) Island Press.

3. tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/improving-the-health-oflondoners-transport-action-plan.pdf 4. This work forms part of the Street Mobility and Network Accessibility research project funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

5. The contrast between walkable and non-walkable environments is much higher in the USA than in Europe. For an excellent introduction to this topic, read The Geography of Nowhere: Rise and Decline of America’s Man-made Landscape; J. H. Kunstler (1993).

6. See also Heath Impact of Cars in London (GLA, 2015) london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Health_Impact_of_Cars_in_ London-Sept_2015_Final.pdf

Designing healthy behaviours Preventable diseases and health inequality are unwittingly being designed into our neighbourhoods according to Rachel Toms, programme lead for Active by Design at Design Council Cabe. Stephen Gallagher speaks to Toms to find out what can be done.

Copyright Design Council 2015

The way in which the lifestyle you choose can help make or break not just your body but also your mind is a realisation that has exploded into public consciousness in recent years. Indeed, in the wake of what seems like a daily flow of articles about the cognitive benefits of cycling, campaigns by celebrity chefs about the dangers of a poor diet and stories of the growing numbers of smokers who are turning to ‘vaping’ for a safe nicotine hit, there won’t be a part of your day left that hasn’t been influenced by those that know better. The result, it is hoped, is that we are making more informed choices about our physical and mental wellbeing. A major report recently published

by Public Health England, and which received national press coverage1, seemed to back this up with news that England, after lagging behind like a wheezing smoker, has finally caught up with the life expectancy of its Western neighbours.

All of which is good, of course. But hold the celebrations.

If you dig a little deeper, as pointed out in a recent article by The Telegraph, you will find that the headlines

40 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 6 | Autumn 2015

mask some disturbing figures that show that “children growing up in the richest areas of Britain can expect to live a full, active life for as much as 20 years longer than their counterparts in the poorest neighbourhoods.”2 What this means is that, yes, you can live longer than ever before, but unless you can afford the right kinds of foods or the gym membership, or are able to choose to live a pleasant walk away from the shops, you may well find that a healthy lifestyle doesn’t come easily.

And this is even before you begin to consider the areas over which your average citizen has no control: enter the built environment.

But as the urban experimentalist Charles Montgomery pointed out in his talk at the recent Academy Congress, your work – Academicians, that’s you – is the single most important in the world. “You’re not just building and shaping cities and communities,” he said, “your work will determine whether people are healthy or sick, whether they are connected or disconnected, whether they are rich or poor.”

Design Council Cabe’s four functions of designing healthier places

So, with all of this influence to wield, isn’t it about time for the built environment to get it right?

but making them highly desirable, and therefore the natural choice. The point is that, particularly in deprived communities, the best way to increase healthy behaviours is for those activities to be an integral part of people’s everyday lives, rather than an add-on, like choosing to join a gym. So whether you are talking about a home, a school or an office, a street or a neighbourhood, or even a town, we should be designing places in which healthy activities are an integral part of everyday life – with walking at the top of the list.”

Rachel Toms, programme lead for Design Council Cabe’s Active by Design initiative, is one of a growing number of urbanists urging her colleagues to take healthy environments more seriously. “Preventable diseases are still a big problem in this country. Over the last century we have successfully designed out infectious diseases from our towns and cities through sanitation and regulation, but we have inadvertently designed in the right conditions for cardio vascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and many other problems associated with physical inactivity,” says Toms.

In its work to help developers and local authorities understand the significant challenges that their projects are up against, the Active by Design programme has identified four overarching functions through which health can be built into both new and regenerated places: physical activity, healthy food, positive social contact and contact with nature. For Toms, this is a process of facilitation. “People, to a large extent, are a product of their environment and we [built environment professionals] are creating that environment. There’s very strong evidence linking the four functions to positive health outcomes, both physical and mental,” she argues.

Having started out in landscape architecture, Toms moved on to design advice and now heads Design Council Cabe’s Active by Design initiative, which champions the creation of healthy buildings, streets, parks and neighbourhoods. Their in-house team and network of 36 Active by Design experts advise local authorities, construction companies and community groups on how to build health into their projects through good design. And according to research, it’s not a moment too soon: physical inactivity, for instance, causes 40 per cent of long-term health conditions and costs the UK economy a staggering £20bn each year, with the NHS spending £900m annually for treating the consequences of a sedentary lifestyle. The rewards for solving this problem are evident not only for our health and wellbeing, but clearly financially, too.

“We can design these functions into places, or we can design them out, and we have experience of doing both!

In planning, design and development, house building and regeneration we have to start taking more responsibility for the health consequences of the places we create.

Because if we are really going to achieve a change in the way we shape our towns and cities, that probably means not creating urban sprawl on the edge of cities to meet housing demand, it means meeting housing demand in a different way. It also means reshaping our streets so that they are much friendlier to pedestrians, then cyclists, then public transport users. It’s clear that if people’s health is prioritised, then you can end up with a place, a street or a city centre that ticks all of the boxes in terms of quality of life, good environmental performance, and helping the local economy to thrive.”

But as Design Council Cabe itself says, there is no single panacea – it will be solved by many simple and practical solutions. “It’s about everyday life in a particular place involving activities and behaviours which are essentially healthy,” Toms says. “This means that walking or cycling to school or to the shops is the first choice because it’s the most straightforward or most the appealing way to get there. That’s what we’re trying to achieve. Not just making healthy behaviours possible,

Activating the environment by design

41

One example where this type of thinking has been put into action is Bradford’s City Park, a recipient of the Academy’s Great Place award and part of the city’s 20-year regeneration strategy. Design Council Cabe says that the transformation of this previously inhospitable space into an interactive water feature and focal point has encouraged over 150,000 additional trips a year to the city centre, almost all of which have involved physical activity. While the water increases revelers’ contact with nature, the numerous cultural celebrations that take place in this space, which attract up to 10,000 people on site, increase social contact.

But most importantly, this is a space that is accessible to everybody.

However, there is a long way to go to convince or indeed educate people about the risks posed to their future health from a poorly performing environment.

Take healthy food for example. In recent years campaigns by celebrities such as Jamie Oliver about the levels of harmful additives in food have shifted behaviours. But this scale of public awareness simply doesn’t yet exist for the built environment. That said, digging a little deeper beyond the large capital projects there is real progress being made through softer initiatives at a smaller scale. In the city of Stockholm, for example, 66 per cent of people have been tempted away from an escalator and into using one set of stairs by the allure of something fun – musical piano steps. Despite the scale of this project, the important point is that ideas like this can tap into any aspect of your life to shift behaviour.

In the end, how do we really know what works and what the impact of such initiatives is? Toms is quite clear that measuring outcomes for people’s health is something that needs to improve and eventually become matter of course in construction and regeneration projects. “There is significant potential

Images – copyright Design Council 2015

42 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 6 | Autumn 2015

to use local data to measure the effects of building and regeneration projects on people’s health. Local authorities and clinical commissioning groups are already gathering lots of data on health, which I think we should be using as we design the places that people use and inhabit. This is something the built environment professions really need to consider for the future.”

So given that the solutions seem obvious, why aren’t more of our new and regenerated places combating the problem rather than amplifying it? According to Toms, a key part of the solution is leadership.

“I think power is dispersed and a little fractured, which is one of the reasons why we end up with ‘business as usual’ housing delivery that often leads to car-orientated sprawl. There is a strong role for leadership, which could come from either national government or local government, or indeed a city mayor.

And designers have an important role to play in making healthy activities integral to people’s lives in the places they create. We all need to start talking about what is and what isn’t acceptable for urban growth, or the regeneration of existing towns and cities, in terms of the role of the built environment in influencing people’s health.”

For more information visit: designcouncil.org.uk/projects/active-design Stephen Gallagher is deputy director of operations at The Academy of Urbanism

1. theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/14/health-lifeexpectancy-england-regional-differences-poorest-richest 2. telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10699077/Rich-will-live-lifeto-the-full-20-years-longer-than-poor-official-figures-show.html

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Space for great places!

The great places here are an opportunity to share what we love and know about the urban environment.

As you can see they range from small to large, inside and outside, and singularly identifiable to abstracted ideas of what a great place is.

Please send us your great places so that we can share them in the next edition. Be imaginative and creative – we want to make these places live on our pages. Send us an image, a drawing, a poem, a…you decide.

Send contributions to sg@academyofurbanism.org.uk

A walk through a London market David Yates, Young Urbanist

Ambling along the corridors of the market I snap a few pictures and mutter to myself: just another odd character surrounded by many. At one stall this observation seems wrong – both stall and trader appear to have come from the same distressed, almost dark, world. The man is tall, thin, and is adorned – rather than dressed – in torn clothing that neither looks old enough, nor worn enough, to be so frayed. Each item of apparel has been specifically selected as a direct statement. It is not that he has worn the items to the point of ripping, this man is wearing the torn clothing as a symbol, a sign of distress.

The tears are well balanced and although large areas of skin show on his torso and legs, his clothing remains functional – just. Those areas of skin showing are liberally covered in tattoos, covering much of his neck and arms, all the way down to the hands – which are the most striking. Small diamond-shaped tattoos in close tessellation cover over half of the skin on both of his hands. Alongside, bracelets and bangles, necklaces and earrings also sit under long hair that is not exactly limp, but far from styled.

This trader, like his clothes, matches his stock: they are tattered belongings and found objects made into curiosities – put into relief by his shoes. Sitting at the end of the skinny grey jeans are a pair of shiny, clean black boots. They are heavily styled with black and white faux animal markings and worn in a particular fashion – untied with the tongue sticking out.

Often this man is accompanied by – or he accompanies, it is not clear – a beautiful, and equally thin and styled 44 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 6 5 | Spring Autumn2015 2015

woman. Dressed to match, she carries the same pattern of tattoos on her hands, yet slightly fewer in number.

Are they a tally, a record of something?

A technology of sorts, something to remind them as they reach with their bare hands through the world. Often this trader appears with a tatty top hat, as he stands in front of his stall, rather than behind like almost all other traders.

To him this marketplace is neither about style nor is it work, but it is money and opportunity – a place where such things are still available to one distressed by life. His stall, much like himself, symbolises darkness and decay. Old plastic dolls’ heads pulled from a skip perch next to one another in rows. Black feathers sit on dark velvet headdresses beside images of children with forlorn faces smothered in dirt. Shrunken monkey heads, sculls, and complete sets of human teeth are displayed against green velvet and framed in dark wood. They are macabre – often ‘found’ items, but crafted with skill and vision.

Dark and decaying, they are like the trader and his partner: beautiful in their reclamation of death. Another joins him at the stall and this newcomer confirms the style choices: matching the stallholder in his tattered shirt, earrings and scruffy hair – yet bereft of tattoos. It is nearing lunch on a weekday and he sits, not working, just passing time, helping to make the pile of dog-ends on the floor bigger. As he sits, I note his torn short and holey jeans – but his shoes are new, shiny brown leather boots and tied loosely on his feet, tongue hanging out.

A place to remember Linda Gledstone Staithes ph. Vaidotas Miseikis

To me, a great place is more than just bricks and mortar. It’s about the memories it evokes, the tales it tells and the activities which unfold.

Staithes in North Yorkshire is one place which for me has become a great place.

An historical fishing village on the North East coast, Staithes is now predominately aimed at tourists who are attracted by its picturesque location and holiday cottages.

Whilst I was growing up, my dad saw potential in this, especially as its proximity to Sheffield meant he needn’t take more than a few days’ holiday from the family business. Its sheltered harbour is a small and perfectly formed paradise in which some of my most vivid memories are bound. From the time at nine years old I saved a small boy from the rocks, to the day we scattered my Mum’s ashes on the beach

– not to mention the crazy weekend trips with friends in the back of a Transit van – it has been a space for me to both absorb and contemplate life.

I’m writing this having not visited in a few years, but this for me is the power of a great place; as the pubs and Staithes bonnet hats diminish, and the holiday-lets increase, to me it will always be a place worth visiting.

Vancouver Michael Short AoU The Vancouver skyline ph. dreamstime.com

I fell in love with Vancouver the first time I visited in 2007. It was not only just the stunning natural backdrop to the city provided by the mountains to the north and the sea to the west, and the cluster of glittering tall buildings in Downtown. Rather it was, as I soon learned, the intimate relationship between them nurtured through rigorous and creative urbanism that sought this harmony.

Having recently completed a PhD on the impact of tall buildings on the character of cities, this trip was a salutary lesson in how positive good urbanism could be for the evolution of places, and the promotion of top quality places through specific building projects.

Vancouverism, as this place-specific approach to urbanism is known, emerged from the ‘80s onwards and has a number of distinct elements which has resulted in the city as we now see it – tall, but widely separated,

towers interspersed with low-rise buildings, public spaces, small parks and pedestrian-friendly streetscapes to minimize the impact of a highdensity population, and mixed uses at street level.

I revisited the city in 2010 and examined the promotion of one particular building, the Living Shangri-La tower (mixed-use, 57 storey tower designed to be the tallest in the city) through the regulatory system. The site of the tower was identified as a site for the development of a higher building, to a height of 183m (although the western part of the site is limited by the protection of a view from Heather Bay to the Lions). The negotiation of the zoning application centred around the proposed building height, and its relationship to this view corridor.

The protection of that view remained sacrosanct throughout the discussions for the new tower’s design, height and

form resulting in an axial slash across the site.

The city recognised early on that there were, in fact, very few possibilities in Downtown for a tall building to punch above the general building height and thereby create a skyline of interest.

I was particularly impressed that whilst the building had its detractors, the regulatory system promoted a relationship between the character of the city, the new building and its design quality. Surely we have much to learn from this clear and innovative example.

Gallery Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action

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I Lost My Heart in San Francisco Phoebe Atkey phoma.co.uk

Originally drawn in pen, San Francisco’s streets and buildings are simply beautiful, before they surrender to the Pacific’s summer oddity and disappear from sight, surrendering to the sea mist.

Illustration by Phoebe Atkey

46 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 5 | Spring 2015

Bobures, the other face of urbanism: reflections from Lake Maracaibo Symon Sentain AoU

I arrive at the tiny Miguel Urdaneta Fernandez Airport in Zulia State, Venezuela, and then board the only bus that will take me to the Sucre District, and the small town of Bobures, the place of my birth, land of my ancestors.

It’s 4am and yet, as we drive through La Plaza Rafael Urdaneta Avenida and Los Aldredores de la Plaza, the street musicians are still on the corner playing the polyrhythms, syncopated notes, and multiple musical time signatures of salsa on makeshift instruments. Couples, old, young, and somewhere in between, strut their stuff in complex turns, spins and shuffles.

I smile. ‘Bobureanos y Bobureanas’ – the men and women of Bobures – are considered the best salsa dancers in all of Venezuela. It is easy to see why: we are in a constant flux of impromptu dance that I’m only conscious of when I return.

We approach La Iglesia Virgen del Carmen, the town’s Catholic Church.

Under the covered narthex the vigil choir sings a Gregorian chant, Boburesstyle, adapted to allow for a Salsa-inspired musical accompaniment and a dance, bequeathed by our African

ancestors. I glimpse the nave, both the Gospel and the Epistle sides, as well as the wonderful Chancel, all borrow freely from our African and Amerindian heritage – a natural conjugation of African, South American, and European.

The Mercado del Pescadores – the town’s fish market – plies its trade, the buyers out early to snag the best fish from Lake Maracaibo along which Bobures closely sits.

Outside El Centro Clinico Ambulatorio, our general hospital, a group of four elders sits at a small square table playing dominos. Each player stands, when it’s their turn, to slam a domino down with force, a theatre of movement.

Showering and putting on a T-shirt and shorts, I retrieve my Chimbanguela drum, and walk 50 yards to my cousins on the beach. I immediately join in the musical ensemble, weaving in my rhythmical counterpoint. The music ebbs and flows, reflecting Lake Maracaibo’s ceaseless motion. We sing an old Simon Bolivar ‘anthem’ as we play, a joyous remembrance.

This is Bobures, a town through which a musical heartbeat keeps time with the seasons and which never ceases to dance in celebration of its architecture, spaces, culture and peoples.

It’s 5am, when I arrive. However, I must make my excuses to various family members – too tired.

I awake to the sound of Chimbanguelas drums, a call to musical arms. Opening the window, I look out at the sandy beach of Lake Maracaibo and across the gleaming waters. I breathe in.

It smells good, wholesome.

ph. Terenzio Soldovieri

Gallery Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action

47

Urban Mediaspace Aarhus Dokk1 Torben Brandi Nielsen AoU

On 20 June 2015 the new Urban Mediaspace Aarhus Dokk1 – our main library – opened. It’s situated at the spot where the small river Aarhus Å enters the inner harbour, right where the city was founded more that 1,000 years ago.

The building is 30,000m2 – 18,000 of which are devoted to the Library. But by far the best aspect is the number of visitors. The first month it received 120,000 people – in a city with only 320,000 inhabitants.

More than three times that of the old library. It’s a family-orientated place, both inside and out. Children are welcome, as are the city’s 50,000 students.

The building also celebrates new life: a 7.5m long brass gong hanging down in one of the high rooms is hit, reverberating across the building, every time a new citizen is born.

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Dokk1 Aarhus ph. News Oresund

My own view is…

We must empower collaborative people to act!

by Jane Briginshaw AoU

The first person to stand up is Honor Massarella, then Jo Gooding, then Carol Botten. It’s a packed room, buzzing with infectious energy and excitement. “Forty people have joined…” They’re telling us how many people have come on board in Leeds.

Expansion plans are already needed for the Cardiff chapter. The women are not always self-assured but as they hit their stride we all feel as if maybe this time the world could change.

It’s Urbanistas – the women-led network, empowering collaborative people to act and do ‘urban’ in more social ways and ‘flip the ratio’ of male and female visibility in politics, business and urban life. We’re talking about all-women platforms, changing the nature of ‘panel land’. What we are seeing is one of the new unions in full flow. Started by Liane Hartley and Rachel Fisher three years ago, Urbanista women have pretty much eaten the ground in front of them.

The thinking behind the network goes like this.

The drivers behind the way cities are changing are increasingly social (social networks; peer-to-peer and anonymous sharing; the rise of good business; behavioral economics; emotional intelligence; collaborations between unlikely partners such as big business and small producers), being disruptive, less corporate, more DIY and spontaneous.

Women seem to naturally operate more in this way. If this is really the way business and cities are going, then perhaps this is the best time for women to grasp the nettle and seize the opportunity to be leaders. Urbanistas is there to help grow that leadership (at all levels) and encourage women to start something of their own that has positive social benefits for cities and the people that live there.

Our motto is ‘start by starting’ and is about not having to wait until your idea is perfect, fully formed, boxes all ticked and given permission for – sometimes you just need to do one tiny thing to get you going.

Switch to Cowcross Street: UCL’s Matthew Carmona is telling The Academy of Urbanism about the leadership gap left by CABE, the ‘proven benefits of making good places’ and Place Alliance – the movement that ‘brings together organisations and individuals who share a belief that the quality of the built environment has a profound influence on people’s lives’.

The Alliance is broad too, aiming to bring together ‘the multiple agencies of government… connecting through to industry, the professions and community groups active in the field’.

Urbanistas are empowering collaboration on projects and ideas that make everyday life in cities better, the Place Alliance is collaborating to improve the status of placemaking, and The Trouble Club is challenging the idea that women aren’t interested in politics or tech, business or philosophy, that we can’t argue or lack spatial awareness, that we are risk-averse, that all we read is fiction.

And have a look online at Clarence Eckerson Jr. making fantastical transportation media for Streetsfilms.

Sit back for the best seven minutes of your day and see the parklet programme, which converts parking spaces into public space complete with tables, chairs, art, and greenery. You will see why this hugely creative brand of advocacy film-making is changing the nature of planning streets for people and places.

Have you noticed these movements and unions springing up? With no wish to over dramatise, I can’t help seeing

parallels with spontaneous movements of the Arab Spring, Occupy, Podemos and Syriza, borne out of deep frustration with the way things are.

Exasperation too with the desperately slow pace of change: for example when, after years of heavy lifting, my main road, serving no less than five schools, remains a hostile and scary traffic corridor for children and adults and I can’t seem to do a thing about it?

We must be in a widespread period of transition causing us to react in similar ways. Many feel that the current political institutions are ineffective; many want to challenge the status quo for the purpose of claiming representation for their own values and interests. There is still plenty of room for these movements to grow because, unlike the famous social movements, our homegrown examples did not start as social media sensations.

We naturally create meaning through interaction, instinctively know that networking operates through the act of communication. We are swept along as we experience the means of communication changing and see new, free space opening up. We are empowered by space that is not controlled in the traditional way. So we can have real hope that we might actually, finally make change happen.

Of course, the consequences of these unions are unpredictable, but even if they are only simple networks of people who want to get things done, we might just be experiencing an ‘enough is enough’ moment that changes everything.

Jane Briginshaw AoU is head of design and sustainability at the Homes and Communities Agency urbanistasuk.wordpress.com Editor’s introduction Gallery | My | AoU owninview Action is... 49

Urban idiocy

Brilliant ideas that ruined our cities Part three: our addiction to grass and trees Most urban idiocy stems from the old maxim that you can have too much of a good thing. Once an urban good is identified – be it health, clean air, pedestrian safety, low levels of congestion – professions are set up to pursue this good and they do so to the exclusion of other urban issues.

Nowhere is this truer than with grass and trees. People like grass and trees.

If you ask them, they will tell you that they like them a lot and, if you give them the choice, they will gorge themselves on this urban salad until they make themselves sick.

Like all urban idiocy this starts with an issue of real concern. The Victorian city was deficient in green space. There were large swathes of Victorian Britain, particularly those housing the poor, where there was barely a blade of grass, let alone trees, play spaces, sports fields and parks. Social reformers rightly identified that this was really bad for the mental and physical health of urban populations, who suffered from lack of exercise and clean air, and the psychological deprivation of being cut off from nature. The result was the

municipal parks movement that has given us some of our most magnificent urban spaces. Urban reformers took this further, arguing that green space should be integrated into the fabric of urban areas. The Garden City movement promoted the integration of development with green space while Raymond Unwin argued for standards of open space linked to an area’s population. In his 1912 pamphlet, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, he reasoned that, since a certain population required a certain amount of open space, increasing the density of people in a neighbourhood only increased the need for open space and therefore decreased the amount of land available to accommodate those people. The Garden City at its 12-15 homes-to-the-acre was of course the ideal density to balance these issues.

The real radicals were, however, the modernists. In Radiant City, Le Corbusier swept away dark overcrowded cities with their hateful streets, clogged with cafés and the like. He argued that we should instead elevate our cities as towers, bathed in sunlight and set on piloti to allow a Teletubby landscape of grass and trees to cover the whole land area (never mind that grass and trees

50 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 6 | Autumn 2015

don’t really grow under cover). Across the country, slums were swept away to be replaced with council estates on columns set within a verdant landscape of grass and trees – what could possibly go wrong? Meanwhile, in other parts of cities, as industry closed down and sites fell vacant, the Derelict Land Grant act was used to raze whole districts and turn them back to grassland. Parks departments were so overwhelmed with the task of cutting these vast grasslands that they were forced to largely abandon the Victorian parks to concentrate on the task.

Faced with a lonely walk over unlit grassland, strewn with wind-blown litter and marked by the landmark pyres of burnt-out cars, past the parade of boarded up shops and roofless church that closed down because they lost their customers/congregation, you would think that local residents would take against this obsession with greenery? People are only too aware of the problems but as far as they are concerned the issue is not the open space but the people (the other people that is). “You can’t develop the green space”, they say, “that would be terrible.

It would only bring more people into

the area who are the cause of all of the problems”. People are addicted to this greenery; no matter how much harm it does them they demand another fix.

This is not to say that green space is not important. It provides space for recreation, play and sports, it allows ecological diversity, helps microclimates and air quality and is good for wellbeing. It is just that, like many good things, these benefits do not necessarily increase in proportion to the amount of open space provided.

There comes a point where there is so much open space that the density of activity falls, undermining local shops and facilities, as well as bus services.

The open space makes walking trips longer and less safe so that people use cars, and in poorer areas, even taxis.

The lack of pedestrians, of course, just makes the area feel even less safe, leaving unsupervised open areas to be taken over by gangs of youths. So, yes, you can have too much of a good thing.

Much of the urban idiocy exposed in this column is thankfully a thing of the past. Not so with open space. We may have moved away from the Corbusian extremes of the modernists, but planners are still addicted to grass and trees and

this is one of the few areas where they have the whole hearted support of the public. The most commonly observed open space policy in the UK is, what used to be called, the Six Acre Standard, promoted by the National Playing Field Association (NPFA) and first published in 1925. NPFA is now called FIT (Fields in Trust) and their modern standard suggests 1.6ha of sports fields and 0.8ha of play provision per 1,000 people (say 400 homes).

Natural England also has standards suggesting that every home should be within 300m of a 2ha natural space and that there should be 1ha of nature reserve for every 1,000 people. Meanwhile, the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners suggests a standard of 20 plots per 1,000 households.

Many local plans adopt these standards because they seem sensible, have public support and save them having to do their own assessment. Some authorities have done open space assessments of their area calculating the amount of open space in each ward compared to the ‘requirements’ based on its population. Unsurprisingly, the more lively urban wards are all terribly deficient in terms of open space.

Despite this, few question whether

such standards might make it impossible to create good urban environments. What I can tell you is that this is exactly what these standards do – they make it impossible to build at anything other than suburban densities for the very reasons that Raymond Unwin pointed out in 1912. Increasing densities becomes subject to the laws of diminishing returns because higher densities mean that more land has to become open space. The logical conclusion of this gets us back to Le Corbusier’s towers.

Great cities like Paris are woefully deficient in open space by these standards but what they lack in quantity, they make up for in terms of quality. This is where we should be focusing our efforts to create urban areas that include quality open spaces, that create opportunities for recreation and escape and that are net contributors to biodiversity. Compared to this, blunt open space standards that are widely adopted as planning policy but mitigate against good urban development really are a contemporary form of idiocy.

The Urban Idiot

Urban idiocy 51

Academicians

DIRECTORS

ACADEMICIANS

From top left to right

Arthur Acheson Prof Robert Adam Marcus Adams Lisa Addiscott Lynda Addison OBE Dr Husam Al Waer Kyle Alexander OBE Malcolm Allan Joanna Allen Ben Allgood Ewan Anderson Kathryn Anderson Nigel Anderson Ian Angus Debbie Aplin Judith Armitt George Arvanitis Sam Ashdown Stephen Ashworth Alastair Atkinson Jasvir Atwal Jeff Austin Nicola Bacon Samer Bagaeen Alastair Baird Prof Chris Balch Yolande Barnes Alistair Barr Prof Hugh Barton John Baulch Will Bax Alan Baxter CBE Simon Bayliss Ian Beaumont Craig Becconsall Matthew Bedward Paul Bedwell Simon Bee Andrew Beharrell Keith Bell Neil Bennett Robert Bennett

Andrew Burrell Prof Kevin Murray Henk Bouwman Janet Sutherland John Thompson (Honorary President) David Rudlin Steven Bee (Chairman) Pam Alexander OBE Tony Reddy Biljana Savic Tim Stonor Bob Young

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Duncan Berntsen John Best John Betty Richard Bickers David Bishop Deirdre Black Philip Black Adam Blacker Alastair Blyth Martin Boddy Kristiaan Borret Nicholas Boys Smith Mark Bradbury Rosemary Bradley Angela Brady Noel Brady Torben Brandi Nielsen Chris Brett Eddie Bridgeman Guy Briggs Jane Briginshaw Annabel Brown Patricia Brown Samantha Bryans Craige Burden Mark Burgess Sarah Burgess Jonathan Burroughs Richard Burton Peter Butenschøn Prof Georgia Butina Watson Peter Butter Karen Cadell Gerry Cahill Fiona Campbell Charles Campion Steve Canadine Tony Carey Fredrik Carlsson Matthew Carmona Simon Carne James Carr Sam Cassels

Philip Cave Tim Challans Marion Chalmers Joanna Chambers Dominic Chapman Richard Charge Ming Cheng Alain Chiaradia Nick Childs Dominic Church Tom Clarke Anne Cleary Clare Coats Dr Jim Coleman Robert Coles Garry Colligan Paul Collins Martin Colreavy Max Comfort Brian Condon Charlotte Cook Karen Cooksley Prof Rachel Cooper OBE Ian Corner Cara Courage Will Cousins Rob Cowan David Cowans Toby Crayden Joe Crockett Emily Crompton Chris Crook Adam Crozier Ciaran Cuffe Linda Curr Peter Cusdin Ned Cussen Justine Daly Jane Dann Alex Davey Philip Davies Mark Davy Eric Dawson James de Havilland Neil de Prez Sophia de Sousa Ian Deans Toby Denham Guy Denton Nick Dermott Clare Devine Catherine Dewar Hank Dittmar Lord John Doune Prof John Drever Paul Drew Eugene Dreyer Peter Drummond Michael Duff Tony Duggan Paul Dunne Paul Durnien John Dyke Nigel Dyke Richard Eastham David Edwards

Elad Eisenstein Mark Elton Luke Engleback Gavin Erasmus Karen Escott Roger Estop Prof Brian Evans Prof Graeme Evans Roger Evans Wyn Evans Dr Nicholas Falk Kerri Farnsworth Max Farrell Sir Terry Farrell Ian Fenn Jaimie Ferguson Frances Fernandes Stephanie Fischer Andrew Fisher Helen Fisher David Fletcher Prof Carlotta Fontana Sue Foster OBE Bernie Foulkes Ted Fowler Jane Fowles Simon Foxell Edward Frampton Alan Francis Peter Frankum Daisy Froud Sandra Fryer Tim Gale Catherine Gallagher Jeremy Gardiner Carole Garfield Lindsay Garratt Tim Garratt Angus Gavin John Geeson Peter Geraghty Lia Ghilardi Andy Gibbins Prof Mike Gibson Ian Gilzean Stephen Gleave Dick Gleeson Guy Goodman Keith Gowenlock Michele Grant Mark Greaves Jonathan Greenfield Ali Grehan James Gross Simon Guest Richard Guise Patrick Gulliver Paul Hackett Leo Hammond Tim Hancock Philip Harcourt Geoff Haslam David Hastings John Haxworth Philip Hayden Michael Hayes CBE

Peter Heath Tina Heathcote Michael Hegarty David Height Russell Henderson Simon Henley James Hennessey Tim Hewitt Paul Hildreth Stephen Hinsley Eric Holding Peter Hollis Stephen Hollowood David Howard Stephen Howlett Robin Hoyles Jun Huang Simon Hubbard Anthony Hudson Jonathan Hughes Michael Hurlow John Hyland Tony Ingram James Jackson Julian Jackson Philip Jackson Colin James Dr Noel James Amy Jefferies Ruth Jeffs Timothy Jemison Cathy Johnston Gregory Jones Howard Jones Peter Jones Rory Joyce Gesine Junker Martina Juvara Gavin Kain Dr Kari Kankaala Dr Kayvan Karimi Philip Kassanis Despina Katsikakis John Kelpie Steve Kemp Jonathan Kendall David Kennedy Justin Kenworthy Mary Kerrigan Ros Kerslake Anne Kiernan David King Martyn Kingsford OBE Janice Kirkpatrick Angela Koch Felicie Krikler Charles Landry Richard Latcham Derek Latham Michele Lavelle Diarmaid Lawlor John Letherland Michael Lewis Stephen Lewis Alex Lifschutz Einar Lillebye Michael Liverman David Lock CBE Fred London John Lord Mark Lucas Aylin Ludwig David Lumb Maja Luna Jorgensen Nikolas Lyzba Carol MacBain Robin Machell Roddie Maclean Keiji Makino Geoffrey Makstutis Grace Manning-Marsh Andreas Markides Peter Marsh Dr Katherine Martindale

Andrew Matthews Bob May Steve McAdam John McAslan John McCall Prof Michael McGarry Kevin McGeough Martin McKay Craig McLaren Mette McLarney Craig McWilliam Stephan Miles-Brown Gerry Millar Robert Millar Nikola Miller Adrian Millicheap Stephanie Mills Dr Negin Minaei Shane Mitchell Kris Mitra Dr John Montgomery Cllr John Moreland Paul Morsley Richard Motley John Muir Ronnie Muir Dr Claudia Murray Deborah Murray Prof Gordon Murray Hugh Murray Peter Murray Lucy Natarajan Stephen Neal Marko Neskovic Francis Newton Lora Nicolaou Dr Olli Niemi Ross Nimmo Malcolm Noble Hugo Nowell Richard Nunes Craig O’Brien Calbhac O’Carroll Killian O’Higgins Dr Dellé Odeleye Simon Ogden Tiago Oliveira Trevor Osborne Paul Ostergaard Erik Pagano Chris Pagdin Dr Susan Parham Kevin Parker Phil Parker Fiona Parry Sowmya Parthasarathy Nikhil Pase Liz Peace Richard Pearce Adam Peavoy Russell Pedley Ross Peedle Prof Alan Penn Hugh Petter Louisa Philpott Jon Phipps James Pike Ben Plowden Demetri Porphyrios Prof David Porter Robert Powell Sunand Prasad John Prevc Dr Darren Price David Prichard Paul Prichard John Pringle Stephen Proctor Steve Quartermain CBE Helen Quigley Shane Quinn Colin Rae Andrew Raven Mike Rawlinson

Richard Reid Elizabeth Reynolds Christopher Rhodes Patrick Richard Sue Riddlestone OBE Antony Rifkin Marion Roberts Prof Peter Roberts OBE Dickon Robinson Dr Rick Robinson Sandy Robinson Bryan Roe Nick Rogers Anna Rose Richard Rose-Casemore Graham Ross Jon Rowland Sarah Royle-Johnson Dr Andrew Ryder Robert Sakula Huseyin Salih Rhodri Samuel Clare San Martin Andrew Sanderson Peter Sandover Astrid Sanson Hilary Satchwell George Saumarez Smith Keith Savage Arno Schmickler Dominic Scott Sharon Scott Symon Sentain Toby Shannon Chris Sharpe Cath Shaw Richard Shaw Barry Shaw MBE Keith Shearer Michael Short Anthony Shoults Ron Sidell Paul Simkins Dr Richard Simmons Tim Simpson Alan Simson Anna Sinnott Ann Skippers Jef Smith Roger Smith Carole Souter CBE Adrian Spawforth Andy Spracklen Alan Stewart Peter Stewart Susan Stirling Rosslyn Stuart Peter Studdert Nicholas Sweet Ian Tant Jonathan Tarbatt David Taylor Ed Taylor Nick Taylor Rebecca Taylor Sandy Taylor Nicholas Temple Ivan Tennant Alison Tero Prof Mark Tewdwr-Jones Gary Thomason Alan Thompson Chris Thompson David Thompson Robert Thompson Dale Thomson Dr Ying Ying Tian Greg Tillotson Fleur Timmer Niall Tipping Damian Tissier Andrea Titterington Ian Tod

Peter Tooher Paul Tostevin Robert Townshend Rob Tranmer Stephen Tucker Richard Tuffrey Neil Tully Jeffrey Tumlin Lisa Turley John Turner Jonathan Turner Stuart Turner Roger Tustain Nick Tyler CBE Julia Unwin Dr Debabardhan Upadhyaya Giulia Vallone Hans van Bommel Honoré van Rijswijk Mattjis Van Ruijven Atam Verdi Jonathan Vining Andy von Bradsky Brita von Schoenaich Prof Lorna Walker Thomas Walker Julia Wallace Ann Wallis Russell Wallis Andy Ward Ralph Ward Dr Gerry Wardell Paul Warner Elanor Warwick David Waterhouse Nick Wates Camilla Ween Oliver Weindling Dr Michael Wells Jan-Willem Wesselink Rosemary Westbrook Allison Westray Chapman Pam Wharfe Duncan Whatmore Lindsey Whitelaw Lindsay Whitley Stephen Willacy Peter Williams Patricia Willoughby Marcus Wilshere Richard Wolfströme Saffron Woodcraft David Woods Nick Woolley Gary Worsfold John Worthington Tony Wyatt Louise Wyman Wei Yang Gary Young Paul Zara Parsa Zarian Jack Zheng Qu

YOUNG URBANISTS Alexandros Achniotis Jan Ackenhausen Raquel Ajates Line Algoed Amer Alwarea Ben Angus Jen Ashworth Cory Babb William Back Alexander Baker Simon Banfield Veatriki Bania Phillippa Banister Veronica Barbaro Jake Bassett

Chloe Bennett Sarah Birt Vasiliki Bourli Michael Bredin Fergus Browne Adam Bulleid John Burns Yesica Caballero Baillie Card Rodrigo Cardoso Athlyn Cathcart-Keays Roland Chanin-Morris Leo Cheung Katherine Clegg Joseph Cook Daniel Cooper Dr João Cortesão Aaron Coulter Rebecca Cox Robert Cox Charles Critchell Victoria Crozet Nicholas Daruwalla Aaron Davis Kate Dawson Anna de Torróntegui Ina Dimireva Neil Double Louise Dredge Alejandro Echeverria Noriega Alexander Evans Laurance Fauconnet Thomas Findlay Baiba Fogele Nicolas Francis Matthew Gamboa Nicholas Goddard James Goodsell Edward Green Zarreen Hadadi Hannah Harkis Jane Harrison Rosie Haslem Andrew Hedger Simon Hicks Sarah Hill Dominik Hoehn Hasanul Hoque Patrick Hourmant Rachel Hoy Lewis Hubbard Elinor Huggett Martha Isaacs Louise Johnson David Kemp Robert Kerr Muhammad Khaleel Jaffer Melissa Lacide Marion Lagadic Rachel Lambert Catherine Larmouth Mark Lever Tierney Lovell Joana Luís Vieira Richard MacCowan Iain MacPherson Claire Malaika Tunnacliffe Theo Malzieu Thomas Marshall Potter John Mason Adrienne Mathews Laura Mazzeo Isabel McCagg Cris Mitry Jose Monroy Ketki Mudholkar Alistair Neame Dan Chinh Nguyen Eoin O’Connor Alex O’Hare

Sean O’Leary Floriane Ortega Edoardo Parenti Sejal Patel Fred Paxton Claudia Penaranda Fuentes Francesca Perry Diana Phiri Anna Pichugina Victoria Pinoncely Julie Plichon Kseniia Pundyk Sanna Rautio Ronald Riviere Jonah Rudlin Tom Rusbridge Mar Lluch Salvador Jessica Sammut Ross Schaffer Alexei Schwab Kym Shaen-Carter Yahya Yasser Mohamed Shaker Lana Shaylor Jonathan Sheldon Jane Sherry Hannah Shoebottom Simeon Shtebunaev Nelio Silva Freitas Sam Sims Bethania Soriano Emma Spierin Helen Spriggs Matthew Spurway Rebecca Sumerling Bea Symington Mohammad Tammo Tracey Taylor Nicola Thomas Vanessa Thomas Kieran Toms Chloe Treger Hitoha Tsuda Carolina Vasilikou Giacomo Vecia Emilie Walker Ding Wang Michelle Wang Jonathan Waugh George Weeks Caroline Westhart Dr James White Roger White Tatiana White Roz Williams Christopher Wood Mengqian Wu Mirjam Wurtz David Yates Szu-an Yu

HONORARY ACADEMICIANS Prof Wulf Daseking George Ferguson CBE Jan Gehl Christer Larsson

ARTIST-INRESIDENCE David Rudlin POET-IN-RESIDENCE Ian McMillan

Academicians and Young Urbanists

…and a final thought…

Back to the future

by Yolande Barnes AoU

Rarely have I heard the words ‘curate’ and ‘entrepreneur’ used as often and ubiquitously as in the last two or three years. They seem to be synonymous with the creative culture of the tech age; the buzzwords of the digital economy.

the quality of air, life and education as trade links; as much to do with the local culture, arts and music festivals as dominance in the finance sector; as much to do with the community of local artists and designers as the speed of local broadband.

The use of these words highlights for me the value we are increasingly placing on human abilities to relate, to imagine and to create. It may seem paradoxical that we set such store by these human capabilities in an age when we also worry about the rise of artificial intelligence and the possible redundancy of human beings but this paradox serves to highlight the value of human creativity in the digital age.

This value is being realised across the globe as I write. It is changing the nature and role of the city and has important geographical consequences which should be of great interest to urbanists everywhere.

Although we may think that the entrepreneurs of the tech age are capable of writing the algorithm on a laptop which will make them billions from a suburban bedroom, most of them would far rather be drinking an expertly crafted flat white in an artisan bakery in the city where they will meet their next business or life partner – or simply meet the serendipitous idea that will launch their next venture. The measure of city success becomes how well it can facilitate, house and attract this activity.

Much of what is written about the impact of the digital economy on the built environment relates to buildings themselves, or to the ‘hardware’ of cities. New and different working practices are undoubtedly changing the way offices look, and the capability of new technologies may well usher in new ‘smart cities’ wired for big data efficiency. But the impact of the digital revolution is also social, in the broadest sense, and will have its biggest impact on the form of the city itself and even the geographical hierarchy of cities.

The Savills’ #TechCities research programme this year identified how small cities, capable of attracting digital talent, are competing head-on with the global megacities. Austin, Tel Aviv, Dublin and Berlin, for example, rank alongside London, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore. This capability to compete has as much to do with

Savills’ research has shown that cities themselves now have a digital currency that is not dependent on the size of their financial sectors but on their ability to attract human capital.

Not since the 17th century London of Peyps and Lloyd has the (independent) coffee house and the street on which it stands been such an important place of commerce. And, interestingly, the cities that are thriving in the digital age are those that display many of the same characteristics: the connectedness, the walkability, the human scale of historic London.

So the digital revolution has the potential to change city economies not because it changes the way buildings look and perform but because it changes fundamental location criteria. There is little place for isolated, homogenous, out of town, car-reliant office campuses in this economy if they cannot attract the human units of production.

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All this not only ushers in a muchheralded era of city living but threatens to make the automobile-oriented late 20th century city obsolete. The new digital urbanism is symbolised by the 21st century San Francisco goldrush as young tech entrepreneurs desert surburban Silicon Valley for the delights of urban Frisco. It is also symbolised by the real estate death throes of ‘Motor City’ Detroit alongside the very early emergence of new creative communities in the same city.

So the ebb and flow of urban life continues: what was de rigueur in the late 20th century is obsolete in the 21st; towns and cities that suffered at the end of the industrial age can be renewed, regenerated and reinvigorated in the digital age.

What the digital age means for some conventional urban design and architecture could be cataclysmic but the disruption also creates once-in-a-generation opportunities for designers and planners who begin to understand the future that is unfolding.

Yolande Barnes AoU is director of World Research at Savills