Aou Journal 7: Housing

Here & Now

AoU Journal No. 7 Spring 2016 ISSN 2058-9123

In focus: housing

Politicians fiddle while housing goes unbuilt Sub-urbanism: a new focus?

Creating a proper city Let’s not make a crisis out of a drama

Contents

Front cover image: Liverpool housing by Andrew

1 Welcome 2 Editorial 3 The Academy in Action 7 Great British plans: and how

to avoid future waste

Ian Wray’s book prompts

Nicholas Falk AoU to reflect

on how we deliver major infrastructure 10

14

17 Co-governance: building

a stronger spirit of collaboration

Katy Hawkins reports on

Bologna’s forward-thinking

approach to collaboration

Assemble Kieran Toms speaks to the 20 Turner Prize-winning collective

The Academy of Urbanism

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From Manchester to Marseille Charlie Critchell shares his research on the potential impact of high-speed rail beyond our capital cities

Why the physical legacy of Apartheid is still a challenge for South Africa’s cities Camilla Ween AoU explores the role of ecomobility in uniting divided cities

24

Housing in focus

academyofurbanism.org.uk @TheAoU Join The Academy of Urbanism on LinkedIn, Facebook and Flickr

25

Politicians fiddle while housing goes unbuilt Jeff Austin AoU holds no bars in his explanation of the root cause of the housing crisis

Editorial team Alastair Blyth Emeka Efe Osaji Stephen Gallagher David Rudlin Timothy White

28

Sub-urbanism: a new focus?

Jon Rowland AoU questions whether current housing really does represent our values and desires

Editorial panel Steven Bee Kevin Murray David Porter

31

Creating a proper city Yolande Barnes AoU urges city-makers to work and think together at street level

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

34 Making room: responding to

the housing crisis in New York

and London

John McAslan AoU shares his

ideas on how to deliver

more and different housing

37

The new world Mike Wilkins AoU sums up the changing political and financial context faced by housing associations

40

Getting a handle on housing affordability: lessons from the Commonwealth Derek Wilson looks for answers in Vancouver and Sydney

44 Let’s not make a crisis

out of a drama

James Gross AoU talks to

economist and government

housing advisor Dame

Kate Barker 48

Space for great places!

A gallery of ideas and reflections on great places

52

Urban idiocy Brilliant but flawed ideas for the city

54

My own view is…

Higher education can foster urbanism, says Paul Ostergaard AoU

55

…And a final thought…

David Porter’s fourth instalment of learning to learn from place. This time, on how we capture the whole story of places

56

Academicians and Young Urbanists Who we are

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. Our mission is to recognise, encourage and celebrate great places across the UK, Europe and beyond, and the people andorganisations 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 on +44 (0) 20 7251 8777.

Principal Sponsor Grosvenor Sponsors* Alan Baxter Barton Willmore BuroHappold Farrer & Co. Muir Group Ramboll Savills Siemens Space Syntax Thames Clipper Tideway Urban Space Management Supporters in kind* BDP Design Council Cabe Gillespies Jas Atwal Associates JTP Lathams Monocle Prentis & Co. Space Syntax URBED Wolfströme * Spring 2016 Academy Team Linda Gledstone Director of Operations Stephen Gallagher Director of Communications Zarreen Hadadi Membership Executive Delano Bart-Stewart Communications Executive Bright Pryde-Saha Young Urbanist Co-ordinator Dogan Behic Accounts

Welcome

Welcome to the Spring 16 edition of Here and Now. The format of our Journal is becoming established: a selection of regular updates, insights and reflections, and a substantial thematic section with contributions from Academicians and others with a particular perspective on the issue du jour.

The quality, quantity and accessibility of housing has been close to the heart of urbanism theory and practice since the late 19th century. The Academy has identified and celebrated a number of examples of innovative and established housing developments, management schemes and improvement projects over the past 10 years. It is all the more frustrating, then, that in the UK; in England in particular; and especially in London, our inability to match housing supply to the formation of new households has got worse rather than better over the past 40 years.

There does seem to be an emerging consensus now, across all agencies involved in the supply and management of housing, that the market cannot resolve the issue on its own. ‘Public’ housing is once again being seen as a means of providing a large number of affordable homes, and perhaps the obsession with home ownership is beginning to wane. As a child of one of the post-war council housing estates that Martin Crookston celebrates and advocates in his book Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?, I feel that this revival not only has the potential to increase housing supply substantially, but also to remove the stigma now associated with ‘council estates’. They once again offer homes to a broader cross-section of society, rather than primarily those in ‘housing need’.

Shelter is one of the fundamental requirements in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and the Academy, in exploring the higher levels of success in urban self-esteem, may not have given it the attention it deserves; particularly when much of the world’s urban population would give their eye teeth for the sort of housing of which we are, at times, so critical.

By the time you read this we will be exploring the future of urbanism through our 10th Anniversary Congress, in the context of east London, where there is still scope to redress the general imbalance of housing provision in this most worldly of World Cities. I hope our discussions will shed more light on the nature of the problem, and give us greater confidence to influence the housing agenda, drawing on the combined experience and expertise of our Academicians and the knowledge we have gained from the places we have visited, assessed and celebrated through our Urbanism Awards.

I look forward to joining that debate, and to seeing as many of you as possible at our Congress and on the Awards assessment visits this summer.

Steven Bee AoU Chairman

Chairman’s introduction 1

Editorial

In this issue we put the spotlight on housing which seems to be something, as some of our authors point out, that people are on the receiving end of, rather than active participants in creating. We point out that as urbanists, our aim surely is to create homes rather than houses – places for people to live. Creating, as Yolande Barnes puts it, the ‘proper city’ – simple buildings in a complex streetscape capable of accommodating a huge range of diverse activities.

Neighbourhoods though, can become separated physically or even psychologically as people shun areas of our cities whether it is because they feel unwelcome, or in danger. Camilla Ween in her article on the challenges presented by the physical legacy of Apartheid in South Africa points out that this is not only an urgent issue for cities in that country, but also for so many of our cities that have evolved into ghettoised communities with real or perceived erected barriers between each other.

Movement in cities happens naturally when people feel they are welcome and barriers do not exist and people are free to move into neighbouring areas. Breaking down such barriers is fundamental to creating an equitable city where all people can move freely everywhere. Making cities permeable across their communities is an essential aspect of creating sustainable cities.

Urbanists can be facilitators of this as well as doers. Kieran Toms talks to Alice Edgerley from the collective Assemble to find out how they develop community projects from temporary conversion of a filling station to the regeneration of a street that was a finalist in the AoU Awards. Collaboration is key.

In her interview with Christian Iaione, innovator behind Bologna’s Co-cities Protocol, Katy Hawkins draws attention to a different kind of collaboration between authorities and communities and points out that conversations about community engagement have become dominated by ideas of networked-thinking, which transcends bottom-up, top-down.

Communities, then, are perhaps better able to judge what places should be like and how to create the ‘proper city’.

Alastair Blyth AoU Editor

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The Academy in action!

In this issue we cover the The Glass-House Community Led Design’s 2015/16 debate series, ‘A place for everyone’, a study visit to AoU award-winning Donostia-San Sebastián, lectures on love and fragmentation, as well events in Hastings and Oxford that were designed to impart the experience and expertise of Academicians.

If you have an idea for an event or activity the Academy should be focusing on, contact: sg@academyofurbanism.org.uk

Image: Vision for Oxford Central West

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action 3

GLASS-HOUSE DEBATE SERIES A PLACE FOR EVERYONE?

SHAPING PLACES FOR OPEN INNOVATION

The Academy was delighted to be a national partner for The Glass-House Community Led Design’s latest debate series, which sought to question notions of belonging, aspiration and ownership within place.

Innovation experts, planners, developers, artists, urban designers, and architects were brought together

by Academicians from Mecanoo Architects and Creative Places to explore how the historic physical structure of Cambridge has assisted its exceptional innovation in science and technology.

2015-16

In Nottingham, the discussion fell to the rights and responsibilities of shaping our places. Many people in the audience raised the importance of building, managing and evolving relationships between those who live in places, and those who play a role in the design and management of them.

“We don’t need looking after!” said a member of a local neighbourhood forum (in Sneinton) who argued that the traditional paternalistic relationship between the local authority and its communities needs to change. With an increasing number of mechanisms for local people to influence decision-making about their places (such as those enabled by the Localism Act – neighbourhood planning, community rights etc.), the balance of power is changing.

Moving between the issue of privatisation, the neglect of peripheral or less glamorous places, through to the motivation and empowerment required to get people to take positive action, the discussion probed and questioned the relationships between people, organisations and places.

Perhaps the most sensible question and comment came at the end of the debate, from nine year-old Henry, who asked why we are not talking to and teaching kids from local schools about all of these things when they’re young, so that when they are older they will be experienced and able to face the challenges. Why not indeed.

Read all four full reports at theglasshouse.org.uk

November 2015

Hosted by the University of Cambridge, the group explored how this can inform the design (or re-design) of the science parks now proliferating around the city.

One of the main topics of discussion was how the core of historic Cambridge has nurtured innovation through a physical proximity of ideas via a close clustering of people.

Particularly notable is how the close juxtaposition of creative minds, which has always been cross-connected between highly varied disciplines, allows for idea exchange across diverse fields in a small geographic area.

Another aspect noted as crucial for innovation was social interaction, and the key question asked was how a city that promotes innovation as central to its identity can nurture social interchange.

The most replicable quality from Cambridge is not the exceptional college social structure, but the urban context in which the colleges exist: streets, social venues, and green spaces.

Lastly, the capacity of a city as a place to play and create was discussed in reference to ideas explored by emeritus professor Patrick Bateson, a Cambridge-based behavioural ecologist. Bateson’s work points out the connection between a ‘playful state of mind’ and innovative work in art, science and industry. This discussion posed the question: can urban design contribute to such a state of mind? The Bologna, San Sebastián and Stockholm at The Urbanism Awards Ceremony, November

mixed-use, socially stimulating city, it was argued, can stimulate innovation.

The context for innovation has perhaps never been more aligned with good urbanism. Jonathan Burroughs AoU presented current thinking on ‘open innovation’ as a model for industry research and development.

This concept has been gaining more traction and is characterised by greater business openness than was the case in the past.

It recognises that the flow of knowledge in and out of companies is more economically rewarding than when work is developed in a protected, or fully ‘in-house’ system.

This is reflected in changes to the architecture of business environments; both AstraZeneca in Cambridge and Samsung in the Silicon Valley are constructing research buildings that embrace an open flow of people through them.

Could we therefore extend this thinking and design to enable staff in such innovative businesses to socialise back in the city streets themselves?

When looking around us we can see more interconnection between clusters leading to what has been called by the Brookings Institute ‘innovation districts’.

Cambridge, though certainly an innovation district, is increasingly based on a spread of monothematic, zoned research parks.

The Academy of Urbanism forum highlighted that the success of historic Cambridge, alongside the known importance of both social interaction and play to innovation, should point to a better blueprint for enhancing a city’s economic output via improved urban design and mixed-uses in its science or technology zones.

Read the full report at academyofurbanism.org.uk/ open-innovation Adam Peavoy AoU

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THE FRAGMENTED CITY February 2016

Since the start of the millennium, Latin American and Caribbean countries have taken remarkable measures to address the Millennium Development Goals.

Dr Claudia Murray AoU, research fellow at the University of Reading’s School of Real Estate and Planning, joined us for an evening talk at JTP to explain more about the huge strides these countries have taken to mitigate and reserve problems such as poverty reduction and access to education, among others. Dr Murray also explained how these countries will tackle the new and more taxing targets set within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

As a result of work in this area and recent visits, Dr Murray will be exploring opportunities for the Academy to liaise more closely with individuals, cities and organisations operating in Latin America, including cities such as Medellín in Colombia.

Medellín, Colombia © Iván Erre Jota

VISION FOR OXFORD CENTRAL WEST

THE 2026 URBANISM MANIFESTO

The Academy was invited by Oxford Civic Society to help facilitate an event at which a cross section of stakeholders were brought together to imagine a the future of one of Oxford’s most significant areas of potential growth: Central West.

In line with the Academy’s 10th Anniversary Congress, ‘The Future of Urbanism’, the Young Urbanists gathered at the offices of Arup to consider some of the recent changes and innovations in urbanism, and discuss how they might help to shape the fabric of our cities in the future.

Beginning with a series of short, provocative presentations on

March 2016

April 2016

The timely event showed that the old Parish of St Thomas offers space to enlarge the city centre to service a greater Oxford. If it is developed imaginatively it can help provide affordable housing, generate better jobs, solve transport problems, help reduce pollution and improve the quality of life for all.

housing, transportation, disruptive technologies, funding and devolution, delegates then split into focused groups to delve deeper into the relevant issues in relation to their impact on the future of cities.

Throughout the year, the Young Urbanists will continue to explore how these themes might influence our urban future, and will develop and publish an urbanism manifesto looking forward 10 years to 2026.

Bright Pryde

Osney Island, Oxford

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action 5

AOU SPRING DEBATE April 2016

“We have civic stewardship every time a group of citizens take a collective initiative to upgrade or give new life to a site, independently of impulses from government entities.” Hosted by Grosvenor in London, the Academy’s annual spring debate took on the theme of Stewardship. Three different perspectives were offered: Rachel Miller, head of strategy at Grosvenor Britain and Ireland, on the role of landowner; Rosemary Westbrook AoU, director of housing at the London Borough of Camden, on the role of the public sector; and Lucas Schoemaker, representing Springhill Co-housing in Stroud, with a community perspective.

While today each may have a distinctly different level of influence, the three represented sectors have all historically had an important role in the development of successful places. From the example of brewer-turned-creativelandlord, Truman in Shoreditch, to the local authority picking up and turning around fallow sites, stewardship is a wide and demanding role that involves looking beyond boundary lines.

It was Schoemaker who really struck a chord with his views on integrating citizens’ buy-in to ensure stewardship is a long-term effort.

“In Stroud”, Schoemaker said, “people themselves own the land trust – 10 farms are owned in this way. They have the responsibility and opportunity to care for the land trust. If people can decide as a group what their values are, then this leads to stewardship.”

As a follow up it would be a pleasure to hear about stewardship of place activated through the power of people and passionate communities of interest. Indeed the secret of the concept of stewardship’s appeal lies in the coalescence of people and place and their mutual co-dependency for activation.

Marianne O’Kane Boal

LEARNING FROM DONOSTIA-SAN SEBASTIÁN May 2016

A team of 10 Academicians revisited the Academy’s European City of the Year to find out a bit more about what lies behind its success, but also to apply some of the team’s assembled experience to some of the city’s preeminent challenges. Donostia-San Sebastián is a city that is increasingly known for its high-tech industries and in particular, its incredibly high levels of productivity.

When asked about the secret to their success, the city pointed to a targeted approach to creating and expanding added-value across industries. Where

Donostia-San Sebastián

products have been created, other sectors have been quick to exploit wider associated opportunities – the obvious example being mobile apps.

It is certainly a place where those that thrive are those that collaborate.

Another aspect of its success is an approach it calls The Friendly City, which focuses decisions on how the end user interacts with the city. This permeates almost all actions from the strategic level right through to the local level, and in the middle is turbocharged by a raft of social innovation.

The consequence of this is a hugely liveable and user-friendly city, both for citizens and visitors.

John Worthington AoU

4X4 MANCHESTER: THE BIG QUESTIONS May 2016

Over the course of four weeks, the 4x4 Manchester series tackled general societal issues and prompted debate.

Each Wednesday, four speakers explored the week’s chosen theme for 15 minutes each, followed by an audience discussion.

This year, the series focused on our urban environment through the lens of Money, Love, War & Peace and Freedom. The topics were explored by interdisciplinary speakers, including practitioners, artists, poets and academics.

Using a society and built environment perspective, the themes were approached abstractly. Love was discussed through the dynamic of loving and fully immersing yourself in the work you do, the role or absence of ‘love’ in policy, and the concept of falling in love with place. “A city is not designed and done. We interact with it, we fall in love with it. And sometimes we fall out of love with it” suggested Sophia de Sousa AoU, one of the event’s speakers.

Visit 4x4manchester.com

6 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

GROSVENOR LEARNING JOURNEYS May 2016

WHITE ROCK HASTINGS DIAGNOSTIC VISIT

A number of Grosvenor’s Leadership Team have been welcomed in Bristol by local Academicians. As part of their principal sponsorship of the Academy, Grosvenor is keen to understand the key influences and processes behind the success of some of our award winners.

The first visit included tours by boat and foot of Stokes Croft, the Floating Harbour, the city centre and Queen Square (below), as well as projects like the Temple Quays Enterprise Zone.

The group visited venues, experienced the city, and met with entrepreneurs and policy-makers.

Visits to Glasgow and Rotterdam will take place later this year in June and September respectively.

May 2016

Hastings Borough Council invited the Academy to undertake a diagnostic visit to assist with shaping a brief for the future development of the town’s White Rock area. The local authority is keen that the success of Hastings – it has featured in the Academy’s Great Town and Great Neighbourhood awards – is amplified towards the White Rock, an area that has long been identified as a strategic development site.

A panel of five Academicians took on the challenge, spending 24 hours drawing out local ideas, concerns and aspirations for the site. The Academy will continue to work with Hastings to progress its brief.

Stokes Croft © Shellac

by Richard Guise AoU

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action 7

Great British Plans: and how to avoid future waste Reflecting off Ian Wray’s recent book Great British Plans, Nicholas Falk AoU argues for a rethink in the way that major infrastructure projects are planned and funded in Britain, and puts forward three fundamental principles against which to judge their success.

Ian Wray’s superb historical review of some major British achievements, and the way they were planned, provides an excellent basis for considering how to improve the process. By analysing projects as diverse as the rebuilding of London with great squares instead of grand streets, or Birkenhead Park, which inspired New York’s Central Park, along with more recent creations such as the new town of Milton Keynes and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, Wray shows a remarkable similarity in the way we British address grand projects.

A process of ‘muddling through’ or ‘disjointed incrementalism’ as the American political scientist Lindblom called it, has been coupled with a reliance on dedicated entrepreneurs to fight against a conservative state that tries to keep public expenditure to the minimum. While this may give Britain some of its endearing character, as we struggle with what to cut next it is time to question the process for planning and funding major infrastructure projects, and to ask: are there better alternatives?

But how do you judge what is success?

This was the main theme of my doctoral thesis on Planning London’s Docklands, and my first published article called ‘How do you judge a city costing £700 million’ in an edition of Architectural Design published back in 1974. My arguments that public funds might be

better invested in regenerating inner city areas rather than building new towns led to setting up URBED 40 years ago. It also brought me into conflict with many of our leading planners.

It is paradoxical that David Rudlin (my co-director at URBED) and I are now having to make the case for sustainable urban extensions to some of our major cities on the grounds that there is simply not enough brownfield land to cater for housing growth or the funds to build totally new settlements. Apart from whether you favour large or small projects, or private versus public enterprise, we need some fundamental principles to evaluate the case studies that Wray puts forward, and to make better choices than, for example, merely going for High Speed Two because ‘every other country has one’!

The simplistic appeal of cost-benefit analysis is clearly not enough.

Extraordinarily, many of the biggest projects received little or no evaluation against the alternatives despite the criteria set out in the Treasury’s Green Book. Multi-criteria analysis is better, but how do you avoid too many objectives, or a situation like the National Policy Planning Framework, which makes it impossible to trade-off sustainable development benefits against the rigid objective of ‘protecting the green belts’? Clearly, political considerations

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will always be paramount, but the job of politicians is to lead opinion, not slavishly follow it.

My thesis argued for three fundamental principles, which are, like those that underpin the American Declaration of Independence, ‘self-evident’ and therefore cannot be reduced further, (though more weight may be given to one than the other.) The first is Social Justice, a principle advanced by the American philosopher John Rawls, in which it is not acceptable to pursue policies that do not improve the lot of the worst-off. The second is Natural Balance, or which might now be called the Ecological Imperative, which is to leave the planet better off than we found it. The third is the Minimisation of Waste, which argues for keeping both short- and long-term costs down.

Social justice My objection to the high investment in the New Town of Milton Keynes, regarded by many as a British success story, was that many new residents at the time might have been happier to stay in London if only the same funds had been invested in improving inner city conditions. At the time, opinion research found that many of the residents were miserable – New Town Blues as it became known – having left friends and family behind.

Top: The London 2012 Games © Simon Bottom: High Speed One rail at Ebbsfleet © Wol1908

Today’s surveys reveal not only a much happier population, the model of a consumerist society, but also a town that has outpaced others in terms of population and economic growth, and also managed to keep housing affordable. Yet the basic car-based plan, which created many small diverse settlements, could have been designed to make mass transit viable if the promoters had thought ahead.

Indeed, as Wray points out, the planners turned their back literally on the original Llewellyn-Davies urban

design principles for a vision inspired by the American planner Mel Webber of ‘non-place public realm’. Walter Bor, one of the Llewellyn Davies team who drew up the master plan, told me that the road grid was built to ensure there was no turning back.

In building a new generation of settlements, we should be designing them so that everyone can walk or cycle or use public transport, rather than being limited to the few who can afford their own car to get to work or the shops.

Natural balance My criticism of the outstanding work done by Sustrans in converting disused railway lines into long-distance cycleways is that we might have been better off using rail as the basis for sustainable urban extensions, and making the centre of our towns and cities much more bike friendly.

Similarly, the British motorway system has ploughed on without much regard to the more difficult issues of enabling people to make shorter journeys to work without excessive stress.

Our country’s unique obsession with strangling our cities with tight green belts has resulted in sterile countryside that scarcely supports any wildlife, and the additional carbon emissions as people spend more time driving to work than in other European country.

Interestingly the first British ring road, which like many of Wray’s examples, was pioneered in Liverpool as far back as between 1903 and 1923, was part financed by ‘a charge levied on developers of new houses fronting onto the road.’

Charging development for the infrastructure has become an unequal struggle between the private and public sectors, in contrast to countries like France or Germany where the government accepts the importance of investing in infrastructure in

Editor’s introduction Great | AoU British in Action Plans 9

advance of development (resulting in much stronger manufacturing and construction sectors). Rather than valuing the ‘common wealth’ represented by well-used open spaces, we have come to value only what is in private ownership, and cut back local government from being a pioneer of what makes for better lives to acting as a regulator alone.

Wray points out that local government’s income from central government rose from 15 per cent in 1913 to 45 per cent in 1973, yet the Layfield Report (and others since) have failed to stop Westminster from becoming ever more autocratic.

Minimisation of Waste The odd way we plan in Britain might not matter so much if it produced the economies the Treasury seeks, or led to better decisions on important projects.

But centralised systems in fact produce worse results than more polycentric ones.

Case studies such as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link show how financial impacts are disregarded for reasons that turn out to be mistaken, whether it be expensive new terminals at Waterloo that then become redundant, or new stations at Stratford where the international trains do not stop. The barren wasteland at Ebbsfleet is a reminder that transport links may be a

necessary condition for development but are rarely a sufficient one. Yet High Speed Two continues to be trumpeted as the saviour of the Midlands or a means of regenerating Euston (which as a local resident I know to be quite unnecessary), while much smaller projects to reopen local stations wither for lack of champions.

In theory, projects and plans are to be evaluated against alternatives, in line with both Treasury and European Union rules.

In practice, the weight of interested parties in any major project, who can effectively control the debate, leads to our poor country going for one bad project after another, as the saga of London’s proposed Garden Bridge illustrates. Sir Ivor Crewe and Anthony King provide many more case studies in The Blunders of our Governments to suggest the process is endemic.2 But as Sir Peter Hall and I showed through case studies of French infrastructure plans, there is a much better way, if only we freed up our cities to resource local investment plans and enabled them to borrow for wellconsidered investment projects.3 Conclusions Wray hopes we will see the light, yet his book shows for the first time how our approach to planning reflects

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our culture, with its tolerance of inequalities and a decaying public realm. However, occasionally, as with securing the Olympic Games, the UK shows it can act together for a greater prize.

So instead of asking what kind of state we want, which gets us tangled in unresolvable ideological issues, we simply need to ask how we are going to get better value from the major infrastructure projects we need to meet our energy, transport, water and waste needs, and to double the rate of house building. Instead of looking to the Chinese or the ‘private sector’ to fill the gap, we need to bring together the expertise to plan for posterity, not austerity.

Dr Nicholas Falk AoU is founder director of URBED and trained as an economist as well as strategic planner.

1. Ian Wray, Great British Plans: who made them and how they worked, Routledge 2015 2. Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, The Blunders of our Governments, One World Publications, 2013 3. Peter Hall with Nicholas Falk, Good Cities Better Lives: how Europe discovered the lost art of urbanism, Routledge 2014 Milton Keynes © Keith Williams

Assemble Kieran Toms talks to Alice Edgerley of Assemble, which saw their Cairns Street project in Liverpool reach the finals of the Academy’s 2015 Great Street Award and win the 2016 Turner Prize.

Folly for a Flyover, Hackey Wick © Matthew Brown

“Yeah, but is it Art?” To be fair to Assemble, pretty much every Turner Prize entry gets the same treatment.

There’s been mercifully less debate about whether what they do is urbanism though. In fact, part of their winning entry, Cairns Street, was a finalist in The Academy of Urbanism’s awards, noted as being “regenerated in a most remarkable way.”

The street is within the Granby Triangle, an area of Liverpool where demolition and clearance have been planned for years. But residents there thought that their streets were worthy of restoration. The battle ended up with them forming a Community Land Trust (CLT) and, over the last decade or so they have initiated a programme of ‘direct action’: cleaning up streets, introducing plants and flowers, and painting hoardings. Assemble didn’t start the process, but they soon became a key part of the project.

The judges commented that Cairns Street showed “determined community action winning out where official approaches failed,” and that “the planting and street market have created opportunities for positive conversations that could not happen otherwise.” The street, they argued, has shown the value of artistic engagement beyond merely cost. The judges’ final summation is particularly telling: “Ultimately, Cairns Street is more about

the people constructing a resilient community than the renovation and construction of houses.”

This tipping of the balance towards a people-led process is backed up by even a cursory glance at Assemble’s website. It is immediately evident that they do a lot of different things.

Many of the photos they have picked to show their work are not the shiny, shimmering examples of the finished product that you might see elsewhere, but instead are photos of the work itself: Hard graft. Hammering. People discussing.

impactful and singular, simultaneously independent and collaborative. I spoke to Alice Edgerley from the collective, who was kind enough to take some time from what sounds a hectic schedule to share with me some insight into Assemble.

In the same way, their description of themselves is notably devoid of labels, and instead attempts to describe what they actually do, and what they hope to get out of it: “Assemble are a collective of 15 whose work addresses the relationship between people and the built environment.” Elsewhere, they describe how they: “…take a hands on, collaborative approach, and whilst their work usually includes design it rarely starts or ends there, often employing a range of means from the social to the infrastructural to make spaces which enable independence; self-authorship, creativity and difference.”

Alice told me: “We were really keen to have a go at doing our own projects.

A number of us had graduated – we were all working in practices at the time and we’d meet up in evenings and weekends, we were trying to look for a place to build our own project.”

In some ways then, they are quintessentially urban – a mish-mash of different ideas and disciplines, thrown together in improvisation and adaptation, but ultimately

I started at the beginning. The Cineroleum was their first project, building a temporary cinema on a former petrol station site in London’s Farringdon in 2010. How had that helped to form their principles and processes?

A number of the collective gained early construction experience working on other temporary projects including Franks Café in Peckham and the Southwark Lido by EXYZT. “From this we learned how to build things and learned construction – really, the process started from there – we came to understand all the different parts of project development.”

The plans were led very much by a constrained budget – an Arts Fund grant of £2,500 – which influenced

Assemble

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action 11

material choices and also how they facilitated project delivery: “We were all working as volunteers, all the elements were designed so that anyone could come on site to build really easily. We set up production lines so that people could get involved, usually on site, and we had about 200 or so volunteers over the course of the threeweek period.”

At that point it wasn’t necessarily conceived as part of a long-term vision, but was approached as a one-off project. Alice said: “We tried to think about how you could recreate the golden age of cinema: festoon curtain, signs, flip-up seats. The Cinema Museum, a fantastic museum in Elephant and Castle, were really helpful – lots of different people were involved, with different skill sets.”

Alice was keen to impress on me that other groups should be encouraged to attempt similar things. Here is her advice: “Just start looking for a site. Think about the sorts of things you might do there, how it is being used, how public it is. Start talking to the landlords, look it up on the land registry. See if it is available for

a temporary project, or something else. Notice a place that looks like somewhere something could happen, and then just go from there. If you want it to be a self-build or open build, then you need insurance.

Then it’s just a case of thinking about all of the programming as well as the actual structure, what prices things are, what stuff will be happening. The good thing about it being on a very low budget is that you have to think about materials and how you use them in a fairly resourceful way.” In the years since their first project though, I speculate, their profile and presumably, their resources, have grown a little.

How has their process changed as they have grown in experience and in profile?

“I think it’s definitely been on a project by project basis depending on who we are working with but a lot of our references, approaches, starting points, and questions were started on those first projects,” said Alice. She stresses the importance of making something public, and involving the public in the development of their environment, and that it is also about resourcefulness

12 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

Cineroleum at night Clerkenwell Road, London © John Gorgy Below: Cairns Street, Liverpool

and affordability, a way to make something really accessible. I tell Alice that I am interested in how these principles and methods might work outside of a collective like Assemble, in other organisations. She tells me that they are definitely applicable on a larger scale. She points out that the aforementioned work in Liverpool is itself their biggest project, so I can see that their methods are already working on different scales.

She also points out that their methods are not necessarily new or unique.

She gives me the example of French architect Lacaton & Vassal, citing their “amazing project” in Northern Paris where they’ve retrofitted an existing tower block. This is the 16-storey Tour Bois-le-Prêtre, dating from 1961, which was originally designed by French architect Raymond Lopez.

They have transformed it, showing off an alternative approach to redevelopment of post-war housing.

Lacaton & Vassal were established in 1987 and are still going strong, and Alice is pleased to reflect that those sorts of projects are what they do all the time. Referring also to things

like the recent rise in the number of Community Land Trusts, and of childled play environments, Alice explains how Assemble are just part of a much bigger thing.

More generally, Alice explains: “A lot of our projects are based around forming quite strong relationships with the people we’re working with and obviously that does take time. Quite a lot of the time our projects aren’t very fast moving. Also, we’re involved not only in the design and delivery of the project, but the development of brief and the organisation that goes onto run it.

“On a couple of projects, we’re still on the board of the project itself. I think that means that it is easier to work on a smaller scale sometime. It depends on the group you’re working with, because they often have a much wider remit than we do.” And what about the future for Assemble? In terms of how they might expand or grow, the answer isn’t really clear at the moment. Being nonhierarchical, and thus without one boss who will decide it all, they are currently discussing how expanding or growing might work.

But one big change will definitely take place: “We’re having to move out of our current workspace Sugarhouse Studios. Our lease has come to an end, we were given special time there as part of a much bigger development but it was always due to be demolished, it was always going to be a temporary arrangement.”

The collective is now looking for a new location in which to set up.

However, they are very much relishing the challenge: “I think that’s really exciting, how we’re going to create our workspace, involving lots of other people, thinking about what sorts of facilities we provide, what the public output is, how we’re going to work with the council. It is proving to be a bit of a challenge – especially with how expensive London is. It’s exciting though, thinking about how to make it work!”

Kieran Toms is a transport and public realm planner and a Young Urbanist.

visit: assemblestudio.co.uk/

Short-term interventions, from Top: Cairns Street, Liverpool Cineroleum, Clerkenwell Road, London © El Bingo

Editor’s introduction Great | AoU British in Action Plans 13

From Manchester to Marseille: what can the promise of highspeed rail do to a city?

Young Urbanist Charles Critchell travels by highspeed rail from Manchester to Marseille to make the connection between railways and city regions.

High-speed rail is big news in both the UK and France, though for vastly different reasons. The French are more than a little smug about their much vaunted high-speed network, one which has been successfully rolled out across the country over the course of the last 30 years or more.

Manchester to London

Here in the UK plans for a similar network have been championed and chastised in equal measure. Much has been made of the government’s plans to build HS2 – but between the attention-grabbing headlines concerning exorbitant costs and environmental ruin, how much do the public really know? Or perhaps of greater importance, do they even care?

Local urbanists Joe Ravetz and Gabi Schliwa, who showed me around the city centre before sitting down to discuss the government’s designs for Manchester, are both wary of the supposed implications any perceived new status may bring. “Far from being a second city behind London we really believe that Manchester operates in a completely separate sphere. It’s not about North and South but Manchester as a place and a city in its own right,” argued Ravetz.

I believe that yes, they do, and consequently set out on a series of consecutive rail journeys through the two countries with the aim of meeting some of them. Supported by the Young Urbanists’ Small Grants Scheme, my travels took me up to Manchester and Liverpool in the UK, and then down to Marseille and Toulon in the South of France.

I wanted answers to three very specific questions: How good is the connectivity between different modes of transport along the route? What is the level of interdependence between rail infrastructure and city regions?

And can high-speed rail help to devolve power to places beyond a country’s capital and second city?

To supporters of HS2 the construction of the new rail line and the growth of the North are seen as not only symbolic, but perhaps even symbiotic – a straightforward relationship of cause and effect.

The pair further identified spending cuts, lack of accountability and “blame game” tactics as contributing to the poor state of the North’s much maligned rail network. “Yes, HS2 could work to increase opportunities for northern cities,” Ravetz told me. “But there remains a stronger need to make the North work as a cohesive entity first.”

As we crawled back to London, owing to disruption on the track somewhere ahead of us, I asked the retired Mancunian couple sat across the aisle for their views. Their contention that high-speed rail is in fact old technology

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was one with their belief that devolving the issue of next generation rail travel to the North as an engineering problem would serve to provide the region with a sense of genuine ownership over its future – and subsequently work to rebalance the disparity of power between North and South.

London to Marseille The theatricality of St Pancras station definitely adds to the sense of adventure imparted by a Eurostar journey. The international trains’ décor is becoming a little tired, and space comes at a premium. But I found that, when faced with the prospect of travelling to the continent via other means, some passengers were more than willing to pay the extra cost to travel in comfort from city centre to city centre.

In Paris, I transferred from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon for the Marseille-bound TGV. The first thing that strikes you about the ParisMarseille train is the room afforded by its double-deck design. A young professional travelling from Paris to Cannes for the weekend helped to shed more light on the appeal of the French high-speed network. For him, the major benefit of the TVG is the opportunity it gives him to escape the city and be in the south of France in just over three hours. The regularity of the service is another big plus for passengers,

Top: train conversations Below: Marseille

justifying their belief that the service is designed to work around them.

In Marseille we met Emmy Arts, the head of international relations at the prestigious Ecole Centrale de Marseille.

She told me that, although the city was justified in winning the coveted European Capital of Culture in 2013, it is still experiencing the growing pains associated with its rapid ascendancy.

Much like the contacts in Manchester I had spoken to the day before, Arts believes that Marseille has always had its own identity – something compounded by its role as a largely unloved salt-of-the-earth place, for years considered culturally backward in comparison to both Paris and Lyon.

“The locals love to joke that Marseille faces the sea, turning its back on the rest of France,” she said.

The arrival of high-speed rail has been credited with bringing investment and opportunity to the city, with Marseille’s revival acknowledged in the shape of the aforementioned City of Culture gong. In the intervening two years however, things have changed. Despite increased growth and relative political stability, a lack of continued investment has left its ugly mark.

The following morning we walked along the waterfront of the city’s La Joliette district, the defining urban quarter of Marseille’s cultural renaissance. The images depicted on the Photoshopped

From Manchester to Marseille 15

Marseille

banners draped across the now deserted street-front block don’t quite match the reality: windows are boarded up, and the noticeable lack of human activity soon becomes disconcerting.

As with those who we had spoken to on the cross-country trip, we found that cost is never far from people’s minds: constructing a brand new line that local people could not afford to use certainly wouldn’t help sustain the trust built between SNCF and its customers.

In fact, it’s only due to the development of a high-speed rail network all those years ago that SNCF now finds itself in a position to develop the same technology along regional routes, and offer the option of a much-improved service. The French story shows that, properly managed, high-speed rail can begin to work directly in the interests of local communities.

Lessons learnt The four-day trip had helped to answer a few of my questions – but it had also served to raise several more. On the question of connectivity, I had at times been frustrated by local transport.

Having spoken to those in both Manchester and Marseille who use these networks every day, I found that they recognised the benefits that highspeed rail could bring – but that for them it was direct investment in local transport infrastructure which would have the biggest impact on their quality of life.

It was a similarly nuanced picture when it came to the issue of rail infrastructure and city regions.

Establishing stronger ties with local cities would be a big plus for those residing in both the North of England and the south of France – but the residents of both Manchester and Marseille made clear it should not come at the expense of a distillation of a city’s identity.

I believe that this may explain the reluctance of people en masse to embrace high-speed rail. Considered on its own merits, it still remains a critical investment – but only if it is able to be developed and co-exist alongside visionary, collaborative, and above all, responsible policymaking.

That this sentiment should remain so strong even now is testament to the competitive mindset that was bred between neighbouring cities with the onset of the industrial revolution all those years ago.

As in France, an established high-speed network would in time create the added impetus for improving local transport networks. If high-speed rail is built and measures for local infrastructure are not implemented, much of the value that a high-speed network can bring would be lost.

But what was then undoubtedly a catalyst in advancing knowledge and production may now serve to quell both progress and co-operation. Cost again was an issue people cited as critical: yes, they favoured greater integration, but not if it meant further local cuts.

Finally, people do recognise the need for devolution – but the practical parameters and tangible outputs of it remain largely undefined. Those residing in both Manchester and Marseille – the unofficial ‘Second Cities’ of their respective countries – appear ambivalent about this status.

The chancellor wants a Northern Powerhouse to enable the North and South to contribute more equally to the country’s economic growth – but what does this mean in reality?

In Manchester, there’s a perception that the sweeping and sustained local cuts of the last parliament caused widespread havoc. This sits uncomfortably with the government’s new found enthusiasm for shaping the North to the vision of what many consider to be a London-centric political class.

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And while it cannot be denied that local rail infrastructure in the north of England desperately needs overhauling, only a project like highspeed rail will bring with it the political clout to ensure that this is carried through.

Yes, high-speed rail is expensive, it will be slow to deliver and it is, above all, political. But this must be used as an advantage. A better performing mainline railway may or may not in time address the issues that the chancellor identifies; we must ensure local transport networks are developed so that everyone can feel the benefits of this important long-term investment.

Charles Critchell is a trainee Architect currently working in a London practice.

Charles has a keen interest in urbanism, transport infrastructure and government policy – all of which are key drivers in his Academy-funded project, Second Cities: Manchester to Marseille.

Co-governance: building a stronger spirit of collaboration How to co-create and negotiate the endless city is an ongoing process between its citizens, state and administration. Katy Hawkins interviews Christian Iaione, innovator behind Bologna’s Co-cities Protocol – now set to transcend international borders – in search of new examples of collaboration, specifically between authorities and communities.

Conversations about community engagement and local action have long surpassed the idea of top-down, bottom-up process. Indeed, they have become dominated by ideas of networked-thinking, devolution and polycentric structures: process orientated approaches.

These conversations, when successfully played out in reality, see local action that is able to travel in all directions through advanced and nimble mechanisms that enable it to impact on policy and inform governmental priorities. They also allow for the distribution, rather than centralisation, of power. This is epitomised in the structural properties of blockchain, a network of voices that operates without a central linchpin and thus enables anyone (those with differing views in particular) to work in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Bologna © Christian Grelard

These initiatives, when not communityled, are typically run by facilitators and enablers – often a hybrid of urbanist, sociologist and social innovator, but mostly defying such categorical distinctions – of which there is a growing breed. They are positioned at various points within the network – typically somewhere between the state and the local community – to enable the process of collaboration and co-creating.

Methods of Co-managing City Commons Collaborare è Bologna is a City of Bologna project managed with the

Second Cities | Co-governance 17

Bologna Urban Center and various partners. It promotes a ‘Culture of Collaboration’, with continuous and consistent community involvement, while making technologies, resources, spaces, knowledge, skills and information more accessible.

is viewed as an opportunity to learn.

As one of the initiators, Iaione saw this process as “a way to collaboratively redesign institution and laws – to enable action for the general interest, with ideas of social justice, inclusion and democracy at the model’s core.”

Within this framework, in May 2014 the Municipality of Bologna approved an instruction manual, Regulations on the Collaboration Between Citizens and the Administration, for a collaborative dialogue between the public, private and community spheres. It is a tool that seeks to simplify and promote forms of collaboration in the management of the commons.

A framework that acknowledges everyone means that input from all those that such a process affects can be channelled effectively. This was in fact one of the starting points: a realisation that a lot of energy was being lost due to a lack of organisation.

Working on a city-wide scale, Co-city in Bologna is a framework that has since been applied to other cities, not by replicating itself but by following the same process of learning from the ground and accommodating a process that is respondent to the specific place and people within.

The project was co-developed by Christian Iaione as a part of LabGov (LABoratory for GOVernance of the commons), where experiments and trials are the way of working – failure

Of the five actors the framework identifies: citizens, public authorities, private sector, civil society organisations and knowledge institutions (of nurture and culture), it was citizens’ (specifically activists and social innovators) energy that was often lost either due to lack of direction or being misdirected towards another place, namely to fight against the state.

From this starting point Iaione asked the question: why don’t we invite the individual into a polycentric governance scheme that keeps central the individual? We should invite them to work within the system – and then

Bologna © Lorenzoclick

18 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

give them the tools to organise and collaborate with the other actors.

What then is the role of public authorities within this model? Iaione explains: “First to scout and enable active citizens and social innovators, and then to oversee the process and give technical support to citizens, the proper techniques to collaborate – and ensure they are collaborative, not competitive, processes. Secondly, they need to be working on finding solutions that re-define asymmetries.” It is their role to treasure the civic imagination and liberate the imagination and energies. Then oversee the process and resolve any conflict.

The framework is careful not to relieve activists of their non-conformist and often nomadic status. According to Iaione, this action should be “organised, but not necessarily formalised, therefore aimed at delivering all sorts of solutions that may contribute to the wellbeing of people in a certain city. As for the citizen, their role is conceived as central. They have the knowledge to come up with new solutions. Nowadays knowledge is distributed. It’s not like 19th Century – knowledge is spread out – and society bears it.”

Burgess Park has an effective ‘Friends of’ group © Stevekeiretsu

So what about the central notion of the commons?

The idea behind the Co-city project in Bologna was to apply the thinking of American political scientist Elinor Ostrom to the urban realm, by considering the whole city to be a commons.

By tracing the development of the term ‘commons’, from agriculture to guilds to urban, it can be broadly agreed that there is no commons without commoning. It is in the act of collectivedoing, or, the relational aspect, that is important. The value of the resource is that it is collectively produced as a result of human activity.

Theoretically speaking, Ostrom’s work on the commons was the leading principle for the co-city model – she won the famous Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons. Her work was confined to how people collectively manage common and pooled resources in rural areas, such as forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, and irrigation systems.

Ostrom examined successful examples of self-organised governance systems and defined the context in which they can work: where there are clear boundaries of the resources and the parties involved, internal rules and sanctioning processes, monitoring systems to ensure accountability, mechanisms of conflict resolution, and ensuring stakeholders (appropriators of the common resources) are involved in the decision-making process. Beyond this: effective communication, internal trust and reciprocity, and the nature of the resource system as a whole.

Ostrom famously disproved American ecologist and philosopher Garrett Hardin’s notion of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, which was the idea that without centralised monitoring people would abuse the commons and take more than their fair share.

Ostrom pointed to examples whereby communities have successfully

managed common resources – through internal processes of self-sanctioning and exclusion and other successful self-organising principles.

In November 2015, Iaione hosted a conference in Bologna – the so-called Red City – to unpack some of these ideas, with an international audience of experts bringing their first-hand experiences. The conference, entitled The City as Commons, posited that we might view the entire city as the commons.1 What can the UK and other places learn from this? It could be argued that Italy’s lack of public funds for physical infrastructure mean that re-framing the role of the municipality and the citizen is beneficial to its resources. Yet in actuality it seems to demonstrate a strengthened social infrastructure in spite of the economic climate.

In the UK, our obsession with productivity and building leaves less time to reflect on social infrastructure and ways of working. By way of devolved governance we have an overlapping and layered myriad of structures at play, situated within differing frameworks.

Community Rights, such as those outlined in the UK’s Localism Act, have led to neighbourhood forums. There are also community land trusts, tenant management organisations, an array of lighter touch ‘friends of groups’, tenants and residents mixes between community and business, traders associations, business improvement districts and even business-led neighbourhood plans that are being trialled in certain areas.

Iaiones’ research notes the restrictions of such governance structures in that they are nestled within an existing system where capacity for scaling-up is, in this way, restricted. Moreover, with rights set from above – thus limiting their abilities – they often come with issues surrounding legitimacy, accountability, inclusivity and transparency due to the fact that these principles are not sufficiently in-built

into their framework. Furthermore, the task of enabling people to seize these opportunities is one that is often underresourced. Indeed, funding to help with technical aid in neighbourhood planning processes is declining, meaning that not all people can make use of what’s on offer.

Perhaps as in Bologna, there needs to be more focus in the UK on inclusivity and creating an environment in which all people – regardless of background – can make use of the opportunities that are available.

As Iaione puts it: “When you run a study you try and find springs of innovation – from whatever is existing: the Business Improvement Districts and neighbourhood improvement trajectory, coupled with participatory urban assembly … these are ingredients we need to use.” Indeed, polycentric structures often simply co-exist, with governance boundary lines sometimes unknowingly overlapping.

By bringing representatives from the aforementioned groups (and more) together, there is a big opportunity to build understanding and see how they can work better together, with the whole of the community in mind...

And therefore build a stronger spirit of collaboration between these oftendisparate local governance structures.

Katy Hawkins is a project co-ordinator for The Means, consultant for HopCroft Neighbourhood Forum, associate at something good something useful and an active TRA committee member.

Previously she undertook an MRes in Interdisciplinary Urban Design, at Bartlett UCL.

1. http://www.slideshare.net/LabGov/giovanniallegretti-tuscommoning-when-a-law-promotea-new-culture-of-commoning-and-collaborativegovernance-the-case-of-tuscany

Co-governance 19

Why the physical legacy of Apartheid is still a challenge for South Africa’s cities Transport is responsible for about one-third of all carbon emissions, so if cities are to effectively mitigate against climate change they need to move to less carbon intensive travel and particularly less car dependency; this is now referred to as ecomobility.

Central to promoting ecomobility is encouraging walking and cycling. For this to happen, argues Camilla Ween AoU, cities need to be permeable so that journeys are as short and as direct as possible and the urban realm must be attractive, so that these trips are pleasurable.

I recently took part in the Johannesburg EcoMobility World Festival. I had read accounts, for instance, by Engineering News (2008), that suggested Johannesburg is a city dominated by car traffic. I arrived with preconceptions and plans to highlight examples of how Europe is changing its cities to embrace sustainable travel options.

What I had not appreciated is that 21 years after Mandela’s ‘Rainbow Nation’ speech, South Africa still appears to be living with the legacy of apartheid whereby its cities were built to segregate the various ethnic groups and communities. Those separations still pretty much exist today because it appears the physical barriers that defined each community still remain largely unchanged.

Movement happens naturally when people feel they are welcome and there are no physical or psychological barriers to moving into a neighbouring area. Unfortunately, when the physical fabric of a city drastically changes or the buildings metaphorically ‘turn their back on you’ then there is a sense of ‘do not enter’. The result is that people avoid the area by taking great detours rather than taking the direct and convenient route. Breaking

down these psychological barriers is fundamental to creating an equitable city where all people can move freely everywhere. This is an urgent issue for South African cities, but also for so many of our cities that have evolved into ghettoised communities with real or perceived erected barriers between each other.

If more people are to be encouraged to leave their cars behind and use sustainable alternatives, then our cities must be permeable so that walking and cycling are an attractive option.

Making cities permeable across their communities is an essential aspect of creating sustainable cities.

Changing the fabric of a city, and particularly upgrading poor housing takes time, but the boundary zones can be broken down so that people feel free to cross them. When I worked on large development zones in London such as Earl’s Court, White City, King’s Cross and others, a key objective was always to ensure that each new piece of the city integrated well into surrounding neighbourhoods in order for all communities to benefit from new facilities. My team and I coined a strategy called ‘fuzzy boundaries’ whereby there would be no discernible border or boundary between one

20 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

place and another. We used a number of strategies to achieve ‘fuzzy boundaries’.

A key to achieving ‘fuzzy boundaries’ is to stitch together the road network so that movement and linkages will naturally occur across the boundaries, which may mean rerouting roads in order to merge them. It could also simply be a matter of upgrading the quality of an existing road by providing high quality pedestrian facilities and tree planting, including introducing continuous cycle lanes and ensuring that street lighting and furniture are attractive. If the strip of street across a boundary zone is celebrated and treated as a gateway then people are likely to be comfortable crossing it.

Another way to overcome boundary barriers is to create new urban space that clearly belongs to both communities. This can either be smallscale and urban such as a new town square, market place and meeting point, or it can be the introduction of an open green space such as a parklet.

If community or civic functions are located within these areas, they will naturally attract people from both sides of the boundary and foster interaction.

The key is to design these so that they feel equally part of either community.

Clockwise from top: Johannesburg Š Google Earth EcoMobility World Festival Johannesburg city centre Š Timo

Physical legacy of Apartheid 21

Johannesburg city centre © Paul Saad

Often the boundaries will follow a natural feature such as a river, stream or ditch. If the banks of a stream are levelled and planted, these types of boundaries can be turned into linear parks and become quiet movement corridors for walkers and cyclists, which is an alternative to the busy streets. They must have regular entry points so that they are porous, feel safe and become actively used.

When the border is a highway or a railway, the difficulty of overcoming severance is a bit more of a challenge.

If highways are elevated then public access and linkage can be created underneath the highways and public facilities. For instance, sports grounds and playgrounds can be included.

The important thing is to create thoroughfare so that there is lots of pedestrian and cycle traffic.

If highways are at-grade then ‘flat bridges’ can be introduced at regular intervals so that pedestrians and cycles are given direct access across the traffic. This will mean introducing traffic lights and it also means that vehicle traffic will be marginally slowed down, but this is a necessary price of civilising our cities. Railways also need to be crossed at regularly intervals so that they do not create long lengths of severance, either with over-bridges or tunnels.

What is poignantly evident from satellite images of Johannesburg is that the wealthier areas are significantly greener. Planting trees and green

infrastructure is an intervention that can make an immediate difference because trees have multiple benefits, such as: they create shade in hot weather; they help to reduce air pollution; they support biodiversity; and they bring life and beauty to the urban environment.

The appropriate strategies to break down the boundaries between segregated communities will likely be specific to each city and each community. Interventions should employ an urban iconography that is local and which speaks to the local communities.

The overarching principle is to create permeability and a natural flow of people. Active areas are by nature more inclusive and welcoming. These types of urban interventions are a key element of ecomobility. Cities must be convenient and safe for walking and cycling if people are going to abandon their cars for a new world of sustainable mobility.

Camilla Ween AoU is director of Goldstein Ween Architects.

1. Engineering News (2008) Busiest Freeways in Southern Hemisphere. Available at: http://www. engineeringnews.co.za/article/busiest-freeways-in-southern-hemisphere-2008-09-26 2. ICLEI - EcoMobility (2015) EcoMobility. Available at: http://ecomobility.org/ 3. UK Government (2016) Policy: Transport Emissions. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/transport-emissions

22 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

The Johannesburg Declaration on EcoMobility in Cities 2015 The Johannesburg Declaration was an outcome of the EcoMobility World Festival in Johannesburg in 2015, which was organised by Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI). It was endorsed by 19 global cities and organisations, and presented at the UN Climate Summit – COP 21 in Paris in December 2015 – by Johannesburg’s mayor Parks Tau. The Declaration summarises multiple benefits for sustainable urban development and sends a signal to the Habitat III (Quito October 2016) negotiations. It sets out wide ranging principles for cities to follow in terms of sustainable transport and urban design that should form part of cities’ climate change mitigation strategies.

It urges cities to give full support to the comprehensive implementation of transport related targets on road safety, air quality, energy efficiency and urban transport as set out under the Global Goals on Sustainable Development (SDGs).

The full Declaration is available at: ecomobilityfestival.org/thejohannesburg-declaration/ The COP 21 discussions are available at: talkofthecities.iclei.org/blog/ ecomobility-actions-speak-louderthan-words/

Housing…

In Focus Perhaps we have made a mistake. The theme of this “In-focus…” is housing. Should it not be homes? Housing, as two of our authors point out, is often ‘something done to people’. Even the language used by those in the game – ‘units’ – is the language of production conjuring up large estates or blocks of, well, houses.

Yet homes have a different connotation, somewhere that people make their own, somewhere that people might even want to be.

As urbanists, surely our aim is to create homes – places people actually want to be. It is not just about the house (or flat) but about the context – shops, offices, the myriad services that we might use.

In her article, Yolande Barnes AoU refers to this as creating the ‘proper city’ – simple buildings in a complex streetscape capable of accommodating a huge range of diverse activities. It is this idea that often seems to be lost in the debate.

Much of the discourse seems to revolve around affordability.

Providing places that people can afford to rent or buy is essential.

But even the concept of affordability is often reduced to simple monetised terms of cost and value in GBP. Houses are simply a commodity. Rarely it seems does the true cost and value to society permeate through to decisions made by policy makers. Can society really afford not to create homes for people?

In our look at this issue, Jeff Austin AoU is adamant that there is housing crisis and that it is deep-rooted. However, Dame Kate Barker questions whether there is a crisis at all – yet! After all, she argues, many young people are still living at home and will do so for longer.

The problem may come when that generation cannot rent or offer their own children somewhere to live. There are of course other people in society who don’t have such access, and are still excluded.

Both Barker and Austin ask a similar question: Why are the politicians ‘lacking political will’, asks Barker; why are politicians sticking their heads in the sand? asks Austin.

Barker hints at a possible answer. Politically, housing is a problem to be managed. To solve it, demands something more. Perhaps a good starting point would be to define the problem – housing or homes!

Image © Samuel Barnes

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

Politicians fiddle while housing goes unbuilt The housing crisis in the UK is deep-rooted, extensively documented, and well known by just about everyone – not least the many of us experiencing the effects. The crisis has been growing at an alarming pace over three decades in each year of which housing supply has seriously undershot demand.

Whether it is reports from the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Office of National Statistics or any of a host of sector experts the impact messages could not be clearer: from key workers being priced out of both market and rented accommodation anywhere near their place of work, to housing waiting lists exceeding life expectancies in the capital, to accelerating housing costs stripping out billions in potential consumer spend that could be stimulating the real economy.

This is a structural failure so serious that it’s impacting not just the whole economy, but also our fundamental quality of life. So why are politicians and the government sticking their collective heads in the sand?

In the Thatcherite vision from the 1980s, with its brave new world of Right to Buy council homes, Jo Public should by now be comfortably ensconced in a home-owning democracy. And, with an effective block on councils building new homes, a raft of private developers – volume, specialist and small-scale builders – should be competing to offer us reasonably priced homes. However, this simply has not happened.

In fact, the year-on-year undersupply of new housing has had the dual effect of grossly boosting land and house prices whilst significantly growing the rented market and rent inflation, with myriad demographic, social and economic consequences. This is further compounded by the consequences of the government’s other home-owning policies, principal of which is the aforementioned Right to Buy, under which almost 40% of houses sold off with a generous discount find themselves on the private rental market.1 This has

given birth to ‘Generation Rent’, the effects of which are only set to continue. PricewaterhouseCooper estimates that two-thirds of those in the 25-to-34 age group will occupy this sector by 2025. Meanwhile, the biggest losers in the equation will be those who require most assistance: the Office for National Statistics calculates an expansion of the rent-to-income ratio of over 30%, from a base line of 10% in 1983 to 25% in 2014 and rising. Put simply, wages for lower income groups have fallen as accommodation costs have gone up.

The term ‘affordable’ housing has acquired an Orwellian mantle as in London alone the waiting lists for social housing in the absence of real affordability is around 350,000, extending to 1.2 million across England. At the same time, developers from China, Singapore, Malaysia and Qatar have permission to build more than 33,000 homes that are distinctly unaffordable to the average worker.

The little that’s being done to combat the growing crisis is not enough and in most cases, a diversion to meaningful change. Successive administrations have combined marginal changes to development planning with unproductive subsidy of homelessness, low pay, inflated rents, mortgages and private sector landlords – all at an annual cost to the tax payer running into the billions2.

The recent policy initiative that extends permitted development rights to convert office to residential use is actually taking capacity out of employment allocation with no chance of switching back. This is a policy destined to create problems for the future Politicians fiddle 25

400,000 New housing supply in England 1950-2011 (Savills, DCLG)

350,000 300,000

Private enterprise Local authorities Housing associations

250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0

1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

balancing of jobs with local housing. In London some 1 million square metres has already been lost to office employment use, equal to 25,000 jobs for which accommodation has been removed.

Redirecting developers and planning authorities away from allocating social rented accommodation, in favour of units for sale within affordable housing schemes, shows that government is merely happy tinker around with tenure whilst wholly avoiding the key issue of insufficient supply. Seeking to compel local authorities to sell off ever more of their remaining housing to cover the costs of extending the Right to Buy, and its failed objective of expanding home ownership to housing association rental stock, is yet further evidence of a complete absence of policy formation focussed on the glaringly obvious – not enough new houses being provided where they are needed.

What lies at the heart of the problem of housing supply being so out of synch with demand? Clearly not the absence of land on which to build; only about 10% of UK land mass is under urban use (residential, employment, roads, urban green space and so forth).

It’s the provision of land with planning permission that has consistently lagged demand for the past 30 years.

People want to live where there are jobs and places to learn skills that will support them in the labour market, as well as good social and physical infrastructure.

But towns are surrounded by green belt, the relevance of which is rarely if ever objectively reviewed. Its ‘no go’ development status forces up land values on what is available to around £4.5m per hectare at the edge of London. And where permissions are obtained and banked at these high values and scarce allocations, there is an inevitable profit incentive for the volume house builders to restrict completions to maintain and maximise the sale price. This supply constraint is further aided by the enforced absence of local authorities as an alternative provider of new homes

26 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

and the decimation of small builders by punitive bank lending conditions following the 2008/9 financial crash.

The received wisdom of green belt as an essential public asset and social good is largely mythical.

The principal driver to its inviolate status is county paranoia of new towns and their migratory inner city overspill despoiling their vision of what benefits a relatively few economically blessed home-owning commuters and residents, coupled with fears of the wrong kind of neighbours and voters. The shire counties used the green belt to fix barriers around the post-war new towns that were forced upon them by government, and little has changed.

The political parties have consistently colluded in the green belt shibboleth for risk of upsetting what their advisors regard as the all-important Middle England voter. As put by Professor Ian Gordon, writing for the Centre for Cities, “Securing a decent quality of life, both for Londoners and their South East neighbours, will require region-wide efforts to re-model a much-valued – but outdated – green belt for the 21st century.”

So what is the quantum position today as a result of this history of political denial and supply side neglect?

An annually sustained build rate around the 300,0003 mark is required for re-provision of expired stock and to address accrued under supply and future need. This order of new build necessitates a radical departure from the usual channels of parcel development and disjointed increments around and within existing settlements.

Government must intervene at the policy and financial level to enable the release of green belt and delivery of a new generation of expanded towns. And as the wisdom of Ian Gordon points out again, politicians must look beyond their own boundaries: “isolationism is no longer sustainable given the threat posed by chronic housing shortages, as well as the size of the opportunities that an integrated regional approach to

Annual housing costs (Savills) Age

England & Wales

London

Over 65 50-65 35-49 57% in private rent

67% in private rent

Under 35 £2,000

£6,000

£10,000

£14,000

£18,000

Clockwise from top left: Annual housing costs (Savills) Green belt town Guildford © David Nichols Daily Mail headline (May 2016)

public investment would offer.” Politicians have also to stop pandering to home ownership fantasies and learn from the failed and costly assumptions on housing tenure, market forces, and the role of the public sector.

Rents don’t have to spiral: Germany demonstrates stable, low and predictable rents because of the way the finance is sourced and structured. Social housing doesn’t have to be residualised and local authorities don’t have to be excluded from the supply side; indeed, we can see empirically how doing so has been a major contributor to the housing crisis.

However, in familiar fashion, the government’s latest piece of tinkering – this time through the Housing and Planning Bill – has only further removed local authorities. The bill sets the legal requirements for housing policy and will, according to Ministers, save the housing crisis – though in reality it is inadequate in generating enough dwellings as it does not have any radical mechanism for increasing the volume of supply.

Only local authorities can do this. Local authorities need a requirement to build for the third of the population who will never be able to buy.

But following the third reading of the bill in the House of Lords, it became obvious that the minister for housing, Brandon Lewis, was unprepared to accept that local authorities have any productive role in negotiating the crisis. As it stands, Lord Kerslake’s observation that this Bill will be the death of social housing, has come true. Despite its clear view about demand and targets on housing, the government has purposely destroyed this potentially potent part of the supply side. In doing so, it has set out its stall against lower income families. However, it’s worth remembering, this is not unique to our current government: it was in fact perpetuated by 13 years of Labour rule.

“History will see this as the residential commodification era, in which housing provision seemed to lose all

contact between supply and demand of housing as a utility and simply focused on supply and demand of investment - and that is worrying” (Peter Rees, Professor of Places and City Planning, UCL).

To get to an equilibrium is going to be challenging; overcoming ideological obsession with marginalizing the public sector and the entrenched myths of green belt alone will require brave voices and sustained commitment cross-party and across the development and planning sectors. As for our existing local authority housing estates, they can and should be renewed using the Complete Streets method that re-integrate estates into their local surroundings (see p. 33).

According to research by Savills4, this approach could yield an extra 73% in households on applicable land – from 78 homes per hectare currently to an average of 135 homes per hectare. Respect and engagement of the communities affected by the process is critical to ensuring success, but Savills indicates the potential is huge: “public and third sector landowners looking for sustainable income and long-term investors looking for popular and sustainable real estate would make Complete Streets the built form of choice.”

But above all, getting the capacity, skilled design and construction workers, trainers, facilities, and logistics in place after so many years of neglect will not be easy.

Further delay and yet more tinkering is simply not an option.

Jeff Austin AoU is director of JVM Consultants.

1. ‘Inside Housing’ from 2015, Nov: http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/revealed40-of-ex-council-flats-now-rented-privately/7011266.article 2. 2015, Department for Work and Pensions 3. ‘Future Homes Commission report, Building the Homes and Communities Britain Needs’ https://www.architecture.com/Files/RIBATrust/ FutureHomesCommissionLowRes.pdf 4. http://pdf.euro.savills.co.uk/uk/residential---other/completing-london-sstreets-080116.pdf

Politicians fiddle 27

Sub-urbanism: a new focus?

At last year’s Academy Mid-Year Review, the question of the suburb as a form of urbanism emerged. Little attention has been given by the Academy to suburban development in spite of the fact that some 85% of us live in the suburbs.

Few new settlements have been visited by the Academy.

Over the Academy’s lifetime only six of 150 awards have focused on suburban housing. The Academy has now set up a group of Academicians to explore this conundrum. The initial discussions revolved around the house – the subject of this first article. A second article in a future edition of Here & Now will address the place.

“Home is where one starts from”

T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets “Our homes are vessels of extraordinary history, perhaps the last repositories of a language of symbol and collective memory, that ties us to our ancestors, to profound and ancient threads of meaning.”

Edwin Heathcote: Home

The concept of the house The Times recently indicated that the most popular house in England was an early Victorian two story house with a central door and windows on either side, a pitched roof and wisteria growing up the front porch.

Why is this?

At a recent conference I talked about the myths we live out and the role of powerful images on our perceptions.

Homes are more than machines to live in. They might keep the rain out, but they also host values that resonate with us on a deep and symbolic level, a kind of physical manifestation of all our hopes and fears.

The concept of the house is hard-wired into our psyche. It conjures up deep feelings of comfort, memory, family, safety and so on. These are primal elements in our identity. They contain a rich history of meaning and illusion that enables us to feel fixed in time, place, and in memories that might be our own or acquired from our social environment. They help place us in our world and help define our identity.

French anthropologist Levi-Strauss viewed the way we build and arrange our dwellings as reflecting our view of ourselves in the cosmos. If we are rich, we can attain these feelings. Great private houses and Grand Designs show what can be done.

Image © Natesh Ramasamy

28 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

The AoU and this article focus on housing; houses that are part of a larger agglomeration or suburb, that are mostly built for, rather than built by households.

Homes for Change housing co-operative in Manchester Part of the Hulme Great Neighbourhood Award assessment © John Lord AoU

The traditional village green © Andy Wilkes

In a recent book on the rise of homo sapiens, Yuval Harari posits the concept of the cognitive revolution being the first step in human kind creating an understanding of our world and our position in it.

replicate these myths, but are constrained by a housebuilding industry controlled by 10 companies, and bureaucratic rules set up to ensure the continuity of the myth. Sometimes we end up with meaningless gestures for political or economic reasons.

The cognitive revolution enables the telling of stories to explain why things are the way they are, and thus create myths to ensure these ideas are embedded in our psyche and our language. But to do this requires cultural institutions and rules, and these have to be established. In the field of planning and urban design these myths still exist and are in frequent use. So too are the institutions that promulgate them.

We use our homes to make purposeful and deliberate statements about ourselves, designed to reflect our attitudes, our goals, our roles and priorities, and visual delight. In other words, homes are places in which we construct a version of our own selves – even when severely constrained by product and regulations. So the question is: can we do better?

Do the homes we build reflect our desires to encapsulate these values? Do we, as urbanists, reflect the rituals and meanings of the houses we design or places we plan? Do our house-builders really reflect our deep emotions? Is that why the ‘punters’ like their houses? The home and its anthropomorphic interpretation as a dwelling has come to represent an arrangement of spaces within a recognisable carapace.

But whilst that arrangement has changed over time, through social and economic pressures, the skin has not. One just has to see these two images to realise the strength of the external image.

Although many architects consider the Georgian house the quintessential English dwelling, most of our housing today is built around the myths of village life, coloured by vicarious nostalgia for a non-existent past. How many times have we seen plans of urban extensions that include words like ‘Village Green’ or ‘Market Place’ where neither really exists? But whereas the village house might have been supported by a garden, today the priority is room to park the car.

To a certain extent the Garden City has become mythological. We use its images as design benchmarks against which new development is judged. But the result is often poor quality sprawl. Our bureaucracies have institutionalised some of these concepts in publications such as the Essex Design Guide.

The new urbanists recognise this. We can have Bulthaupt or Smallwood kitchens, we can fill our rooms with faux Chippendale furniture or IKEA chairs, and the latest gadgetry. Our independence can be celebrated internally but the external design would infer a desire for a more normative statement about ourselves and our culture.

The images we live with take on a timeless quality.

Nothing much changes except the product becomes smaller and less robust. In some cases we try to

Sub-urbanism: a new focus? 29

Is this why the product, the house, remains unchanged?

Or is it just the way the industry is organised?1 We are losing the ability to build our own houses.

They are built for us. We have little say in personalising them. Our houses are now so tightly drawn that if we want to change our house we have to move, and take our memories in the form of ‘stuff’ with us to provide continuity. The house is bought, lived in for seven years and then we move. We seem to have lost meaning, we are no longer rooted in place, nor can we be, so the house is just a temporary receptacle that we camp in.

The house has also become a vehicle for investment, a means of ensuring a pension, and collateral in financial negotiations. The house design has been standardised, commodified and determined by corporate exigencies and institutional controls that are difficult to change.

It’s the same house whether it’s in Carlisle or Southampton. It relies on a limited supply chain, a workforce that has lost many skills, and a complicit professional environment. It has been valueengineered, built to exacting constraints, and lost any redundancy that would facilitate adaptation. The house has become a closed system. The RIBA was right to call for Long Life: Loose Fit. Many years ago I was involved in researching housetypes for a developer. We discovered that a three-bed family house was no longer being bought for large households but for smaller ones that wanted space but could find no appropriate product – even though they were hampered by density and the market. The demographics had changed but not the product, nor the institutional mechanisms that encouraged it. The house remains determined by density of habitable rooms and units per hectare and not by floor-space. It would seem impossible to build a ‘loft in suburbia’.

There is some radical rethinking that could change the current housing market. Cherwell District Council’s Graven Hill project for some 2,000 custom-built dwellings could re-engage our ideas about home and house. So too could lessons from site-and-service2 and core housing3 and other similar dwellings from around the world.

What does this mean for AoU and its drive for more appropriate urban forms? Suburbs are a key element of our urban life. They too morph. Intensities change.

Outer suburbs become inner city, edges become central; uses change. Do those that are being built now match the rate of change? What lessons can we learn from new suburban development in UK and Europe?

The first three principles espoused by the AoU are that successful urbanism is the result of a collective vision; the cultures of the people should be expressed at a human scale and through both physical and social structures, and; the full potential of the community must be supported spiritually, physically and visually.

These are still to be addressed in our suburbs. Perhaps it is time for the Academy to raise its head above the parapet and further engage with the providers and their institutions; call for better houses, ones that answer some of the questions relating to values and well-being; and to open up the market and fight for a qualitative improvement in what is built. We would like you to help by sending us exemplars of the new suburban house, or the criteria that you consider appropriate for the AoU to champion.

I’ll leave the last words of this section to Sam Jacob, a founder of FAT Architecture:

If ‘house’ is the building where one lives and ‘home’ is what happens in it, can these be reconciled? First there are cultural differences that help determine the role of the house, and that’s why a Dutch house is different from an Egyptian one.

“My real advice for building a really happy home? Resist the creeping commodification of your own domesticity that contemporary Anglo-Saxon culture promotes.

Construct homes as places that allow us to live out more fulfilled lifestyles. Think of your home as a place that helps you develop and experiment with the possibilities of your identity, family and ways of living rather than something that fits in with external expectations.”

Secondly, as our cities have fragmented into residential, retail or working zones, our ability to make the most of our connections has changed with technology. We don’t have to talk to our neighbour when we can ‘Skype’ friends in Australia.

Jon Rowland AoU, director of JRUD, with acknowledgements to Pam Wharfe AoU and Stuart Turner AoU.

This means that our memories and identities have had to become more portable. Whilst environmental psychologists suggest the physical settings, such as the size of windows, height of ceilings, shape of rooms all impact on our general health (volume builders take note); the trend towards greater uncertainty, mobility and different kinds of connectivity might mean that the memorabilia, the stuff that helps shape ‘home’ for the next generation, the young urbanists, is being digitised and stored in the ‘cloud’. Does that mean that ‘home’ is now a laptop? No housing developers are considering any of these issues.

30 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

The next article will be about ‘place’. We hope that you will also think about exemplars of good ‘places’ and what criteria, values and cultural or demographic attitudes makes a good ‘place’.

1. The Quality of life in cities: the twenty-first century suburb. J Rowland and C Mitchell; Urban Design and Planning; V165 Issue DP3; ICE publishing.

2. “Sites-and-Services” schemes are the provision of plots of land, either on ownership or land lease tenure, along with a bare minimum of essential infrastructure needed for habitation – GDRC.org 3. COntinuous REcording of Lettings and Sales in Social Housing in England – gov.uk

Creating a proper city Yolande Barnes AoU, head of global research at real estate firm Savills, argues that...

Ashburys and Chelseas and Shoreditches to go round.

We haven’t built anything like them for the last eighty years so only the wealthiest can compete for these rare types of neighbourhood in the most central locations.

Too often in the 20th century, housing development was something done to people rather than by people and many of the resulting places are not valued – environmentally, socially or economically.

The lack of affordable housing is the topic on everyone’s lips, not just in London and the south of England but, it seems, in every growing and successful city that I have visited or studied across the globe in the last five years.

This lack of supply often shows up as angry discussions online, as well as in the local and national press, about the gentrification of neighbourhoods and displacement of indigenous communities, and the ever-increasing cost of real estate. Increasing numbers of business leaders are seeing the lack of affordable accommodation for key staff, particularly younger talent, as a key barrier to growth. Economists and city politicians are rightly starting to see this issue as a threat to the future prosperity of cities.

If the issue of supply continues to be considered in terms of the number of ‘housing units’, the problems of a supply shortage will persist. This is because housing demand is not for ‘units’ but for homes. A home is much more than a building – it is a place, an identity, a neighbourhood. If we fail to provide neighbourhoods with a real sense of place and identity, we have failed to provide homes, we have merely provided ‘units’.

Although the rate of housing delivery per head of population is absurdly low in the UK by international comparison (Fig 1.) (Bulgaria is the only country I have found with a lower rate), I think the problem is a fundamental and structural one. It has to do with the way that the built environment has been developed in the post-war era in terms of both business models and design. I have observed the increasing difficulty with which ordinary people in cities across the globe can access good, affordable housing. This is caused by a lack of the type of property people want and in the type of neighbourhood that they want it. There are simply not enough Greenwich Villages, Haight

Even in London, one of the highest demand cities on the planet in terms of housing, there are still locations where property values and transaction levels are very low by comparison with the rest of the city. They are the places, some of which are quite well connected by public transport, that only consist of housing units and little else. Even the hardest pressed twenty-something in search of a London rental would not consider living in them. They are just not London, not ‘proper city’.

And ‘proper city’ really, really matters in the digital age.

The digital age is a paradoxical one. It is an age when

Sub-urbanism: a new focus? | Creating a proper city

31

The anti-street: Le Corbusier’s plan to sanitise Paris © Climax City

In contast, the streets of Dharavi, Mumbai © Adam Cohen

access to everything everywhere on a single hand-held device means that being ‘somewhere’ has never been more important. It is an age of global goods when the locally made, hand crafted, bespoke object has rarely been more sought-after. It is an age of global, footloose, high-skilled labour when the attraction and retention of human talent has rarely been more difficult for employers.

Most of the activities that we call ‘living’ cannot be accommodated in the standard buildings designed, coded-zoned and categorised in the late 20th century. How often has the design of a new place accommodated all the activities that take place in real neighbourhoods? How often, for example, have you seen provision made in a masterplan for things like a small builder’s yard, a computer training classroom or a funeral parlour? These are all random but representative examples of the thousands of businesses, enterprises and uses that we regularly find in highly valued and high-functioning everyday neighbourhoods. You’ll find them all in old cities or present day self-built shantytowns but rarely in modern, planned neighbourhoods.

All this means that it is an age when the city has become a commercial unit of production and its ability to foster human encounters, new enterprises and creativity has rarely been more valued. The coffee shop is once again as important to the future prosperity of a city as it was in the early days Lloyd’s of London.

The fact that we seem incapable of building it any more is of huge and significant strategic importance and will profoundly affect the ability of local economies to grow and prosper.

I say we can’t build it any more because the last six decades of built environment practice have been all about single buildings, single uses, single owners and short-term business models, none of which can possibly create city. Proper city is about creating simple buildings in complex streetscapes capable of accommodating the huge range of messy, diverse activities that make up human lives – and with a system of robust governance that allows these to respond and change over time.

32 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

We have all seen fabulous architect’s computergenerated images of proposed development schemes portraying myriad pedestrians and cyclists enjoying lush green landscapes but without any public conveniences, bicycle repair shops nor gardener’s sheds in sight.

Just as not every human activity fits into a standard planning use class, neither can every future human activity be predicted – especially in the face of the disruption and rapid pace of change of the digital age.

Nobody knows, for example, the full and final impacts of e-tailing on standard use classes like retail and warehousing. All we know is that buildings designed in

Grub Street, London

Existing street pattern for Savills’ hypothetical local authority estate; Potential Complete Streets estate pattern for the same estate

2002-11 new units per 1,000 pop

Proportion of all homes delivered by self-build / self-procurement

UK

2.6

14%

Germany

2.9

60%

Sweden

3.4

65%

Denmark

3.9

45%

Belgium

4.2

65%

Netherlands

4.5

27%

Austria

5.1

80%

France

5.9

60%

Ireland

11.8

58%

Fig 1. Source: EU & Eurostat, National Data, Savills Research

a different age will be accommodating activities that were unimaginable when they were built.

When speaking to audiences about the impact on cities and real estate of the digital revolution and the tech economy, I often find myself using the phrase ‘back to the future’. It seems that the greater the need for flexibility in buildings and for human interaction in business and enterprise, the more useful and appropriate Georgian terraces and Victorian warehouses on a connected network of mixed-use streets seem to be. Don’t think I’m arguing here for classical or pastiche architecture. These places are popular not because of their architectural style but

because of their form and geography. Proper city streets are the most popular home for creative digital industries and the people who work in them, across the globe.

If we don’t want scarcity to push up the price of these neighbourhoods then we have to create more. This will mean different business models are needed for delivery. The long-term value of good urbanism is not easily realised if short-term debt-funded development models are involved. The future is not out-of-town business parks and car-reliant housing estates. Our targets for delivering homes has to be about a lot more than unit numbers. Delivering good urbanism will need a simultaneously enlightened approach by politicians, investors, planners and built environment professionals. If the government wants to deliver housing that will work, for the long-term interests of everyone, a massive cross-sector, cross-party effort is needed. Making some housing part of the infrastructure commission’s remit is a step in the right direction.

Taking the whole built environment out of the political cycle and putting it in the hands of such a commission, with the teeth to deliver a complete urban environment rather than just unit numbers, might be an even bigger step toward real progress.

Yolande Barnes AoU is head of global research at Savills.

Creating a proper city 33

Making room: responding to the housing crisis in New York and London John McAslan AoU draws comparisons between New York and London for lessons on how cities can tackle housing shortages

Image Š David Holt

34 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

Arriving in London via Boston in 1981, as an architect in my mid-20s and to a country immersed in a royal wedding and new technologies, I admit that I wasn’t particularly interested in housing or demographic situations. It seemed so easy then. I borrowed a deposit and bought a flat in Notting Hill for £18,000 – three times my then salary. Six months ago the global forecasters, Oxford Economics, warned that the average house price in London could rise to £1 million in the next decade. In the boroughs of Hammersmith, Fulham and Camden, for instance, average house prices today are already 20 times average earnings.

of thousands of Londoners when she recently declared: “Never in the history of social housing has so much been taken, by so few, from so many few.”

Commentators have said virtually the same about the situation in New York.

So how do these two liveability-challenged cities tackle this combination of housing shortages and high residential real estate prices in market-driven environments?

First, and quite fundamentally, New York and London must recognise that their housing crises demand exceptional measures.

London and New York are the world’s two most powerful city states. They lead in finance, culture, and the arts. They epitomise 21st century aspirational modernity. New York’s GDP is $1.5 trillion annually.

London’s is about two-thirds of that, with a GDP reported as equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s. London’s housing stock is said to have the same value as Brazil’s entire GDP.

Second, there should be a more dynamic use of brownfield land. There is space for at least 400,000 new homes in London’s post-industrial land and thousands of unimplemented planning permissions for this land. In New York, 75 per cent of the empty lots – half are suitable to be built on – have remained unused for more than 30 years. There should be tougher regulations to obligate developers to build higher quality schemes within a specific period.

In 2006, the average asking price for a two bedroom house in London was £330,000. By 2013, despite the Recession, it was £500,000. Today, it’s around £600,000. In New York, according to the Furman Center for Real Estate, house prices have risen by 350 per cent in the last three decades.

Third, small may be beautiful. Micro-housing developments are underway in London, as it is in New York, where one million people are searching for affordable homes. In both cities, Micro Housing formats of between 250 and 450 sq ft studio and onebed units are being designed and built. They recall housing theories first explored in Europe in the 1920’s and developed later in legendary architectural projects such as the 1972 Capsule Tower designed by Kisho Kurokawa, and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 complex in Montreal.

New York’s previous Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, created 165,000 low rent apartments during his tenure. And the current Mayor, Bill de Blasio, says he’s on a “sacred mission” to build or renovate 200,000 affordable housing units in New York’s diverse neighbourhoods for households earning less than $40,000 a year, in a plan that will cost the city $40 billion, in the next decade.

In London, The Collective and Pocket Living are building a range of schemes across the city, with average rents of £200 per week, or at a purchase price affordable to those on average London wages.

Pocket Living supplies micro-flats of around 400 sq ft. They cost about £160,000 and are bought by people who earn, on average, £39,000 a year. The Collective rents bedrooms and washrooms – and sometimes kitchenettes – covering about 20 sq metres. The rents average at £220 a week. That includes running costs, WiFi and council tax, with access to gyms, common rooms, gardens and dining rooms. Other similar smaller scale housing innovations are entirely possible, but they need a bold and properly funded modular housing industry.

Since 2009, affordable housing starts have stalled at 7,000 a year, and 60,000 New Yorkers (including 22,000 children) are registered as homeless. Some 400,000 people officially live in New York City’s traditional public housing units. Unofficially, at least 100,000 more live in them secretly. Meanwhile, New York’s public housing stock faces a maintenance and improvement backlog of $16 billion. Since the 1980s, inner city gentrification has contributed substantially to house prices rising by 250 per cent between 1974 and 2006 in New York, and by similar rates in London.

In principle, these transformations are a good thing because they often improve the urban fabric. But they serve the market economy. The social market economy which produced substantial tracts of affordable and local authority housing in London and New York, postwar, has been superseded by the alluring Yellow Brick Road to endless gentrification.

Fourth, as an alternative to creating vertical housing, we need to design and build more medium-rise units.

Could we not revisit the New York tenement model, or Berlin’s courtyard housing typologies, or use the principles of the 19th century Peabody housing?

In London, 1975 was the peak year for council housing, with 60 per cent of homes owned or managed by local authorities. Today, it runs at between 10 and 14 per cent. Jasmin Parsons, an affordable housing campaigner, summed up the feelings of hundreds

The prospect of big medium-rise housing blocks does not have to conjure up grim 19th century images. If they are well-designed, these large-scale domestic buildings can be exemplary and pleasant places to live.

Making room 35

Mount Earl Gardens by Pocket Living

New Era, De Beauvoir and Colville estates © Alan Denny

Fifth, the development of co-housing should be encouraged. This means individuals getting together to buy urban sites to build housing units with communal facilities. There would also be many people who would invest in co-housing opportunities. Whilst they would make a modest return for the investment, their contribution would, in a low-risk way, help London’s affordable housing crisis. A New York version of this kind of communality is appearing in democratically controlled Community Land Trusts, with buildings owned by a mutual housing association, which sells or rents the apartments affordably.

social housing scheme called the Bacton Estate – without the involvement of a private developer. It’s the first social housing built in the borough for 30 years. In Tottenham, where my practice has set up the design-related social involvement project, N17, the local authority is investigating joint-venture housing initiatives with private developers.

Sixth, new use-classes should be created to facilitate the adaptation of redundant buildings into housing and live/work units. In London, for instance, there’s a vast amount of empty space above low-rise shops, which could easily be converted into flats and live/ work units. But I caution against unregulated office to residential conversions, which deplete office stock and drive up office rentals.

Seventh, bearing in mind the increasing numbers of home renters, we surely need more firmly regulated rent differentials using means-tested rental models.

This is being tried in schemes such as the New Era Estate in Hoxton by Dolphin Living. Of course, we have to see how this kind of rent model actually pans out. But, if successful, it could ensure a greater, more culturally civil mixture of different types of people and housing, in London Eighth, local authorities should strive to become lead developers, or co-developers, of social or affordable housing. This important strategy is beginning to take root in London. As lead developers, they don’t need to take the usual 20 per cent private sector cut, and can therefore underwrite genuine affordability and design quality. In Camden, for example, the local authority Community Investment Programme has built a new

36 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

In Haringey, which has the second highest number of homeless households in temporary accommodation in London, the council is considering joint ventures with private developers to create new mixes of affordable social housing within a public-private ownership model.

Ninth, the design quality of housing is crucial. It’s surely obvious that well-designed affordable homes can contribute greatly to the quality of domestic life.

But in London, planners have made no truly sustained demands for design quality. They struggle to process even the existing volumes of planning applications with any true understanding of architectural quality or urban design. Should the housing situation be left to develop in a purely market-led way? Can the market improve housing affordability? Does it want to? Is there any thorough democracy in the dynamics of housing provision? Are we somehow losing the fundamental idea of having secure homes?

London and New York are, indeed, the world’s preeminent world-class cities. But in terms of providing housing for the majority of their inhabitants, we are entitled to ask this spiky question: Who, exactly, are these two great cities world class for?

John McAslan AoU is executive chairman and founder of John McAslan + Partners.

The changing context faced by social housing is more complex and inherently risky for housing associations than at any other time in their history. Mike Wilkins AoU, chief executive of Ducane Housing Association, offers his views on the state of play now and what’s to come.

rents are rising more quickly than earnings. A quarter of households in the capital are living in poverty. So with wages tending to be low, which puts housing out of reach for many people, and local housing allowances capped, ‘hidden homelessness is on the rise as more children are returning to live with their parents.

Over a number of government administrations, there has been a reduction in both direct capital subsidy (grant) and more recently revenue subsidy (housing benefit/universal benefit). This has exposed associations more to the vicissitudes of the property market; the only way to build more homes is to crosssubsidise development for social rent with outright sale and market renting, as well as the more established model of shared ownership.

The government’s response to this crisis is to focus on promoting home ownership through programmes such as the starter homes initiative and help to buy. Starter Homes applicants, it seems, are not required to qualify on income, just age, and after five years the property can be sold at a profit on the original discount.

However, even shared ownership can be pricey – rising land and construction costs In London last year saw the first £1m flat put up for sale.The chancellor has taken some steps to reduce demand by increasing stamp duty on expensive homes and buy-to-let investments, which is having some impact at the top end of the market. This has decreased interest in London property from Chinese and Russian investors, while Brexit uncertainty has possibly dampened some enthusiasm.

However, the sale of starter homes was only one in a number of hefty administrative impositions, the most significant of which was the voluntary right to buy. This was essentially an election strapline which the Tories thought would be ameliorated in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. However, with an outright victory, they had a manifesto promise to keep. There followed a certain amount of haggling with the trade body of the National Housing Federation. In return for keeping the Right to Buy off the statute books, the ‘sector’, or parts of it, voted to accept the ‘voluntary’ part of the Right to Buy.

Nonetheless, market predictions are for continuing increases in house and land prices, alongside rent in the private sector. This makes finding a home more expensive for individuals, and potentially more risky financially for housing associations. There is an unprecedented demand for new homes. In England it is estimated that 250,0001 new homes a year are required, yet house building output in 2015 saw only 142,890 completions.

In practice, the proposals require housing associations to be fully funded for the loss of stock through the right to buy by local authorities. The prospect of local authorities owning high value stock that could be sold was the driver for this. However, it doesn’t take much analysis to see that this will be restricted to a few cities, and mainly London. Whilst the regulations are still being formulated, some estimates of the

In London, 50,000 new homes will be required per year by the end of the decade to keep up with demand.

Building output for all tenures is currently half of that.

House prices in London are now over 40 per cent above where they were before the financial crisis, and

Making room | The new world 37

take-up of Right to Buy suggest that it may involve as little as 1% of the stock. However, local authorities are clearly the losers in this particular money-go-round.

Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of right to buy, associations face the increased administrative costs of implementing other government housing policies. For example, right to rent introduces the requirement to check on some applicants’ rights to reside in the UK. Additionally, pay to stay requires the identification of households with incomes of £30k and over (£40k in London), at which point the rent for these families increases to 80% of market rates. There is no doubt here that tenants faced with a huge hike in rents will opt for Right to Buy! However, associations possess no statutory powers to require tenants to prove their income, so the implementation of all of these policies is complex and an administrative burden. This administrative drag will be felt particularly by smaller, community-based associations with fewer internal resources.

Housing associations, who have typically developed one-third of total new build output in recent years, may be building fewer homes in the future as new government strictures apply. For example, in a headline-grabbing move in the summer of last year, the chancellor announced that housing associations would be required to reduce their rents by one per cent each year for the next four years. Add to this the regulator – the Homes and Communities Agency – whose big concern is with efficiency and value for money, and we may see fewer medium-sized associations building new homes in the future.

A few years ago, the Coalition introduced the muchcriticised ‘affordable rent’ grant regime, which allowed associations flexibility on rents up to 80 per cent of the

market rate. Much of the criticism arose from this being named ‘affordable’ in the first instance, a sort of affront to common sense.

It also provoked some concern with local authorities.

In practice, most rents went up to around 45-60 per cent of market rate; one route for at least some rented homes to be built . However, even this grant is now being shelved in favour of a range of homeownership initiatives. Affordable rent properties, by the way, will have cuts in rent and service charges of one per cent over the next four years.

Another aspect of this is that the type of demand for new homes is changing. One-third of social housing tenants are over the age of 65. The demographic peak in this age group anticipated over the next 10 years cannot be supported alone by local authority budgets for care and support. With some small associations no longer able to compete, only the largest associations can take on care contracts with national minimum wages to pay.

The problem is that this government administration is not particularly interested in providing more rented homes (for people who will not vote for them). They have instead introduced ideologically and electorally driven policies on homeownership which, in practice, will not deliver the number of new homes required. The housing minister Brandon Lewis has set a target of 1m new homes over this parliament, 200,000 of which will be starter homes.

These have been re-branded as affordable housing for planning / section 106 purposes. However, analysis

by Savills2 suggests that these ‘affordable’ help to buy and starter homes will not significantly increase the number of new homes being taken up. On the positive side, however, funding for new homes is not likely to

Images: Ducane House Association

38 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

be a critical business issue in the short term. With historically low interest rates and plenty of appetite from investors, the funding markets are broadly happy with the ‘investment class’, and bond finance has been available at competitive rates for a number of years.

under the voluntary right to buy, there is a net loss of accommodation at the affordable end of the spectrum.

Regaining local authority and housing association co-ordination is crucial for making the best use of land and resources to meet local needs, as highlighted in the London Housing Commission Report.

Although it may appear that low interest rates are the new norm, these are unusual market conditions. The regulator asks associations to run stress tests on their business plans to the point where the organisation collapses under a combined set of extreme circumstances. The idea behind this is that boards will be able to detect signs of possible future problems at an earlier stage and take corrective action.

It is a dire situation, but central government coordination would, in theory, help considerably, particularly regarding land release. At the moment, there are some positive steps towards this with the Homes and Communities Agency and the GLA (in London) aggregating large sites for development.

Another measure towards this has been the ‘use it or lose it’ policy to discourage lengthy land hoarding.

It would be hard to describe the current administration’s policy response as evidence-based.

Reductions in the welfare bill and an emphasis on home ownership without considering the impacts could be regarded as blinkered and ideologically driven. This is in the midst of a property cycle of increasing scarcity and price increases for rent and purchase, without any obvious signs that the market will respond to demand and build more homes.

Housing associations do have to carry additional administrative burdens as a result of recent legislation.

Together with the rent cuts, this is driving better efficiency in the sector. Mergers, in theory, should offer better value for money for tenants and provide more homes. In April, the merging of some of the biggest associations is planned (London and Quadrant, East Thames and Hyde HAs), forming a 135,000 home landlord. Let’s hope that the quality of services to tenants is not lost as a casualty in the drive towards greater efficiency.

Some believe that the production of housing, for example in the post-war period, was most effective when private sector output was added to by public social housing. This is mainly because the private sector house-building market is not entirely driven by demand. Developers holding land banks will measure out new building activity when the market is rising, but will generally hold off when the market turns down. This leaves local authorities and housing associations to make best use of their resources to build more homes. However, with local authorities having to sell homes to compensate housing associations for homes they have sold

Mike Wilkins AoU is chief executive of Ducane Housing Association. For more information visit thehomesweneed.org.uk.

1. Report of the London Housing Commission, 2016 2. Savills Policy Response, February 2016

The new world 39

Getting a handle on housing affordability: lessons from the Commonwealth Cities in the UK, and particularly London, may have a housing affordability crisis, but it is not a unique problem. Derek Wilson looks at what we can learn from Sydney and Vancouver.

As protesters demonstrate on UK streets on a seemingly monthly basis, it would appear that the Government’s housing strategies are undergoing a crisis of confidence. Its Housing and Planning Bill is attracting criticism not only from community activists, but also its own political allies.1 Housing affordability is a major source of discontent for many, and as of yet, there does not seem to be an adequate or appropriate response.

This is not a situation unique to London or any one of the UK’s increasingly expensive residential markets; cities around the world are facing similar challenges and calls for action, with the majority of their governments unable to implement meaningful reform.

However, concerted responses in a number of global cities have shown how progress can be achieved. Two such cities – both of which are facing affordability challenges even more extreme than London – are leading that charge. If we are to address the affordability crisis in the United Kingdom, we should look to these examples, appreciate their successes, understand their shortcomings, and relate them to our own challenges back at home.

Sydney: Building a New Legacy For two and a half decades, home ownership has become increasingly unaffordable for Sydney residents. It has historically been an expensive city in comparison to most markets, but is even more so today; as of 2016, only Hong Kong outranks Sydney in terms of income-adjusted cost of housing.2 While this can partly be attributed to the desirability of the city itself, and partly to sustained economic growth, governance issues have exacerbated the problem and rendered housing a trophy asset.

Many of these issues stem from market-oriented approaches to planning, under which the private sector was relied upon to provide infrastructure in the absence of government support. In the early and mid-

40 40 Here Here & & Now Now || AoU AoU Journal Journal No. No. 77 || Spring Spring 2016 2016

2000s, infrastructure expenses were offloaded to such an extent that the cost of servicing a single residential lot could exceed A$100,000. This had the predictable effect of directing private developers towards higherend (and higher-margin) residential products, with the supply of more affordable housing being slowly choked off. Combined with a limited land base restricted by urban growth boundaries, housing prices skyrocketed against income, increasing more than 50 per cent between 2001 and 2010.3 This outcome can be partly chalked up to laissezfaire models of governance.3 Without the necessary resources and regulatory mechanisms to maintain affordability, a widespread market failure was created, and the median home price in Sydney is now more than twelve times the median household income.1 Anna Chubb, senior advisor to the minister of planning for New South Wales, notes that: “historically, we haven’t had strong leadership in strategic planning, and as a consequence we haven’t created a framework for affordable housing to be discussed in a reasonable way.”

However, the current government has taken a significant step to rectify this situation with the establishment of the Greater Sydney Commission, a body dedicated to the refinement and implementation of Sydney’s metropolitan plan. It will co-operate with multiple levels of government to introduce new legislation promoting housing affordability across the region. Adopting a ‘portfolio approach’, the GSC plans to focus on increasing the housing supply, improving the range of price points within it, and diversifying the housing stock beyond apartments and singlefamily dwellings. Though many of these strategies have been considered before, there has been no single body responsible for implementing them. Chubb believes that with this structure, “[Sydney] now has the leadership in place to actually make it happen for the first time.”

In addition to their portfolio approach, the GSC also plans to adopt a range of more targeted measures, each

10 Sydney Melbourne Brisbane Adelaide Perth Hobart Canberra

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2011

2006

2001

1996

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Housing Affordability: Australia Major Markets: 1981-2012 Source: Demographia 12th Annual Housing Affordability Survey

Housing protestors in London © Weekly Bull Opposite page: Vancouver © Kenny Louis

of which is intended to address particular market segments. Comprised of nine interconnected policy groupings, this integrated approach aims to create connections between government, the private sector, and non-profit organisations at a variety of scales, tackling everything from taxation and financing of particular developments to the planning of the entire metropolitan region.

a more comprehensive approach is required – namely, one that addresses both renters and homebuyers at all price points through a range of housing types and affordability strategies. The strategy of building more starter homes may work for some, but it seems unlikely to achieve the type of systematic change that Sydney is aggressively pursuing – or that UK citizens are demanding.

Chubb urges that governments should “look at [housing] as a supply chain, and not just as one solution, but a whole range of them. The best strategy is a multi-pronged approach – not just about inclusionary zones, not just about supply, but about all of those things, and more.” This multi-pronged approach is how Sydney has chosen to move forward, and based on recent government plans, it appears as though its residents at all levels of the economic ladder will soon see some very tangible government interventions aimed squarely at improving their access to affordable housing.

Vancouver: Maintaining a Balance Up until 1986, Vancouver was little more than a blip on the global radar. But Expo 86 changed that. Vancouver was thrust onto the international stage, and before long was growing at an unprecedented rate. Investment poured in and property markets boomed. More than 200,000 wealthy immigrant investors from these areas have moved to a city with a population of 2.4 million, and they now comprise 9% of metro Vancouver’s entire population.6

The example set by Sydney is particularly relevant to the UK, where approaches to housing affordability have been trending towards the neoliberal strategy of simply building more. The 2015/2016 Housing and Planning Bill is a case in point – it attempts to address the affordability issue by promoting the construction of ‘Starter Homes’ for first-time buyers.4 This policy is potentially problematic for two reasons: first, it does not attempt to address affordability issues for those outside this very specific target market, and second, it may not be particularly effective for those it does focus on.

This has coincided with a staggering rise in the cost of housing, which geographer Professor David Ley views as the “collateral damage” of Vancouver’s economic growth strategies. Vancouver now ranks immediately behind Sydney as the third most expensive housing market in the world, five places above London.1 The median house price is now equal to 10.8 years’ worth of median household salary, and like London, the city’s citizens are becoming increasingly aggravated by the lack of affordable housing. “You’ve got a global market, but you’ve got local people trying to compete in that global market, and you find that they are getting priced out. There’s no other alternative at the moment, which is why you see the frustration” says Mukhtar Latif, the chief housing officer for the City of Vancouver.

“You need to have government intervention to create affordability.”

The UK charity Shelter projects that for more than half of the administrative areas around the country, the starter homes proposed by the government will still be out of reach for the average wage-earner by 2020.5 Based on these assessments, the government’s proposed policy looks to improve affordability for some first-time homebuyers, while neglecting to address the rest of the market. The Sydney case would suggest that

In a city with a median household income of C$69,700, and a median dwelling price of C$726,200, it is

Getting a grip on housing affordability 41

understandable why some Vancouverites might be resentful of the influence of foreign money.1 Simon Fraser University researcher Andy Yan found that in addition to these high costs, university-educated adults receive lower salaries in Vancouver than in any of Canada’s other 10 largest cities.7 Vancouver is now starting to see an exodus of young professionals looking for higher salaries and lower living costs, which is prompting concerns that the city has become a victim of its own success.6 While Canada’s recently elected Liberal government is currently working to establish a funded national housing strategy, the City of Vancouver has up until now received little support from the federal or provincial governments on the issue of housing, despite it being a core part of their mandate.

In the absence of intervention by the responsible governments, Latif is now spearheading an aggressive affordability strategy with the city in order to bring down the cost of housing. Unlike the supplyoriented strategies being deployed in the UK, he is moving forward with policies that aim to secure the affordability of existing properties – and by affordability, he does not only mean home ownership.

Latif suggests that Generation Y is much more transient than previous generations, and that home ownership is much less of a priority. That change in perspective has been embodied in policy. “We’ve been pushing more on rental than on home ownership … rental is much more affordable in terms of access to housing”, Latif says.

The City of Vancouver has recently introduced various incentives to promote the development of rental housing by institutional investors, ranging from reductions in parking requirements to increased density allowances. These incentives are estimated to add 1,000 additional rental units to the market every year, and while this figure may seem insignificant, it can have a tangible impact in the small corner of the market that is off-limits to investors.

The city is also working to secure existing rental units and affordable housing stock; many of the units developed in the 1970s and 1980s are currently leased for as much as 40% below market value, due to longterm rent controls. By mandating the preservation (or replacement) of these units, the effects of global capital flows are prevented from corrupting the affordable housing inventory that already exists. Further actions to limit the impacts of global investment have also been suggested, with mayor Gregor Robertson calling on the provincial government for a tax on property speculation.

“There is a way of dampening the market, and I think it’s important that we look at those tools as much as we look at understanding what those investments do to the market,” Latif suggested. However, he says that these types of policy responses are rendered much less effective in the absence of detailed data. “One of the

42 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

things we have been quite keen to explore here is the introduction of pilot programmes to test the market and understand what’s happening, and then adjust those [policies] if need be.”

These pilot programmes are invaluable when weighing the need for economic development with the need for affordability – a critical issue that Vancouver and London have in common. Previously run-down areas in both cities are rapidly gentrifying, with new economies emerging and housing costs increasing. As Latif puts it, “it’s a balance between the economic growth you are seeking to achieve, the vibrancy that brings, and the jobs and opportunities, as much as it is the investments that are coming from overseas and pricing people out of their homes.”

Despite Vancouver’s limited authority on housing policy, and the abdication of responsibility by more senior levels of government, it has nonetheless managed to test and implement innovative market interventions to help restore that balance.

Bringing it home Sydney and Vancouver have much to teach London – and the UK more generally – about the challenge of housing affordability and how it can be met with strong governance and innovative policy. They demonstrate that there is a way forward, even when confronting the most systemic and seemingly intractable problems.

With a comprehensive and integrated strategy delivered at all levels of government, there may indeed be a way forward for cities in the UK as well.

Derek Wilson is a Young Urbanist and the principal of Regenesis Urban Strategies Limited, a Vancouverbased consultancy with international expertise in the economics of sustainable urban development. Derek is also currently reading for a MSc degree as a Kellogg College Scholar at the University of Oxford.

1. “Planning bill needs changes to help councils tackle the housing crisis.“ The Guardian, 10 April 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/10/ planning-bill-needs-changes-to-help-councils-tackle-the-housing-crisis 2. 12th Annual Housing Affordability Survey: Rating Middle-Income Housing Affordability. Demographia International, 2016.

3. Beer, Andrew, Kearins, Bridget, and Pieters, Hans. “Housing affordability and planning in Australia: the challenge of policy under neo-liberalism.”

Housing Studies 22.1 (2007): 11-24.

4. “Housing and Planning Bill 2015-16 – Key Points Summary”. ServiceMatters.

Retrieved from: www.housingnet.co.uk/download_pdf/1317 5. Rachael, Emmett and Van Lohuizen, Adam. “Starter Homes – will they be affordable?”. August 2015. https://england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/ pdf_file/0011/1183790/Starter_Homes_FINAL_w_Appendix_v2.pdf 6. Ley, David. “Global China and the making of Vancouver’s residential property market.” International Journal of Housing Policy (2015): 1-20.

7. St. Denis, Jen. “Vancouver’s huge income-to-home-price gap will continue to challenge city: planner”. Business in Vancouver. September 25, 2014.

w w w. b a r r g a z e t a s . c o m alistair.barr@barrgazetas.com

Promoting with a difference Landform is one of the UK’s leading strategic land promoters. We secured consent for over 1,500 new homes in 2015 – a success rate of over 90% Why are we so successful? We work closely with communities to deliver the homes people want If you have an interesting site or project then we would like to talk

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The risks of opportunity | Feeling safe 43

Let’s not make a crisis out of a drama You might have thought that being 700,000 homes short would constitute a crisis. Well, no it doesn’t! James Gross AoU finds out why when he speaks to economist and former member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee Dame Kate Barker, 12 years on from her review of housing supply.

Nobel Prize winning American economist Milton Friedman once said: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

Given that Barker identified no less than 36 recommendations back in her 2004 review into housing, she’s not someone known to be short of an idea or two, so does she agree with the perception that we’re currently in a housing crisis? And having since joined the board of a UK national housebuilder in a non-executive capacity, what are her current views on a resurgence of more interventionist housing policies coming out of government?

Straight off the bat Barker is quick to point out that nobody, and certainly not government, has a clear idea of what a ‘repaired and functional’ housing market looks like and neither was this the objective of her 2004 review.

The recession has seen a reversal of much that was previously adopted, although much of this reversal could be seen as having been political. Along with the removal of regional planning that exorcised many of Barker’s recommendations, Barker was accused of paying insufficient attention to the perception of the environmental cost of housing and increasing the rate of supply.

Barker is open about her view that this was a valid concern but is pragmatic about her answer. The review assumed that housing need can be calculated by taking a fixed population and apportioning space equally, but Barker recognises that the difficulty with this is that some people will pay more.

However, she does not think there is a good reason to constrain the amount of space people have per head.

“Overall, there may exist reasons for constraining it but I cannot really see any good reason why,” she says.

“When I wrote my review I wasn’t attempting to fix the housing market, I was doing something slightly constrained for the treasury, which was answering the questions a) what rate of new supply would we need so we don’t have house prices rising continually faster than income or rising over cycles, and b) can you think of policy changes that would help us to push the rate of housing supply up towards that?”

Likewise Barker is pragmatic about the extent to which housing should encroach into the countryside: “I can see reasons to think about the density in which we build more flats or more terraces and not use up quite so much of the countryside, not that I think we are running out of countryside, but for sustainability reasons you want to put people in places together and I don’t think that argument has really been changed by the internet.”

The policy recommendations identified by Barker assumed a relatively stable economy, echoing Gordon Brown’s consignment of ‘boom and bust’ economics to the history books. Some 30 in one form or other were adopted by both Labour and Coalition Governments.

This of course raises an interesting question. We are nowhere close to establishing a housing market that matches output to demand, indeed our planning system focuses on need rather than demand. Barker cites the influence of social geographer Danny Dorling: “You

44 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

Cambridge old and new (and still expensive) © Peter Parkorr / AoU

can’t produce the right houses of the right kind in the right place all the time,” because as she says: “What the world and the environment and the industry wants, changes too much too rapidly.”

demand. However, by the Home Builders Federation’s reckoning in 2014, 10 years after the review was published, we needed to be building circa 320,000 new homes a year to hit this, a figure not often given much press. With actual completions well down on this number, are we (and is current policy) not missing our annual completions required to resolve a crisis by a factor three and not the twofold factor more frequency cited?

This is a key point – we have a planning system set up to define, and seek to meet housing need, but what Barker says just strikes home the absurdity of the situation. Demand doesn’t come into it. For example, if Oxford and Cambridge and their wider pan-district environs maintain their position as global hubs of technological, especially bio-medical research, there is little in the planning system to cater for the aspirational elements of demand for housing that goes with this, and our metrics remain narrowly focused on the politically more palatable definition of need.

“If you really don’t want to build enough houses to meet demand, then what you end up with is rich people get all the houses and the poor don’t get any space. One of the reasons we buy bigger houses is just demand for space. People often say it makes sense to buy a house as big as you can possibly afford,” says Barker.

“I suspect that investment is behind a lot of that, and the government is very, very reluctant to tackle this through tax for political reasons. For other political reasons it’s very reluctant to encourage the rate of building needed to soak up demand,” she observes.

“We can’t dismiss that we are bound to have places like Cambridge which are growing very, very quickly and are very successful and are building lots of houses, building rather nice houses and it gets more and more desirable by the minute,” she says.

So, is Barker of the opinion that the government has the tools at its disposal to promote growth and meet demand but chooses for political reasons not to do so?

“Yes, they [the government] are reluctant to drive policies which offend local people who don’t want a new building near them, which if built in sufficient quantity would really make a difference. Consequently they prefer to provide lots and lots of measures to ‘support first time buyers’ because that plays politically quite well and makes it look as though you’re doing something,” she said.

Barker goes on to point out that government seems reluctant to reduce demand: “If you really don’t want to meet demand because you have decided environmentally – a lot of people, small country – this begs a lot of questions about density. Government is very reluctant to choke off demand for housing by any measures, council tax or capital gains tax or anything like that.”

This seems like a bit of a revelation. Barker’s review originally set higher level targets to bring housing price inflation in line with a common European average of circa one per cent, itself perhaps enough to address

But is this enough to avert a crisis? Probably not, but the issue seems to be that this government (and

Dame Kate Barker Interview 45

© freepik.com

previous successive governments before it) wishes to direct attention away from the real tensions in the hope that macro-socio-economic crunches are not manifest in this parliament. Will we therefore forever remain at an impasse, or can Barker foresee the situation hitting critical levels to trigger a crisis of Freidmanesque proportions?

No she can’t, and puts it like this: “So this is where I challenge myself. If you had told me that we would only build in England about 160,000 over the last 10 years, relative to the rate of potential household growth based on trend numbers, which probably is about 230,000, you’re about 700,000 units short; I would have said, oh that would really create a problem. But actually what’s happened is 90,000 more young people a year are doing what my son’s doing. They’re moving back in with their parents!”

It seems the type of crisis that was required to trigger mass building programmes in the past was vastly more significant than anything we are facing now.

Perhaps the housing crisis that we are witnessing now is actually not touching people in sufficient numbers to even merit the title.

“I probably wouldn’t call it a crisis – I think it’s odd to call something a crisis when actually there is no real evidence that housing space per person has gone down,” says Barker. However, she feels strongly that the people who have really ‘suffered’ in the past 10 years, are the people who have not been able to get on the housing ladder and are in stuck private renting.

She points out that: “If you haven’t got on the housing ladder, you are kind of trapped in a spiral. Whereas once you have bought a house, you have to of course maintain it, but the actual price of what you pay does not rise every year. You know that if you have fixed your interest rate, you are in a very good position and more certain of what you are going to pay than in the private rented sector, so I think there are groups of people that have suffered, and for them individually perhaps it is a crisis actually. But I always feel that the cry of a crisis overall is a bit strong.”

In terms of policy then, if we’re not able to hope for significant change to return to the creation of new settlements, and if the cap on demand is not going to let cities such as Oxford and Cambridge grow to their true potential due to the politics of who might live around there, might not the situation change once there begins

46 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

to be a noticeable increase in the age and profile of the demographic of those still living at home with their parents once this shifts from those in their 20s and 30s to those in the 30s and 40s?

“This is quite a slow burner - I don’t think supply being 100,000 in one year rather than 200,000 makes that much difference,” she said. although she acknowledges that perhaps in 10 years it may do. “There must be a sense that if we carry on like this sooner or later, then even the people living at home will become faced with an intolerable situation.” Barker offers one scenario that suggests that people who do not come from families where there is home ownership, and are compelled into private renting which they cannot move out of because they never inherit any money, might just become incredibly cross and manage to form articulate groups.

“So it’s possible that a weight of young people finding that they are getting less young and still not ready to move out unless their parents help, and their parents are too old and not earning any money so not able to help them – actually becomes a more tangible scenario,” she says, adding: “ I mean they’re not even able to move out and have kids!”

As Barker says, when it comes to demographics the rate of change is slow enough not to be easily noticed.

What else might we look to in the interim in terms of measures that could result in a discernible impact?

Self-build or direct build by local authorities for example?

“I would like to see local authorities become more energetic in the land market, this might help but I don’t quite know where they would get the funding from, that’s the problem,” she says. “I’m quite supportive of the public sector using their land and I think they’re getting there as well. In the short-term I’m sort of optimistic that might actually be enough to paper over the cracks a bit: our 10 years may become 12.”

However, she still has one concern: “Because it takes so long to deal with these really big things we have been talking about, you just wonder where the political planning and drive is to get that done. Fundamentally I think that the question isn’t practical, but I really think government could do this.”

James Gross AoU is masterplanning director at Barton Willmore.

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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 abstract 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 great place – full stop Dr Emine Thompson AoU

According to the European Commission’s recent survey of 79 cities, Newcastle was named as the happiest city in UK, in front of the other UK cities surveyed: Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow, London, Manchester and Greater Manchester.

This survey also places Newcastle in the top 20 happiest cities in Europe, in front of Belfast, Rotterdam, Cardiff, Groningen, Antwerp, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Manchester and Essen.

Newcastle is also named one of the eight best student cities in the UK with two universities five minutes walk away from each other. You might think I am a Geordie with this type of pride, but far from it… I come all the way from Istanbul where two continents meet, with many centuries of historical and cultural background. However I have been living and working in Newcastle since 1999 and it is my UK hometown now.

I fell in love with Newcastle when I first arrived in the city as a visiting academic eighteen years ago. So, why do I love this Northern city? Newcastle is a compact city; they say you can walk across Newcastle in 15 minutes. It sits

on the northern bank of the River Tyne, a topographical situation providing fantastic imagery for photographers.

It is also a diverse, vibrant and a welcoming city.

It has everything you want from city life, as well as beautiful countryside within easy access. You can find great architecture, cultural heritage, fine museums, art galleries, cathedrals, theatres, great food, great night life, boutique hotels, public art, and retail next to each other in the town centre.

The Town Moor, 400 hectares - area of common grazing land (with cows!) provides the city with a green lung and a large open space for recreational use.

Remarkably, it is larger than Central Park in New York. Once the heart of the coal industry the banks of the River Tyne have been transformed into an elegant waterfront, the Quayside, where you can admire iconic bridges and nip across the splendid Millennium Bridge to Gateshead to visit the Baltic Art Gallery and the Sage Music centre.

Part of the Northern Powerhouse, Newcastle has a diverse industrial heritage with historical figures like George Stephenson, Joseph Wilson

48 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

Swan (true inventor of the electric light bulb) and many others.

20 minutes drive will take you to the seaside- Whitley Bay and Tynemouth, where the River Tyne reaches the North Sea. From there, with an overnight trip, you can go to Amsterdam via ferryboat. You can travel to the tourist highlights of Hadrian’s Wall within an hour’s drive, or you can take time off to walk the whole 84 miles of the wall, from coast to coast.

Further north will take you to the great Northumberland landscape and to the Farne Islands, Wallington Hall, Dunstanburgh Castle, Cragside, Lindisfarne (Holy Island) and many other fairy-tale and must-see places. A particular highlight is Alnwick Castle where you can feel part of the Harry Potter story!

Whenever I go to London on business or visiting friends and say I just travelled from Newcastle, Londoners think I must have been travelling days on end to reach the capital so early in the morning. But Newcastle is just 277 miles away, but be-careful when you come and visit us, you might end up moving ‘up North!’

The Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família

by Angela Brady AoU

A wander through an outdoor gallery Alan Higgins, Young Urbanist

For the past seven years I have had the pleasure of calling Canberra home.

One of the great public controversies when I first arrived was the perceived overabundance of public art installed across the city. As time has passed there is increasing recognition that these installations enhance our city.

Many now see the importance these pieces provide to the character of our town centres and local shops, and a few have gained landmark status or names of affection.

City Walk in the centre of Canberra (Civic) is home to parade of public sculpture from a soundscape of suburban life, to a large silver cushion – lovingly known as the goon bag*.

Between these sculptures you can find buskers or street art of the legal and illegal varieties. What I love about the public art is that it shows the quirky side of Canberra’s personality, a city which is often criticised as over planned and bureaucratic. Public art allows me to experience my city in new and interesting ways.

Above: The Other Side of Midnight © Archivesact

It could involve me passing through a piece of sculpture, matching the rhythm of my steps to the tempo of

music, or enjoy the outdoor gallery created by street artists.

I have met people who feel they need to treat public art like a revered museum or gallery piece, but I believe public art is designed to be engaged with, enjoyed, and improves how we experience our cities. Public art is creative expression that changes with the passing seasons, or the moods of the weather. They could become one of your many friends you meet each day.

I particularly enjoy seeing children climbing over public sculpture, encouraging engagement with art in a very physical way. City Walk is home to the whimsical The Other Side of Midnight (2012) by Melbourne artist Anne Ross. You can often see children clambering over the painted doll and her carousel dog companions.

So, no matter what city you’re in, as you busily traverse through the urban jungle look out for that glimpse of colour and strain your ears for the melodies. Let yourself wander through your local outdoor galleries. *goon bag – Australian slag term for cask wine.

Gallery

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action 49

Something old, something new

Aker Brygge © Kelp

Stephen Yarwood AoU

Oslo is as far from my hometown of Adelaide, Australia, as you can get. Yet it is in many ways a spiritual home I speak of regularly to people around the world in search of quality urban outcomes.

So many electric cars, a decent smattering of bikes (despite the winter weather), plenty of light rail and an impressive human scale built form which makes for a wonderfully walkable city centre. Yes it is old, expensive and almost a little too grungy in places, however the recently renovated city centre shipyards speak volumes for a well-crafted sense of design that thrives across Scandinavia.

Aker Brygge was, until the early 1980s, known as Akers Mekaniske Verksted.

A shipyard and engineering industry precinct that was shut down and

reinvented as a place to live, shop, eat and enjoy. It was the clear highlight of my recent visit to a city that has much to offer.

Today Aker Brygge is something old, something new, with much to enjoy whilst surrounded by blue.

Projecting into Oslo Fjord it is just walking distance from the city’s traditional heart, well connected via public transport, fully pedestrianised and includes a dining waterfront offering stylish, if not cheap, local and international cuisine.

There remains a small boat harbour, a ferry terminal, office space for around 6,000 and homes for nearly 1,000. The well-considered balance of land uses works seamlessly with a bold and stylish built form that is not afraid to integrate a wide array of old and new

materials. It comes as no surprise to me that it is one of the most visited places in Oslo, with 12 million visitors each year.

The consistent six-to-eight story built form is tied together effectively by a network of walkways, public spaces, water ways (with active integration) and almost countless pieces of old and contemporary urban art that makes exploration a joy.

If I sound like a smitten tourist, so be it. There are worse things to do than wander the cities of the world in search of stimulating urban spaces. It was satisfying to find my values realised across the other side of the world in truly smart and stylish but also practical ways. If you have not been to Oslo, don’t be scared off by the tag of ‘world’s most expensive city’; it’s a must for any person in search of great places!

With love from Philly Lucy Natarajan AoU

I had the good fortune to visit Philadelphia in 2014, when it hosted the annual conference of the ACSP (Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning).

Of course I had read about how this city played a starring role in the American Revolution and about the socio-spatial innovation of Penn’s rectilinear garden oriented grid structure, but once there I was struck by the historic city in two ways I’d not quite expected.

Firstly, while it is the centre of an international metropolis, downtown Philadelphia has the walkability and sense of openness of a much smaller settlement.

With beautiful preserved (and rescued) quarters it manages to be grand but accessible, bustling but not oppressive.

It is full of human-scale creative spaces with an organic buzz that is tangible in the murals, squares and public art.

Street life seems to permeate indoors, through residential thresholds, markets and community buildings.

Secondly, the historic urban core is presented inspiringly. I particularly enjoyed looking back over the city from the Museum of Art, however we’re invited to stand a little closer to other gems, not least: the cracked liberty bell always visible in its glass casing; the 36 floors of the original PSFS skyscraper all visible from street level; and we are overlooked by the bronze statue

50 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

of Pennsylvania’s founding Quaker.

It feels like a display of artifacts that claims foundational status for Western culture and modern cities, but in doing so asks for more ambition.

In short, for me Philadelphia speaks of hope and potential. It would be remiss to pretend that there are no flaws, no grimy corners, no poverty, and it is true that my experiences come from passing through just one very well-tended part of town.

But as an outsider I felt welcome and somehow connected to the place, but not as a consumer or tourist. So if you do go west, stop in Philadelphia for a bit a brotherly love and don’t forget to climb the Rocky steps.

Royal Festival Hall Terrace and Festival Riverside Robin Buckle AoU

These are really fantastic summer spaces. On those special days when it’s sunny in London, both spaces provide the perfect place to enjoy the warmth of the late afternoon and early evening sun, away from the noisy and frenetic streets…and have a drink and bite to eat as well!

It is such a convenient and well connected place to get to – a short walk from Charing Cross and Waterloo Stations, the underground and buses – set in the heart of the Southbank complex with its many bars, theatres and restaurants, and next to the river.

No surprise then that the Festival terrace is often packed in the early evening, teeming with people meeting friends for a pre-show drink and meal or just meeting, soaking up the relaxed but buzzy atmosphere on one of the best public terrace spaces in London.

The upper terrace commands great views across the river to the North Bank of the city. Your eye is drawn to the distinctive arches of the Charing Cross building designed by Terry Farrell and Partners which straddles the station, flanked by the well-mannered Portland stone clad buildings which help define Victoria Embankment Gardens. In-between is the river itself with the bustle of ferries arriving and leaving from Embankment and Festival Piers, and to your left, the white Golden Jubilee Bridges which deliver people in a seemingly never-ending stream onto the terrace and South Bank. All are glimpsed through, and framed by, the mature London Plane trees which are so much a part of the character of the riverside on the South Bank and help define the wider space.

Below the upper terrace, the restaurants and shops at the lower level

spill out onto the Festival Riverside.

The Terrace and Riverside are both connected by covered stairways which link the different levels directly. These canopied structures not only mark the access points between the two levels, they also help punctuate the space, especially at the upper level. Here, they also helpfully create edges which are often colonised by the satellite bars that service a constant queue of thirsty punters during the summer months.

I often meet friends here after work. I love it. It’s a great outdoor room where you can sit (if you can find a table) or stand next to the parapet, drink in hand, chatting about the events of the day. For me spaces like this are an essential part of a living city, a fabulous viewing gallery and large open sitting room where you can watch, be watched and join in with people enjoying a delightful slice of life in London.

The skeleton of Amsterdam by İrem İnce

Gallery

Editor’s introduction | AoU in Action 51

Urban idiocy

Brilliant ideas that ruined our cities Part four: at the mercy of a socialist experiment No part of the planning of our cities is more prone to idiocy than housing. I don’t mean the planning of the housing that most of us live in, obviously, that hasn’t really changed for more than a century. It is housing of the ‘poor’ where so much professional attention and intellectual debate has been focused and where the idiocy is to be found, and it is the tenants of social housing that have suffered.

This idiocy doesn’t arise from any particular malign intent on the part of the urban professions. Quite the contrary, on the whole they had nothing but the best of intentions. The post-war settlement that created the National Health Service and the welfare state included the promise that everyone would be well housed and that on the whole this would be done by the state.

Within the clean white lines of high-rise council estates or the Arcadian promise of New Towns, the people of Britain would be given light and airy, warm and healthy, spacious and efficient homes (or machines for living as the Bauhaus

called them). Their landlords would be the local council rather than Rackmanlike landlords, and their estates would be designed to promote community spirit and with just the right amount of play space, greenery, shops and local services. Slums were cleared and politicians competed, as they do today, to build more and more homes each year.

It was all tremendously exciting for the architects and planners of the 1950s and 60s. Finally they had the opportunity to put into practice all the radical social ideas that they had been taught at college and heard about at conferences (such as the Eighth Congrès Internationale d’Architecture Moderne that took place in England in 1951).

The early schemes like Roehampton in London and Park Hill in Sheffield were all over the architectural press as were the Mark I new towns. As Martin Richardson said of the Greater London Council at the time, “it was like a giant nursery school whose principle objective was the happiness of its architects”. We look back now at the

PauloHill, Margari via Flickr Park Sheffield © Paulo Margari

52 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

estates borne of all of this excitement and it’s hard not to wonder what they were thinking. How could anyone imagine that the brutal environments of concrete walkways, tower blocks and parking courts, or the maze-like low-rise estates, strewn with litter and controlled by gangs, could ever provide a humane place to live, to bring up children or to grow old? But they did – the well-meaning idiots.

This is an object lesson in how idiocy takes hold. Start with a spoonful of utopian dreaming, mix with academic theorising about communities and how they interact, stir in a dollop of ideological certainty and add pinch of science fiction. Bake for a few years in the architecture and planning schools and then teach uncritically to generations of students and promote to politicians – local and national – desperate for a solution to their housing problems.

And of course the movement had its Starchitects who set the tone, challenged preconceptions and dominated the architectural mags.

People like the great Basil Spence

whose terrifying Hutchesontown C Estate in the Gorbals was seen as a triumph, or the Bond villain Ernő Goldfinger1, whose Trellick Tower is still considered one of the finest buildings of the era. Or indeed Alison and Peter Smithson, whose iconic Robin Hood Gardens estate in London’s Poplar has been much in the news recently because of the debate about its demolition that sums up so well the point that great architecture and social housing don’t always mix.

However, the idiocy that took hold in the 50s and 60s had its roots in an earlier generation and the prime idiot in this respect was Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, who said some really stupid things about cities which many people took seriously. He was profoundly unhappy with the sheer messiness and inefficiency of cities and indeed society as a whole. He suggested a society ruled by the unelected intelligencia would sort everything out and build cities that worked.

Across most of Europe this was considered an interesting intellectual idea, but in Britain we fell for it

hook line and sinker. The post-war planners, ignoring the authoritarian anti-democratic bits, definitely saw themselves as the intelligencia who would sort out the city. They overlaid Corb’s theories with a heavy dose of ideology, making it difficult for anyone to argue against the new orthodoxy.

They were aided by politicians who were reforging Britain in the ‘white heat of technology’ and boasting about the number of slums they had cleared and houses they had built (which peaked at more than 400,000 homes a year in the late 1960s – three times the rate in recent years). Communities that had existed for a century or more were ripped up and rehoused in towers and streets in the sky. Working class communities were consigned to years of misery at the mercy of gangs and drug dealers who were the only groups to which the new environments were ideally suited.

started to build humane social housing: we have just stopped building social housing at all, at least on any significant scale.

The tragedy is that the modernist experiment in social housing tarnished the very idea of state-sponsored social housing. This can be seen in David Cameron’s announcement in January this year of the redevelopment of 100 estates of “brutal high-rise towers”.

In the government’s eyes, brutal high-rise estates are synonymous with council housing, symptoms of a failed socialist experiment. The result is that we are once more consigning the poorest in society to the mercy of private landlords, paid for through a housing benefit budget that is roughly equivalent to the amount that we once spent on building social housing. One type of idiocy has unfortunately been replaced by another.

The Urban Idiot

It is just as well that this moment of madness has passed and we have stopped building housing disasters! The problem of course is just that – it is not that we have learned our lessons and

1. Ian Flemming really did name the baddie in Goldfinger after the great architect after the two clashed at a planning dispute over the building of Goldfinger’s home in Hampstead.

Urban idiocy | About AoU 53

My own view is…

Higher education can foster urbanism

by Paul Ostergaard AoU

Universities continue to play a fundamental role in the development of cities, both economically and, importantly, as places. Not only have they contributed to the development of young settlements, but also their transformation.

My hometown is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1758 a British general by the name of John Forbes carved a road out of the forests and steep topography of the Allegheny Mountains from Carlisle to Fort Duquesne. This was a heroic effort to kick the French out and establish British supremacy in the upper Ohio valley. This road is now Route 30, known these days as the Lincoln Highway. His efforts provided an alternative to paths from Virginia and contributed to the early growth of this remote outpost. Forbes built a large fort at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers and named the place Pittsburgh after British Secretary of State William Pitt. Early settlers chipped coal from the hillsides and, over the years, this plentiful fuel helped entrepreneurs build the largest industrial complex in the world.

As a centre of engineering, research and invention, Pittsburgh’s growth was led by corporations and supported by emerging universities. At the height of industrial Pittsburgh, fortunes were being made in massive workshops and integrated industrial plants producing metals, glass, tools and all manner of machinery. George Westinghouse invented the air brake. Charles Martin Hall invented aluminium production.

The first full-scale atomic electric power station for peacetime use was designed and built in Pittsburgh.

In our post-industrial world, Pittsburgh has managed to transform itself into one of the most desirable cities to

live, according to several national surveys. Our universities and colleges have been a major force behind this dramatic transformation. Founded by industrialists, these institutions are now centres of research in many disciplines and they attract students from around the world. The United States benefits from an independent and vigorous system of higher education with a wide variety of institutions and programmes available to choose from. To get into university an American high school student is now competing against a world marketplace of students. Nearly one million international students are now enrolled in American universities and colleges.

Universities and colleges must create campuses and learning environments that are attractive to prospective students and competitive with other institutions, hence an unprecedented growth in facilities. Now more than ever, students are drawn to cities. Urban schools have a market advantage over pastoral college settings. Students crave city life with its cafés, museums, concerts and public spaces. International students, in particular, are attracted to urban environments and are shaping retail and entertainment offerings in many American cities.

Urbanism for students is found in both large and small cities. Seton Hill University, a small liberal arts college in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, has its arts programs located in new facilities in Greensburg’s downtown district.

Separated by about half a mile from its original hilltop campus, the school provides a shuttle service between the two locations. Students love the urban environment of downtown Greensburg and have occupied old retail space with

54 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

art galleries and coffee shops. Their presence has motivated developers to transform old buildings into student housing and new restaurants.

A new arts district is emerging.

Tidewater Community College established an urban campus in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, that has contributed mightily to the rebirth of the downtown as a vibrant centre in the region. The streets are filled with students, staff and faculty that have revitalised an abandoned shopping district into a delightful urban neighbourhood.

Many understand the important role that universities play in the economic prosperity of a region. The coalition of education, research and business creates a powerful market force. But in addition to the formation of new businesses, higher education can play a critical role in urban regeneration.

Positioned properly, our downtowns and neighbourhoods can become unique and inspiring places for learning environments of the future.

Paul B. Ostergaard AoU is executive vice president of Pittsburgh-based Urban Design Associates.

…and a final thought…

Putting the life in space and place – learning to learn from place part IV

“If there is a lesson in street-watching, it is that people do like basics — and as environments go, a street that is open to the sky and filled with people and life is a splendid place to be.”

William H Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, 1980.

Whyte, a sociologist who became a pioneering urbanist, was also a wonderful and under-rated filmmaker.

Perhaps you have done this already, but if not, visit vimeo.com and then search for The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Bingo – there it is: one hour of repeated fascination, an urban ballet made with humour and wisdom (always a great combination). To quote from his very quotable sound-track: “The street is the river of life of the city, the place where we come together, the pathway to the centre.”

His film manages to be both rigorous research and poetry at the very same time. He uses what was, in the late 1970s, state of the art technology: time-lapse film, alongside survey and mapping techniques to uncover the ground-rules for public space revealing a series of great insights that hold true 36 years later. I commend them, but for now, I am interested in his use of film to put life into space and place. The moving image helps us think differently about place.

The places Whyte filmed were, by comparison with our award-winning places, pretty hard-nosed and tough, shot mainly in downtown Manhattan, but with excursions to streets and playgrounds that could have come from West Side Story. They were ‘unphotogenic’ as urban places go.

We see the dense business district, particularly the Seagram Plaza, as

it was in the late 1970s, with flared trousers and droopy moustaches to give period charm. Whyte’s camera puts flesh on the bones of what an ambitious young architect, known as Rem Koolhaas, had just identified approvingly as the “culture of congestion” that characterises his “delirious New York”.

Inspired by Whyte, I have been using my iPhone (despite its pitiful memory) to make my own versions of his Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. I use the same phone in its ‘photo-mode’ and ‘video-mode’. What I found out is that, when you change the setting from ‘photo’ to ‘video’, the way I looked changed. The way I understood place changed too.

I realised that when I started using the phone in video-mode, the way I held it changed, and how I looked through it changed. I remember a film-maker friend explaining something strange about cameras, still or movie: that they have a will of their own – that they have a tendency to point at, as he put it, “what the camera likes to see”. His point being that the camera does not just take photographs, still or moving, but it composes them too. It is not a neutral and objective recorder, but comes with values attached. It is a compositional device.

The ceremony has much of the excitement of the Oscars but, despite the vivid contributions from Poetin-Residence Ian McMillan, it is hard to capture the life of a place. It can be mapped and surveyed, but never measured.

Projected on the screen, we see stillphotographs giving an impression of the attractiveness of special places. I do not think I am alone in worrying that we reward not just great places, but photogenic places, places that the stillcamera likes to look at.

The lesson of the movies is to reemphasise the importance of the life of places for people watching. As Whyte puts it: “What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people.”

Professor David Porter AoU is professor of architecture at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing.

Not only does video-mode capture movement, it captures the sound of a place, which in itself radically changes our experience because we ‘see’ places with our ears as well as our eyes.

In the early days of the Academy, I remember one of the board members, perhaps John Thompson himself, explaining that the idea behind the awards was based on Hollywood and the Oscar award ceremony. Hence “… and the winner is…”

Editor’s My ownintroduction view is | And| aAoU finalinthought Action 55

Academicians

DIRECTORS From top left to right Andrew Burrell Prof Kevin Murray Henk Bouwman Janet Sutherland John Thompson (Honorary President) David Rudlin Steven Bee (Chairman) Tony Reddy Biljana Savic Tim Stonor Bob Young

ACADEMICIANS Arthur Acheson Prof Robert Adam Marcus Adams Lisa Addiscott Dr Husam Al Waer Kyle Alexander OBE Pam Alexander OBE Malcolm Allan Joanna Allen Ben Allgood Charles Anderson Ewan Anderson Kathryn Anderson Nigel Anderson Ian Angus Debbie Aplin Judith Armitt George Arvanitis Sam Ashdown Jamie Ashmore Stephen Ashworth Jasvir Atwal Jeff Austin

Jeanette Baartman 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 Duncan Berntsen John Best John Betty David Bishop Deirdre Black Philip Black Adam Blacker Alastair Blyth Martin Boddy Nicholas Boys Smith Mark Bradbury Rosemary Bradley Angela Brady Noel Brady Torben Brandi Nielsen Chris Brett Eddie Bridgeman Mark Brierly Guy Briggs Jane Briginshaw Annabel Brown Patricia Brown Samantha Bryans Robin Buckle

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 Ian Chater 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

56 Here & Now | AoU Journal No. 7 | Spring 2016

Ian Corner Cara Courage Will Cousins Rob Cowan David Cowans Timothy Crawshaw 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 Hank Dittmar John Downie Prof John Drever Paul Drew Eugene Dreyer Peter Drummond Tony Duggan Paul Dunne Paul Durnien John Dyke Nigel Dyke Richard Eastham David Edwards Stephanie Edwards Elad Eisenstein

Mark Elton Luke Engleback Gavin Erasmus Karen Escott Roger Estop Prof Brian Evans Prof Graeme Evans Roger Evans Wyn Evans Patrick Eve Dr Nicholas Falk Kerri Farnsworth Max Farrell Sir Terry Farrell Mahmood Faruqi Ian Fenn Jaimie Ferguson Kathryn Firth Stephanie Fischer Andrew Fisher Helen Fisher David Flannery 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 Mark Furlonger Tim Gale Catherine Gallagher Carole Garfield Lindsay Garratt Tim Garratt Angus Gavin John Geeson Jan Gehl 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 Paul Hackett Leo Hammond Tim Hancock Philip Harcourt Geoff Haslam David Hastings John Haxworth

Michael Hayes CBE Peter Heath Tina Heathcote Michael Hegarty David Height Russell Henderson Simon Henley James Hennessey Paul Hildreth Stephen Hinsley Marie Hodgson Eric Holding Peter Hollis Stephen Hollowood David Howard Stephen Howlett Robin Hoyles Jun Huang Simon Hubbard Anthony Hudson Nigel Hughes Michael Hurlow John Hyland Tony Ingram David Jackson James Jackson Julian Jackson Philip Jackson Colin 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 Daniel Kaye John Kelpie Steve Kemp Jonathan Kendall David Kennedy Justin Kenworthy Mary Kerrigan Ros Kerslake Anne Kiernan David King Martyn Kingsford OBE Angela Koch Felicie Krikler Charles Landry Richard Latcham Derek Latham Michele Lavelle Diarmaid Lawlor John Letherland Stephen Lewis Alex Lifschutz Einar Lillebye

David Lock CBE Fred London John Lord Mark Lucas Aylin Ludwig David Lumb Maja Luna Jorgensen Nikolas Lyzba Carol MacBain Robin Machell Roddie Maclean Peter Madden Keiji Makino Geoffrey Makstutis Grace Manning-Marsh Andreas Markides Dr Katherine Martindale Andrew Matthews Bob May Steve McAdam John McAslan John McCall Frank McDonald 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 Dr John Montgomery Cllr John Moreland Paul Morsley Richard Motley John Muir Ronnie Muir John Mullin Dr Claudia Murray Deborah Murray Prof Gordon Murray Peter Murray Dr Lucy Natarajan Stephen Neal Jon Neale 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 Emeka Osaji Trevor Osborne Paul Ostergaard Erik Pagano Chris Pagdin Dr Susan Parham Kevin Parker Phil Parker Michael Parkinson Fiona Parry Sowmya Parthasarathy Nikhil Pase James Patterson-Waterston Richard Pearce Adam Peavoy Russell Pedley Ross Peedle

Prof Alan Penn Hugh Petter Richard Petty Graeme Philips Alex Phillips Justin Phillips Louisa Philpott Jon Phipps Karen Phull James Pike Ben Plowden Demetri Porphyrios Prof David Porter Sunand Prasad John Prevc Dr Darren Price Simon Price David Prichard Paul Prichard John Pringle Stephen Proctor Steve Quartermain CBE Helen Quigley Shane Quinn Colin Rae Andrew Raven Mike Rawlinson Richard Reid Lawrence Revill Elizabeth Reynolds Christopher Rhodes Patrick Richard Sue Riddlestone OBE Antony Rifkin Marion Roberts Prof Peter Roberts OBE Steve Robins 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 John Sampson Clare San Martin Andrew Sanderson Peter Sandover Astrid Sanson Hilary Satchwell Arno Schmickler Dominic Scott Sharon Scott Symon Sentain Toby Shannon Chris Sharpe Cath Shaw Richard Shaw Barry Shaw MBE Keith Shearer Gorana Shepherd Michael Short Anthony Shoults Ron Sidell Paul Simkins Dr Richard Simmons Tim Simpson Alan Simson Anna Sinnott Ann Skippers Jef Smith Roger Smith Carol Somper Carole Souter CBE Adrian Spawforth 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 David Thompson Dr Emine Thompson Robert Thompson Dale Thomson Dr Ying Ying Tian Greg Tillotson Niall Tipping Damian Tissier Andrea Titterington Ian Tod Steve Tolson Peter Tooher Paul Tostevin Robert Townshend Rob Tranmer Stephen Tucker Richard Tuffrey Neil Tully Jeffrey Tumlin Jonathan Turner Stuart Turner Roger Tustain Nick Tyler CBE Julia Unwin Dr Debabardhan Upadhyaya Richard Upton 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 Nathan 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 WestrayChapman Pam Wharfe Duncan Whatmore Peter Wheelhouse Lindsey Whitelaw Mike Wilkins Stephen Willacy Martin Williams Peter Williams Patricia Willoughby Marcus Wilshere Richard Wolfströme David Woods

Nick Woolley Gary Worsfold John Worthington Tony Wyatt Louise Wyman Wei Yang Stephen Yarwood Gary Young Rob Young Paul Zara Parsa Zarian Jack Zheng Qu

YOUNG URBANISTS Khalifa Abubakar Alexandros Achniotis Jan Ackenhausen Raquel Ajates Alexander Alexiou Amer Alwarea Patrick Andison Ben Angus Jen Ashworth Cory Babb William Back Alexander Baker Claudia Balseca Simon Banfield Veatriki Bania Phillippa Banister Sangeetha Banner Veronica Barbaro Jake Bassett Sarah Birt Vasiliki Bourli Masie Bowes Michael Bredin Fergus Browne John Burns Yesica Caballero Baillie Card Rodrigo Cardoso Harriet Carter Roland Chanin-Morris Leo Cheung Katherine Clegg Daniel Cooper Dr João Cortesão Aaron Coulter Rebecca Cox Robert Cox Charles Critchell Victoria Crozet Lilly Dai Nicholas Daruwalla Hanaa Dasan Aurelio David Aaron Davis Kate Dawson Vito De Bellis Anna de Torróntegui Amy Dickens Ina Dimireva Neil Double Louise Dredge Stephanie Ete Alexander Evans Thomas Findlay Alisha Fisher Diana Fjodorova Baiba Fogele Nicolas Francis Alex Frankcombe Matthew Gamboa Andrzej Gierak Nicholas Goddard Jose Gomez Sanchez James Goodsell Katsushi Goto Ian Gracie Edward Green Zarreen Hadadi

Ali Haddad Hannah Harkis Jamie Harrison-Grundy Rosie Haslem Ines Hassen Andrew Hedger Simon Hicks Alan Higgins Sarah Hill Dominik Hoehn Hasanul Hoque Patrick Hourmant Lewis Hubbard Elinor Huggett Saskia Huizinga Rachel Hutchinson Thomas Hyde Loukia Iliopoulou Martha Isaacs Fred Jerrome Jacob Kalmakoff Foteini Kanellopoulou Georgios Kapraras David Kemp Robert Kerr Muhammad Khaleel Jaffer Anna Kravec Melissa Lacide Marion Lagadic Rachel Lambert Christian Lapper Catherine Larmouth Mark Lever Philip Liu Tierney Lovell Joana Luís Vieira Ava Lynam Danielle MacCarthy Richard MacCowan Iain MacPherson Claire Malaika Tunnacliffe Theo Malzieu Patricia Martin del Guayo John Mason Laura Mazzeo Isabel McCagg Kathryn McCain Hector Mendoza Darcy Millar Cris Mitry Jose Monroy Antonia Morgan Jelly Moring Clémence Morlet Ketki Mudholkar Alistair Neame Maria Newstrom Dan Chinh Nguyen Pauline Niesseron Szymon Nogalski Eoin O’Connor Alex O’Hare Sean O’Leary Louise Oppe Eleana Orr Floriane Ortega Edoardo Parenti Sejal Patel Fred Paxton Claudia Penaranda-Fuentes Francesca Perry Diana Phiri Anna Pichugina Victoria Pinoncely Julie Plichon Kseniia Pundyk Emma Rainoldi Dinar Ramadhani Sanna Rautio Ziad Rayya

Ronald Riviere Jonah Rudlin Tom Rusbridge Mar Lluch Salvador Jessica Sammut Renelle Sarjeant Ross Schaffer Alexei Schwab Kym Shaen-Carter Yahya Yasser Mohamed Shaker Lana Shaylor Jonathan Sheldon Jane Sherry Hannah Shoebottom Simeon Shtebunaev Nelio Silva Freitas Roxana Slavcheva Emilia Smeds Andy Smith Henry Smith Bethania Soriano Emma Spierin Helen Spriggs Matthew Spurway Mark Stewart Catherine Street Ran Suk Rebecca Sumerling Lucy Sykes Bea Symington Tracey Taylor Vanessa Thomas Gavin Thomson Kieran Toms Chloe Treger Carolina Vasilikou Giacomo Vecia Mariangela Veronesi Ding Wang Michelle Wang George Weeks Caroline Westhart Roger White Tim White Niall Williams Derek Wilson Evelyn Wong Christopher Wood Mengqian Wu Mirjam Wurtz David Yates Szu-an Yu

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

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

Academicians and Young Urbanists

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In May 2016 the Government Office for Science released the final outputs of its Foresight project on the Future of UK Cities. Space Syntax provided spatial modelling input to the project, producing, testing and analysing a range of population growth and rail network improvement scenarios for the UK’s national system of cities.

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Recent developments in urban analytics allow rapid testing of national infrastructure proposals, including their impacts on the performance of urban places.

These forms of systematic analysis can assist urban decision makers in assessing large scale infrastructure scenarios and prioritising investment strategies in an evidence-based manner.

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www.spacesyntax.com