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Fresh ideas for city life
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itizen was born of the belief that we suffer from a crisis of imagination and not resources. Our aim is to capture the spirit – the energy and vision – of those who believe that citizens hold the power to change things that aren’t working. That our collective creativity and knowledge and determination and ambition can – and absolutely should – be harnessed to the greater good. To promote, challenge and develop ideas that allow people living in cities to have more fulfilled and more sustainable lives. London refuses to grow older with any degree of grace. Like all great historic cities, it bears the imprint of experience. A hotchpotch of organic evolution, formal urban planning, ad hoc intervention and happy accident. Monuments and civic buildings reflect the values of a long-forgotten age. Housing is too scarce, too small, too pricey to meet the city’s needs. Transport systems jostle for supremacy with modern highways planning – both straining to impose their particular brand of logic on a city that refuses to be tamed. The result is a complex, creaking infrastructure; a city rich in character and historic resonance, but dogged by congestion and pollution, and increasingly ill-suited to the demands of modern life. The city’s ailments are not just physical. The decline of civic society is manifest, not just in recent demonstrations of widespread discontent, but in the reported record levels of feelings of disaffection, isolation and loneliness. Civic society as we know it is hanging in the balance. Unhappiness can breed disillusionment or apathy. But it can be a powerful call to arms. As citizens, we have a choice. Lethargy or energy. Cynicism or activism. Traditional structures of decisionmaking and power have left great swathes of the population disaffected and overlooked. We miss out on their energy and insight and expertise. The challenges we face are complex and potentially catastrophic: religious tensions; political differences; social, cultural and economic inequalities; the pressing need to address the challenges posed by climate change.
These will not be solved by professional silos working in isolation, or by politicians dictating solutions from above. We need to find a means of working that encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration, that draws on the intellectual and creative capital of our diverse population. This, in turn, calls for a new approach to the way in which we renew and reinvigorate our urban fabric. New social, cultural and economic models call for building types that cater for a more tolerant, inclusive and participatory city life. Which challenge – or amalgamate or disrupt – traditional architectural
Traditional structures of decision-making and power have left great swathes of the population disaffected and overlooked typologies. We need infrastructure that facilitates local energy production, recycling and sustainable transport. We need a more creative, collaborative approach to planning, zoning, funding, procurement, investment and design. The first publishing venture by the London School of Architecture, Citizen magazine seeks to galvanise, amplify and accelerate these efforts, to provide a fulcrum for ideas and debates. But critique is not enough. Climate emergency and civil discontent are critical issues that need to be addressed with action on the ground. 2020 has to mark the start of a decade of delivery. We seek radical, proactive proposals for change. We are optimistic, rather than idealistic. We are not interested in utopian visions of a Brave New World but in viable propositions. Small – or large – steps which respond to, and work with, existing conditions and context. Fresh ideas that reflect the responsibilities, demands and values of the modern citizen; which offer a real prospect of improving people’s lives. Isabel Allen, Editor-in-Chief Summer 2019 |Citizen|1
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Summer 2019 Launch issue
5 Engage and deliver
52 Think tanks
Suzanne Trocmé describes how buildings initially derided for unorthodox design are often most successful in capturing the public imagination
Six design proposals to help London meet the objectives of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals
7 Never mind the buzzword
Neil Lee asks whether inclusive growth is just a fashionable buzzword or an effective strategy for balancing equality and growth
Nigel Coates argues that a more fluid attitude to gay culture might yield more adventurous and experimental approaches to city-shaping and citizenship
8 Towards a new social contract
92 Lonely cities
Isabel Allen reflects on calls for a new relationship between citizen and state. Photo essay by Magnus Dennis
Thomas Bryans asks how design can help to solve the current social health crisis and mend fragmented communities
16 Rules of engagement
98 People Places Planet
Henrietta L Moore and Richard Sennett go head-to-head on the relationship between culture, society and the city
Visions for London by the next generation of architects
21 Eyes on the prize
Future-proofing global cities for demographic change
Max Cotton on the need for united action against climate change
Editor-in-Chief
Isabel Allen isabel@citizen-mag.org
146 Cities for an ageing population
166 Home truths
Soheb Panja calls for a radical rethink of the design of the British mosque
Tom Mann calls for architects to challenge existing models of housing design and delivery
26 All change
168 About turn
The entrepreneurs who are working across and beyond professional boundaries to improve city life
Architect Richard Hyams outlines his plans for subverting the housing industry and solving the housing crisis
40 Making practice perfect
170 Talking heads
Members of the London School of Architecture suggest how architectural practice needs to change to benefit the modern city
TED Talk insights on cities of tomorrow
44 Fast track to the future
176 The way we live now
Chris Williamson explores the potential for green technologies and infrastructure to transform the way we travel, live and work
Victoria Glendinning celebrates London’s capacity to reinvent itself and speculates on what the future holds
22 Modern mosques
Queering the city by Michael Cradock Cover story pages 80-91
80 Queer freedom
Editorial Board Pooja Agrawal
172 Credits and thanks
The London School of Architecture 2018/19
Finn Harries
Professor Dame Henrietta L Moore
is an environmental campaigner and co-founded JacksGap, an online blog and video project with over 3.9 million subscribers
is the founder and director of the institute for Global Prosperity and the Chair of Culture, Philosophy and Design at UCL
Simon Esterson
is co-founder of Public Practice and a member of the GLA Regeneration Team
Art Editor
Peter Buchanan
Arthur Kay
Farshid Moussavi
Holly Catford
is an architect, urbanist, writer, critic, lecturer and curator. His many books include five volumes of Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Complete Works (Phaidon Press)
is CEO of Skyroom, which partners with landlords to create high-quality, low-cost, ecofriendly homes for key urban workers on disused rooftops in London
is the principal of Farshid Moussavi Architects and a professor at the Havard University Graduate School of Design
Matthew Claudel
Crispin Kelly
is a designer, researcher and writer. Formerly the strategic advisor to Future Cities Canada, he is currently head of civic innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
is the CEO of Baylight – an award-winning development company which has been developing commercial and mixed-use property in London for more than three decades
co-founded the quarterly publication Courier, a magazine that reports on modern business and start-up culture
Creative Director
Assistant Editor
Jason Sayer Staff Photographer
Freddie Ardley Sub-editors
Julia Dawson Dario Goodwin Associate Editor
James Soane Business Development Manager
Aman Saundh Founders
Isabel Allen Will Hunter Citizen Magazine 141a Mare Street E8 3RH 020 7206 2585
Sherry Dobbin
Tom Mann
is a cultural strategist and producer, and the managing and cultural director of Futurecity
is a director at Savills and leads the firm’s residential development consultancy team, focusing on super-prime and large-scale regeneration developments
Soheb Panja
Professor Richard Sennett
is a professor at MIT and a prolific writer on culture and cities. He has served at the United Nations for the last three decades
Summer 2019 |Citizen|3
Knock Nothing Down To demolish or not to demolish? Visit our new display inspired by late architect Will Alsop RA and presenting past and upcoming projects by aLL Design, which reimagine new cities above the existing ones.
12 June – 26 August 2019 The Architecture Studio Royal Academy of Arts 6 Burlington Gardens London W1S 3ET The Sharp Centre, OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design), Toronto, Canada (c) Richard Johnson
4|Citizen|Summer 2019
Opinion
Engage and deliver
Exactly 10 years ago I was tasked with finding superlative – and at least a couple of Pritzker Prize-winning – architects to interview on a podium, agendas permitting, in front of a huge audience in the south of France to mark the 20th anniversary of a world-renowned real estate show – no mean feat. Daniel Libeskind and Thom Mayne agreed, as did Wolf Prix and Zaha Hadid, before her Dame hood, and when Libeskind called off due to a cold, we were fortunate to find Frank Gehry in the audience and happy to pick up the mic. He was in Cannes to see a client and thought to drop in – I think to see Zaha, who became a pussycat in his presence. Glamour aside, the discussion (thanks to Wolf Prix) turned to whether it is a greater legacy to be built or be unbuilt in the 21st-century architecture/developer climate. Do ideas often claim a better future than the reality? he pontificated. What is the greater legacy for the architect with unique vision? Prix thought it was to better to be unbuilt, in most cases, when theories abound. Well he should know. No ‘love-in’ this; there was neither back slapping nor rubbing, but a meaty exchange between great minds and it was a privilege to bear witness. At the time, 2009, Thom Mayne was hoping to win the competition to build London’s US Embassy (he did not). Daniel Libeskind we talked about in his absence. He had clearly suffered his own defeats, like the monumental and well-published spiralling design for London’s V&A courtyard which won a competition in 1996, but which eventually was realised by Amanda Levete, following a further competition with a whole new jury that chose a far more demure proposal. As often with ‘monumental’ architecture it comes down to engagement, and the civic meeting civility – which takes the most prescient, possibly precocious, talent to pull off. When the late Dame Zaha Hadid died, oh so prematurely, three years
MICHAEL MORAN
Suzanne Trocmé describes how buildings initially derided for unorthodox design often defy controversy by engaging with people
Heatherwick’s Vessel has been derided by critics, but visited in huge numbers by locals and tourists alike
ago, 25 projects had been realised in quick succession. There were 24 more on the table. That is a fine legacy but what a struggle, her first realised project (the Fire Station at Vitra) coming after 14 years of unbuilt work. Then in 2006 we saw the Zaha Hadid exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, with Frank Lloyd Wright’s own spiral lifting us step-by-step through her journey. We felt her pain and her tenacity as we climbed the ramp, from her extraordinary paintings to the finished built work. Of course FLW also broke many moulds. His spiral was an attempt to avoid New York City’s fire department rule that there had to be one fire exit on every floor. So, he made a single floor in defiance. There wasn’t ever a fire. Neoteric thought is hardly recognised at the time and others struggle with its agility. I have often wondered why some of the most instantly recognisable, eye-catching and best-loved structures have been built for temporary exhibition. The Eiffel Tower and the Grand Palais, Crystal Palace and the London Eye, Buckminster Fuller’s Biosphere. There are many more. Perhaps it is because they are ‘of’ their time, distilling the nectar whence they came. Because no one tore them down at once, as planned. Because
they engaged the citizenry. Are they just icons of a bygone era? Examples of engineering feats at the time? Maybe, just maybe, there is never as much hoopla around impermanence. Recently, I went to see Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel in New York, which has been as controversial as many of Thomas’s schemes. OK – a waste of space and money or…? What I saw was engagement – it was packed with people of all generations climbing up and down the stairs to nowhere. It is wonderful it has been built because New York is proud and anyone can experience how it feels to engage in another world. I look forward to the Wilkinson Eyre building in Sydney too, primed for next year – One Barangaroo. It will be the tallest building in Sydney at 275m and it took 10 years to get that little moment over the line. Yes, there will be a casino and, yes, it is a Crown Residence and there will be whopping apartments for sale. But it will rejuvenate an area that has had no real value in decades. Permanent or temporary, ‘if it don’t leak, it ain’t Architecture’. In my mind, an architect builds for the moment and dreams in the future. Suzanne Trocmé wrties on art, design and architecture, and is a curator, author, broadcaster and furniture designer. She is editor-at-large atWallpaper* Summer 2019 |Citizen|5
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Opinion
Never Mind the Buzzword Neil Lee asks whether inclusive growth is just a fashionable buzzword or an effective strategy for balancing equality and growth
Cities are commonly seen as places of opportunity. The richest global cities – such as London or New York – create well-paid jobs in a way few other places do. Residents tend to do well, and migrants come to better themselves.Yet they are also places of inequality and poverty. London is the UK’s richest city, but it is also the most unequal, and Manhattan balances incredible wealth with real poverty. This is a dilemma for urban policy-makers: how can they balance growth with equity? The answer for many has been inclusive growth – a concern with both the pace and the pattern of economic growth. The concept has rapidly become a new mantra in economic development. It started in the Global South, where policymakers wanted to ensure that development benefited the poor, before spreading to cities across the Global North as well-meaning but cash-strapped city governments sought ways to address inequality. The OECD, a rich-country club, launched a programme on inclusive growth in cities, hoping to share best practice about how it can be achieved. Scotland has put the concept at the heart of its national strategy, and cities such as Leeds now have inclusive growth strategies. Inclusive growth is a clever concept. It is hard to disagree with the cuddly notion of inclusion and, after a sluggish decade since the financial crisis, policy-makers are still desperate for growth. For proponents of the concept it is a politically acceptable way of focusing resources on inclusion without the political challenges of redistribution. Opinion polls show that the general public is, on average, unconvinced about the benefits of redistribution. But who could be opposed to the idea of growth which includes everyone? It represents a long-overdue recognition that economic development has a distributional impact. While urban policy-makers face considerable constraints, they can change something. And if the
concept of inclusive growth shifts a little bit of mainstream spending then that will be a good outcome. It is certainly better than nothing, but the concept of inclusive growth has some big problems. There is a real danger of becoming a placebo: giving the impression of action, making policy-makers feel good about themselves, but changing little. In the context of austerity, where policy-makers have few powers, and geographical political divisions, where major cities are often run by different parties to the national government, it provides an opportunity for urban policy-makers to feel they are doing something, even if they aren’t. And it can be a distraction from the policies – taxation, welfare reform, and benefits – which we know do have an effect on poverty and inequality. Then there is the question of how inclusive growth can actually be achieved. Policy-makers can steer local economies, but do so in the face of major forces such as international trade or technology. They have some levers to ‘shape’ the nature of growth but not as many as they often pretend. Successful urban economies such as London may have some options,
but many cities have found it harder to achieve growth in the first place. Expecting them to somehow ensure that growth is inclusive is a tall order. Finally, it isn’t at all clear what it actually means: there is no consistent definition, and the concept has become sprawling with seemingly unrelated policy areas being called ‘inclusive growth’. Some see it as being tightly focused on traditional growth policy around labour markets and skills. Others see it more broadly as including health and education. It’s a fuzzy concept, which is quite helpful politically, as diverse groups can unify around a general goal in a way they couldn’t around something more precise – inclusive growth strategies have ranged from focused schemes to improve labour market participation to more disparate areas like playgrounds. But it also causes problems. Inclusive growth risks becoming a fashionable buzzword rather than a meaningful concept. For urban policy-makers – often seen as faddish – this isn’t a good look. Neil Lee is an associate professor of economic geography and director of the MSc in Local Economic Development at the London School of Economics Summer 2019 |Citizen|7
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Text by Isabel Allen Photographs by Magnus Dennis
Extinction Rebellion’s occupation and reappropriation of London’s streets, monuments and civic space reflected a widespread hunger to redraw the lines of engagement between citizens and state
Towards a new social contract 8|Citizen|Summer 2019
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What does it mean to be a citizen in 2019? The Oxford Dictionary defines the word citizen as ‘A legally recognised subject or national of a state of commonwealth, either native or naturalised’, or ‘An inhabitant of a particular town or city’. Both definitions imply that citizenship is a passive state, an accident of national affiliation or geography. Neither begins to capture the complexity of a concept that is both heavily contested and emotionally charged. Our understanding of the concept changes from culture to culture, generation to generation, and according to personal perspective. Even with the benefit of hindsight, we have failed to reach consensus on how the concept of citizenship came into being. Its emergence in the city states of ancient Greece is variously characterised as a defensive response to the fear of slavery or a reflection of the fact that the existence of slaves afforded free men sufficient time to participate in public life. What remains consistent is the assumption that the privilege of citizenship goes hand-in-hand with obligations, responsibilities and rights. These range from the minimal – paying taxes, respecting the law – to a broad spectrum of expectations encompassing political participation, military service, community service and adherence to explicit or implicit codes of civic behaviour. Modern democracies hover between two opposing views of the nature of civic duty. The liberal view sees and accepts individuals as acquisitive rather than political. The role of the state is to provide the stable framework – legal protection, essential services, security – to allow individuals to pursue their natural inclination to further their own interests and accumulate private wealth. In return, citizens are expected to pay taxes and abide by the law. The civic view sees citizenship as an active role: the ideal citizen is not just public spirited, but politically informed and engaged. Brexit Britain is in the process of self-reflection about its own definition of citizenship. In the most literal sense, citizens are facing the transition from dual EU and UK citizenship to being UK citizens alone. The academics Richard Ashcroft and Mark Bevir make the argument that, since the overwhelming majority of those who voted for Brexit were citizens of both, the vote can be at least partly understood as a relative evaluation of the two different citizenships, with Leave voters taking 10|Citizen|Summer 2019
the view that the economic and political rights associated with British citizenship are undermined by their status as citizens of the EU. The fact that many voters claim to have acted on false or insufficient information suggests that citizens failed in their civic duty to keep themselves sufficiently informed to be able to play an educated role in political life. Or that the establishment – in the form of our political leaders and the media – failed in their fundamental duty to speak the truth and keep the populace informed. Either way it indicates a failure of the civic conception of the contract between citizen and state. The resurgence of widespread political protest represents a reaction to this failure; a vote of no confidence in the system’s ability to represent the needs and values of its citizens; a resistance to the essentially liberal model of democracy in which, for the vast majority, political engagement is limited to casting the occasional vote. The invasion of London’s streets and squares signals a hunger for a different kind of citizenship: one that asks more of its people but – hopefully – promises to give more in return. The new wave of movements based on participatory democracy, including calls for a UK citizens’ assembly, are notable for understanding that a commitment to active citizenship is part and parcel of a call for wholesale political change. Ashcroft and Bevir agree, arguing for a fully federalised UK, restructured to encourage greater participation and ownership among those who identify primarily with local agendas and issues. Extinction Rebellion (XR) has channelled a groundswell of grass-
The invasion of London’s streets and squares signals a hunger for a different kind of citizenship: one that asks more of its people but – hopefully – promises to give more in return
roots activism and protest into a decentralised mass movement which aims to mobilise 3.5 per cent of the British population – around two million citizens – into active rebellion, demanding radical changes to power structures, wealth distribution and approaches to climate change. Three months ago, this seemed like an outlandish, if laudable, ambition. Then in April, XR orchestrated the most significant campaign of mass non-violent direct action in the UK’s recent history. Hordes of protesters descended on the capital to highlight how little time the world has left to halt manmade environmental breakdown and to exercise their democratic right to deliver their mission statement – along with countless personal and group letters to MPs – to parliament. XR’s mission statement is a direct reflection of this two-way contract between citizen and state. On the one hand, they are calling on government to commit to better and more truthful communication with citizens. On the other, they are demanding the establishment of an empowered national citizens’ assembly to oversee the creation of a democracy fit for purpose, along with a policy of devolution ‘to the lowest level’ that would give regions and localities increased powers over policies, decision-making and laws. Its political ambitions are underpinned by a call for a participatory democracy grounded in a more tolerant – and more active – society. These go hand-in-hand with a demand for the UK to cut carbon emissions to zero by 2025 – a reflection of the fact that modern-day citizenship comes with obligations to the planet as well as to the state. While determinedly non-violent, the movement is unapologetically subversive. More than 1,000 people were arrested for acts of civil obedience during April’s protest. Which makes it all the more astonishing that the campaign has garnered informal and formal support from members of the establishment. The Labour Party has spoken in support, comparing them to Chartists, suffragettes and antiapartheid activists; the sainted – and ultimately vindicated – historic civil rights protesters of the past. Shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth addressed the crowd directly, expressing support for a citizens’ assembly and pledging to make climate change a central focus of Labour’s health and wellbeing policy, while former Labour leader Ed Miliband declared that the government must declare a climate emergency and
More than 1,000 people were arrested for acts of civil obedience during April’s protest. Which makes it all the more astonishing that the campaign has garnered informal and formal support from members of the establishment
introduce a ‘green new deal’. Some protesters who spent the night in custody reported that the police treated them with respect and expressed sympathy with their cause. The lines between establishment and rebel are being rapidly redrawn. This confusion – or emergence of a new consensus, depending on your point of view – was made visible in the occupation and transformation of London’s squares and streets. The impact on the city first became apparent on 15 April as protesters stopped traffic at Oxford Circus, Marble Arch, Waterloo Bridge and the area around Parliament Square. The ‘invasion’ gained momentum as protesters – or rebels – occupied sites across the capital and around the UK. London was soon awash with images of protesters subverting the function
– and the symbolism – of London’s public spaces and claiming the city as their own. These images stand as a reminder of the extent to which our built environment reflects the values of a bygone age. Successive generations have shaped the city to reflect the whims and priorities of the ruling elite, or to serve the needs of commerce or the demands of the motor car. Monuments and statues celebrate past heroes. Buildings reflect an organisational hierarchy increasingly under threat. It’s not yet clear where this new spirit of rebellion will land. What is clear is that we are entering into a new social contract; that disaffected citizens are beginning to seize the obligations, and the privileges, of active citizenship – and are not in any hurry to let them go. Summer 2019 |Citizen|11
Extinction Rebellion aims to mobilise two million citizens into active rebellion, demanding radical changes to power structures, wealth distribution and approaches to climate change
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It’s not yet clear where this new spirit of rebellion will land. What clear is that we are entering into a new social contract
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London was soon awash with images of protesters subverting the function – and the symbolism – of London’s public spaces and claiming the city as their own
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Henrietta L Moore and Richard Sennett, two leading campaigners for global change, go head-to-head on the evolving relationship between culture, society and the city
Rules of engagement
Photographs by Freddie Ardley Summer 2019 |Citizen|17
RS: It’s a deep and perplexing question: to ask what architecture has to do with citizenship. When I teach, I ask students to draw a democratic window. I ask them, ‘How can you join a window with a political concept?’ Students usually debate how big it is and wonder if it opens. Is it about letting people in or out? Or both? Is a revolving door democratic? Is transparency democratic? Or is the question more about protection from surveillance? These are very different notions of democracy: one is about rights and not being spied on, the other is about transparency and how citizens see each other. HM: The state protects citizens from
harm, or at least that’s what states used to do. Modern states don’t do that. China, with its ‘Social Points Programme’ and facial recognition technology, traces your every move – the state watches everything you do in shops and on blog sites, what you see, what you read, what you write and everything else. These ‘social points’ allow you to do certain things, like get on trains or go to the theatre. By experimenting with this, China is trying to build its idea of a social citizen, making sure citizens don’t do things that it perceives as detrimental to the country. Here, surveillance is tied up with the betterment of citizens. In the UK, surveillance is about protection, particularly from terrorism.
RS: People go to cities because historically they are less regulated than small towns. Here, urban citizenship equates to anonymity. Yet the Chinese social points system destroys this. HM: The system also creates new
kinds of divisions in Chinese society that shape how we approach and understand it. For instance, in the case of the theatre, you might not start by thinking about who you would be interacting with, but whether you’re able to go at all. The boundaries of social contracts are being redrawn and we’re not sure of the basis on which they will be moving forward.
RS: A lot of what has passed for reform in Britain and particularly London has a negative impact, like the congestion charge for example. People and businesses with resources have such charges paid for and it doesn’t affect them. However, if you’re working class it does impact you a great deal. When thinking about 18|Citizen|Summer 2019
climate change and cities, there are a lot of supposed solutions which we think are ecological. But they are so class-inflected that they wind up being the opposite. On the other hand, there’s a lack of reform regarding things like gentrification. If you don’t want to gentrify a neighbourhood, you put in price controls on property to make sure it’s not a local café one day and a Pret the next. It takes political will to do this and that has been missing. Those controls do exist in Amsterdam, however, and there you get really mixed neighbourhoods. The principle in general is that the free market is bad for the city.
Look at the Windrush scandal.Why did the government feel they had to make a distinction between residents and citizens? Henrietta L Moore
HM: Free markets, in this sense though, aren’t actually free – they are governed by market forces and lobbyists. They are, in effect, controlled by monopoly capitalism. All markets require regulation, London included. When you look at its history you find the guilds, which acted as regulators. They trained people, managed markets and were a form of quality control. RS: This whole conversation illustrates the limitations of design.You can design spaces to be protective and transparent, but what is needed is a different power relationship. I’ve been working with the UN on Nehru, a marketplace in Delhi. It’s one of the most peaceful places in the city, but on paper you would never expect that. It’s a huge market where Muslims and Hindus trade and interact. People in the market have control over how it’s run, and this has made them into citizens of that marketplace and the space it inhabits. HM: The notion of what it means to
be a citizen is changing. In London, we are living in a city that is super diverse in sociological terms. Yet there is a push from the state to find divisions between people. Look at the Windrush scandal for example. Why did the government feel they had to make a distinction between residents and citizens?
RS: Clarifying citizenship can be wounding to a country. It’s not enabling at all. People who are legal or illegal residents are sources of enormous energy, be it political or economic. Thanks to Brexit, that energy will likely die. We are short of 70,000 nurses. They have to come from somewhere. But if you look at what the Home Office is doing, they’re not going to come to the UK. That is something Brexit is going to teach people in two or three years
Professor Dame Henrietta L Moore is the Founder and Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity and the Chair in Culture, Philosophy and Design at University College London. She is the lead academic at the RELIEF Centre where she is working to improve levels of prosperity in Lebanon; and PROCOL Kenya, which focuses on broadening the definition of prosperity in Africa. Moore is co-founder of Fast Forward 2030, a network for businesses aiming to incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals into their business models. Professor Richard Sennett writes about cities and culture and has authored 16 books – the most recent being Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City. For the last three decades, he has served as a consultant to various bodies within the United Nations and wrote the mission statement for Habitat III, the UN’s environmental congress. In 2014 Richard founded Theatrum Mundi, a research foundation for urban culture. He has taught at many institutions, including New York University, the London School of Economics and MIT.
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on a much bigger scale. I really think Britain is going to have a convulsion after 31 October. The blue-rinse Conservative – let’s say – men, haven’t got an idea of what it is going to be like. It’s fine to say ‘take back our borders, keep those nurses out!’ But who is going to do the picking of fruit in British farming? Not them. HM: People are asking, ‘What should
the state/citizen relationship be?’ That’s very important and underpinning it is a rejection of certain kinds of market capitalism that otherwise reduces the place and power of the state to a mere shadow and promulgates the view that state support is not working. Out of this has come a new kind of discussion about how to get local-level politics working. This has been furtherd by the Tory policy of devolution and following this, localisation with local mayors. As a result local councils now have more responsibilities, like caring for the elderly and schools, and control over them. But these responsibilities are expensive, and these councils have had their budgets cut. So quality of life is ultimately going down.
RS: One of the things that has
happened in places like India is that, as a result of development, medical care inequality has risen dramatically. In Mexico City, they have decentralised clinics which are just little holes in the wall where you get a shot or get your knee bound up. They don’t look like typical clinics. That’s a role architecture can play: building trust, marketing it as a place for care. This kind of clinic is a way of tackling the inequality of care. I want to put these clinics at the edges of poor neighbourhoods so there is a social mix. It’s the same with schools. If you put something in the centre of a ghetto you reinforce the ghetto. HM: Many of the solutions to problems
like this will come from the Global South. The problems arise there – and solutions are formed that can be applied to places across the developed world because there is room to experiment.
RS: The focus of citizenship is moving from national to urban. Not that national power will go away, but it’s more malign in some ways and that’s what is happening in a lot of Latin American countries like Brazil. National government is not an oppressor, it’s just that the things that really matter are at a different scale. 20|Citizen|Summer 2019
When talking about the citizen our language is very individualised whereas citizenship is collective.The notion of ‘citizen’ is about transforming a socialised subject into an individualised one Richard Sennett HM: Dysfunctional political and
social systems exist across the world. We have to look for social innovation to help tackle the problems that they bring. I’ve been collaborating with a young entrepreneur, Arthur Kay, to address this. His company, Skyroom, is a response to the fact that London’s key workers all live many miles away from where they work. Its plan is to use London’s flat, disused rooftops to build these workers housing in key areas. This is one example of how issues can be addressed differently.
RS: How could we, instead of caring for elderly people, give them better quality of life? If I ever retire, I want to have a café, or a pub. I don’t want to be in a care home, I want to be in a street. Elderly homes are warehouses of people waiting to die; at least, that is the stigma. My mother, who lived beyond 100, just wanted to stay in her favourite New York bar in her later years. She had her favourite table and two martinis, and she sat there for hours and hours. That kept her alive. That’s a part of social citizenship. HM: We need to address social
problems differently. Take the example of improving care for those with Alzheimer’s in the UK. If you ask: ‘How do we pay for all this?’ you never get anywhere. So, you start the other way around. You improve the quality of life for those with Alzheimer’s and those who care for them. Once you begin that process of financial modelling it’s easier to see how you are going to number crunch it. It’s totally different to saying, ‘How do we pay for something we can’t afford?’
RS: I think that this is the great error of New Labour. The markets they developed were determined by market mechanisms rather than a social agenda. It was a left-wing regime of accountancy.
HM: That underpins ‘little nation’
Toryism as well. It’s not quantification exactly, it’s about control. When people say they don’t want the nanny state, what they mean is that they don’t want to be controlled.
RS: There’s a book by Alan Macfarlane called The Origins of English Individualism, which is about the rise of English individualism during the five centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution. It touches on what Protestantism did in the UK: it put a premium on individuals and not on communities. The argument is that it liberated people to begin a different kind of capitalism, and that in England that was more focused on the entrepreneur. What we are talking about is the citizen. Our language is very individualised, whereas citizenship is collective. The notion of ‘citizen’ is about transforming a socialised subject into an individualised one. HM: In the past, and today, citizenship
requires education. We must think about what a university does, and can do in today’s world, and how it is a part of this conversation. It’s attached to new research. The new role for the university is getting that evidence into action. Arthur Kay and I launched Fast Forward 2030 in 2015. Started in London, but spreading globally, it is about supporting new entrepreneurs who are educated on the new social contract and committed to supporting it. There is also a way of expanding and oxygenating the work we do through the arts. At the Institute for Global Prosperity we are looking at the way the arts can help respond to the major challenges of the day. One of the places we have started working on this is Lebanon through the RELIEF centre, a transdisciplinary research collaboration looking at prosperity in the context of mass displacement. Here, we are working with sound artists to develop an opera connected to the work we do on the ground. We’re exploring how arts, culture and self-development can all work together. RS: There has to be a space in
a person’s life – late teens, early twenties – where you are not ruled by pragmatics. Where you can encounter some freedom in your life which is unconnected to anything else. It should be about expansion and making your way in the world; understanding your own citizenship.
Opinion
Eyes on the prize Max Cotton says it’s time to stop being distracted by political divisions and prioritise the challenges posed by climate change
My father was sitting at a set of traffic lights in his Ford Prefect in the late 1950s. He lit up the last of his cigarettes – Players’ Navy Cut – and tossed the empty packet out of the window. Within a second the packet was back up in his face – speared on the end of a rolled umbrella – and a suited and bespectacled old lady was glowering down at him. ‘Young man.’ She said ‘Do you want this?’ Dad said he didn’t. ‘Well neither does Guildford.’My old man used to laugh when he told this story – a callow and mortified young chap and an indignant doughty citizen who wasn’t going to take any crap – not after Hitler’s bombs. The real reason it was a good story was because it was so unusual. He chucked a fag packet out of the window. So what? We used to do – well, pretty much what we wanted. Every other carriage on the tube was a smoker. I remember the pavements of Fulham in the 1970s as sea of dog shit and – horror of horrors – my initials, along with many other Wiltshire school boys, are neatly carved into the rocks at Stonehenge. The idea of asking a British citizen to go through their rubbish and separate it out into four different bins would have seemed preposterous a few decades ago – unless it could’ve helped make Spitfires. So the gulf between the children of the 60s and the millennials seems huge. And yet post-war governments did whatever they liked too. Any social history documentary about the 1960s would list the abolition of capital punishment, the legalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adult men and the Abortion Act of 1968 as absolutely fundamental to the development of modern Britain. They are the headlines of the 60s. But was an end to hanging in Labour’s 1964 manifesto? Was it hell. Was the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 a big doorstep issue in the 1966 general election? Not on your nelly. Our society was turned on its head between 1964 and 1969 with no mandate whatsoever from the British
people. These were not bottom up changes. They were imposed on us against our will. Among Conservative party members, 54 per cent still support capital punishment 50 years after its abolition. Today, millennials tend to take the built and natural environment seriously; they are blind, without many exceptions, to race and sexual orientation. The real change came when Home Secretary Jack Straw first linked the word ‘rights’ with the word ‘responsibility’ in 1998. As a concept it has taken hold and is written tall and bold across the citizenship ceremonies of western Europe. It came at a time when political solutions to the problems of a rapidly changing society became less obvious; when post-Thatcher governments started to struggle to meet our expectations.That failure has meant
Asking a British citizen to go through their rubbish and separate it out into four different bins would have seemed preposterous a few decades ago
that in many ways we now take responsibility ourselves rather than wait to be told what to do. We faff around putting our rubbish into different bins. We queue for ages at the dump with garden waste. Someone smoking near a pregnant woman can expect to be told to do one. Throw a cigarette packet or a pizza box out of a car window and you are likely to be stopped by the motorist behind you. We are also honing our views on what is and is not OK in other directions. More of us believe that immigrants speaking English and understanding British values are important than we did 10 years ago. More of us see skills as a determining factor in accepting migrants than we did 10 years ago.We also have a society that is confident in its ability to regulate itself. But what does this mean for the challenges we face? Mostly, it means that we have to learn to put aside our differences; to take a long deep breath and agree on the issues that matter most. Is there general consensus that we need to address global warming? Won’t the government – of any colour – cave under the pressure to address environmental issues? Yes. Just as long as our environmental concerns do not become too polarised. But Brexit has completely polarised our political world. Most of us believe that how you voted in June 2016 tells us a lot about who you are: I’m Leave and a bit of a petrol head; I’m Remain and a bit of a hippy. We can only address the challenge of climate change if we put these differences aside. All of us need to just lie down, shut our eyes and think of David Attenborough. Not smoking in someone’s face and caring about what we do with our rubbish have become the norm because most of us thought they should. Bluntly, citizen power will only work if White Van Man and crusty jugglers can be on the same page. Max Cotton is a broadcaster and former political correspondent for the BBC Summer 2019 |Citizen|21
in the UK regularly visit a mosque, it’s a safe bet it’s a lot. Mosques in the UK function almost entirely for prayers. Some have small spaces for women to pray. Some teach children how to read the Quran and the basic principles of Islam. Few run activities to attract people who aren’t Muslims but live or work in the local area. It’s a shame. The design and function of the British mosque has hardly evolved since the first wave of Muslims arrived in the UK, largely from South Asian countries, in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s especially surprising when you consider how sensitive community relations often are in areas with large numbers of Muslims, how much cash mosques generate through collections, and how they’ve been identified by government authorities as places sometimes targeted by extremists to cultivate dangerous ideas. Many British Muslims talk of a complete rethink. What should a mosque function like for the next 20 or 30 years? How would a mosque be interpreted in the mind
of a world-class modern architect with an ambitious brief? How can we build a radical mosque – in a good way? The brief should start with some fundamental questions. Should broader British society have a more active stake in mosques? Should mosques be open public buildings, with a range of activities? Do they need to be aesthetically appealing? What would that mean? The needs of a mosque today are different to that period in the ’60s and ’70s when Muslims first arrived in quantity. Back then, they were designed to meet a simple requirement – to have somewhere to pray. In his book about mosques in Britain, Shahed Saleem, says mosques were ‘vehicles for the dynamic reconstruction of tradition’ by immigrants; a place of comforting familiarity to the homeland and perhaps a refuge from any feeling of hostility in their new environment. How relevant are those feelings for a generation of Muslims who not only were born in Britain, but have parents who were born here too?
Soheb Panja says it’s time for a radical rethink of the design of the British mosque Opposite: Muslims gather for prayer at the Islamic Centre on Soho’s Berwick Street.
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Modern mosques
FREDDIE ARDLEY
My granddad used to run a mosque. Well, he and some of his friends hired a scout hall. I was forced to help with the set-up for Friday prayers during school holidays and stay through to the very end. I used to curse the stragglers who hung about way too long and pray for an early finish. The tedium of it all was brutal. (My prayers were answered when one of my granddad’s friends ran off with the donations, bringing the whole enterprise to an end.) Maybe it’s the memory of those painful years, but I remain fascinated by where Muslims pray in Britain. There are 1,500 mosques in the UK, many of which solely operate as spaces for Friday prayers. They don’t include the thousands of repurposed spaces British Muslims jam themselves into. Meanwhile, standalone mosques range from the decaying one by Regent’s Park to one of my favourites – the incongruously located four-storey block in the middle of Soho’s Berwick Street. Although it’s not clear what proportion of the 2.7 million Muslims
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Tim Winter, lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, says: ‘Contemporary European models of society and growth are evidently unsustainable, as the decline of family life, the growth of loneliness, and the collapse of the environment, all demonstrate. Hence mosques (and all places of worship) should be witness to an alternative and more humane and spiritual form of life.’ Remaking a mosque to meet the needs of today’s Muslims should represent an appealing challenge for ambitious architects; one where they can demonstrate the power of good – even beautiful –design to achieve community cohesion, dispel suspicion towards an ethnic group and bring communities together. It’s something costly government policy initiatives have aimed for and, more often than not, failed to achieve. They should be open to Muslims and non-Muslims alike and designed to function for women as well as men. They should provide educational services, and facilitate activities for
the local community, whatever faith they are. The design should signal this and enable it. The modern mosque should communicate the fact that it encompasses a wide range of activities while projecting an image that is transparent, welcoming and alive. The design industry has long fought for recognition for the intangible value of great design, its ability to attract people, create positive feelings and stimulate people to interact in a positive way. Last April the Cambridge Mosque opened, pointing to a kind of building no one has seen before in the UK. Designed by Marks Barfield and built to a cost of £23m, it could well inspire other trusts and architects. It’s billed as an eco-mosque, but perhaps more radical is the fact that it is explicit in not following any school of Islam and is actively trying to serve as a cultural bridge between communities. But this kind of thinking remains the exception rather than the norm. A historian in Saleem’s book is quoted as saying ‘Imaginative architecture is a luxury’. That should
be fighting talk for an impassioned designer with a view of what great design can achieve. But first, architects would have to disrupt the traditional base that controls the power, money and decision-making behind mosques. It would mean elbowing their way in to the funding behind mosques – whether that’s private donors, governments, charities or trusts. Winter says, ‘Mosques are typically run by trustees who self-appoint, and are community leaders representing the culture of the first generation of migrants.’ He adds: ‘They tend also to be embedded in ethnic and sectarian positions which to some younger Muslims may seem divisive and damaging.’ Transferring this power to a youthful and ambitious custodian – with a foot equally in the ‘British’ as well as ‘Muslim’ parts of their identity – could be little short of revolutionary. Imagine a brief that calls for a modern interpretation of the way Islam in modern Britain looks and behaves. Soheb Panja is the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Courier magazine
MORLEY VON STERNBERG
The new Cambridge Mosque, designed by Marks Barfield, is explicit in not following any school of Islam and actively trying to serve as a cultural bridge between communities.
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Make it yours ! With clear shapes and strong colours USM adjusts to your collections, your interests, your life. Never the same, always yours.
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A new generation of practitioners are challenging our definitions of experts and expertise and calling for more diverse voices to be heard. Citizen talks to some of the innovators and entrepreneurs who are working across and beyond professional boundaries to improve city life
Interviews by Jason Sayer Photographs by Freddie Ardley
Amelia Viney founded the Advocacy Academy to support young leaders from marginalised communities to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence to create a more fair, just and equal world
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All change What do you do?
We take young people at the sharp end of the failures of our system. They are trained by the best changemakers in the country and we support them to launch and run and win campaigns that will change their lives. Why do you do it?
Because 88 per cent of young people feel their voices are completely unheard in society and 60 per cent have no idea how decisions are made on their behalf. That leads to policies that fail to reflect the diverse interests of our communities and young people growing up without the life they deserve.
Congress and work for an MP in Westminster. Everyone looked like me: white, though mostly male. Lots of Oxbridge graduates like me. To break the cycle, I had to stop accumulating power and start redistributing it to people who really need it. What’s your business model?
We are not a business, we are a charity. The question of what a business model is, is a question asked by capitalism. I don’t believe capitalism is the answer. It doesn’t make people happy and isn’t beneficial for the majority of the world.
How did you come to be doing what you’re doing?
What barriers have you had to overcome to get where you are today?
At 15 I battled for my school to become the first fair-trade school in the country. I went on to lobby on social justice issues in
Charities are supposed to be apolitical – that’s limiting. Great charity work builds the capacity of people to create systemic
change which is inherently political. We’ve had to do a lot of careful thinking about what we can and can’t do and what we are able to do within the letter of the law. What’s the biggest challenge you face in trying to do your job?
The way Great Britain looks at social justice and activism. In America, for all of its stupidity, everybody is entitled to their say. Here, when I say activism, people think of marches and placards. They don’t see strategic campaigning or 10-year movements. They see it as a niche. I hope it becomes mainstream to fight for a better world. theadvocacyacademy.com
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Alex Depledge is CEO and co-founder of Resi, an online consultancy that demystifies the process of making home improvements
What do you do? We offer affordable, fast, high-quality architectural services to every UK household, no matter the size of their project or budget. Our online platform allows homeowners to manage their entire project from one online dashboard, connecting to our team of architects with our messaging and screen-share features. We provide a clear price plan upfront, and even assist with budget. We also help with planning applications and building regulations, as well as connecting homeowners with vetted builders to complete their projects. Why do you do it? We want to make using an architect as straightforward and cost efficient as possible. For too long, architecture has been inaccessible and confusing – ripe for disruption. How did you come to be doing what you’re doing? My business partner Jules Coleman and I set up Hassle. com which allowed cleaners to bid for jobs. I was responsible for growing the business to more than £8m turnover in under two years. After Hassle. com, Jules and I took time out. Around this time, I was having a nightmare trying to extend my house. Three months in and £2,500 lighter, I still had nothing to show for it. At that point, I met architects Rich Morgan and Nick Stockley, Resi’s other co-founders. They told me the whole industry was confusing. As soon as they said that, I knew I’d found the next idea. What’s your business model? We charge for services rendered, whether that’s architectural plans, facilitating building regulations, or connecting clients with reliable contractors. The residential improvement slice of the UK construction GDP was worth £22 billion in 2017. This is our target market, one with huge size and potential for growth. resi.co.uk Summer 2019 |Citizen|29
Alisha Morenike Fisher is co-founder and director of 3.09, a multi-disciplinary international design collective that works through digital networks to facilitate social change both geographically and culturally through the lens of migration, tech and the built environment. She also co-founded Black Females in Architecture
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Why did you launch 3.09?
We were all frustrated that we haven’t designed our cities, regions and landscapes to serve citizens in the best possible way. There are too many pockets of spatial inequity and injustice and we want to improve communities who, like us, have been overlooked, disenfranchised or not even seen. We’re currently piloting a programme where we’re being mentored by OneTech and supported by Studio Egret West, Tibbalds, RIBA South West and a few others to support young people from underrepresented groups with an interest in the built environment.
What’s the biggest challenge you face in trying to do your job?
Around the time 3.09 was launched, I founded the Young Architect’s Network on Facebook and, shortly afterwards, Black Females in Architecture. So I can’t spend as much time on ensuring 3.09 is as successful as I would like. It’s definitely a balancing game. But the benefit of being part of a collective is that we can all lead different projects. What’s next for you?
I’m currently working at Public Practice, an incredible initiative to encourage and facilitate more built environment
Ben Rogers is the founding director of Centre for London, the city’s only dedicated think tank
What do you do?
What’s your business model?
We develop new solutions to London’s critical challenges by publishing research, holding events and bringing people together from different parts of the city. We’re politically neutral and a charity, and try to help national and London policymakers to think beyond the next election and plan for the future.
We get some core support, including from individual philanthropists. Most of our income comes from a mix of organisations from the private, public and third sector for research projects and events. We rely on the support of our funders but, importantly, retain editorial control over all our work.
Why do you do it?
London badly needed a think tank. No one else seemed to even be thinking about setting one up so I thought I should. What is the ultimate goal?
To help to create a fair, sustainable and prosperous London. London is one of the world’s economic, political and cultural capitals, but it is also a city of extremes where enormous wealth sits alongside poverty. I want to help ensure that every Londoner can make the most of the opportunities the city offers.
What’s the biggest challenge you face in trying to do your job?
Making sure that the capital has more control over its taxes and services. England is a remarkably centralised country and the Mayor and London boroughs are much better positioned than Whitehall to tackle the city’s complex problems. centreforlondon.org
practitioners to work in the public sector and I’m learning so much. I’m slowly realising my strengths, but I definitely see myself challenging the industry. Whether it’s through 3.09, Black Females in Architecture or a new venture in the future. 3pointohnine.com blackfemarc.com publicpractice.org.uk
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Pierre Shaw and Kishan San launched the School of Speculation (SOS), an independent design school which challenges current models of higher education
Why did you set up the School of Speculation?
SOS is a response to the worsening crisis in arts education. The UK portrays itself as an international home for the creative industries, yet the government has removed art and design from its ‘core’ subjects at secondary school level and university tuition fees continue to rise. We wanted to provide vocation-based education for designers and architects looking to test their discipline through research-related spatial practice, artworks or interdisciplinary design. What’s your business model?
The school is run as a not-for-profit organisation in order to maximise the potential for funding and pass on financial benefits directly to its students. We are looking to develop a model that works in partnership with host institutions. Our city’s museums and galleries (many of which share an interest in radical pedagogy) can really help to shape a new educational offering. What is the ultimate goal?
To provide a multitude of truly affordable critical design courses with a sustainable financial model that allows us to operate all year round. schoolofspeculation.xyz
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Tara Gbolade is an architect, app developer and co-founder of Gbolade Design Studio, a practice focused on architecture, property and product development
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What drives you?
I truly believe that our imagination has the power to change lives. Architecture and app development change the way everyday people experience and interact with the world around them, allowing them to live fuller and more sustainable lives. That’s why we developed the MyPart3 app, which aids architecture students undertaking their Part 3 qualification and the r-Home, an off-site housing system that focuses on social connectivity and family flexibility.
What barriers have you had to overcome to get where you are today?
I’m young(ish), black and female. I’ve had to contend with this through my career. However, I’ve also been surrounded by brilliant MDs, mentors and clients, who have challenged, inspired and believed in me. These are my personal heroes and I’m forever grateful for their support. Understanding the challenges faced people from a BAME background inspired me to start the Paradigm Network: a professional network that champions BAME representation within the built environment. We’ve been fortunate to be
Andrew Gregson founded Green Lab in a bid to change the way we consume the Earth’s resources, particularly when it comes to food
What do you do?
I run Green Lab, which changes the way our food systems work by supporting individuals, organisations and communities to design more sustainable solutions to complex food, water and waste challenges. Green Lab is a creative community and affordable workspace with a biolab, organic materials lab, grow lab and makerspace – we sit at the intersection of sustainable design, technology, science and agriculture. Why do you do it?
We only have a generation, maybe less, to make significant changes to the way we farm our food and reduce waste and to rethink how our planet’s resources are used not just for the next 30 years but for future generations.
How did you come to be doing what you’re doing?
I graduated as a designer and then went into the corporate world combined with working for some start-ups, science communication, digital fabrication, media and TV. A love of the natural world, and the likes of Jacques Cousteau, Gerald Durrell and David Attenborough, led me to my work at Green Lab. What barriers have you had to overcome to get where you are today?
Self-belief. It took me a long time to realise that you really can do anything you like with your life. greenlab.org
What is the ultimate goal?
To make a one per cent impact on the food system. Over 30 years that could be a huge shift. I’d also like to see a Green Lab in every major city, sharing knowledge through a distributed network of passionate change makers.
supported by forwardthinking companies including Jestico + Whiles, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, Brick by Brick, and Build Studios. What’s your business model?
We’re archipreneurial in our approach to what a successful practice looks like. With a small core team, we take a collaborative approach to working with creative architects, app developers and property experts – which means my working weeks are incredibly diverse, educational and fun. gboladedesignstudio.com mypart3.co.uk paradigmnetwork.co.uk Summer 2019 |Citizen|35
Alice Barnard is chief executive of the Edge Foundation, a charity pursuing a unified and holistic education system that supports social equity and enables young people to fulfil their potential and come away with a skill set suited to the 21st century
John BinghamHall is the director of Theatrum Mundi, a charity that aims to improve the understanding of cities through collaborations between artists, architects, planners, engineers and urbanists
What drives you?
Edge believes all young people should have access to a broad and balanced curriculum, including technical and creative subjects, taught in a way that makes learning meaningful and relevant. The culture of high-stakes testing in schools stifles creativity and limits opportunities to develop skills such as communication, problemsolving and teamwork. The government is stubbornly adhering to a curriculum designed in 1904; young people now need different skills and knowledge. Our current education system disadvantages young people from the
What do you do?
There are eight of us – architects, urban designers, sociologists and people from an arts background. I find myself mixed in with all of them in different ways: writing proposals, leading workshops, planning events, conducting research, meeting and developing ideas with potential collaborators, and presenting our work. Why do you do it?
Richard Sennett founded 36|Citizen|Summer 2019
most deprived backgrounds and we are wasting huge amounts of talent, which our society and economy desperately needs. How did you come to be doing what you’re doing?
I’ve been a reporter, the head of an organisation campaigning on rural issues and run my own business, but my route to Edge was via the Peter Jones Foundation where I was chief executive. That organisation is all about supporting young people to be enterprising and successful, so it was a short step to Edge, it’s just that we’re tackling it from a policy perspective and trying to effect systemic change.
Theatrum Mundi because he saw a desperate need for ideas that would help urbanists to imagine new possibilities to address the failure of so many places to stimulate public life. He saw that these ideas could come from the more unconstrained ways of thinking in things like music, choreography, theatre and writing. What’s the biggest challenge you face?
To mediate between people who speak very different
What’s your business model?
Edge is fortunate in that we have an endowment, meaning we are not reliant on public money, not subject to influence from government, and can be selective in which donations we accept. This means we have a truly independent voice. What’s the biggest challenge you face in trying to do your job?
The intransigence and reactionary thinking of Nick Gibb (the current schools minister). He is so entrenched in 19th-century ideas about education. edge.co.uk
languages – for example a choreographer and a traffic engineer – and draw out useful links between them that aren’t superficial. Assessing our work is also a challenge. Only five people may come to a workshop, but if that sparks five valuable ideas or projects, it’s more worthwhile than a public event of 500 people where nothing much changes. We’re trying to understand how to keep track of that. theatrum-mundi.org
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Nick Osborne provides online resources in self-management, self-organisation and self-organising systems to help people work in new ways to cope with the challenges of today’s fast-changing world
What do you do?
I help organisations run without managers. I have created a Learning Platform for Self-Organisation to help people understand and develop their abilities work together in new ways. I am also a partner with HolacracyOne which teaches a self-management practice, and am a partner with Evolution at Work which helps people to develop and thrive in self-organising environments. I work in schools too, with Learning Edge, teaching students about how their brains work and helping them to learn how to learn. Why do you do it?
Our current efforts to figure 38|Citizen|Summer 2019
out solutions to issues such as climate change, economic disparity and political polarisation aren’t working. It’s time for an upgrade in how we work, think, decide and live together. How did you come to be doing what you’re doing?
I spent many years researching and experimenting with alternatives and different tools, methods and approaches to problem solving: from Edward de Bono’s thinking tools to Formal Consensus decisionmaking. I’ve also been involved in setting up ecovillages and have an MSc in Management Development and Social Responsibility.
Cathy Runciman co-founded and co-runs Atlas of the Future, an online platform for stories about people working on projects that are shaping a positive democratic future
What do you do?
What is the ultimate goal?
Atlas of the Future shines a light on people dedicating their energies and talents to shaping more equitable and sustainable futures. Once a year we bring people together at our Fixing the Future event to make new connections, stimulate discussions and inspire change. I’m also head of partnerships at independent global media platform openDemocracy, a non-exec director at Makerversity, a pioneering community of maker businesses in London’s Somerset House, and a member of the Point People systems changers network.
Democratising the future! Which means: inspiring people to create a sustainable future that will truly benefit everyone, everywhere; raising the value of the most futurefocused people, projects and organisations whose work will impact society; ensuring everyone is involved and no one feels excluded – breaking down barriers of culture, language, age and experience; improving future literacy by making developments in science, technology and across all areas of human endeavour more understandable, universal and accessible – and fun!
Why do you do it?
Independent media can play a vital role in the ecosystem needed to help create positive change. We need to counter the narratives of fear which are used to create a lack of agency and hope.
What’s your business model?
A mix of funded partnerships, events, consultancy and content creation. What barriers have you had to overcome to get where you are today?
I’ve become increasingly aware of how much privilege (or how few barriers) I have. I’m constantly inspired by what the people we write about have often overcome to do the work they do. These provide me with a hefty toolkit I can use. What’s the biggest challenge you face in trying to do your job?
atlasofthefuture.org opendemocracy.net makerversity.org thepointpeople.com
SCOTT CHASSEROT
Developing my own mental, emotional, linguistic and spiritual agility and flexibility to be able to authentically connect with people who see and experience the world in different ways. They say, ‘If you are going to be a bridge, then expect to be walked on’, and I feel like I have been walked on a lot! nickosborne.net holacracy.org evolutionatwork.org learningedge.me Summer 2019 |Citizen|39
How does architectural practice need to adapt to benefit the modern city? Members of the London School of Architecture set out their agenda for change
Making practice perfect 40|Citizen|Summer 2019
James Soane
Architects should counter the status quo with an agenda that prioritises sustainability and equality over economic growth
Do you find your heart sinks when you hear the retort ‘when I was a student,’ followed by an anecdote describing better times and better teaching with the implication of glory days? This nostalgic thinking is not only tedious, but dangerous. It frames the present as a degraded version of the past. Right now there is an imperative to engage in the present, and in particular the issues of climate chaos, inequality and challenging normative city making. It could be argued that most of the societal issues we face are as a direct result of the neglect by those with power – architects included – for whom the project of progress and growth has been prioritised over an approach that nurtures and nourishes life on earth. Today we recognise this urge as the dominance of neoliberal thinking, where the impetus to create value has overwhelmed discourse and debate through political frameworks to become received wisdom, or ‘common sense.’ In order to challenge the status quo, the LSA chooses to engage in conversations and research that cause friction, rubbing against the orthodoxy of expansionism. For a young architect this means engaging at a political level to trace the levers of power and to figure out how decisions are made that affect the built environment. Theories that describe form-making are useless in the face of the scale of change required to rebalance our systems of production, consumption and disposal. It makes sense that we are witnessing such a crisis of public confidence as our power structures crumble, with a loss of accountability and the proliferation of alternative truths. Grass roots action has never been more critical in offering resistance to predominant ideologies that favour inequality, extraction and destruction of the environment. Writing in Politics of the Everyday, Ezio Manzini pleads for society to engage in projects that are not always framed around profit and to develop wide-ranging emancipatory politics that enable a collaborative and collective culture. The architect of the near future will need not only to repair the damage done to the ecosystem, but to pioneer new ways of living within our means. It is clear that the changes required in global governance are not forthcoming from the top down, so the opportunity for transformation has to come through a networked series of micro experiments, support structures and best practice. Coupled with this is a return to the importance
of implementing local initiatives that bring people and labour together, rather than outsourcing to the largest global players. It is here the LSA proposes a class action in both senses: as a proactive group approach to design and as an interrogation of the ethical crisis. In the UK, prior to the Industrial Revolution, communities were well served by this form of collective governance which had the power to alter societal behaviours and work for large numbers of people. Today this mode of practice tends to favour industrial-type disputes, although the majority of legal challenges are taken through the professional channel of on an individual basis. The move to treat justice as a question of a single human right rather than the rights of many, perhaps accounts for the lack of large-scale class action. While there is an increasing call for the legal challenge of toxic corporations and corrupt regimes, compensation will never address the systemic problems wrought on the world’s organic system. There has to be a system change that moves towards an understanding of shared richness and shared responsibility. Actions by the LSA class are seen in the act of collaboration over design projects and through the research leading to the writing of their personal manifesto. The conversation is seen as a tool to understand the complexity of those parameters that begin to look at a better way of belonging within the world. The process of design implicitly creates ethical choices which need to be made explicit, and the agency of the architect is as an actor within a wider company. We may not know all the outcomes of our design actions, but we have very sound data proving that current strategies cause multiple disruptions. It is troubling that the scientific evidence is not compelling enough to inspire innovation. David Wallace-Wells, in The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story Of The Future, describes the ‘uninhabitable earth’ as a place in the near future that has been almost destroyed, saying it is already much worse that we think. His motivation is to inspire action, anger even, in order to reveal that there are still choices to be made and alternative directions of travel. If education is about gaining knowledge, skills, beliefs, values and behaviours, now is a very good time to reset the agenda and to take action. James Soane is director of critical practice at the LSA Summer 2019 |Citizen|41
Joe Walker and Tom Badger
Architectural practice has to become more collaborative, proactive and outward-looking to retain its relevance and power
The past two years at the LSA have been an intense interrogation into how London operates, how it is designed and how the life of its citizens can be improved. The ambition of the projects from this year’s graduating cohort has been to actively pursue social and environmental change within the city, with much of the discourse revolving around the role of the architect and architecture in making meaningful change – how can the skills we have learnt have a significant and positive impact on our city? The ability to tackle these questions requires an acute understanding of how the discipline operates and the current context in which we work. Historically this has not been a strength of the architect. We have been known to operate with an elevated sense of self-importance, while much of the power once associated with the architect has been siphoned off to project managers, engineers and other consulting bodies. Combined with the built environment’s existence as a method of generating financial return, the architect now acts as fund manager, gently fluffing the developer’s portfolio. The practice of architecture is reduced to decoration and branding, its virtues and traditions rendered irrelevant. From this perspective, it is perhaps difficult to imagine how the architect can have any impact in a city where decisions regarding our city-making are (almost) always governed by land value, construction cost and policy. Our value systems place emphasis on the monetary, meaning the logical construction of the city is often the cheapest. Combined with our collective Modernist hangover, any notion of changing the world through architecture is met with scepticism rather than excitement. We live in the shadows of our Modernist past, where the best intentions became tools of control, power and ego. This might seem to paint a particularly bleak picture of the 42|Citizen|Summer 2019
discipline, but we believe it is this understanding of the limitations of architecture that allows us to confront the status quo, using the ways in which we are taught to think to make the city a more equal and sustainable place. In order to do so requires an awareness of three key assertions: 1. The discipline is dictated by and dependent on external forces. Politics, economy and users all shape space as much as the designer. 2. No change can come about through a single discipline. The complex issues of the 21st century require complex solutions. 3. Architectural discourse is often overly referential to its past or overly speculative towards its future, negating its need to be a contemporary practice. The following sections examine these observations and speculate on how the practice of architecture can become more contingent, collaborative, and contemporary. Can a building change the world? Probably not. Can architecture be a part of wider more meaningful change? Certainly. It is the belief of the LSA that propositional thinking and spatial intelligence are vital in bringing about meaningful change in the city, but this does not necessarily have to be practised within the traditional scope of the profession. We must engage with a new state of self-awareness. The practice of architecture can no longer wallow in its state of irrelevance or pretend that it holds the position it once did within society. We must confront, accept and navigate the complex systems that surround the profession, becoming agents of change in the city. With rising levels of inequality and the impending dangers of global warming, change is now vital. It is our belief that creating a contingent, collaborative and contemporary form of practice can re-establish architectural discourse as a key part of this change. JoeWalker and Tom Badger are 2019 graduates from the LSA
1. Contingent practice Architecture is a discipline that opens to the world, yet its practice has often been resistant to change. For it to fulfil its potential, we must be aware of (and accept) the forces that affect our work, becoming propositional as strategists as well as visual designers. Only then can we begin to work with (and against) the systems that govern the built environment. Contingent practice requires a degree of complicity, where the architect mediates, thinking creatively to produce new fragments of city that benefit the citizen while conforming to the powers of the market as well as policy. We must use the forces that govern our work to enrich a project rather than diminish it. This requires a particularly proactive approach. Rather than waiting for the phone to ring, we should be reassessing the extent of our agency and recognising that our scope of work could extend far beyond its current conventions. In understanding the complexities that surround the work, the architect becomes an agile agent collecting and utilising all the forces at play in order to improve the city, rather than working with a single client towards a controlled design output.
Environment Policy Community Client
Designer Built output
Resistant and ignorant to external forces
Client Environment Policy Community
Built output Designer
Open and engaged with external forces
2. Collaborative practice Rejecting the image of the architect as lone genius is vital to a more collaborative practice. If we are prepared to get rid of the idea of an architect as a visionary and focus on more normative forms of design and knowledge generation, we can re-establish the weakened relationships to other forms of design practice and the construction industry. The ambition here is to use architecture to combat inequality and instability, using the knowledge of those around us to enhance the ways in which we create. By using our understanding of space alongside the expertise of others, new opportunities arise. Architects could invent new things, not only architecture, but also objects, environments and the organisation of urban space. It’s a question of communication, the way people and things connect to one another. In doing so, the architect becomes part of a wider network of thinkers all contributing towards the betterment of our city and the wider environment.
3. Contemporary practice We should strive to be contemporary, constantly re-evaluating the modes and meanings of everyday life. This requires treading a fine line between thinking of a future without being overly speculative and looking to the past without being overly referential. We must avoid Ludditism through constant, self-driven education, continually re-evaluating and developing our faculties.
Referential
Knowledge of discipline
Knowledge of discipline
Collaboration
Knowledge of discipline
We must be against the fetishisation of technology, utilising its potential but not being governed by it. This applies to the tools we use to design our work and those used for the built fabric. We cannot be ignorant towards technology’s capability to enhance practice but must also resist the temptation of becoming overly enamoured of it and in doing so forgetting why that tool was picked up in the first place. Present
Past
Truly contemporary practice requires us to look outward as well as at ourselves. To be of value it requires an intense study of everyday life of the citizen, a study that – by its very nature – should be repeated as often as possible. It is the understanding of what is truly relevant to a community and asking if the built environment serving that community fulfils its needs and desires.
Speculative Future
Contemporary practice
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Fast track to the future 44|Citizen|Summer 2019
ChrisWilliamson looks at the way the duties and demands of citizenship have evolved since the days of the Roman Empire and explores the potential for green technologies and infrastructure to transform the way we travel, live and work
‘Those who at any point over the past thirty or so years followed the discourse on the design of the contemporary city cannot help but be led to the conclusion that the architect’s last hope by which to shape and discipline an increasingly unruly and uncontrollable metropolitan condition is through its networks of infrastructure.’ Roger Sherman, associate professor and co-director of cityLAB UCLA, 2014. I believe that architects in the future will need to be as involved in what makes cities work as in the design of individual buildings. That is certainly borne out by the work of WestonWilliamson+Partners. Our mission statement is about ‘creating civilised cities’. Our work includes masterplanning, and major infrastructure projects such as the Thames Tideway project, Crossrail and HS2: projects that shape the city and make it work effectively. On looking to the future, it is sensible to reflect on the past. As Steve Jobs said: ‘You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards’. I am an avid reader on the subject of ancient history: the Persians, the ancient Greeks, and the Egyptians. But I am particularly intrigued by the Roman Empire. A comparison of our cities now and Rome two millennia ago is interesting to consider. If Tiberius were to return to Rome today, he would be astonished by many things. The growth and influence of Christianity, for instance, and the scale of the buildings dwarfing the Pantheon built in Augustus’s reign. Computers, televisions, radio, mobile phones, cameras and other technological advances would amaze him. But the biggest shock might be the way we move between and around our cities: the cars, buses, trains, aeroplanes and helicopters. This has probably had the biggest effect on our environment as it has dictated land use and planning, and will continue to do so. Some of these changes can be predicted, but others afford such boundless possibilities that it is only possible to forecast change without the knowledge of what that change will be. It will, however, offer great possibilities to architects. Architects must meet these challenges to combat climate change attributable to population growth and the move from rural communities to large urban complexes. The pace of change A further influence on the future and any attempt to predict it is also evident in studying the past. That is our development as a species. Here, Tiberius might find the inhabitants of the city relatively little changed: taller, generally better educated and most more travelled, but with broadly similar hopes and fears – a need to love and to be loved, to protect and nurture, and the same capacity for harm (with which he was all too familiar). We still have Research project by WW+P exploring the potential of new technologies and modes of transport to create high-rise, high-tech garden cities. There would be no private vehicles within the 2.5 km-diameter city centre. Electric shared vehicles would be available with a maximum wait of five minutes. At the centre is a high-speed link between cities.
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broadly the same diet (though more plentiful and varied), and feel heat, cold, injuries and hurt in the same way. Modern medicines might improve and extend our lives, but we still die of many of the same ailments as Tiberius’s citizens. He would be amazed by a modern hospital with X-rays and MRI technology, but appreciate that they are essentially powerless against human frailty. For comfort, many of us still believe in an afterlife – though for many millions this is based on the teachings of a man who had few followers during Tiberius’s reign. The divisions of race and religion would also come as little surprise to the emperor, although they have been amplified by modern communications and weaponry. Tiberius would not find much difference in other aspects of our daily lives in our cities. Many of the laws and rules for how we conduct ourselves (or should) in a civilised urban
society would be familiar. The duty of a citizen and civic pride would be understood. He would also recognise the hedonism and would appreciate our love of music and entertainment, albeit being astounded by the instrumentation and technology. My point in this absurd imagining is that our minds and bodies are essentially the same after 2,000 years even though the technological advances have been immense. Even in the last 50 years the way our cities are being shaped has developed rapidly, but the focus is still on satisfying the same essential needs in man. So how does this affect our thinking about the future? I think it is an essential reflection because, despite technological advances, we (as rational and emotional beings) still respond to the environment in a similar way, and that will surely continue. The citizens of ancient Rome would gaze with awe and wonder at the Pantheon 2,000 years ago in much the same way as we would at the Bilbao Guggenheim. The technological advances to achieve the latter are incredible, but the effect is the same. Similar advances over the next 50 years will affect the way we design and build, but how might they affect what we build and why? It is not just on the monumental scale where similarities should be drawn. On a domestic scale, the needs of shelter and also the forms and scale of construction are little changed, though we have much greater capacity to moderate our environment in inhospitable climates. Climate change will continue to increase the occurrences of these unless we act concertedly. This will be an increasing concern in all architectural projects, but also transport projects, which contribute around 46 per cent of global climate change emissions. Creating civilised cities Computers and building information modelling have transformed what we can build and how it is built, and will continue to do so. Robotics and 3D printing technology will add further capacity for new forms and new ways of construction. I think the greatest effect on our cities will be how we move around them and between them. Economist Paul Buchanan explains that we have traditionally travelled for around one hour to get to work. This would have been true in AD16 and it is now. The workers of Rome might have walked or ridden to the fields, construction site or port for an hour to their employment each day. With modern travel, that hour covers a greater distance and, when the first phase of HS2 is completed in 2025, the young architects of our office might travel from affordable accommodation south of Birmingham to the office in London and take
WW+P’s design for the ‘Archaeology Towers’ in Hong Kong is viable only because of the proposed metro station below. The towers join together to provide social space on levels 11-15, but divide to provide a new urban public space at street level.
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advantage of connectivity throughout the journey. Connectivity will continue to be a blessing and a curse. The need, or expectation, to be continually connected and constantly available is a pressure. WestonWilliamson+Partners has recently drawn up a scheme for a Hyperloop (a vacuum tube with a maglev train travelling at 1,000km per hour between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane), which will change the way people commute and choose to live in the east of Australia. The need to combat climate change will be a spur to these advances. The number of people currently travelling on planes between these cities is astonishing. If we want to move people out of planes and cars we have to make public alternatives much better: more reliable, more comfortable. Or perhaps the need for continual connectivity might render travelling speed secondary to speed of communication.
Left: The UK government’s invesment in infrastructure projects such as Crossrail are attracting development opportunities along the route. At Paddington, plans from Sellar Property Group, (the developers behind the Shard) have been brought forward due to better connectivity.
If we can stay in touch, will we need to travel so much? The timescale for large infrastructure projects such as HS2 is so long that there is a real danger that new technologies will render them irrelevant before they are completed. There is a distinct possibility that automated vehicles could take customers away from HS2, for example. People may choose to relax at a slower speed if they can sleep or work on a door-to-door journey. It is for this reason that high-level discussions are taking place between Google, Uber and others in the forefront of these new technologies to involve them in HS2 and ensure that ‘HS2 is future-proofed, adding expertise on everything from booking tickets to on-board retail.’ (The Sunday Times, 19 February 2017) It is quite possible that there will be less emphasis on speed. If we can be connected to the office and others at all
Above: Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane could be connected by the Hyperloop, a vacuum tube with a maglev train travelling at 1,000km per hour. The route between Melbourne and Sydney is one of the busiest in the world, with four to five planes per hour at morning and evening peak. The Hyperloop would be a sustainable alternative.
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times, comfort and convenience would be preferable. Perhaps a slow safe solar-powered airship taking three days to fly from London to Sydney would be preferable to a cramped uncomfortable faster jet burning fossil fuel and contributing to climate change. There are other exciting possibilities. London is being transformed by commitment to good public transport and will continue to attract overseas investment as world cities compete against each other for the same pot of money. Even vertical movement is on the agenda, with thyssenkrupp Elevator developing personal transportation from underground metro-platform level to designated locations in surrounding towers, moving both horizontally and vertically. This technology could transform the way we move around tall buildings as much driverless cars will change the physical environment of our cities. In addition to the research work with thyssenkrupp, WestonWilliamson+Partners are conducting a research project to design and promote a new green city based on high-speed rail – a high-rise version of a true garden city: a civilised city. We can see how this might look already with the proliferation of electric scooters transforming areas of California and other major cities and in the way Uber and others have completely altered how we travel in areas poorly served by public transport to fill in the gaps. New high-speed rail connections are proposed in the UK, Singapore, the Middle East, the US and elsewhere. This presents a huge opportunity to rethink how cities work and look. We have taken this opportunity to reimagine how a new settlement of 350,000 people could be designed around a new high-speed transport hub. It could be north-west England, southern Malaysia, or northern California. The design would be site-specific while adopting the design principles that we suggest. I believe that current plans for the areas around high-speed rail stations south of Birmingham and Ebbsfleet are too unambitious and will do little to provide much-needed quality housing in the UK. At the moment, only 15,000 homes are proposed at Ebbsfleet when so many more are necessary and could be built, put in reach of employment opportunities by high-speed rail. Developments such as Canary Wharf show how important it is to synchronise the provision of public transport with the rate of development. At times, commuting becomes unbearable. Previous new town examples – such as the Garden City, Milton Keynes, Chandigarh and new settlements in China – have relied too heavily on petrol-fuelled personal transport. Our proposal eliminates the private car entirely within the 2.5km-diameter centre.
Passion for infrastructure Greener technologies will power new vehicles and, if automated vehicles can be designed to move on a variety of terrains, we can dispense with roads altogether. This would totally redraw man’s imprint on the planet. The freeing of land currently used for car parking alone will transform the look and feel of our cities. The UK government’s enthusiasm for infrastructure is welcome. When WestonWilliamson+Partners designed the London Bridge station for the Jubilee line extension in the 1990s, it was seen as a purely transport-oriented project. Since then, successive governments have looked closely at the regeneration possibilities of infrastructure projects. Other countries have also taken up the challenge. Singapore is leading the way with its vision for public transport and long-term planning. Sydney and Melbourne also have ambitious plans. The new uses for their dense networks of alleys – the laneways – have transformed these cities. As Charles Montgomery says in his excellent book, Happy City: ‘Rome rose as its wealth was poured into the common good of aqueducts and roads then declined as it was hoarded in private villas and palaces.’ Predicting the future Our passion for transit-oriented development (TOD) comes from our interest in the future of the planet. We are now used to severe climate conditions on an almost yearly basis. There are still some sceptics who do not believe that our pollution is causing climate change. But, even if this were the case, mental and physical health benefits can come from changing the way we design our cities. We all have our own vision of the future. We know what it might be like, but changes often happen in random leaps rather than as a smooth continuum. What we do know is that not only architects, but society at large, face great challenges. If robots print, deliver, assemble and install our buildings and infrastructure, what will the ageing population – demanding ever-better healthcare and amenities – be contributing? This may be a question the robots will be asking themselves (as we will have taught them to reason), and they will be deciding our future. That really would give Tiberius something to think about. He had to contend with close and distant family members plotting against him. But we all have the capacity to be the architect of our own downfall. I was 13 when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and have always had great optimism for our ability to perform incredible feats and solve any problem. And I believe we will. ChrisWilliamson is a founding partner at WestonWilliamson+Partners Joseph Bazalgette’s Abbey Mills pumping station. The Victorians took the designing of infrastructure seriously and made it beautiful.
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Think How can design improve the way we live in cities? Six think tanks from the LSA put forward proposals to help meet the targets set out in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
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Tanks Design Think Tanks are collaborative projects between students and leading architectural practices at the London School of Architecture. The UN Sustainable Development Goals address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate, environmental degradation, prosperity, and peace and justice. They are a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. 54 Homesteading in the City
58 Floating Exchange Rates
72 Home Economics
New Knowledge Design Think Tank
Metabolic Cities Think Tank
Leaders: Peter Swallow (Grimshaw Architects) and Akari Takebayashi (Heatherwick Studio) Students: Carrick Blore, Nancy Jackson, Linda Malaeb, Charles McLaughlin, Sasha Nakitende, Xavier Smales and Lucy Steeden.
Leaders:Yasir Azami and Andrew McEwan (Orms) Students: Daniel Barrett, James Clark, Luke Hughes, Calven Lee, Eira Mooney, Priya Nahal.
UN Sustainable Development Goal
l 12: Responsible Production and Consumption 64 Welcome to Walthamstow
Emerging Tools Design Think Tank
Leaders: Angie Jim Osman and Sarah Curran (Allies and Morrison), Maria-Chiara Piccinelli and Maurizio Mucciola (PiM.studio Architects) Students: Daniel Booth, Alec Crisp, Chiara Dognini, Dante Hall, Jessica Hodgson, Fruzsina Karig, Alex Pringle.
Global Currents Design Think Tank
l 2: Zero Hunger l 12: Responsible Production and Consumption
l 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
UN Sustainable Development Goals
Leaders: Javier Quintana de UĂąa (IDOM), Rafael Marks and AnnaLisa Pollock (Penoyre & Prasad) Students: Charlie Clayton, Hugh Gatenby, Katja Hasenauer, Nefeli Kouroushi, Phoebe Mo, Daniel Paigge, Steve Alton. UN Sustainable Development Goal
UN Sustainable Development Goal
l 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities 76 The Last Mile Adaptive Typologies Think Tank
Leaders: Harbinder Birdi, Benjamin Graham, Fiona Stewart and Mikel Azcona (Hawkins\Brown) Students: Ella Clarke, Sam Davies, Duncan Graham, Betty Owoo, Ivo Pery, Oliver Sanger. UN Sustainable Development Goal
l 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
68 The Happy City Architectural Agency Design Think Tank
Leaders: Christophe Egret and Mark Warren (Studio Egret West) and Thomas Bryans (IF_DO) Students: Charlie Corciulo, Sara Edilbe, Nicholas Leigh, Jaymi Sudra, Charity Whitehead, Stephen Yiavasis. UN Sustainable Development
l 3: Good Health and Well-Being
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Homesteading in the City An alternative model for sustainable urban communities based on the production, consumption and celebration of fresh food
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Challenge
Proposal
London’s population is predicted to reach more than 10 million by 2025. Current modes of food production and consumption have drained agricultural land of natural minerals and nutrients, reducing the quality of the food we buy. Supermarket shopping and home deliveries encourage mass food farming, causing a dislocation between urban residents and the origins of the produce they consume. According to charity Recycling For London, 910,000 tonnes of food waste is thrown away in the capital each year, costing local authorities some £50 million per annum and contributing 19 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year.
A high-density, intergenerational, cross-cultural neighbourhood for 1,500 people on the banks of the River Lea which uses sustainable agriculture to produce its own food and deploys the rituals of farming, cooking and eating as the framework for cultural celebrations and community life. In the last decade, the Borough of Tower Hamlets has been subject to rapid densification with little attention paid to the community-led urban realm. This proposal combines high-density housing with a variety of agricultural methods – including soil-based seasonal growing, greenhouses, orchards, hydroponics, aquaponics and fish ponds – giving
1500 residents
285ha
= 1500conventional residents Above: using agricultural methods it would require 285 ha to feed 1500 people. By using modern agricultural technologies it’s possible to provide 75 per cent of a resident’s diet in just 10m2. Left: the trellis allows light to filter down to ponds and walkways at ground level. Below: dwellings back onto the growing core, with excess heat promoting growth.
residents a diverse diet and a yearround supply of seasonal fresh food. A riverside fish restaurant catches and cooks fish as required. The development is served by a market hall run as a co-operative by residents and members of the wider community – a system which promotes skill sharing and fosters connections between the diverse inhabitants. Traditional shopping aisles are replaced with a vertical hydroponic system of stacked growing shelves on rotating paternosters. Stacks rotate at different speeds to reflect the rates of growth of different crops and ensure that plants arrive at ground level at the point when they’re ready for harvest. Shoppers pick the produce they need,
eliminating the need for transport, packaging and waste. The combined growing area of the scheme amounts to 15,000m2 producing 430 tonnes of fresh produce every year, suggesting that up to 75 per cent of residents’ diets can be produced on site. Impact
The commercial value of the project lies in the sale price of the residential buildings. The project will only become viable if there is a means of subsidising, offsetting or capitalising on the cost of delivering this model of housing rather than conventional homes. Measures could include: l Increased house prices to reflect the quality of shared amenities,
285ha
public spaces and community life. l Reduction in the required percentage of affordable housing (on the basis that providing alternatives to unsustainable agriculture is as important as providing affordable housing), resulting in increased profits from the sale of market-value homes. l Support from the proposed ‘Feeding Cities Initiative’, which offers relief on planning obligations – including Section 106 contributions and Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) payments – in order to fund integrated urban agriculture in residential developments.
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Photo caption Tiunt et et aut dolut facepra velendenem 88 excerch itatquis am
89
Pond e
where your m and where promotes ciation for plate and kely to take it
Top: the market hall is served by a system of rotating stacked growing shelves. Customers pick fresh produce, eliminating the need for packaging, transport and waste. Above: a riverside fish restaurant catches and cooks fish as required.
97
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60 tons Fish ponds aquaculture
Right: the combined crop area of the scheme amounts to 15,000m2, producing 430 tons of fresh produce every year. Below: the trellis provides additional growing space. Areas of hanging netting provide space for children to play and protect crops from birds.
96 tons Hydroponic farm aquaponics 2 tons Orchard fruit trees
431 tons
130 tons Green cores LED-lit hydroponics 50 tons Stacked paternosters Greenhouse hydroponics 80 tons Rooftop greenhouses Greenhouse hydroponics 14 tons Elevated trellis Soil-based
Annual output of growing spaces
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Challenge
Floating Exchange Rates Drawing on the positive aspects of London’s boatdwelling community to develop an affordable, sustainable co-living model for the capital’s waterside sites
Right: boater restocking coal. Opposite top: aerial view showing relationship between housing and public space. Opposite bottom: diagrams comparing the programme to a conventional housing scheme and showing the relationship between the programme’s guiding principles.
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London’s house prices have led to a rapid rise in the number of young people living in boats. While there are upsides to this way of life, it can be resource-heavy and labour-intensive. The city’s rivers and canals are becoming increasingly congested and polluted. We are simply running out of space. We need to find new ways of living that are compact and affordable, reduce consumption and waste production, and promote a more harmonious relationship between residents and the natural world. Proposal
Londoners, especially young people, are increasingly accepting co-living as an affordable alternative to traditional private dwellings. This proposal sets out a land-based, co-living model, which celebrates and amplifies the positive aspects of life on the river – the culture of sharing, community, self-sufficiency and self-build – while minimising resources and making a positive contribution to the natural environment. The project draws on an analysis of boat-dwellers’ existence to determine which facilities and activities can happily be shared and how much private space residents need. The basic unit type is a one-bedroom 2.6m x 2.6m triplex – based on the width of a Dutch barge – which can be arranged in various configurations around a shared kitchen, a dining area, a shower room and a large garden terrace. Residents have just 20.8m2 of private space – less than half of the 49m2 required by building regulations.
A trellis-like timber framework at roof level can be used as growing space and defines an area for selfbuild extensions. Semi-private sheltered courtyards provide space for allotments, playgrounds and open green space. The wider site is planned with an emphasis on rewilding, improving biodiversity and creating an environment that provides rich habitats for wildlife and prioritises cycling, walking and childrens’ play. This think tank accepts the need for small private dwellings but calls for policy to change to acknowledge the fact that generous shared facilities and accessible green spaces are essential for this model of co-living to work. Impact
The proposal has been tested by drawing up a design for Lea Bridge Depot, a riverside site which was the subject of a pre-application scheme submitted by Savills in 2015, and by making comparisons between the two schemes. While the Savills proposal offers 449 homes, giving a density of 79 dwellings per hectare, the reduced dwelling size of the co-housing model provides 516 homes at a density of 90 dwellings per hectare. The Savills scheme is up to six storeys high; the co-housing scheme never exceeds four. The use of lightweight, compact buildings gives an overall massing of around half the gross external area of the Savills scheme and a more harmonious relationship between buildings and landscape.
Quantitative
Quantitative
Quantitative
Average Dwelling Private/ Shared balance
Proposed Dwelling Private/ Shared balance
Average Dwelling Private/ Shared balance
Proposed Dwelling Private/ Shared balance
Average Dwelling Private/ Shared balance
Proposed Dwelling Private/ Shared balance
material cycle maker space
LIVING WITH LESS
SHARING WITH MORE
housing typology new community
Average Dwelling Green/ Open space
Proposed Dwelling Green/ Open space
Average Dwelling Green/ Open space
Proposed Dwelling Green/ Open space
Average Dwelling Green/ Open space
Proposed Dwelling Green/ Open space
Average Dwelling Social/ Neighbour interaction
Proposed Dwelling Social/ Neighbour interaction
Average Dwelling Social/ Neighbour interaction
Proposed Dwelling Social/ Neighbour interaction
Average Dwelling Social/ Neighbour interaction
Proposed Dwelling Social/ Neighbour interaction
CLOSER TO NATURE connection to the wider community
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History of the Boats
History of the Boats History of the Boats
Above: drawing used to describe the day of a resident within her dweliing. Right: Boat history.
History of the Boats
Human power 1620-1660.
Shire horse 1660-1700.
Engine 1700-1955.
Tractor 1860-1960.
1. Human Power: 1620 - 1660 2. Shire Horse: 1660 - 1700 3. Heavy Goods: 1700 - 4. Engine: 1700 - 1955 5. Tractor: 1860 - 1960 6. Lady of the Lea: 1931 - 1960
Lady of the Lea 1931-1960.
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Existing resident and new residents of our proposal sharing the site as part of the close neighbourhood.
Below: diagram showing facilities that can be shared by existing and new residents. Overleaf: masterplan proposal.
Town Hall
Ground floor facilities
Industry buildings
Farmers’ market
Engineer’s house
S it e Workplace
B oroug h Workplace
Workplace School
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Welcome to Walthamstow An integrated tourism strategy for Walthamstow that reflects the local culture, character and scale and enriches the urban environment for visitors and residents alike
Challenge
HE AQUADUCT
Above: an aqueduct is one of a series of imagined interventions that create a new journey through the borough.
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The GLA’s Tourism Vision for London anticipates the number of tourists visiting the city to grow to 40 million by 2025. Tourism can enrich the life of the city, facilitating cross-cultural exchange and economic growth. But it can also create infrastructural, social and ecological destruction, fundamentally altering local identity and character, and commodifying cultures and traditions. Increasing use of social media and digital sharing technologies such as Airbnb, TripAdvisor and Instagram are making the impact of tourism felt in places beyond the traditional tourist traps. Walthamstow – London
Borough of Culture 2019 – is forecast to receive 500,000 visitors this year. Proposal
A tourism strategy for Walthamstow that enriches – rather than obscures – local character and is rooted in the history, culture and scale of the local neighbourhood, and which stands as a riposte to tourism’s tendency to reduce complex neighbourhoods to a few key headline sights. A series of large and small-scale interventions synthesise Walthamstow’s heritage and culture into a multi-layered sensory narrative, which intrigues and delights. Rather than seeking to simplify and explain,
Above: schematic map of Walthamstow showing the comparative journeys taken by tourists and residents and the points where the two overlap. Overleaf: poster promoting the project to tourists.
the experience is deliberately evocative, provocative, incoherent and surprising – an urban dreamscape where long-forgotten stories gain a voice and emerge in entangled in improbable ways. Impact
Highlighting and amplifying Walthamstow’s idiosyncrasies and extraordinariness will alter perceptions of the London Borough locally, nationally and across the globe with a knock-on impact on tourism, investment and economic growth. Perhaps most importantly, the symbiotic relationship between the lived experience of residents and
the area’s public face will help to counteract any ‘disconnect’ between locals and tourists and to establish Walthamstow’s tourist industry as a source of civic pride. It is hoped that this strategy will provide an impetus for other outer boroughs to adopt an approach to tourism that treats the neighbourhood not as a satellite dormitory but as a destination in its own right.
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Challenge
The Happy City A neighbourhood strategy for creating meaningful connections between people through design
Abject loneliness is now recognised as severely detrimental to physical and mental well-being. While solitude can be valuable and desirable, loneliness becomes an issue when the person experiencing it has no control over an unwanted experience. This strategy explores the way in which architecture can give people opportunities to seek out company and make meaningful connections when they choose. Proposal
A manifesto and design guide that examines the causes and impact of loneliness, and offers an analysis of architectural precedents, which have successfully encouraged: l Incidental connections: the chance encounters that give people the excuse to interact without advance planning. l Observed connections: interaction that occurs passively between people. l Shared activity: interaction that occurs actively between people, whether planned or impromptu. l Inclusive connections: provision for interaction across all demographics, catering to diverse tastes and rituals. l Sense of belonging: elements and experiences that give people a sense of belonging, either as citizens of
their community or citizens of the natural world. This research is distilled into a set of principles that can be easily applied to other schemes. The principles were tested in a proposal to rework an existing design for new housing adjacent to Queen’s Market in Upton Park to improve possibilities for interaction. Impact
The overarching aim is to contribute to a shift from an individualised society to a compassionate society. The impact of educating architects to design spaces that foster social connections could be wide-ranging and profound: l Reducing abject loneliness through design could significantly reduce the financial burden on public health services. l Reducing the alienation caused by loneliness could reduce the risk of radicalised violence in communities. l Strengthening civil society could significantly improve social mobility within communities. l Making places feel less lonely and improving the quality of the surrounding properties could significantly increase return on investment for those properties.
Local Market Analysis
Opposite: analysis of the third floor plan of PRP’s proposed development with suggested enhancements. Right: hand-drawn plan of the market that captures the feel of what it’s like to live in this community. The sketch is based on the team’s site visits and the strangers who connected with them.
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HAPPY CITY
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Principles rinciples
meaningful connection through:
observed connection Inclusive connection
Incidental connection
Left: extract from the design guide showing the five principles of meaningful connection. Below: polaroids of Upton Park residents who took part in consultation.
meaningful connection through:
incidental connection meaningful connection through: Observed connection incidental connection
meaningful connection through:
inclusive connection Shared activity
MEANINGFUL CONNECTIONS
MANIFESTO
meaningful connection through:
shared activity connection through: Sensemeaningful of belonging
observed connection meaningful connection through:
shared activity
meaningful connection through:
Polaroids of Upton Park residents Who took part in our consultation
meaningful connection through:
observed connection
inclusive connection meaningful connection through:
HAPPY CITY
meaningful connection through:
MANUAL - UPTON TOWN PARK
A gently sloping ramp connects sense ofconnection belongingsense of belonging inclusive meaningful connection through:
GFUL CONNECTIONS MANIFESTO the market to housing, bringing
the two groups of site users together through a variety of programmes. The variety of large and small spaces allow users to inhabitfor the space principles meaningful connection together or alone. The path is L CONNECTIONS MANIFESTO narrow in places to encourage incidental connections: the incidential interaction users chance as encounters that give people ful connection negotiate the space. the excuse to interact without
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sense of belonging: elements and experiences that give people a sense of belonging either as a citizen of their community or citizen of the natural world.
Axo
HA
Above: half landings on the shared stair core provide niches for stopping, creating opportunities for incidental interaction. Below: extract from the design guide showing the principles for creating connection applied to balcony design.
BELONGING
SHARED ACTIVITY
onometric of Housing
PPY CITY
MANUAL - UPTON TO Belonging
Sensory
SHARED ACTIVITY Belonging Incidental BELONGING
BELONGING SHARED ACTIVITY Shared Activity
INCIDENTAL SENSORY
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Inclusivity
INCLUSIVITY Sensory SHARED ACTIVITY
SHARED ACTIVITY INCLUSIVITY Observational
OBSERVATION INCIDENTAL
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INCLUSIVITY
Summer 2019 |Citizen|71 OBSERVATION
Challenge
Home Economics Increasing the supply of affordable housing by using advanced construction technologies and rethinking the balance between public and private space
Between 1997 and 2016, London’s population grew by 1.7 million, an increase of 25 per cent – but housing capacity increased by only 15 per cent. The UK has seen a dramatic reduction in the social housing stock in the last decade, with the construction of homes for social rent dropping by 80 per cent. There is a 40,000-unit shortage in housing supply today. Much of the housing we do build is delivered by a handful of volume housebuilders delivering a uniform product, which is ungenerous, inflexible, unsustainable, socially isolating and prohibitively expensive. The UN affordability standards state that each household should spend no more than 30 per cent of their income on housing for it to be considered affordable. In London, the average figure is more than 40 per cent. Proposal
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Metabolic City
An approach to increasing housing supply driven by small groups or individuals prepared to take responsibility for their own dwelling procurement and based on a five-pronged strategy to address construction cost, land scarcity, density, community and adaptability: l Introducing 3D printing construction technologies as an industry mainstream. The technology has the potential to deliver bespoke, precise and low-cost structures in a short amount of time. l Developing gap sites to repurpose unused space in urban areas as housing or civic infrastructure l Increasing shared facilities –
including utilities and living space – to allow for a higher density of dwellings. l Providing a contemporary interpretation of the hearth to encourage communal life. l Offering adaptable and incomplete dwellings to allow customisation and offer residents scope to expand/retract their home rather than relocate. We propose a new planning use class – C5 – that covers smaller dwellings supplemented with additional shared space. Impact
For people with construction skills – and the means and will to acquire land and planning consent – this model provides a way of entering the housing market. Section 106 payments, contractors’ and project managers’ fees are deducted from project costs. A group can form a trust to apply for loans from ethical sources, such as the GLA’s Innovation Fund, designed to aid affordable housing projects using modern methods of construction. The trust invests in 3D printing equipment, which can be rented out to generate income and reduces construction time and cost. Once users move in, they pay 30 per cent of their income in return for equity in the trust. The trust, in turn, repays the loan for construction costs. Once a resident reaches the maximum equity share, they pay a reduced monthly contribution to cover ongoing maintenance costs. The trust gains additional income by renting out the communal living space for local community events.
Home Economics
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Below left: when the users first move in, the development is at its maximum density and contains around 100 residents. Below: dwellings after ten years. Over time the density fluctuates between 80 and 100 residents as internal partitions are removed to change the number of bedrooms.
move in the maximum density and esidents.
Above: think tank members mapped their own tenancies as a basis for unearthing tensions between the typically accepted necessities of a home and the way they actually live. They unanimously concluded that a private living room could be sacrificed for a larger shared space.
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Home Economics
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Above: sites are clustered Home Economics together and facilities are shared within a cluster. While every site will have a shared utility and garden, only the larger site will contain a shared community living space. Clusters are designed to work together, with minimal walking distance between properties and shared living space. Left: a new planning use class, C5, is proposed to cover small dwellings that are supplemented with additional shared space. Below: average UK house price inflation between 1950 and 2010.
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Left: diagrams showing the construction process using 3D printing construction technologies with CAD manufactured timber floors and walls. Below: case study proposal for an underused garage site close to the Lea Bridge roundabout.
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Summer 2019 |Citizen|75 Metabolic City
Home Economics
The Last Mile Combating the rise of door-to-door deliveries with a distribution network that reduces the volume of traffic on inner city streets
The borders of London over time l Roman London (AD43) l Elizabethan London (1556) l Georgian London (1760) l Early Victorian London (1836) l Late Victorian London (1886) l Greater London (1965) l Greater London (2019) l M25 l Air routes
The ‘last mile’ refers to the final leg of the journey of a person or product before it reaches its destination, typically a residence or a workspace. Accordingly, the last mile is the space we inhabit on a day-to-day basis. It should be healthy, clean, safe, inclusive and designed to encourage sustainable lifestyles and foster relationships and growth. But the rise of the on-demand economy and the associated increase in traffic is causing pollution, congestion and poor air quality and compromising the social function of London’s squares and streets.
charged with responsibility for a which eradicates door-to-door holistic approach, including the deliveries and removes cars from Potential Spread of Trial Network removal of light good vehicles from our streets.Roman London (AD43) Elizabethan London (1556) the roads, policy changes, support Internet-bought goods are Georgian London (1760) for autonomous vehicles and better delivered to consolidation centres Early Victorian London (1836) public transport, and support for new based at strategic transport locations Late Victorian London (1886) technologies. The ultimate aim is to in the outer boroughs. From here Greater London (1965) create a safe, clean, inclusive last mile packages are sent by (2019) new means of Greater London where pedestrians and cyclists take transport –M25including autonomous precedence and communities can and electric – to Air vehicles Routes flourish and grow. neighbourhood distribution centres. These centres serve as pick-up points for packages as well as performing23 a variety of other civic social functions. It is envisaged that these centres will act as a place for people to gather and socialise.
Proposal
Impact
Sadiq Khan has suggested that all personal deliveries in London will be banned by 2041. This provides an opportunity to introduce a new publicly-owned delivery network,
We see this body of work as a call to action to those who have influence over London’s last miles. In particular, we advocate the creation of a new GLA Last Mile Taskforce
Challenge
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Above: map showing potential spread of trial network. Below: packages are consolidated at depots at strategic locations in the outer boroughs and sent to neighbourhood distribution centres using new forms of transport. These distribution centres have a range of ancillary uses but are primarily a place to pick up packages as an alternative to home delivery.
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Future problem
Current issue
Current condition
Future problem
Design solution
Design solution
Future condition
Design solution
Greenery and water are brought into the city centre, as we reach ecological enlightenment.
The ground plane is opened up as high-density living means public space becomes increasingly scarce.
Changing work habits bring creative industries into the city centre and allow for flexible work schedules.
A wide range of emerging technologies are incorporated into the streetscape of the future.
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Above and right: a landmark distribution centre is located within Liverpool Street Station. The collection point is incorporated into the station entrance minimising disruption to day-to-day routine. The station becomes a new public space as changing work habits reduce the rush hour peak.
6. Liverpool st a new public sp work habits lea rush hour
DISTRIBUTION CENTRE
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DELVERY CENTRE PUBLIC REALM STARTUPS
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1. Personal deli Central London infrastructure
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A more fluid attitude to gay culture might yield more adventurous and experimental approaches to city-shaping and citizenship
Queer freedom Text by Nigel Coates Drawings by Michael Cradock
Michael Cradock is a 2019 graduate of the London School of Architecture. These drawings are extracts from Queering the City, a proposal to infiltrate the architectural language of the traditional establishment with a new vocabulary of queer symbology. The project stands as a riposte to the appropriation and sanitisation of gay culture by the heterosexual mainstream.
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If you are young, confused and possibly gay, where will you be heading? To the city, of course On the surface ‘coming out’ need not be the existential convulsion it once was. These days children are introduced to the modern notion of a ‘family’ from an early age. Two mummies or two daddies will soon be as commonplace as mummy and daddy. Normalised too are the gay or lesbian couples who, despite not having kids, spend their downtime doing just what straight couples do – going to Heal’s on a Saturday and Columbia Road Flower Market the next day. Their leisure time may be more Gogglebox than rave. Normalisation of gender variance has allowed non-heteronormative households to emerge into the civic domain, winning professional respect and fully participating in society across the board. But hasn’t something of the cutting edge of gay life been lost along the way? Gay was never meant to be average, or end up in the stasis of marriage, however hard it has been to achieve this privilege. Indeed, the whole thrust of gay culture has been to exploit its outsider status. In London we take the multicultural outlook as a given. We are inclusive, and find it hard to fathom why, thanks to Brexit, the rest of England lurches to the right. If you are a young, confused and possibly gay man, where will you be heading? To the big city, of course, where your dreams can be shaped, made real, no matter what the risk. Peeling away skin after skin, the adolescent metamorphosis has no limits. Freedom and respect are the promises. As for parents, who often believe their offspring to be more privileged than them, an undercurrent of resentment for gay and lesbian rights may colour their approach. The gays are out in the open; their rights match ours; what more do they want? 82|Citizen|Summer 2019
Associated throughout history and by every major religion as sinners, gay people have been regarded as a menace. ‘Why do homosexual people, historically marked as sinful, inverted or mentally ill, ask to be able to adopt that very family order that has contributed so much to their misfortune?’ asks Vittorio Lingiardi.1 In social terms, should we celebrate the new norms of citizenship to a lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans member of society, or is it fair to say that our essential identity, our ‘otherness’, has been lost? Peter Ackroyd believes so.2 ‘With the right to marry and adopt, gay people seem less involved with the rush and roll of cruising and carousing than they were thirty years ago and more concerned with settling down within a domestic environment ... With the opportunities for marriage beckoning, the need for an aggressive counterculture has dwindled.’ Perhaps this counterculture has not so much dwindled as changed. This essay explores this conundrum in terms of the normalisation of gay citizenship and its contribution to society. While the often closed nature of gay culture may be on the wane, a more fluid outlook might yield a blueprint for a more adventurous and experimental way of being citizens and shaping our cities. Which is where the term ‘queer’ comes in: both distinct and highly specific it requires a certain awareness of gender fluidity, or as Nikki Sullivan put it so aptly, ‘Queer means to fuck with gender’.3 Would it be possible to be both an upstanding member of society and to indulge in the hedonistic activities that cast gayness as a seditious force? The letter Q has recently been added to the acronymic string, LGBTQ. An insult reclaimed, the term queer has been adopted as a political signifier that can act as a
broader catch-all. Arguably Q embraces all the other letters in the list. I won’t include the I (inquisitive) in the banner, but imagine it’s there too, LGBTIQ+ etc). When I write LGBT I mean it in its historical sense, and it implies a ring-fence around same-sex interests that has largely become obsolete. Now LGBTQ signals an approach to the city with an access-all-areas confidence. People want to embrace broader social values and not hide away; they want to be and be seen as fully paid-up members of society. It follows that citizenship among the LGBTQ community rests on passing on tolerance to others and enacting mentorship to those who need it. Young men emerging on the scene are often ill-equipped to handle relationships of any kind, despite having been taught to have a tolerant outlook towards LGBTQ people. In Ancient Greece, where gay relationships had a central sociocultural role, the training of the adolescent male was one of the duties of the older man; the older man would mentor the minor on adulthood as well as sexual practice. Now, not every young gay man wants to learn from an older man, but many do. As an occasional ‘daddy’ I know, and mentorship is part of the role. In turn the potential for LGBTQ people to contribute to society at large is in its infancy. In terms of sexual identity, gay people are as different as other social minorities, but perhaps we have a head start in terms of freedom of outlook, and that frames a new kind of power. The mutation of homophobia Like a stubborn stain, homophobia mars our society. It’s just that it’s retreated underground. Ackroyd once more: ‘Coming out is still a right of
passage, frequently characterised by trauma. Where sixty years ago homosexuality itself was a crime, homophobia has taken its place, and the very expression “coming out” testifies to lingering social prejudice.’ LGBTQ people may feel confident that their rights and freedoms are safe enough, but as every gay person knows, knocks can come from the most unexpected places, the workplace, the family or just walking along the road. Much as homophobia cannot be spoken, it is often couched in institutional decorum; there is always an opaque excuse for a rejection – lack of experience, being overqualified, insufficient diversity. In her experience, Princess Julia,4 DJ, commentator and mentor for young fashion designers and drag queens, sees inadequate mentoring in the family. ‘I meet young people with parents younger than us and you’d think they would be enlightened. But alas no. Often they’ve abandoned their children. It’s tragic that there are generations of ignorant parents out there who continue with outdated ideas and notions without ever questioning them.’ No wonder ‘coming out’ is traumatic. This hate of the other manifested most recently when parents protesting at LGBTQ issues being part of sex education, claimed contravention of their religious beliefs, with placards reading, ‘We’re not Homophobic’ and ‘Let Kids Be Kids’. The church has a get-out from the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 and cannot be forced to marry same sex couples. Society treads a tightrope between the right of inclusivity and protecting religious beliefs even if they are discriminatory. Hatred can accumulate in silence, and turn on the gay or lesbian as readily as on the apocryphal
immigrant. But the most numbing responses are reserved for the trans woman, who is frequently met with a mix of pity and ostracisation. Hampstead’s bathing ponds have been the latest arena for a gladiatorial clash between trans women and feminists. Stonewall said the Equality Act 2010 protects trans people who identify as female from being discriminated against when accessing services such as Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. But feminist campaigner Amy Desir, who uses the Ladies’ Pond, calls the policy ‘absolutely disgusting’. ‘In recent years I’ve seen first-hand aggression towards LGBTQ people in the more diverse communities in east and south London,’ says Wayne Shires, the club impresario who has helped shape gay life in the capital. ‘It’s a gentrification thing as well, so not only homophobic, but “gentriphobic”.’5 Illegality has also tended to push homophobia out of sight, yet it pervades society covertly. No one admits as much, but all gay people know it’s there. In praise of shadows In the old days you had to act straight to avoid attention. Gay and lesbian venues would deliberately be invisible to anyone other than their customers. You had to be in the know. The clientele liked it that way, even if you sometimes got mugged on the way out. Before legalisation in 1967, the gay scene operated in the shadows. Like hermit crabs, gay venues would nestle into cheap, offbeat property that wouldn’t attract attention – in abandoned warehouses, railway arches and failed pubs. The last thing anyone wanted was to be on display – except on the dance floor. Famously Francis Bacon and his mates would hang out in the legendary Colony Room Club on Dean Street in
Soho. They would go to Wheelers on Old Compton Street for lunch and then transfer to the Colony where, under the imperious gaze and sharp tongue of the owner Muriel, they could drink on uninterrupted behind closed doors through the afternoon until chucking out time at 11pm. Alcoholic behaviour was encouraged and behind a highly protected membership policy, ‘decent’ codes of behaviour could be disregarded relatively risk-free. So it was for many of the gay basements across Soho and in a small neck of Earl’s Court where misbehaviour would begin with a warm up in the Coleherne pub and move on into the surrounding streets and Holland Walk. Shady corners were at a premium. Nocturnal cruising persists on Hampstead Heath and the Rose Garden in Hyde Park, but it’s on the retreat. My own formative gay experiences unfolded in El Sombrero in Kensington High Street and the Catacombs where I first met Derek Jarman. Derek was a born mentor, gregarious matchmaker for friends and collaborators alike, and a fervent advocate of cruising on Hampstead Heath. Ranging from the hardcore sex and cruising clubs through to theatricalised arenas like the Blitz, there were a host of other clubs too numerous to mention here. They would operate mostly on a single night of the week, transforming what were normally tawdry commercial failures into rocking successes as long as attendees kept coming. The wildest was Taboo every Thursday, started by Leigh Bowery and Tony Gordon in the cheesy basement of the Maximus club in Leicester Square. Bowery encouraged the crowd to push their looks and their behaviour to legendary heights of invention and camp. Bowery himself would appear each week in a Summer 2019 |Citizen|83
The lesson of the past decade is that queerness, with all its panache and ferocity, is in elegant retreat new outfit more outrageous than the last, and turned nightclubbing into an art form. Early on I learned that the sacred space of the dance floor worked well alongside the dimly lit corridors of men-only clubs such as Heaven. With no performers as such, clubbers would build on the general atmosphere of delirium induced chemically or musically in the performance of the pickup; essentially there were two roles, the one of the statue or the one of the stroller. Like fishing, you’d wait for your catch. As Ackroyd observes, the vital excitement of living in the shadows would not last forever. ‘The substantial lesson of the past decade is that queerness, with all its panache and ferocity, is in elegant retreat ... Bars no longer have back rooms that remain open after the public rooms have closed ... A dichotomy has emerged between those venues that bellow and those that whisper, those that are openly gay and those that are merely “gay-friendly”.’2 In fact many gay bars and clubs have become de rigueur for straight people, singularly or in coupledom. People say they have the best time; the music is better and the crowd more inclined to let go. London’s LGBT world has been evolving over so many years, there have been campaigns to historicise it, with the aim of enshrining some of its key ‘monuments’ and traditions, whether in the form of gay institutions like the Royal Vauxhall Tavern (RVT) or the erstwhile behaviours of men on the prowl in the shadows of the city’s parks and squares. A successful campaign was raised to protect the RVT from development. Both the building and its use as a gay venue are now listed, a unique achievement. The HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s left the gay world in 84|Citizen|Summer 2019
tatters, which makes charting gay histories all the more important. Architectural academics Ben Campkin and Laura Marshall are documenting how much has changed, from the lost iconic venues to the way gay men used the city’s parks and squares. Their essay ‘London’s Nocturnal Queer Geographies’ analyses the changing landscape of the queer community. In 2017 they masterminded an outdoor performance intended to draw attention to lost landmarks including the Black Cap, the Joiners Arms, the Glass Bar and the Lesbian and Gay Centre. Referencing the 1931 New York Beaux Arts Ball, performers wore headgear based on these buildings. They chose the resonant setting of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, just behind the RVT and the village green for a host of gay venues in the nearby railway arches. In 2019 they made a repeat performance at the Whitechapel Gallery’s show Queer Spaces: London, 1980s –Today. In 2018 London artist Prem Sahib erected 500 sq ft on Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, a steel labyrinth not unlike the inside of a gay sauna. Typically he takes what is normally hidden and puts it in full view, using gay places and behaviours to draw out meanings. ‘I identify with the disco movement because I feel that its politics were its pleasure principle … Disco had a social efficacy despite its superficial veneer and that’s how I like to think about my own art making.'6 His photo series of the Chariots gay sauna in Shoreditch, which closed in 2016, dwells on the absence of the action. His Helix IV isolates one of the kitsch Classical reliefs that originally hung around the pool and jacuzzi, and pierces it with metal studs and rings, as though it was the body of one of the patrons.
Gay histories are being charted on Instagram by @_molly_house_ who archives ‘The UK’s LGBTIQA+ Subculture. We have always been here, and we have always been Queer’. This squares with the tardy deification of Alan Turing and other gay martyrs such as Oscar Wilde, Quentin Crisp and Derek Jarman. Of interest too in this regard is the Instagram account @ theaidsmemorial, a contributor-driven inventory of those lost during the AIDS crisis, and the Queerseum (Twitter handle @queerseum), which aims to ‘create positive links to our history to shape better futures’. A new kind of interior It seemed that unlike most performance spaces, gay men were finding new ways of using interior space. By the mid-’80s NATØ manifestos would visualise city life and its architecture in a continuous state of flux. Derelict buildings would be corralled as hosts for a liberalised form of citizenship based on freedom and role play. Instead of an occupant you could be an activist, and shape your own life. One line of attack for the architect would be large-scale interventionist furniture that could upset the use of existing buildings. ‘Think of an intermediary architecture on that edge between people’s lives and the given city, city furniture poised to refurbish rather than rebuild.’7 In the mid ’80s, a new stream of creativity emerged, based on making furniture out of scrap, part artwork and part design, and very much on the protagonist’s terms. The loose collective Creative Salvage acted as a kindergarten for Tom Dixon, André Dubreuil and the NATØ architecture group. We were making experiences, things and places on our own terms, and for me, this captured the
QUEER
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Gay geography ebbs and flows, occupying ever more inventive and offbeat locations invincibility I’d discovered in gay clubs. For the first time I felt that my own sexual identity and what I wanted to be professionally were coming together. I could see a parallel between the behaviour of my peers in club environments, from what we wore to how we danced and picked each other up in a meteoric swirl of bodies, glances and poses. I wanted to inject this energy into design; the mood was artefacts in motion, things with character and attitude. There was a lifestyle subscript to behaving as a designer and as a teacher, with a bunch of talented students. We wanted to reshape the world locally, immediately, and were energised enough to take to the streets, armed with newfangled video cameras and the determination to make the environmental version of our tastes in music. In a 1988 essay entitled ‘Street Signs’,8 I advocated a fusion of punk expressionism with nascent digital technology, or what at the time we called ‘software’: ‘Space now synthesises form, information and perception ... It relies on hidden information at every level.’ The street, I argued, was the space that was bringing contemporary phenomena together as never before. Our friends and wider circle could feel the energy. In some ways my assertions seem naïve, and yet they anticipate equivocal switching between the virtual and the physical, the fixed and the dynamic. At the time I thought the plethora of messages bouncing in the street, from window displays to the people using the street as catwalk, was more significant than the architecture itself, which at that time was predominantly Victorian. In ‘Street Signs’, I flagged how technological communication was about to radically reshape our lives. ‘Since we live in a software world, 86|Citizen|Summer 2019
the challenge for architecture is completely new … Real-life architecture must dismantle its finite stance, by simultaneously aggregating and disintegrating. It must learn to deal with process as well as products.’ I now realise that the model for this stance was undoubtedly the gay club, and how it empowered its participants into a form of democratic behaviour that overrode class or difference. ‘Life itself is the real architecture, so let’s use it.’ London as a queer city As in every field, the mood of the moment always dictates to each subset in the LGBTQ community. Gay geography ebbs and flows, occupying ever more inventive and offbeat locations, such as Vogue Fabrics (in an ex shop of the same name), or the Dalston Superstore. Shoreditch and Hackney tend to best reach the queer end of hipster. In the hinterland between them, Bistrotheque has cultivated its own brand of drag vaudeville while maintaining a very good restaurant upstairs. London is always said to be a city of villages, and here in Hackney, the Bistrotheque doubles as the village hall, while half a mile away, The Glory, a rehabilitated pub next to the canal in Hoxton, hosts a gruelling programme of drag performance featuring the legendary Jonny Woo, Princess Julia on the decks and a revolving door of new drag acts fresh in from the provinces. Drag is an ever-evolving art form in queerland, and according to Julia, the current era will be remembered for bringing drag into public consciousness. Soho has cornered the more mainstream, and mixes in the tourists. But readers of the latest issue of QX, the gay weekly online magazine, can choose from a menu of events catering to every shade. Its gaudy ads for
special nights, gay superstores, saunas, bars and sex clubs will take the curious punter to all corners of the city. Traditional gay venues continue to flourish in Vauxhall, Soho and latterly Tottenham. Although hidden from the public gaze, many nestle discreetly in high streets where Starbucks is the norm. In Shires’ experience, ‘younger LGBTQ people don’t identify with the classic LGBT venue and almost see it as old-fashioned ... they would rather visit more “mixed” events and venues’.5 Meanwhile queer nights flourish at the Glory and the Cock, and at marginal pop-ups and onenighters in Dalston. As Julia says of her manor, ‘there’re always new venues opening; it’s part of the dynamic’.4 But LGBT venues are under pressure from the double pincer movement of luxury developments and the internet. The iconic Gucci GG belt comes into view, its GG now standing for Gentrification and Grindr. Pre-Brexit, real estate rocketed all over London and any remaining sliver of land was being turned into luxury living probably in offshore ownership or if the owners do exist, they come once a year for Halloween and Christmas shopping. The life of the city is being squeezed out in favour of absent residents; the lights are on but no one’s home. Except gay people are using their homes for sex. While the privatisation of public space has excluded many dark corners that once favoured casual sexual encounters, geosocial apps such as Grindr or Tinder mean it’s open season. Despite no chance of pheremonal attraction, people have learnt to flirt online and enjoy the rapid availability of sex like drugs, or pizza. Which is not to say that the queers have disappeared. Far from it, people
on the entire LGBTQ+ spectrum live all over London, often moving to the outer orbits to make ends meet. Their arena is anywhere they happen to be, at work, at a friend’s, on the Tube or in a bar. Except they are on their smartphones, cruising with one eye on Grindr. Straight people too are attuned to the open people marketplace. Apart from the happy families, everyone within broadly adult age bands is open to an opportunity. Queerness is bringing all sorts of positive qualities to cities. In many ways the fight for acceptance has been at the forefront of diversity. In the colonial/industrial era, gay people hid their true identity for fear of victimisation, and prison. Now gay values reach into every aspect of society. Heterosexual men have adopted the homosexual’s care for his body and what he wears, spending liberally on ‘grooming’ products and engaging in body culture every bit as much as the average gay man. So what began as hidden codes for the purposes of surreptitious identification and encounter have queered the pitch. A gay man often looks straight and the straight man might pass for gay. So what of LGBTQ space in the contemporary city? In some ways the entire city is available to the queer citizen. On the face of it, the gay world and the straight world can happily coexist and occupy pretty much the same spaces. But if a straight person wanders into a gay bar, the chances are they will feel like a pork sausage at a Jewish wedding; they’ll get a taste of what a gay man feels like walking into a country pub. Multiple LGBTQ identities Architecture cannot guarantee freedom. Space is not in itself political, but exists at the intersection of matrices of power – of economy,
politics, economics and social mores. Architects are programmed to avoid the ‘other’, and default to the heterosexual matrix. Indeed, in the queer chapter in his book Sex and Buildings, Richard J Williams claims there is no hard evidence of a queer architecture. ‘They are occasional at best.’9 But I do agree that queer spaces are most often found in repurposed buildings, and therefore in among the derelict or overlooked spaces available for appropriation, and in direct opposition to the tenets of modernism, which tend to replace the unhealthy and outdated rather than retrofit the otherwise worn out. As Julius Gavroche says, modernism persistently views the provision of architecture for the ‘standardised’ human, and not those on the margins like the blacks, gays, bisexuals, nomads or criminals.10 Modernism is still the default ethical position behind many architects’ work, despite the rapid adoption of gender diversity in society at large. With multifarious sexual identity as a rainbow-coloured umbrella, I’ve always advocated architectural space that is ambivalent both in meaning and function. I assign full-on new build to the conventions of heteronormality, and therefore to the retrogressive and the unimaginative. The real queer space is the protagonist’s body and the pursuit of erotic gratification. In Aaron Betsky’s words,11 queer space engenders the deformation of locations through temporary appropriation, making possible ‘useless, amoral, and sensual space that lives only in and for experience’. For Betsky, ‘the goal of queer space is orgasm’. On the other hand, Christopher Reed imagines queer spaces as a more stable claiming of space against the dominant heterosexual matrix, exemplified in
gay bars, lesbian archives, student groups, sex toy stores, social services, political organisations, and the like.12 A queer space usually has a parasitic interventionist relationship with the existing, but the very confusion of the city, with all its layers and counter forces, pre-empts the essence of the queer spatial condition at whatever scale. Curiously the ever-increasing complexity of LGBTIQ+ reaches into the entire contemporary city and its vast and often confusing array of identities. But this urban scaled queerness is only visible if you choose to see it, or if the architect helps focus new spaces and places with queer intentionality. Ironically, as culture itself has learnt to turn inside out, and to adopt the strategies of the avant-garde, queerness is all around us. As modernism wanes, ‘queerism’ comes into focus, and it has come to pass in unlikely quarters. Magic realism might broaden the goal of design, itself a paradigm for queer space. It reaches first for the existing with the potential to be transformed, and opening it up to a design process that engages nuance and rupture, permitting the power of desire to overwhelm the power of politics, community, economy or sustainability, important as all these are. Queerism is essentially a subversive, parasitic kind of power that can exploit the conventions it seeks to overcome. Meanwhile, many young architectural practices, populated presumably by a smattering of gay professionals, continue to suppress the possibilities of queer freedom, and underplay camp in favour of archetypal forms such as the shed or the tower. They masquerade as heteronormative, a stance way behind society at large. Their sexuality aside, Summer 2019 |Citizen|87
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Queer culture is felt in all creative fields including fashion, food, furniture, design, art and performance proponents of ‘shedchitecture’ purvey a pragmatic bottom line that minimises the risk of losing the job. Shires observes that: ‘queer culture is felt in all the creative fields of the city including fashion, furniture design, art, performance, food ... I think architects have always been a bit “straight-laced” due to the formality of the business. But I do know a lot of new practices run and owned by LGBTQ architects, so there’s hope’.5 Living in light and dark Citing the Situationists, Gavroche reminds us that, ‘the means for this transformation (towards a global civilisation) would be the dérive, the movement through organised space with the aim of opening up to and engendering ludic-constructive behaviour; détournement, the subversive appropriation of spaces, movements, gestures and comportments; the construction of situations’.10 Like the Situationists, grasping and elaborating the ‘situation’ is key. The situation roots the transformation in the physical world and in the present, avoiding the risk of Utopian unachievable goals. Meanwhile, the city itself, its trains, streets, stores, professional clubs and restaurants, perform as soft queer venues where LGBTQ people can curate their lives in an air of normality, where assertion of identity takes prominence over the search for opportunities for sex. Encounter can happen at any time – no wonder that LGBTQ people have such trouble stabilising any new relationship. Queer students are likely to feel perfectly comfortable in expressing their sexuality in everyday environments, often dressing as they would at the weekend for the average day at college. But many kids are ill-prepared for the freedom of gay
lifestyles. Through lack of insightful parenting, newcomers to the scene must navigate a minefield of contradictions, on the one hand promising the pleasures of love and kinship unlike any they’ve had before, but mixed in with drugs, deception and disappointment. Very soon Snapchat or Instagram has led to one of the dating apps. And as the smartphone habit for delivering sex has become the norm, chemsex is but four or five contacts away. Gay world is facing the threat of the newest form of addiction, crystal meth. Victims caught up in the throttling lifestyle of chemsex become aware that, ‘The gay scene can be such a lonely, alienating place’.13 Cross the line to the perfect storm, and never come back. Gay men in search of sex head to afterparties and have drugfuelled sex sessions that last for days. Loss of control is the aim, so normal morality or safeguards go out of the window. An abandonment of any notion of citizenship, wasting all the battles of the last 50 years. This affects a minority of gay men, but it’s a big problem. Many gay men use prep as a way of avoiding traditional safe sex. At ‘prick parties’ you’re tested for HIV at the door, and turned away if you’re positive. Unmitigated sexual adventure is abandoning its historic exploitation of public space, and going indoors, where the public norms of modesty can be abandoned without fear. According to Shires,5 chemsex parties have played a part in the downfall of the ‘men only’ clubs such as The Hoist, Backstreet and the Eagle. Drugs have always been as much a part of gay life as the rapid turnover of partners and situations. According to fashion and availability, the drugs themselves have changed, but they have always been used to heighten
club delirium or the gratification of sex. With chemsex comes consensual abandonment conformity. These parties are reputed to last for days, encourage multiple partners and an exhibitionist compulsion to share the experience ‘live’ on social media. Queerness of straight architecture Despite its risks, it’s never been easier to live the queer lifestyle. Who’s up for an LGBT M&S sandwich – lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato? And then there’s the rainbow version of IKEA’s Frakta shopping bag. And a father teaches his transgender son to use a Gillette razor for the first time. In the wake of the ’90s boom of the pink pound, big business wants a bite of the multicoloured apple. Queer architecture manifests in relation to a given architecture, metamorphosing the existing to make a place that’s vital and new. Radical adaptation relies on disrupting the intended usage and user. Shops and clubs frequently adopt this strategy, renting a ready-made space ripe for a suitable makeover. Vivienne Westwood’s legendary Seditionaries and fetish stores such as Expectations both hide in and exploit their otherwise banal settings. Dover Street Market creates worlds within worlds, a ludic environment that amplifies its gender ambivalent concept; its clothes, and the uncertainty of how they should be worn, builds to the generally ambivalent effect of the environment. If there is no existing condition to transform, then the architect needs to make a ‘history’, a narrative that gives the design something to push against. I have used this strategy in every one of my buildings, like the Wall in Tokyo and the Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch. LGBT codes access all aspects of contemporary life and coincide with Summer 2019 |Citizen|89
So shall the battle continue, not only played out on your smartphone, but in the streets of London the fashion strategy, which embraces gender conventions as part of its push for the new. A trip to Dover Street Market will shock some resistant to change, but excite people who thrive on the spirit of experimentation in clothing. Clothes are deliberately organised, or disorganised, to undo the conventional codification of product divisions. Coats, jackets and trousers are merchandised in with dresses and T-shirts, pressing the shopper into unravelling another set of codes based on the designer or the look. Appropriately the decor scrambles conventions of display; garments might be hung inside a shed, or a set of Victorian vitrines, or a pop-up installation. The pleasure of shopping rests on discovery, unlike M&S that sticks to traditional supermarket geography. Which with a leap of the imagination translates into a city that scrambles codes and celebrates the inversion of usability, the city as a network of diversions can be said to be queer, both in the modern sense and in the sense of ‘strange’ or ‘odd’. But one tenet of architecture is that it should present itself with clarity, with the kind of legibility that leads you to the entrance. Architectural space should reinforce your preconceptions, or should it? Can we see this ambivalence as an objective for the contemporary city? The queerness is there for the looking; it’s just that most architects can’t see it. As modernism in architecture has declined, and the proliferation of other signs in among the buildings, queerness has infiltrated without architects noticing. Only the relatively sophisticated architectural designer attuned to mutations in modern culture is able to make something of the maelstrom of the urban condition. While ever more powerful capital 90|Citizen|Summer 2019
forces tend to rebuild London at ever increasing scale, the fluid and quixotic spirit of queerness tends to pop up in the oddest places. Keen to retain his practice’s leading edge, Norman Foster’s projects move ever closer to the architecture of the body – though the output of his office rarely slides into camp. High-tech’s harshness and frank industrial structures coincided inadvertently with the caged aesthetic of leather clubs like the Backstreet and the Hoist. Today its proponents frequently adopt signifiers derived from the body, even the queer gender-fluid body, such as the labial stadium designs of ZHA or the twisted proto-phallic towers by Foster with the Gherkin, Jean Nouvel with the Agbar Tower in Barcelona or Gensler’s Shanghai Tower. The work of Chinese studio MAD captures fluidity and injects it into the ‘body’ of the city, as if to add neurological responsiveness to its surroundings. Once more to Ackroyd.2 ‘Here is where the notion of queer “spectrum” has proved unhelpful: when the meaning, if any, of a term is uncertain, it will be fought over.’ But perhaps the fight cannot be avoided, but indeed embraced. ‘The increasing preference for a notion of gender “fluidity” itself accounts not only for the almost bewildering array of terms now approved within debates about gender identity, but also for the remarkable ad hominem or ad feminam sparring that takes place in social media.’ And so shall the battle continue, not only to be played out on your smartphone, but in the streets and squares of London until in a softened form, this very complexity and capricious uncertainty comes to signify all that is positive in our society. Nigel Coates is a celebrated architect and designer and chair of the academic court at the London School of Architecture
References 1. Vittorio Lingiardi, Citizen Gay. Affetti e Diritti, Il Saggiatore, 2016, Tom McDonough (ed), The Situationists and the City, Verso, 2009. 2. Peter Ackroyd, Queer City, Chatto & Windus, 2017. 3. Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, Edinburgh University Press, 2003. 4. Princess Julia: interview with the author, 2019. 5. Wayne Shires: interview with the author, 2019. 6. Prem Sahib: interviewed with Frieze, no 163, 2014. 7. Editorial, NATØ 3, 1985. 8. Nigel Coates, ‘Street Signs’, in Design After Modernism, John Thackara (ed), Thames & Hudson, 1988. 9. Richard J Williams, Sex and Buildings, Reaktion Books, 2013. 10. Julius Gavroche, ‘Queering Straight Space: Thinking towards a Queer Architecture’, Autonomies online magazine, 3 October 2016. 11. Aaron Betsky, Queer Space, William Morrow, 1997. 12. Christopher Reed, ‘Imminent Domain: Queer Space in the Built Environment’, Art Journal, vol 55, no 4, 1996. 13. Interview within Laura Harvey, Meg-John Barker, and Rosalind Gill, Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture, Polity Press, 2018.
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How can design help to solve the current social health crisis and make our fragmented communities more cohesive? asks Thomas Bryans
Human beings are social animals; we need other people to survive. This is a hard-wired evolutionary trait that helps to explain why loneliness and social isolation can be so psychologically painful. Within hunter-gatherer societies, to be isolated would have had potentially fatal consequences, from both starvation and potential predation. Feeling lonely was a powerful driver to rejoin your tribe. Loneliness today carries fewer immediate risks, but its damage to our health is equally profound. Evidence indicates that it is deadlier than obesity, and equivalent to smoking around 15 cigarettes a day, according to psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad. Loneliness can be particularly acute within cities, which have been
shown to have a detrimental effect on our mental health and well-being, and increase the risk of major depression and anxiety. This is known as the ‘urbanicity effect’, and the larger the population, the greater it is. The city is not a habitat that we evolved with, it is one that we created for ourselves. With more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas, it is essential to ask whether the places we are shaping are helping or hindering our innate human need for connection. As psychologists Rhiannon Corcoran and Graham Marshall have argued, our prosocial tendencies exist in context.1 We are profoundly affected by our perception of the environment around us, so our towns and cities must be designed to enable and support sociability.
The contemporary urban crisis The problem of urban loneliness is not isolated to any one country or culture. It is global and is being increasingly recognised as a crisis at both national and local levels around the world. Various governments, including the UK, are looking at ways to help address it. However, to do so successfully requires an initial understanding of how we got to where we are. The agricultural revolution of around 10,000 years ago led to the first emergence of permanent human settlements, and eventually to the earliest cities. For many thousands of years, these cities remained small. It has been claimed that social loneliness within these communities would have been low, largely due
URBAN SPLASH
Park Hill, Sheffield Studio Egret West and Hawkins\Brown’s refurbishment of Sheffield’s Park Hill estate focused on small moves that would impact on residents’ lives. The width of the iconic ‘Streets in the Sky’ was reduced to a more intimate scale, while corner-windows in the new flats provide ‘eyes’ on the street.
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Lang Eng, Copenhagen Designed by the architect Dorte Mandrup, this co-housing community includes a shared garden, a 20-seat cinema for collective film and TV watching and an industrial-sized kitchen where residents take turns to prepare shared meals.
STAMERS KONTOR
Lonely cities
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IF_DO (3)
to the intense cooperation and co-production that was required for survival. The larger cities became – particularly with the exponential growth of urban populations over the past 200 years – the more they offered individual anonymity. For some this anonymity provided an essential level of protection, but the weakening of social ties that came with it led to increasing levels of social isolation. Over the past half-century, the way we design and develop our cities has become increasingly privatised. In the 1970s half of all architects were employed by the public sector; now it’s less than 9 per cent. Today, most new public spaces are built as part of large regeneration projects and are privately owned. They are almost
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always economic in purpose: shopping is paramount; casual socialising is not. Private security can evict anyone perceived as loitering or undesirable. To be thrown out of a seemingly ‘public’ place inevitably creates feelings of isolation and exclusion. As Corcoran and Marshall point out, ‘these are not the places where new relationships can emerge and flourish’. On top of this, Secured by Design, a police-led initiative that evolved out of research on crime in New York public housing in the 1970s, has generated a heightened focus on security through the principle of ‘defensible space’, leading to increasing social segregation. As Anna Minton, in her book Ground Control has written, ‘“Defensible space” in fact produces isolated, often
empty enclaves which promote fear rather than the safety and reassurance which automatically comes in busy places, where people are free to wander around and come and go.’ At its most extreme this results in student halls where, for reasons of security, residents are unable to access – and therefore socialise with – other floors of their building. Leaving home and moving to a new city are both heightened risk factors for loneliness. Being in an environment that limits potential social connections as a consequence of design will only make this worse. Changing perceptions Psychological research has demonstrated that in places experienced as threatening or
Draper Estate, Elephant and Castle The Loneliness Lab set up two day-long installations to encourage conversations between residents and other members of the community. People were invited to write anonymous messages on tags tied to balloons. The installation provoked curiosity and created an excuse to strike up conversations with strangers.
MORLEY VON STERNBERG
oppressive, people become anxious and withdrawn, whereas in places seen as beautiful, people feel safe and more likely to engage with others. The effect of this in cities is unmistakable: more attractive neighbourhoods are often those in greater demand, with higher property values and therefore greater affluence, while those that are visibly run-down are often the more deprived. This is borne out in health outcomes, with areas of deprivation being correlated with higher levels of mental health problems, and tree-lined streets with lower levels of antidepressant prescriptions. Changes in the visual appearance of a neighbourhood can alter fundamentally the way in which people perceive the area and therefore behave. A study in Philadelphia that looked at the impact of abandoned lots and buildings found that transforming the lots into pocket parks and replacing doors and windows on the buildings led to a significant reduction in gun violence around those sites: of 5 per cent and 39 per cent, respectively.3 Where spaces are perceived as being safe, people are more likely to come out of their homes and on to the street, and parks provide places where neighbours can gather and socialise, strengthening social bonds. In what began as a research project in its home city of Chicago, the architectural practice Studio Gang asked, ‘What if the police station became a community centre, with recreational facilities that young people could use without fear?’ In a place with long established police-community tensions it was a radical question. The project, Polis Station, rethinks the police station as a piece of social infrastructure; a safe space for local youths to play and
socialise, as well as creating interaction with officers in non-enforcement situations, helping to build trust. While the ambition of the project is large, and could have implications across the United States, its success will come through small, very local, community interventions. The first iteration, a half-sized basketball court on the car park of a police station in the West Side of Chicago, has become so popular that there are ambitions to develop it into a full public park. Even temporary interventions can make a significant impact. On Lower Marsh, a bustling street to the south of London Waterloo station, a single-storey building and an adjacent yard space were overhauled by IF_DO and Meanwhile Space to create a new public square
and a community-focused co-working space that would provide low-cost accommodation for local businesses and start-ups. Due for redevelopment about four years after the refurbishment, the local authority, Lambeth Council, was keen to see the building put to socially and economically beneficial use in the meantime. Such meanwhile projects can have an outsize impact on a community, in being able to create and provide space for activities and organisations that could not otherwise afford to be there. As a Centre for London spokesperson has noted, ‘Many of London’s more unexpected and playful uses of space have been enabled on meanwhile space because it was provided at low or no rent, from pop-up lidos to warehouse parties’.
Ilchester Road, Barking Peter Barber Architects’ singlestorey housing for the over 60s is arranged along a narrow alley with the residents’ private terraces (their only outdoor space) lining both sides. Low metal fences effectively turn the space into a large and convivial gathering space.
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Reconnecting with the public realm Building a network of local relationships typically begins in public space, or in the threshold space between public and private spaces: think of parents meeting at the school gates, or neighbours chatting over the garden fence. At its most fundamental, combating urban loneliness and creating meaningful connections requires an engagement and a reconnection with the public realm. While this inevitably depends on the individual, the design of their environment – the context they are in – will affect their willingness and desire to do so. The students of the LSA’s ‘Architectural Agency’ Design Think Tank interrogated this question over Lower Marsh, Waterloo ‘Meanwhile’ projects can have an outsize impact on community life. IF_DO’s transformation of a single-storey building and adjacent yard provided the communtiy with affordable workspace and a public square while the building was awaiting redevelopment.
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arranged along a narrow alley, with the residents’ private terraces (their only outdoor space) lining both sides. The low metal fences effectively turn the space into a large and convivial gathering space. As one resident, Pauline Branch has described, ‘We’ve been sitting out here in the evenings, singing together. It reminds me of an old East End street – I’m always seeing my neighbours.’
the past year, and their work (see page 68), considered the public realm as everything from the street to the lobby, lift and corridor of a large block of flats. The scale of the urban grid and the front door may be vastly different, but they affect both the quality and nature of our relationship with others around us. In their refurbishment of the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, Studio Egret West and Hawkins\Brown were cognisant of the impact that small moves could have on the people who would live there, particularly in learning the lessons of the original design. The iconic ‘Streets in the Sky’ were narrowed (they were originally designed to be wide enough for a milk float), with corner-windows added into the entrance halls of the new flats. The windows create the perception of eyes-on-the-street, as well as enabling individual expression, ensuring a character and personality is conveyed to passers-by, and creating a greater sense of connection among the neighbours. While significantly smaller than Park Hill, Peter Barber Architects’ Ilchester Road development in Barking embodies a more radical act of prosocial design. The mews of six single-storey houses for over 60s is
Collaborative living While the need to work together for survival is no longer essential, the social bonds we can build through cooperation and co-production remain the same. Unfortunately, our tendency to engage in civic collaboration has been on the decline for decades, and even social gatherings are becoming rarer.4 There has been an increasing retreat from public life to the private domain; in the UK and the US, for example, as televisions became ubiquitous in the 1960s and ’70s, cinema attendance collapsed. Today, with everyone on their own devices, we don’t even need to gather around the TV. The rise of co-housing over the past 25 years as a collective model for living is, in part, a reaction to that increasing fragmentation of social life. They are intentional communities, almost always with shared collective facilities, such as a communal kitchen and dining area where everyone can come together to engage in the sharing of food. On the western edge of Copenhagen, Lange Eng, a co-housing community designed by the architect Dorte Mandrup, is a case in point. Fifty-four dwellings encircle a large central courtyard that acts as a communal garden, while in their community house, a shared 20-seat MIKE MASSARO(2)
Temporary interventions do not need to exist for long to change people’s perception of a place and to help build social connections. In October 2018, on the Draper Estate in Elephant and Castle, two consecutive day-long installations took place to encourage conversations between residents and other members of the community. In an undercroft by the entrance to one of the residential blocks, hundreds of yellow balloons were installed with parcel tags hanging off them so that people could write anonymous messages to others, both about themselves and their thoughts about the neighbourhood. The project was part of the Loneliness Lab, an 18-month study on how spaces can be used to create stronger social connections. Being unexpected and unusual, the installation disrupted people’s everyday experience, provoking curiosity and drawing them in; it created an excuse for conversations to be started with strangers.
cinema allows for collective film and TV watching, and an industrial-sized kitchen enables collective meals to be served to those who want them six nights a week. Each adult takes it in turns to help prepare food every six weeks. They claim to ‘have optimised the time-consuming part of everyday life, enabling us to concentrate on doing things we love, as a community, as families and as individuals’.
STUDIO GANG
Social infrastructure Projects such as Lange Eng prioritise what has been described as ‘social infrastructure’: spaces that are communal, invite people into the public realm and allow for collective organisation. They provide greater shared amenities and facilities, but with the compromise – if it is that – of requiring social engagement and collaboration. As the geographer Jared Diamond has written, cities require ‘the tradeoff between individual freedom and
Polis Station, Chicago This half-sized basketball court on the car park of a police station in the West Side of Chicago marks the start of Studio Gang’s initiative to combat tensions between the police and the community by rethinking the police station as a safe space for local youths to socialise and play.
community interests, and the trade-off between social ties and anonymity’. Over recent decades there has been an increasing trend towards favouring the individual over the collective. The costs of this are multiple: declining mental health, increasing segregation and extremism, and an environmental crisis caused by over consumption. We are at a tipping point, and the way we design our cities needs to change. Co-housing offers what George Monbiot describes as ‘private sufficiency and public luxury’. This is not a new idea: the Carnegie Libraries, built between the 1880s and 1920s, were known as ‘palaces for the people’. Ornate, grand buildings with vaulted ceilings and tall windows; these were not the sorts of spaces that their users would ever be able to afford on their own. Such civic commons – from parks to sports centres, art galleries and allotments – provide opportunities
that would not otherwise be available to us on our own, but also offer the company of others and a platform from which to engage with the wider community. Communities need places like these to thrive; they enable individual connections to be made and relationships to be built. However, urban loneliness is a complex and multifaceted issue. There is no silver bullet that will provide an easy solution, and it requires extensive cross-disciplinary collaboration. Nevertheless, there are clear steps that can be taken. Urban areas that are visually run down should be the focus of programmes to enhance their built fabric, particularly when these are framed around supporting community groups and social connections. New housing developments should be explicitly designed to create prosocial spaces, and, where possible, co-housing should be promoted to support collective well-being. As Winston Churchill famously stated, ‘we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us’. He was referring to the form of the parliamentary chamber in relation to the two-party system, but it was fundamentally a point about the way our physical context affects and influences our behaviour. While our urban environment has the capacity to fragment communities and to make us lonely, it also has the capacity to bring people together and create happier and more socially connected neighbourhoods. Those of us who shape our cities today are creating the places that will help shape our communities tomorrow. We need to live up to that responsibility. Thomas Bryans is a co-founder of architecture practice IF_DO 1. Corcoran, Rhiannon and Graham Marshall. ‘From Lonely Cities to Prosocial Places: How Evidence-Informed Urban Design Can Reduce the Experience of Loneliness’. p8. 2. Landry, Charles and Chris Murray. Psychology and the City: The Hidden Dimension. London: Comedia. 2017. p15.
3. Klinenberg, Eric. Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. New York: Crown. 2018. pp65-69. 4. Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2000.
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Alice Hardy Annecy Attlee Cristina Gaidos Eloise Rogers Joe Walker Matthew Barnett Philippine Wright Seyi Adewole Robert Buss Katie Oliver Maxim Sas Cameron Lintott Maelys Garreau Fraser Morrison Tom Badger William Bellamy
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People Places Planet London is a world city. It is simultaneously expanding and contracting, growing ever-outwards â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and upwards â&#x20AC;&#x201C; yet on the brink of divorce from the neighbouring continent.The next generation of designers must deliver fresh thinking to tackle issues that range from the scale of the street to global climate change. We asked pioneering graduates from the LSA how theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d adapt London to ensure that it is inclusive of its citizens, integrated with nature and fit for the future Visit the-LSA.org/graduates2019 to see more graduate work Summer 2019 |Citizen|99
Alice Hardy A participatory approach to development
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Harnessing the participatory power of its residents, this alternative masterplan for the Kensal Gasworks site in North Kensington stitches together a fragmented landscape to create a continuous green route and employs a new delivery method that balances communal infrastructure provision and self-build. Delivery is planned in three phases, starting with a Green Walkway running to the north of the site and providing access across the railway to the new Kensal Gasworks development.
The next phase is the construction of concrete party walls, which contain the services required for the finished homes, and a service plinth containing parking, bike stores and residentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; storage space. The final phase is delivered as a series of individual self-build projects within the parameters defined by the party walls. Each party wall has a stacked chimney for natural ventilation and all bathrooms and kitchens plug into the service wall to allow for maximum
flexibility in the layout of the rest of the units. The party walls also define all the communal areas and access for the housing block.
Left: sketch showing the variety of forms and typologies that the system can accommodate.
Above: section showing user-modified units being crane-lifted into the main structure and self-build construction work being carried out on individual homes.
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Bottom: masterplan showing how the site can be broken down to a much tighter urban grain, allowing the site to be portioned into smaller development plots for community groups or housing cooperatives.
Right: the syncopation of different party walls allows for variations in typology and urban layout. This exercise experiments with using the party wall as a pattern tool for variations within the street or housing block.
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Stepped party walls Stepped party walls
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Alternating walls Alternating typologies of of party party wall
Sectional variations of party walls Sectional variations of party walls
TYPOLOGY VARIATIONS THE PARTY WALL ADAPTATIONS OF THEOF PARTY WALL The party wall is the formal boundary between dwellings but also depicts the unit size and variation. This set of diagrams looks at how the rythmn
and variation the party wall can depict the variation in unit types. The syncipation ofindifferent party walls allow for variations in typology and urban layout. This excersise experimented with using the party wall as a pattern tool for allowing variations within the street or housing block.
Dalgarno Builds Housing Plots
Green Highway with pedestrian bridge access to the new Kensal Gasworks Development
Dalgarno Builds Masterplan
New community infrastructure, including nursery, community workshop, Youth centre and extension to the existing community centre.
The above indicative masterplan shows how the site can be broken down to a much tighter urban grain with smaller plots allowing for the site to be portioned into manageable development plots for community groups, housing cooperatives or individual self buildes.
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Above: different party wall arrangements can allow for variety in form and the creation of shared or negotiated space within the block. Below: models illustrating the concept of party walls infilled with user-modified housing blocks.
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Annecy Attlee Entwining adjacent at-risk communities
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Throughout London, churches lacking adequate worship space – particularly those with largely immigrant congregations – have gathered in industrial buildings. They take advantage of large, flexible spaces in low-value areas with more affordable rent, repurposing sheds and cheaply-built office and studio space. In several ways, churches and industrial spaces have aligned needs. Both require large spaces. Both have potentially antisocial impact through noise and traffic pollution. Each adhere to rhythmic routine and ritual. As change-of-use permission from industrial to community space is complex and difficult
to achieve, the position of many of these churches is precarious, and their communities are under threat. They require more permanent, assigned space where they can put down roots. Binding these at-risk communities with their neighbours – manufacturers also under threat – can give both typologies greater staying power. This project celebrates the collision of typologies by accommodating worship space alongside industrial and maker spaces within the arches of existing railway viaducts in Bermondsey. Different users are provided with spaces in refurbished railway arches, between which a series of shared
facilities, including a kitchen, canteen and large assembly rooms, may be negotiated for use by different organisations. The architecture draws from the Gothic cathedral, the foundry and factory, and civic infrastructure, with details revealing the spilling and collision of different territories.
Above: section showing the relationship between the Assembly rooms and the units located in the viaduct.
Below: different arch dimensions create spaces with different qualities of light. Right: perforated screens allow the space to be reconfigured in different ways.
THE ASSEMBLY ROOMS SHORT SECTION A; 1:50 SOUTHEAST ASSEMBLY ROOM & ADJACENT UNITS LOOKING NORTHWEST
THRESHOLDS OVERLAP AND RECONFIGURATION
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Above: drawing mapping the shared and overlapping territories associated with fabricators and worship spaces alongside other functions, including bakers, breweries and other industrial uses.
Opposite: ground floor plan showing indicative inhabitation of the viaduct units by businesses and worship groups.
churches
‘made in London’ fabricators
bakeries & breweries
other industrial uses KEY
Churches
‘Made in London’ fabricators
churches
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‘made in London’ fabricators
Bakeries and breweries
bakeries & breweries
Other industrial uses
other industrial uses KEY
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3.0 FINAL PROPOSAL View through the strip of workshops.
Room workshos image +diagram
Cristina Gaidos Portfolio June 2019
Cristina Gaidos Integrating industry at a small scale
Tackling the shortage of suitable premises in London, this project aims to make space for manufacturing and production in the heart of the city, cutting the demands on transportation and making the city more economically and socially resilient. With rapid changes in manufacturing that enable much smaller, cleaner and quieter processes, a new generation of enterprise is combining design, workshop, product development and customer service spaces. They need space to serve as lab, studio, factory floor
and shopfront. Ideally, they want to be in central London, where they can attract the specialised staff they need. Within the Old Kent Road redevelopment plan, this project is a model for building flexible premises on sites that are less desirable for other uses â&#x20AC;&#x201C; particularly long, narrow sites alongside railway tracks and in close proximity to industrial areas. With an eye to future functional changes, the architecture focuses on universal criteria: comfort, atmosphere, light and structure.
Cristina Gaidos Portfolio June 2019
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Eloise Rogers A school for well-being
This new type of primary school aims to mix up everyday routines, getting primary school children out of the classroom and into the city, helping them to live fitter, healthier and happier lives. Here, the typical school building is dispersed as a series of external classroom spaces The Library Objects in Space
along a pedestrian-focused route. A series of interventions and outdoor classrooms stimulate the imagination, trigger curiosity and encourage active play. Reusing a redundant gasometer at the former gasworks in Rotherhithe, this flagship scheme for an
open-plan single-storey facility can accommodate several classroom groups from different primary schools. The flexible environment encourages children to explore and engage with others, while a wellness space offers a shared resource for schools and the wider community. The Big Table Objects in Space
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Joe Walker A higher station in life
Framing a cultural response to the ills of the modern world, this project seeks to help the public become more emotionally resilient and content in everyday life. ‘We have lost sight of what is important in cities,’ says Walker. ‘Capitalism has pushed us into a state of striving for a better life through hard work. Our values have been distorted through this culture, leaving us little space to evaluate and answer our deeper needs.’ He argues that the pressures of modern life lead to anxiety, loneliness and stress, leaving little time or space for citizens to focus on their emotional and social needs.
His proposal opens up and remodels an office block above Charing Cross station to carve out a variety of public and private spaces for socialising, relationships, work, learning and leisure. The injection of new cultural and social space at the heart of the city recognises the fundamental value of personal fulfilment, human interaction and contentment to the quality of civic life.
Right: speculative uses are arranged in a hierarchy of privacy levels, the largest spaces tending to be more public with more intimate smaller spaces.
P
Arranging for Privacy
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C ong regation SE
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Infor mal Work V
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Re f lec tion
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THE STRAND
Left: the main hall becomes a central node, adjacent to most spaces. Rooms that intend to be the most private sit between other intermediary programmes, rejecting the linearity of most stations.
EXIT
TERRACE
CAFE
LIBRARY
BROADCAST SUITE
READING
PUB
SKY GALLERY
LECTURE THEATRE
COWORK
AUDITORIUM
GALLERY
ROOF GARDEN
STATION CIRCULATION
MAIN HALL
UPPER CIRCULATION COUNSEL
CLASSROOM
RETREAT
COURTYARD
PUBLISHING
SHOP WAITING
OFFICE
CONCOURSE
PLATFORM
PLATFORM
PLATFORM
PLATFORM
EMBANKMENT
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Below: upper-level walkways control movement between ancillary spaces while allowing the citizen to watch the activity below.
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Top: upper floor axonometric section revealing the vaulted space above the main hall. Traditional and contemporary workspaces abut each other and surround spaces for learning.
Above: ground floor axonometric section â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the Hungerford Bridge meets an entirely new ground floor civic plaza offering a space for conference, contemplation and movement through the station.
U P P E R
F L O O R
P L A N
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L O W E R
F L O O R
P L A N
A X O N O M E T R I C
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Above: the most significant intervention into the existing building, the stairs are modelled on stations like Grand Central and Milan.
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Right: the creation of terraces, looking to the south of London, could open up a view once only accessible to the privileged few.
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London’s existing railway network could be transformed into a ‘river of green’ providing walking and cycling routes between major transport hubs.
Matthew Barnett A green ribbon over the railways
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Addressing London’s twin challenges of retaining affordable industrial space while seeking to deliver ambitious housing targets, this bold proposal transforms the existing railway network into a ‘river of green’. Since 2001, London has lost 1,300 hectares of industrial land, much of it to residential developments, and this pressure is only likely to intensify with efforts to build 60,000 new homes per year. This project has
identified an opportunity to develop over existing railway infrastructure, much of which is in public ownership. This has the advantage of being able to combine the two uses in section, with industrial spaces on the lower ground levels – which are easier to access for deliveries and dispatch – and housing above (for privacy and views). Affordable residential rentals are included for on-site staff accommodation.
Using Southwark as a test case, 4,000 new homes could be created over the 40 hectares of railway in the borough, adapting a structural template to meet varied site constraints. At a city scale, this green infrastructure could provide walking and cycling routes between major transport hubs, serving to offset the embodied carbon required for development and combating CO2 emissions.
Proposed variations of the scheme, designed in response to a range of pre-existing conditions.
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Option 1 Raised deck
Option 3 Connection to adjacent rooftops
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Option 6 Raised deck and colonnade
Option 7 Cantilevered Elements
Proposed Spectrum of Inter ventions
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Left: high-rise housing offers privacy and views across new high-level green infrastructure and across the city.
Below: building high-density housing above Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s railway lines helps to meet Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s housing targets and locates key workers close to public transport hubs.
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Public spaces provide a community with a sense of ownership, belonging and civic pride. But too often public buildings – libraries, town halls, museums and galleries – outlive their function, becoming outdated or even obsolete. This project proposes a series of public spaces in Walworth, designed to withstand the test of time by creating rooms – not around functions – but for fundamental human needs: living, learning, looking, talking and thinking.
Philippine Wright Freedom from function
TO LOOK OUTSIDE The architecture in this space asks the user to look outwards. A mirror image of the previous space. Almost. Except here the user is given tantalising glimpses of the outside world. Art pieces are framed by natural light. Tree canopies can be glimpsed through the high window as the external world begins to form an additional layer on the architecture, a material in its own right.
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TO CROSS The architecture in this space asks the user to move through. Three doorways all seemingly leading to the same space. Directional and asking the user to continue on their journey. But moving forward to spaces that differ in light. From light to shadows to darkness, three spaces that are all made for different functions and protect and welcome in different ways.
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TO LOOK INSIDE
Seyi Adewole A place for the displaced
Asylum seekers and refugees tend to be housed in camps in peripheral areas, and often the support they need is dispersed in hard-to-access remote parts of the city. This strategy for Croydon integrates displaced people into the existing communities, while creating a one-stopshop facility that offers the help they need to start a new life in UK. Occupying a prime position by East Croydon station, the prominent gateway signals that in-coming residents are an asset to be welcomed. Conceived as a key civic building, the centre includes social areas, workspace, retail, affordable housing and support facilities. The architecture conveys a sense of security, robustness and permanence. Three different garden areas – for food-growing, relaxation and play – spill into the public realm,
blurring the boundary between the building and surrounding neighbourhood. A market garden and trading area offers an opportunity for people to set up food stalls and acts as a magnet for employees of surrounding businesses to sample cuisine from the different cultures on site.
Above: the thickness of the brick wall is expressed through deep reveals and recessed spaces Bottom left: study for the design of the main archway. Below: spatial relationship between the different elements of the programme.
Temporary Accomodation
Kitchen
Entrance
Social Enterprise
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Dining room
Garden
Retail Unit Retail Unit
Group Therapy
Restaurant Retail Unit
Therapy Room 3 Info Hub
Living Room
Co-working Hub Therapy Room 2
Health Checks
Retail Unit
Retail Unit
Retail Unit
Restaurant
Therapy Room 1 Entrance
Key Public Realm Public Connection Visual Connection Private Connection
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Robert Buss Sustainable delivery and waste infrastructure
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Online retail and grocery shopping are on the rise. The fragmented and inefficient nature of logistics, delivery and waste removal services is leading to illegal levels of pollution, the worst congestion in Europe and the most dangerous roads in the UK. While online retail is blamed for the death of high street shopping, the resultant traffic stops us from being able to reinvigorate civic life on our streets. In the face of these substantial problems, this urban strategy seeks to make the city safer, healthier and more
sustainable through tackling inefficient and fragmented last-mile deliveries and waste in London. A 12-hectare automated consolidation centre for parcels, groceries and waste provides facilities to transfer goods to electric vehicles and robots, while fields on the roof create a new park for the neighbourhood. A light rail system is inserted for mass freight haulage along Old Kent Road. The new Bakerloo Line station cuts a cross-section through the building, revealing its inner workings and connecting to a public market.
The project removes polluting vehicles from the streets, enables a circular economy, decentralises power and water, safeguards public green space and builds for the future of a sustainable planet.
Above left: the 15-hectare building disrupts the grain of the surrounding city in order to make it healthier and more sustainable. It consolidates last-mile delivery facilities, waste recycling, decentralised energy production, reservoirs and workspace for sustainable businesses.
Above: automated warehouse robot technology enables complex consolidation and distribution of goods and the circular economy. A vast grid of groceries and parcels are sorted and picked from above and below. Right: inner-London could be served by 12 consolidation centres connected to a network of electric cargo trams, removing HGVs from the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s streets.
Robert Buss London School of Architecture
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View into the warehouse. Seeing where parcels and groceries are sorted and ‘waste’ redistributed is key to generating awareness around sustainability. Windows into the consolidation centre make a visual connection between citizens’ everyday lives and the city’s usually hidden infrastructure.
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A public route through the consolidation centre reveals its infrastructure and provides access to workspaces, a new tube station and the roof park. Groceries and parcels can be picked up from self service points along the route.
TUBE STATION / GROCERY LOCKERS
Robert Buss London School of Architecture
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Above: the building creates a plateau at the height of the surrounding buildings, creating a strong connection to the sky and opening up long views. The roof safeguards 15 hectares of new open space for London â&#x20AC;&#x201C; contributing to the Mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s target of making London 50 per cent green by 2050.
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Right: the project has the potential to have a profound effect on the city around it. Removing HGVs and LGVs reduces traffic by over 30 per cent, improving safety, air quality and congestion; and gives us the opportunity to rethink the way our streets are designed.
PLATEAU IN THE CITY
Katie Oliver A tower for Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lost
The cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ways of dealing with death are unsustainable: London is fast running out of burial sites and alternatives such as cremation are carbon intensive and harmful to the environment. The proposal of a large, Scale dominating tower that can house decomposing dead bodies is a space-saving,
green method of handling Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lost. More practically, the tower addresses projected rising death rates and provides top soil compost recovery through decomposition of the human body. Each tower is joined by ancillary buildings, namely a departure space and memorial arboretum.
Proposed as a Londonwide strategy, where every ward in each borough selects a site for the decomposition tower and ancillary buildings, the project serves as a stark reminder of our own mortality, and in doing so, strives to allow Western society to change attitudes towards death.
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Maxim Sas Harnessing the River Thames
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Concerned about the depletion of London’s stock of public spaces over the past 30 years, this proposal combines public space and green infrastructure by introducing a decentralised network of small hydroelectric plants and the emerging technology of tidal lagoons along the publicly owned foreshore of the River Thames. A 150m-long concrete lagoon structure transforms the Surrey Docks in Rotherhithe, bridging over the river edge to create
strategic routes, with pedestrians and cyclists offset from the building within the 30m width. The historic London typology of an ‘adelphi’ is updated for the present day, including an open public space at ground level and mixed-use programme above. The proposal celebrates the history of the Thames and creates manageable bodies of water to interact with. The hydroelectric plant network contributes to the London Plan
policies for sustainability and complements better river transport services that support healthier streets. This new type of public infrastructure can help society be more open to and aware of the needs of the environment and each other.
Scale
Cameron Lintott Combining the street and the block
St Saviours Estate in Section Bermondsey is part of an area of loose, borderless housing estates from the 1900s. This project suggests a blueprint for increasing the supply of inner-city housing and combating social isolation by making these ‘in-between’ parts of the city more vibrant, contrasting and intense – less suburban and more urban. A new mixed-use building combines civic, communal and private spaces around a public street, which forms part of a route between Tower Bridge and the rapidly developing Old Kent Road. Calle
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Left: the project sits in a backland of Camberwell. As in the Roman domus, the entire home is treated as one big living room. Right: the continuation of nature throughout is a rejection of rigid conventional ways of living. The living room is detailed through the layering of surfaces using straw bale and cob to achieve malleable forms.
Maelys Garreau Rewilding industrial infrastructure
There is a true lack of spaces with a sense of belonging in London: spaces for expression, adventure and danger (in the good sense) are decidedly lacking. Improving access to and awareness of the natural environment, this project provides learning and care facilities to Camberwellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s marginalised youth. The centre of the project is housed in a series of town Right: bathing becomes an act of private regeneration as well as a collective ritual, mediating between the inside and outside. Far right: the heart of the house is an outdoor atrium in which ceremonial rituals are envisioned; as a large classroom or as a monthly Sunday feast.
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house-style buildings which explore the possibilities of straw bale and cob construction. The buildings are woven into a series of therapeutic landscapes which form an accessible, multi-sensory environment designed to promote well-being, serving as both an open access youth centre and sheltered home. Situated on the Valmar Trading Estate, this scheme embraces the wilding of
former industrial infrastructure such as gas cannisters, beckoning nature into a landscape where it was once rebuffed. In doing so, it fosters environmental awareness by creating new relationships with the outdoors through celebrating the earthy, dirty, dominant forces of nature that are present yet shunned by urban spaces.
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Fraser Morrison A tall testament to recycling
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Waste is an inconvenience to cities – the sooner it’s out of our sight, in our bins, off the streets and to a place we’ll never go, the better. But what if, instead of being hidden from view in an ignored landfill swamp, our waste processing plants were totems visible to all? Retaining industry at the heart of dense urban sites, the tower for waste serves as a super visible, hyper-tall testament to recycling. The project enables the London Borough of Southwark to achieve its goal of building 20,000 homes a year by freeing up space on industrial sites. It takes the form of a vertical recycling and distribution centre, occupying a tight site on Stoney Street and integrating existing railway arches. The project opens up the rest of the site to re-establish public routes and creates a series of new public spaces to enhance and compliment the nearby Borough Market. Presented in a stratified manner due to the structure’s vertical nature, the building’s facade expresses the various processes occurring within the building through changes in material. Drones enter and leave the building, taking waste to the tower and distributing recycled refuse upon exiting it. The tower proudly portrays the digestion of London’s rubbish and offers a healthy alternative to the industrial towers and factory chimneys that once filled London’s skyline with pollution, acting as a green, uninhabited smoke stack. We too often ignore the waste that we produce. By consolidating all the dirty recycling processes at the heart of the city, we force society to confront its demons and move towards more sustainable ways of living.
Left: the tower occupies a tight site, creating new public spaces and pedestrian routes
Opposite: drones fly in and out of the super visible, hyper-tall testament to modern recycling. Below: drones collecting rubbish from different local building types: Tate Modern, the Blue Fin office building, Monmouth Coffee and Bermondsey row housing.
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Tom Badger The street without cars
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Throughout the 20th century the automobile was used as a catalyst for change, reflecting the mechanical and efficient world that architects and urbanists wished to create. It became the symbol of modernist thinking, promising a new age of social and physical mobility. However, it has ultimately failed in these promises, leaving our streets filled with pollution. The 21st century allows us to rethink these ideals and create new ways of living and operating in the city – with the street being the central forum of this discussion.
This project investigates Peckham Road and its surrounding residential streets in South London – an area that contains typical London conditions to be redesigned: housing estate, residential street, and cultural space. The project is addressed from the perspectives of policy-makers, activists and designers. A design guide has been produced for how to adapt the street to contemporary demands, while the project also proposes redesigning kerbs and road surfaces to be better suited for pedestrianisation along with a series of modular
buildings in the street which provide social infrastructure. The scheme also looks at existing housing and infill sites, exploring their relationship with the street. This vigorous interrogation of our streets strives to provide a compelling alternative to current societal behaviour in relation to the city’s roads.
BUIDLING IN THE STREET ISOMETRICS
Above left: the existing landscape is redesigned, exploring the potential of typical London conditions if car use was radically reduced. Small modular buildings are added to the streetscape to provide social infrastructure. Existing buildings are extended and improved, altering their relationship to the street. A new landscape blurs the boundaries between street and garden.
Above: the infrastructure for the new landscape is provided by a grid. Plugged-in structures transform streets into libraries, leisure centres and theatres. Each plays with familiar forms and materials associated with the street, encouraging us the re-read the intended use and activity of the street. Right: the once tarmacked spaces surrounding the Pelican Estate housing are turned into an undulating landscape, with old garages repurposed as community spaces attached to the neighbouring theatre.
1. THEATRE
2. LIBRARY 3. PLAYGROUND
4. LIBRARY 5. COFEE SHOP 6. LEISURE CENTRE
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Below: infill sites are used to create cultural spaces that blur the boundaries between inside and out, architecture and street. Here the facade of a theatre is treated like a large door, opening the performance space out to the Peckham road and creating a second auditorium space.
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Right: the proposal uses the materials associated with the conventional build up of the street but subverts their use. The kerb stone is turned on its axis to create a grid. At the meeting point of kerb stones a socket provides power and footing for buildings and furniture above ground.
Above: buildings appear in the street providing social infrastructure and amenity space for local residents. Here, a cafe spaces takes reference from the old cabbies shelters of London.
Right: the boundaries between street and nature are blurred. Gardens and planters spill out on to the grid turning into grass filled paving allowing the street to take on some of the magical qualities of the back garden.
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BUILDINGS
PROGRAMMES
S TO OFF
REFI
Con cept : fir st a l ter s tora
build in gs wh ic h a re t h res h
site an d cur ren t l y u n d er va
William Bellamy A sweet future for the factory
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This proposal transforms the Tate & Lyle sugar factory into a new civic space and mixed-use quarter for London’s young diverse population. The project sets out to address two questions: how should or could we reinvent and repurpose post-industrial space and manufacturing space? And how do we counter the spread of anonymous corporate residential towers that characterise so many London regeneration schemes? The project builds on Tate & Lyle’s industrial heritage, providing workspace as well as
cultural facilities and common spaces. Designed as a new civic quarter, the proposal includes a new public square and riverside path which allows Londoners to gather on the bank of the Thames. A hotel next to London City Airport creates round-the-clock activity on site. ‘Sugartown is the manifestation of a political hypothesis that cybernetics can create a society on equal terms’ says William Bellamy. ‘It represents the possibility of a pluralistic community and a selforganising form of governance at a city scale.’
O R AG E ICE
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Opposite: diagrammatic studies highlighting where there is opportunity for immediate intervention within the refinery â&#x20AC;&#x201C; storage facilities (shown in green) were the main targets for this.
Above: masterplan illustrating programmatic interventions that relate the existing refinery back to its community.
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A cast iron pavement recycled from obsolete machinery on the site will create a contextual and unique public realm.
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Left: the refinery library at the north of the site will relate to directly to the resilience programmes that Newham has to strengthen its localsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; personal, economic and community resilience.
Above: London has a need for space and the opportunity for mess. Here an obsolete space within the refinery is altered to become a workshop.
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By 2045 the proportion of the population aged over 65 will rise to 25%. This equates to 146 million more older adults than there are today – totalling 1.4bn globally. Insights from four diverse cities – Hong Kong, London, Madrid and Vancouver – explore the way cities are responding to this demographic shift.
Cities for an ageing population ‘A child born today can expect to live to 100 years – so now we must seize the opportunity to improve the quality of lives lived longer and transform the way we think about our work, our housing, our health, our finances and our communities.’ These are the words of Caroline Dinenage, Minister of State for the Department of Health and Social Care, speaking about the Industrial Strategy (ISCF) Grand Challenge for Ageing Society. The government has committed more than £300 million to developing new technologies that will revolutionise the way we age and provide everyone with the best possible chance to grow old with dignity in their own home. On the face of it, this is great news. But UK housing stock is not well adapted to older adults, and there are many mismatches between their needs and their environment. According to a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Britain’s housing ‘crisis’ is forcing the frail to live in dangerous conditions, with poor housing leading to an ‘increased need for social care’ and ‘avoidable hospital admissions’. The need for better homes for older adults is echoed by architect Judith Torrington, author of Future of Ageing: adapting homes and neighbourhoods (Government Office for Science). Writing in the Agile Ageing Alliance’s (AAA’s) Neighbourhoods of the Future White Paper, Judith says: ‘Living in a supportive neighbourhood is beneficial to health, well-being and social connectivity. Large numbers of older people become invisible with advancing age, confined indoors by an unsupportive environment and/or physical disability.’ Earlier this year, the AAA published a second edition of Neighbourhoods of the Future. Commissioned by Tata Steel, the new report comes as the UK finds itself in a housing crisis. According to a year-long crossparty housing commission, launched in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster, England needs 3 million new social homes by 2040, more than were built in the two decades after the end of the Second World War.
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Bimlendra Jha, former Chief Executive Officer of Tata Steel UK, identified the magnitude of the challenge ahead: ‘In construction, housing is the single most important problem we currently face. At Tata, we regard this not only as a business opportunity, but also as part of our duty to try and do something better in the communities we serve.’ Speaking at the report’s launch, Lord Best, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Housing and Care for Older People, said: ‘With a large, ready-made market that the unimaginative house building industry is failing to address, there are massive opportunities for creating homes for everyone. Government, local and central, stands to gain from incentivising and supporting a major growth in this fledgling sector, not least in collaboration with housing associations. But the tipping point – when “rightsizing” becomes the norm for those in their 60s and 70s – will arrive when a new generation of entrepreneurs take up the challenge. A market that is worth over £6 billion a year beckons. And with it comes the great prize that both older and younger generations can live in homes that make their lives better.’ According to Tata Steel Marketing Project Manager Matt Teague, Neighbourhoods of the Future is completely aligned with Tata Steel’s illustrious heritage: At the same time as the creation of Tata Steel in 1907, a town grew up around the new steelworks at Jamshedpur. In a letter to his son Dorab, the founder of the Tata Group Jamshedji Tata outlined the following guiding principles for its layout and design:
‘Be sure to lay wide streets planted with shady trees, every other of a quick growing variety. Be sure that there is plenty of space for lawns and gardens. Reserve large areas for football, hockey and parks. Earmark areas for Hindu temples, Mohammedan mosques and Christian churches.’ Such a statement would not have been out of place coming from the pen of Ebenezer Howard, the father of the Garden Cities movement
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in Britain, and demonstrates Tata’s appreciation that – even at a time of rapid industrialisation and population migration from the countryside into the cities and towns – the art of place making; providing a decent, sustainable and, above all, pleasant place for people to live and work, was key to the success of the enterprise as a whole. In 2018 we can still take inspiration from Tata’s words, and recognise that not only do we face the same problems and challenges today, but also new ones. In the western industrialised nations the potential negative impact of an ageing society and the so-called ‘demographic timebomb’ are becoming increasingly apparent. There is an urgent need for a new approach to ageing, one where the knowledge, experience and capabilities of this significant part of the population can be employed (literally and metaphorically) to the advantage and well-being of the individual and wider society. The basis of this approach starts in the home, a place where a person so enabled, can live, work and play without impediments imposed on them by their environment. Well-designed spaces coupled with augmented systems and ‘smart’ services, which have been tailored to the needs of the recipient, are the starting point of a cradle-to-grave approach to housing design where, as the needs of the occupant change over time, the space can adapt with minimal disruption, thus reducing the need for a person to move, and in turn strengthening the building of and continuity of the ‘neighbourhood’. The first Neighbourhoods of the Future white paper set out a manifesto for change and described some of the products, services and, notably, housing designs that could bring about the required paradigm shift in our attitudes and approach to ageing. It seemed like a natural progression to suggest that Neighbourhoods of the Future (2019) should serve as a blueprint for realising the built expression of that change: a Home for Life.
In this spirit we have collaborated with the AAA to produce Neighbourhoods of the Future – a blueprint for the creation of truly intergenerational spaces. This document can be downloaded at: https://www.agileageing.org/page/nof-2019/
‘In a free enterprise the community is not just another stakeholder in business, but is, in fact, the very purpose of its existence’ Age-friendly Cities
Neighbourhoods of the Future includes a section dedicated to the global challenge, produced in partnership with the Grosvenor Group. According to Chief Executive Mark Preston: ‘The world is ageing, particularly in advanced economies. Over the next 30 years, we will see an extra 15,000 people reach retirement age in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries every single day. ‘By 2045 the proportion of the population aged over 65 will rise to 25 per cent, from the current 16 per cent. This equates to 146 million more older adults than there are today – totalling 1.4 billion globally. ‘This demographic shift is set to have a profound impact on society and the social fabric of cities. By 2030 all major urban centres in the OECD will see a sharp increase in the number of older people. These cities will need to adapt and develop a number of short and longerterm strategies to ensure they respond adequately to both the challenges and opportunities that an ageing society presents. ‘For over 340 years, Grosvenor has been developing, managing and investing in properties and places. Whilst there is no silver bullet solution to what is a serious challenge and a defining one for generations to come, we hope that our insights from four diverse cities – Hong Kong, London, Madrid and Vancouver – will further the aims of this white paper by encouraging discussion and debate, involving and encouraging central and local authorities and other relevant stakeholders to work together in recognising the issue and prioritising its resolution.
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Older adults (65+) as a proportion of total city population
Madrid
16% 22%
2015 2030
Vancouver
13% 19%
New York
2015
15% 20%
2030
2015 2030
San Francisco
15% 19%
Washington
13% 17%
2015 2030
Mexico City
7% 12%
Rio de Janeiro
10% 16% 11% 14%
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2% 3%
2015 2030
Buenos Aires
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2030
Lagos
2015 2030
2015
2015 2030
NEIGHBOURHOODS OF THE FUTURE Ă? CREATING A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR OUR OLDER SELVES
Cape Town
6% 8%
2015 2030
2015 2030
London
13% 16%
Stockholm
16% 18%
2015 2030
Berlin
20% 26%
2015 2030
2015 2030
Paris
14% 18%
Milan
22% 27%
2015
2015 2030
2030
Tokyo Shanghai
11% 21%
2015
24% 29%
2015 2030
2030
Hong Kong
16% 27%
Delhi
5% 7% Nairobi
14% 18%
2030
2030
2015 2030
Mumbai 2015
2015
7% 10%
Sydney
2015 2030
14% 18%
2015 2030
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Hong Kong Improving the quality of homes for older people
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NEIGHBOURHOODS OF THE FUTURE Ð CREATING A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR OUR OLDER SELVES
600 square feet is a typical size home for a family of four or more to live together in
326,000 houses will have been built more than 70 years ago by 2045
27% of the population will be over 65 by 2030 and 33% by 2045
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â&#x20AC;&#x153;In Hong Kong, unless older adults require special care, it is not common to put them in a care home.â&#x20AC;?
By Gary Wong Senior Project Development Manager, Hong Kong
Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world and has been ranked by Forbes as the world's most expensive city to buy property in for the seventh year running. The pricing for a residential flat is now averaging between HK$16,000-20,000 per square foot. To make residential property more affordable, developers are increasingly focusing on the development of small flats, primarily targeted at young, single buyers. The high cost of living in Hong Kong means that it is the norm for both parents to work, in turn relying on grandparents for childcare. This adds to the already strong cultural tradition of families staying close or together as a unit. In fact, unless the elderly require special care, it is not common for them to go to a care home. Showing filial respect for one's parents is a virtue of Chinese people. The combination of cultural expectations and the high cost of housing mean that it is typical for a family of four or more to live together in an apartment unit of no more than 600 square feet. But despite the obvious challenges facing Hong Kong, with its rising share of older people, limited space, and a culture of two-year lease lengths, there is sadly little awareness of the issue facing older adults among the public. There are few signs that the authorities are interested in the challenges either, instead focusing on wider issues, such as economic competitiveness. What could the authorities do? Since there is a respect for free trade and enterprise in Hong Kong the government is not minded to impose new conditions on private developments. While the government already has planning rules for new developments aimed at setting minimum standards for the disabled, such as wheelchair access, these could be broadened out and extended to include senior citizens. For example, expanding the current limit on Buildable Floor Area that can be allocated towards recreational use from 5% by say two to three percentage points more, provided the developer commits to integrate a scheme or recreation space that caters to the needs and usage specifically for older adults to help them remain active and integrated in their communities.
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The government could specify a minimum size for apartments in schemes when they tender a land sale for development to ensure that the homes have the flexibility to accommodate multiple generations. There could also be tax incentives, such as tailoring allowances for people living with their parents to be more generous to those families living in more crowded accommodation. A good example of where a project has focused on this demographic is a suite of four projects developed by the Hong Kong Housing Society, a non-government and non-profit organisation, which built 1,224 units between 2003 and 2015. Three - Jolly Place, Cheerful Court, and Tanner Hill - are wholly for older adults, while one, Harmony Place is built for a mix of buyers alongside their elderly parents and offers shared facilities such as a gym, swimming pool, and an activity room. While these schemes have been very successful, delivering fewer than 1,300 units in the past 15 years is definitely not catching up with the market demand. For private developers, the idea of adapting schemes for elderly living is still a work in progress. The sector could look to improve the quality of the offer by working with other sectors to ensure buildings can be adapted as residents age. Developers should also be encouraged to develop products that focus on wellness, which have a positive impact on residents' physical health, mental state and productivity. For example, it's been shown that thoughtful material usage, colours, biophilia design, lighting and use of texture, are features that become increasingly important as people age. There are also good opportunities to cooperate with technology and service providers to include improved telecommunications and internet facilities that senior citizens increasingly take advantage of and may come to rely on more in the future. Constraints of space and pricing will mean the solution will come from adapting existing stock rather than building new properties in Hong Kong. This means enhancing the living areas to include wider corridors, more spacious rooms, a more joyful atmosphere and more greenery as well as better public amenities, to allow older people to remain within their communities. Looking ahead, Hong Kong will always have a high density. That is fine in itself, but in order to meet the challenge of an ageing population the government and developers must work together to ensure the existing stock is adaptable.
NEIGHBOURHOODS OF THE FUTURE Ă? CREATING A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR OUR OLDER SELVES
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London Build-to-rent to ensure our global city remains home to older people
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NEIGHBOURHOODS OF THE FUTURE Ð CREATING A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR OUR OLDER SELVES
ÂŁ2.5 billion is the cost of poor quality housing to the National Health Service every year
80% of older adults wish to age in place
37% increase in number of aged 65+ households by 2029
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“74% of older adults move to places within 100 km (or 1 hr � 1.5 hr train ride) of Central London.”
By Simon Harding-Roots, Executive Director, Grosvenor Britain & Ireland
London is a young and fast-moving city but that does not mean it cannot be a city for older people. Much of the negative language that is attached to the notion of an ageing population is both surprising and frustrating. People are not geriatric at the age of 60 or 70, and many will look forward to as many as 20 years of a really active lifestyle, taking advantage of transport, culture and leisure. The ©silver surfer© generation is an exciting demographic and it means that what we have in London and in the real estate sector is a huge opportunity, especially in a country that does not have a strong culture of keeping older adults within the family unit. We need to move away from the idea that the only option is for the elderly to go into a care or rest home when, in fact, most older people in London, as much as elsewhere, wish to remain independent. The challenge is that many older Londoners are living alone in the family four-bedroomed home that they raised their family in, but which is unlikely to be suitable for an older person. There is a strong opportunity for us as an industry to focus on building communities made up of homes for rent that will meet the needs of all demographics and not just the 25- to 35-year-olds whose faces often adorn modern development hoardings. There is currently an acute lack of the type of accommodation in London that suits all ages. Developers need to capture those elements of a home that older people particularly value, whether that is spacious rooms, wider corridors, storage areas, or some outside space. Including a range of different sized blocks and building with flexibility into a development so the units can be adapted later on is a very cost-efficient way of accommodating residents' future needs.
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Developers should also look to include more public amenities such as ground level open spaces within a proposed new community in order to make it more attractive to the older occupier. Grosvenor hopes to put this into practice in Bermondsey, south-east London, where we have drawn up a masterplan for a mixed use community of 1,500 flats with office, retail and community space. Building for rent means the apartments will typically come with facilities and features such as two standard sized bedrooms and two bathrooms unlike much of London's older stock where there will often be small ©box© rooms as part of the accommodation offer. This takes into account that it is increasingly common for individuals of all ages to share homes, making living in London more affordable. New developments designed with this in mind are more appealing to people who fear being priced out of London. Technology integrated within the very fabric of new buildings will also become an important feature for the increasing tech-savvy older generation. Renting should be seen as a functional way of life that offers flexibility where people might start off in a studio and work their way through the different types of property but within the same development, enabling people to remain in their chosen communities for longer. It can also provide a positive alternative to retrofitting large older houses, which are in demand from families. Tax incentives could play an important role in encouraging older homeowners to sell an oversized family home and so free up housing stock, and for modern regeneration aimed at diverse and integrated communities. A financial incentive to sell, and an exemption from Stamp Duty when buying, could be very beneficial. The good news is that London has made significant strides to make the city more accessible, not just for older adults but for everyone who needs help with mobility, including the disabled and parents with buggies. Whether it is way-finding signage, free public transport, pedestrian zones, dropped kerbs, supermarket deliveries and even taxis at the touch of an App, it makes for a friendlier city for everybody. If we get this right, London will be a more integrated city. With people living for longer in places they are happy in.
NEIGHBOURHOODS OF THE FUTURE Ð CREATING A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR OUR OLDER SELVES
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Madrid Designing new communities that accommodate the older person
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NEIGHBOURHOODS OF THE FUTURE Ă? CREATING A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR OUR OLDER SELVES
1.1 million older adults live in the inner city; over half of the population
84 years the average life expectancy in Madrid is 84, making it the region with the highest life expectancy in Spain
3 out of 4 older adults live in underoccupied buildings
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NEIGHBOURHOODS OF THE FUTURE Ð CREATING A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR OUR OLDER SELVES
“New large-scale land developments in Madrid are now required to incorporate 25% social housing.”
By Fátima Sáez del Cano, Managing Director, Spain Grosvenor Europe
Every crisis brings an opportunity and in the case of Madrid the steep property crash of the last decade has opened a way for the city's developers and authorities to pioneer a new approach to an age-old problem. The downturn means that there has been little property development and low levels of public investment over the last 10 years. Now that confidence is returning, the needs of older adults are back on the agenda and there is an opportunity to implement best practices and designs that have emerged over the past decade. New concepts coming through include shared housing aimed at single women with children, who can support each other with childcare. This idea could be easily adapted to suit older people, overcoming the issue of loneliness and enabling citizens to share costs of living and social care without having to move to a care home. New large-scale land developments in Madrid are now required to incorporate 25% social housing and this could be adapted to include an allocation for older people. In terms of new properties, companies are starting to look at what will appeal to older people. They have to take account of the culture in Spain, which is very much family focused. Grandparents play a large role in helping to take care of their grandchildren for example, which means that families want to live close to (but not with) each other. Therefore, there needs to be a variety of housing to enable people to move within their existing community. This means the concept of a retirement village that is popular in the United States will not attract much interest in Spain. Instead, the industry needs to focus on designing accommodation that is ready now but to which improvements can be made later. We need a revolution that leads to the creation of better alternatives, which will in turn stimulate demand and lead to further innovation. There is a huge opportunity for an industry that is at a
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new starting point. The challenge is to produce something that is attractive to a 55- or 65-year old who may have few additional requirements, but which is flexible and can respond to their changing needs as they age. This will include the flexibility to turn traditional layouts into open plan spaces and providing a main bedroom and bathroom that can still suit the needs of older adults with mobility issues. There is also a huge potential for developers to collaborate with services companies to install features that can help older people, such as incorporating technology that is very intuitive for older people to use and which adds greatly to their wellbeing. The government too can help. Four out of five Spaniards own their home, but it is often their only financial asset, which means that they are reluctant to sell in order to finance living in a retirement home, fearing they will leave nothing to their children when they pass away. The cost of buying and selling homes, including a property transfer tax and notary and registration fees for the buyer and commissions and capital gains taxes for the seller, are high and could be reduced as an incentive to move. The key for developers is to educate the generation who are nearing retirement, helping them understand that there are options between their existing home and a care home. If this group trust developers to deliver high-quality homes that are flexible enough to adapt to their changing needs and at a price that is not just aimed at wealthier households, they are more likely to make the move. The future may lie in the suburbs. Although many of Madrid's older adults live in the city centre, its history and layout make it hard to find new sites or demolish existing buildings that often have no lifts. The move of younger people to suburbs which are well connected to the centre by metro and where there is a supply of ready to develop land, offers the potential to build new neighbourhoods where multi-generations of families can more easily live closer for longer. That would be a positive legacy from the crisis.
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Vancouver Densification key to ease shortage of homes for older adults to rent or buy
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NEIGHBOURHOODS OF THE FUTURE Ð CREATING A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR OUR OLDER SELVES
65 years there are more people over the age of 65 than under 15 in Canada
60% of ethnic minority seniors are Chinese
13% of downtown Vancouver residents are over 65 years old
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â&#x20AC;&#x153; The primary focus of both the public and politicians in Vancouver has been on young people and families and how they will afford to live in the city.â&#x20AC;?
By James Patillo, Managing Director, Development, Grosvenor Americas
Vancouver is a fast growing city but its ability to create sufficient housing to meet the demands of a growing population is generally constrained by lack of available land (surrounded by mountains to the North, an ocean to the West, the United States border to the South, and greenbelt and agricultural land to the East), long entitlement and permit timelines and public resistance. The result of this has been fast-rising property prices and an increasing affordability problem. While this has led to a debate about housing supply, the primary focus of both the public and politicians has been on young people and families and how they will afford to live in the city. My concern is about a lack of attention to the other end of the demographic, the large increase in the ageing population. This constraint on space means densification within existing communities is required, especially as there is a strong desire among older people to remain in neighbourhoods where they have established their lives and social networks. There is overwhelming demand for new residential condominiums and it is not unusual for 100+ unit buildings to sell out in a weekend. However, there is resistance to these types of developments, particularly within the communities where we know there is the most demand for that product. The strong NIMBY (Not-In-My-BackYard) tendencies present in many municipalities means the very people who have reached or are reaching retirement are often the ones opposed to those plans. The challenge for the municipal councils and planning departments is to find solutions to bring more supply onto the market more quickly to meet the needs of people looking to downsize without putting further strain on existing civil and transportation infrastructure. Grosvenor has designed a number of developments aimed at the downsizing market. By way of example, our 98-unit Grosvenor Ambleside development in West Vancouver is designed to meet the needs of the ageing community by including local serving retail outlets and an enhanced public realm.
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The homes have largely been purchased by local older residents who want to remain in the community where their roots are, while being able to walk to local shops and restaurants. Our Connaught development in North Vancouver features 82 homes over three or four storeys with over 60,000 square feet of ground floor retail including full service grocery and drug stores. We have received strong local interest; particularly from downsizers in the immediate vicinity. Our proposed downtown Vancouver condominium development, The Pacific, is also attracting interest from active downsizers who want to enjoy the vibrancy of the urban environment. Another challenge will be to meet the demand from older people who have not built up equity in their homes to fund downsizing and who will require rental apartments in a tight market where the vacancy rate is below 1% regionally. There is a big problem emerging that will likely require government intervention, which could be as simple as rezoning areas for senior assisted living and care homes. The challenge is for municipalities to encourage the construction of more accommodation for both sale and rent, marketed to older people while at the same time meeting demand from the younger generations. Creating balanced communities that serve diverse interests is how healthy societies survive. Hopefully there will also be a change in the way developers look at senior living that produces more options between the current family home and a facility providing full care. People who are ageing nowadays are more active and want to be around like-minded people but do not want or need to go into a care facility. The problem is that I do not see a lot of planning happening in municipalities for making specific zones or land parcels where the only approvable use is senior housing or a care facility. In the absence of deliberate zoning, land prices can escalate to a point where developing certain forms of housing for the ageing is not likely the highest and best use and therefore developers are not likely to do so. One positive trend is the growing YIMBY (Yes-In-My-Back-Yard) movement among the younger generations who are aware that there is a need for more high density housing to respond to the demand created by a growing population and changing demographics. As developers and planners, we have to figure out how to increase the supply while accepting that that process will change the city. That will be a big challenge but it's what has to happen to address the needs of an ageing population.
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AAA would like to thank The Grosvenor Group Research team Graham Parry, Brian Biggs and Simon Chinn The Grosvenor Group Contributors Simon Harding-Roots, James Patillo, Gary Wong and Fatima Saez Del Cano All statistics and images provided by Grosvenor Group with permission to publish in this white paper
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Home truths Is it better to build basic homes with potential than expensive finished products the market can’t afford? Savills director Tom Mann calls for architects to challenge existing models of delivery and design
Everyone – whatever their needs, age, ethnicity, mobility or religion – should have a fundamental right to a decent place to live: four walls and a roof over their head. If only it were that simple. Affordability is a major issue in the private sector. High prices – the average London house-price is £618,000 – mean costs eat up an increasing amount of a buyer’s household income, in many cases well beyond 30 per cent. The market is being propped up by Help to Buy, the government scheme which helps first-time house buyers acquire a new-build property with a deposit of just 5 per cent. Good in theory; problematic on the ground. Back in September 2018, The Times reported that ‘taxpayer cash pouring into the housing market under the government’s Help to Buy scheme is creating a bubble that risks leaving a generation of homeowners stuck in negative equity’. It’s easy to get into debt when the money seems ‘free’ at the time. What makes this all the more alarming is recent data, such as that produced by residential development research specialists Molior London following a series of FOI requests, which shows that in 2018, Help to Buy accounted for around 30 per cent of outer London transactions, 15 per cent of sales in inner London and 25 per cent of London’s house purchases overall.
By fuelling prices, it is putting further upward pressure on the price of residential land which, in turn, makes homes more expensive to buy. Little wonder there is an affordability crisis that is going nowhere fast. Help to Buy will be wound up in 2023. So what happens when the debt bonanza comes to an end? I won’t be sad to see the end of it. For all its good intentions, it hasn’t solved the housing crisis. A 2017 Morgan Stanley report found that builders charge an extra five per cent for properties sold through the Help to Buy scheme: there’s little incentive for a development team to revisit what they’re doing if they can find a ready market at an inflated price. By artificially bolstering the market we are stifling much-needed innovation and creativity, and with prices being pushed up we aren’t meeting the demand where we need it. Surely it’s better to make housing that is truly affordable, at a loan-tovalue ratio that doesn’t store up trouble for later? We just need to work out how. We hear a lot of talk about modern methods of construction, but all we see is modern methods being used to deliver the same problematic builds, albeit at an accelerated rate. Or new, overcomplicated systems that present a raft of new complexities and risks. There are thousands of patents
Shortfall by market sector
Occupier demand Market housing completions Affordable rent and intermediate housing completions
45,000
40,000
42,500
35,000
30,000
25,000
20,000
21,000 18,000
15,000
10,000
11,700
4,330
5,000 3,517
0 New homes (net average completions)
SubMarket Housing
Undersupply is not evenly spread. Savills estimates that 94,000 homes per annum are needed in the London market in order to improve affordability. The majority of
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10,461 7,000 4,000
4,177
2,309
Lower Mainstream (<£450psf)
this demand is concentrated in the markets below £1000 per square foot – and as much as 87 per cent of occupier demand is for homes below £700 per square foot. The greatest shortfall
Mid Mainstream (<£450–700psf)
Mid Mainstream (<£700–1000psf)
by far is in the sub-market housing sector. Savills predicts that the five-year annual average for submarket supply will fall short of demand by almost 39,000 homes a
Lower Prime (£1,000–1,500psf)
year between 2019 and 2023. In the market above £700 per square foot, the forecast five-year annual average supply matches or exceeds occupier demand.
Can we sell, say, a basic shell and core with the bare minimum of finishes and fittings that buyers can improve?
Buyers are waking up to the perils of poorly delivered housing and won’t stand for it. Their collective buying power puts them in charge. What’s needed is a different offer altogether: new ways of delivering homes people want – and can afford – quickly and at volume. We need designers, architects and contractors to work to a common goal, language and system. Housing needs to be designed to be easy, and I mean really easy, to build. A team of builders on a site will have to put it together. Make it too complicated or frustrating and corners will be cut. This calls for ingenuity, creativity and a willingness to rethink how and what we build. Which comes down to good, inspiring design. Luckily this country has anincredible heritage of just that. The industry can’t find this panacea on its own. Policy-makers need to provide the right stimulation and to encourage and reward innovation. For architects though, this is a time of opportunity. The role of ‘Chief Builder’ has been diluted to the industry’s detriment. It’s time the architect reclaimed the centre stage, taking charge of both design and delivery. We need a singular focus, not a compromise born from too many competing visions. Let’s hope the profession is up for the fight. Thomas Mann is a director at Savills London office
Can developers make good margins by doing less but more? At the moment, the focus is on metrics and compliance with guidelines. We seem to have forgotten that housing should be designed and built by people and that people, by their very nature, are creative, entrepreneurial, highly individual – and in a constant state of flux. Income fluctuates. Lifestyles change. Families grow or merge or splinter. Relationships form and fall apart. Real people want homes that can adapt and grow. Homes with quirks and character. Homes they really can afford but then add to – and add value to – when they have spare cash. Sustainability must be taken into account too. By that I don’t mean simply meeting regulatory codes. A simple, flexible, well-designed building should not be single purpose but must be adaptable, durable and built to last, to change. Shortfall 2006-2023
Market Total affordable
100,000 Savills need estimate (94,000) 90,000 80,000 70,000 Draft London Plan target supply (65,000) 60,000 50,000 40,000
41,371
30,000 20,000
26,645
27,739
29,527
25,096
23,777
24,648
26,728
30,179
40,568
38,497
35,080
19,792
10,000
Despite doubling since 2010/11, housing supply in London still falls well below demand. Over the next five years, Savills forecasts there to be just under 38,500 total net homes built on average each year.
Savills 2019–23 forecast (annual average)
2018
2016/17
2015/16
2014/15
2013/14
2012/13
2011/12
2010/11
2009/10
2008/09
GLA annual monitoring report (year to March)
Savills estimate (full year)
New homes (net annual completions)
2007/08
0 2006/07
pending for proprietary systems, all doing different things. How can a builder or developer commit to such systems though, if none are designed to work with each other? What happens if you commit to a system where the supplier goes bust halfway through construction? This is a risk that is killing the opportunity before it has had a chance to get going. Perhaps we should look to the second-hand home market for inspiration. This market offers all kinds of opportunities to buy space within your budget; to invest in something because you see potential, or because it’s all you can afford right now. There is plenty of time to realise that potential – and hence improve its value – as and when funds allow. It’s a model that rewards tenacity and ingenuity, and which encourages people to adapt – rather than to renew – their homes as their circumstances change. As well as creating stability and established communities, this helps to improve the quality of the public realm. People who invest in their homes have an added incentive to look after their neighbourhood. In the new-build sector, the opposite applies. The developer has already ‘unlocked’ all the value. Every inch of developable space has been accounted for, leaving no room for extension. Every corner of the home is fully finished. It might not be to your taste, but you’ve paid for it in the purchase price. From a financial point of view, it’s hard to justify a decision to make any change at all. If and when you want, or need, a different kind of home, your best bet is to sell up and move; a decision which can be costly, disruptive and – once you factor in the cost of stamp duty in London – not as cost efficient as it seems. Bear in mind, too, that developers are obliged to deliver affordable housing, pushing market prices up. I’m not against affordable housing. Far from it. We just need to figure out how to make more housing actually affordable. So what can the new-build sector learn from the second-hand market? Can we sell, say, a basic shell and core with the bare minimum of finishes and fittings on the basis that buyers can improve the spec as funds allow? Can we use the considerable design expertise we have in this country to design new-build housing which is genuinely affordable; which offers the best possible potential for the lowest possible cost?
This falls below the target of 65,000 as referenced in the Draft London Plan and significantly below Savills’ own delivery target of the 94,000 homes needed per year to improve affordability.
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The amodular system: five different modules – fabricated from lightweight steel and designed around the size of a standard delivery lorry – can be combined in different ways to create a range of house types
About turn The construction industry is failing to deliver the housing that councils so desperately need. Isabel Allen talks to Richard Hyams about his strategy for transforming the way affordable housing is procured, financed and built, solving the housing crisis – and changing the world
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Richard Hyams has a quote by the American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead written in large letters on his studio wall. ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’ Hyams is an architect, but he is also an inventor, a problem-solver and an idealist. His practice, astudio, is part think tank, part research laboratory, part design studio – and wholly driven by a determination to ‘leave the place better than we found it’. Architectural projects coexist with an ongoing research programme into subjects including urban balcony farms, algae facades and plant-based air purification systems, a project which dusted off some of NASA’s research from the 1960s that sought to identify which plants were most effective in improving the quality of indoor space – the R&D team dutifully went out and bought what Hyams describes as ‘the kind of plants my Dad liked – spider plants, cheese plants’, giving a corner of the astudio office a 1970s bedsit vibe. This spirit of enquiry is underpinned by can-do mentality – a determination to get results. The practice works with Co-Innovate, an initiative funded by London’s Brunel University and the European Regional Development Fund, which pairs up business students with London-based SMEs to create an ‘innovation ecosystem’ designed to spawn new products and services and the associated jobs and economic
growth. As well as providing funding, the partnership ensures that research projects are underpinned by a solid business plan. ‘We’re a really inventive, entrepreneurial country,’ says Hyams, ‘but most of the value is being lost because we don’t know how to capitalise on our ideas.’ His current preoccupation – modular housing – is a case in point. There are currently some 67,000 patents for modular homes, yet the industry remains in its infancy while many of the patents are being applied abroad. Hyams is determined that his own prefabricated volumetric housing system – amodular, launched in August last year and currently waiting in line to become patent 67,001 – won’t suffer the same fate. ‘We want to solve the housing crisis.’ He says cheerily. ‘It’s as simple as that.’ Changing the system The mission was motivated by a mixture of enlightened self-interest – like many London-based employers, the practice has lost valuable staff members who have moved away from London due to prohibitive housing costs – and evangelising zeal: ‘we should be able to solve it. We wanted to use our expertise as architects to change society for the good.’ It’s a neat system. Five different modules – fabricated from lightweight steel and designed around the capacity of a standard delivery lorry – can be combined in different ways to create a variety of house types. A choice of eight different facade treatments – timber, aluminium,
The first amodular schemes – small blocks of council flats on former garage sites in Barking – are currently on site. The system is ‘just viable’ at this modest scale.
oxidised copper, zinc, corten steel, and two kinds of brick (traditional and contemporary) – allows for a degree of customisation to suit different contexts and clients. It offers all the advantages you’d expect from any well-thoughtthrough system of its kind: quality control, embedded sustainability, reduced waste, high-spec materials at reasonable cost and speedy delivery – the build stage takes less than a quarter of the time required for a traditional construction project. But its real USP is the fact that it comes as part and parcel of an overarching strategy to tackle the issues that are impeding housing delivery. Firstly, there is the modular construction sector itself. Many prominent voices are arguing that modular housing is the most efficient – perhaps the only – way to deliver the 300,000 homes a year that we desperately need.Yet, despite government support, grant relief and the best efforts of manufacturers and investors, we are manifestly failing to produce in bulk. Hyams puts this down to the fact that, ‘it’s still essentially a series of cottage industries. They’re all working to their own particular rules. There’s no standardisation. The components differ from system to system. It’s a real problem for the industry. With traditional construction, if you fall out with your bricklayer, you get another one to take their place. With modular, if you’re committed to one factory and they go out of business or the
relationship goes sour there’s nowhere else to go’. His solution was to establish a framework panel of four different manufacturers, all of whom understand – and have the capacity to deliver – the system, ensuring that there’s a back-up if a partnership falls through. Then there’s the way housing – particularly affordable housing where the need is most acute – is procured. ‘It’s a crazy system’, says Hyams. ‘Boroughs sell a patch of land to a developer. The developer pays over the odds to win the site, spends ages working out how to maximise profit, decides it can’t afford to build affordable housing and then spends a lot of time and effort wriggling out of the deal. The Council’s left thinking “We’ve sold off the land but we haven’t got any homes”.’ Hyams has turned this system on its head. Astudio identifies areas of public land ripe for development and approaches the Council with a business proposition. ‘We don’t make an offer on the land’, says Hyams. ‘We think public land should belong to the taxpayer.’ They give a quote to deliver a given number of homes depending on the capacity of the site. Based on a straightforward formula – £250 per square foot for up to 50 units – the cost represents a turn-key offer that guarantees planning, manufacture and construction for a fixed price. This cost certainty opens up the possibility of new funding opportunities. Hyams has developed partnerships with pension funds and
other financial institutions that will allow boroughs to borrow long-term for low-cost, and pay it back over 25-30 years. The size of the prize The first two amodular schemes – two small blocks of council flats on former garage sites – are being delivered with Be First, the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham’s regeneration company, and Dorsetbased modular manufacturer Rollalong. The projects themselves are modest – 8 and 13 homes respectively. But the potential is huge. At this scale, the projects are ‘just viable’. Economies of scale mean that larger projects can be delivered with 30-35 per cent knocked off the price. The mid-term aim is to build 500 units a year at optimum cost. Be First’s mission is to ensure that 50,000 new homes are built in the borough of Dagenham and Barking in the next 20 years. Over the same time period, the UK has to build 3 million affordable homes to meet its housing needs. The combination of cost certainty, cheap finance and a reliable highquality product makes amodular well-positioned to claim a good chunk of the market. It could be transformational – if nobody gets greedy. The reduction in unit costs offers the potential for increased profit margins. ‘What’s the point?’ asks Hyams. ‘The whole idea is to make it cheap and easy to build as many houses as possible. We’re not doing it to maximise profit. We’re trying to change the world.’ Summer 2019 |Citizen|169
Talking heads
Alastair Parvin Architecture for the people by the people Designer Alastair Parvin asks: ‘What if, instead of architects creating buildings for those who can afford to commission them, regular citizens could design and build their own houses? His solution is WikiHouse, an open-source construction system that makes 3D models accessible to download and 3D print for construction use. ‘We’re moving into this future where the factory is everywhere. That really is an industrial revolution.’
TED talks offer the latest thinking on future-proofing the city. Jason Sayer summarises the talks worth listening to
Mara Mintzer
Tom Hulme
Yale Fox
How kids can help design cities In most of the developed world, you get to vote aged 18.Yet you can start work (and paying taxes) much earlier. Kids make up a quarter of the world’s population, so they ought to have a say in how the world they’ll inherit is going to look. Urban planner Mara Mintzer asks: what would happen if we asked children to design our cities? As this talk demonstrates, kids and adults think about the issues in completely different ways. Adults focus on constraints: time, money, cost and how dangerous it could be. Kids consider the possibilities.
What can we learn from shortcuts? Designer and Google Venture general partner Tom Hulme lives by Highbury Fields in north London. ‘It’s absolutely beautiful. There’s a big open green space. There are Georgian buildings around the side. But then there’s this mud trap that cuts across the middle. People clearly don’t want to walk all the way around the edge. Instead, they want to take the shortcut, and that shortcut is selfreinforcing.’ Shortcuts – desire lines – are signifiers of what people really want. But what can we learn from this? In this talk, Hulme lays out three examples of the intersection of design and user experience, where people have developed their own desire paths out of necessity. Once you know how to spot them, you’ll start noticing them everywhere. ‘Our job is to watch for these desire paths emerging, and, where appropriate, pave them.’
Home renters are powerless, but the problem can be fixed Income inequality is the highest it’s been in nearly a century. Wage declines are making home ownership more and more difficult, leading to increasing numbers of renters. Housing advocate Yale Fox thinks this is a huge problem, since most renters have little power to change fluctuating market prices or the condition of their rentals. Furthermore, landlord negligence in New York City and Toronto causes $750 million of damage, which is falling on the taxpayer in the form of building inspections, legal issues, health issues and tenant displacement among others. In this talk, Fox introduces his company Rentlogic, a system that uses city data to rate apartments and landlords – and helps renters to find the best places to live.
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Amanda Burden
Mark Raymond
Parag Khanna
How public spaces make cities work ‘One of the more wonky things about me is that I am an animal behaviourist,’ declares Amanda Burden. ‘And I use those skills not to study animal behaviour but to study how people in cities use city public spaces.’ Burden has helped to plan some of New York City’s newest public spaces (where such land has to be fought for to begin with) employing her belief that lively, enjoyable common ground is key to planning a great city.
Victims of the city Looking at the evolution of the Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago, architect and local Mark Raymond asks us to do away with outdated barometers for success – typically financial return on investment – and design cities for social change. ‘We need to encourage all types of activity: spaces for performance, spaces for children to play in and learn that it’s cool to be around other people regardless of their social or economic circumstance’, argues Raymond. He shows how design can impact on the lives of people who can no longer afford to live in the centre of cities and are unable to participate actively or fully in a consumerised, capitalised system. ‘If everybody feels part of the society, then we have a much better chance of ensuring a sustainable future.’
How megacities are changing the map of the world As our expanding cities grow ever more connected through transport, energy and communications networks, we evolve from geography to what Parag Khanna calls ‘connectography’. It is ‘connectivity, not sovereignty, that has become the organising principle of the human species’. This emerging global network civilisation holds the promise of reducing pollution and inequality – and even overcoming geopolitical rivalries.
Justin Davidson
Devita Davison
Robert Muggah
Why glass towers are bad for city life – and what we need instead Imagine that everybody in a room looked almost exactly the same: ageless, raceless, generically goodlooking. ‘That is the kind of creepy transformation that is taking over cities, only it applies to buildings, not people,’ says architecture critic Justin Davidson. From Houston, Texas to Guangzhou, China, shiny towers of concrete and steel covered with glass are cropping up like an invasive species. Davidson explains how the exteriors of buildings shape the urban experience – and what we lose when architects stop using the full range of available materials. Glass towers enrich their owners and tenants, but not necessarily the lives of those of us who navigate the spaces between the buildings. ‘We tend to think of a facade as being like make-up, a decorative layer applied at the end to a building that’s effectively complete. But just because a facade is superficial doesn’t mean it’s not also deep.’
How urban agriculture is transforming Detroit Once an industrial giant, Detroit today has become a poster child for urban decay. A scarcity of retail, particularly fresh food retail, has resulted in 70 per cent of Detroiters being overweight and obese. Fearless farmer Devita Davison explains how the city’s plight has left pockets of land ideal for urban agriculture. Join Davison for a walk through neighbourhoods in transformation.
The biggest risks facing cities – and some solutions With fantastic new maps that show interactive visual representations of urban fragility, megacities expert Robert Muggah articulates an ancient but resurging idea: cities shouldn’t just be the centre of economics – they should also be the foundation of our political lives. There’s a reason why three million people are moving to cities every single week, they are where the future happens first. Megacities are punching above their weight economically, but below their weight politically. And that, Muggah argues, is going to have to change. Looking around the world, from Syria to Singapore, Seoul and beyond, Muggah submits six principles for how we can build more politically resilient cities. ‘Cities are open, creative, dynamic, democratic, cosmopolitan, sexy,’ Muggah says. ‘They’re the perfect antidote to reactionary nationalism.’
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The London School of Architecture 2018/19 Charity number 1159927 Established 2015 the-lsg.org instagram.com/LSofARCH @LSofARCH Founder / Director Will Hunter Board of Trustees Crispin Kelly (Chair), Davina Mallinckrodt, Deborah Saunt, Diana Rice, Harbinder Birdi, Margaret Stephens, Nick Bliss, Robert Mull, Roland Oakshett. Sub-committees: John Oliver (Audit & Risk); Carolyn Larkin (Finance & Resources) Faculty Alan Powers (Leader of Historical Studies), Clive Sall (Director of Proto-Practice), James Soane (Director of Critical-Practice), Jason Sayer (Network Coordinator), Lara Kinneir (Leader of Urban Studies), Lewis Kinneir (Leader of Technical Studies), Marilyn Dyer (Registrar), Nicola Read (Deputy Director), Peter Buchanan (Critical Practice lecturer), Stephanie Rice (Operations Manager) Academic Court Nigel Coates (Chair), Farshid Moussavi Academic Partner London Metropolitan University External Examiners Alessandra Cianchetta, Jamie Fobert First Year Tutors Akari Takebayashi (Heatherwick Studio), Kaye Hughes (Khaa), Matthew Whittaker (Whittaker Parsons), Rae WhittowWilliams (Greater London Authority), Steve Smith (Urban Narrative), Tomas Klassnik (The Klassnik Corporation), Theo Games Petrohilos (Unknown Works) Design Think Tank Leaders Adaptive Typologies: Harbinder Birdi, Benjamin Graham, Fiona Stewart and Mikel Azcona (Hawkins/Brown) Architectural Agency: Christoph Egret (Studio Egret West), Thomas Bryans (IF_DO) Emerging Tools: Angie Jim and Sarah Curran (Allies and Morrison), Maria-Chiara Piccinelli and Maurizio Mucciola (PiM.studio Architects) Global Currents: Javier Quintana de Uña (IDOM), Rafael Marks and Anna-Lisa Pollock (Penoyre & Prasad) Metabolic City:Yasir Azami and Andrew McEwan (Orms) New Knowledge: Peter Swallow (Grimshaw), Akari Takebayashi (Heatherwick Studio) Second Year Tutors Ben Gibson (Gibson Thornley Architects), Carl Turner (Carl Turner Architects), Cathy Hawley (Citizens Design Bureau), Jesper Henriksson (Hesselbrand), Jessie Turnbull (MICA architects), Lewis Kinneir (Carmody Groarke / Skyroom), Paolo Vimercati (Grimshaw), Paolo Zaide (Ravensbourne University), Philip Turner (AHMM) Technical Studies tutors Tara Clinton and William Whitby (Arup) Technical Partner Arup Thank you to Arup who have supplied exceptional support to the design studio, with input from Amanda
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Williamson, Andy Sedgwick, Angus Tidey, Carolina Bartram, Chris Clarke, Daisy Hobson, Deni Siampou, Hasan Yousef, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Rose, Tom Rolls, Will Arnold, Yolande De Souza Visiting Critics Alastair Parvin (00/Open Systems Lab), Alicia Pivaro (University of Westminster), Alison Brooks (Alison Brooks Architects), Andrew Houlton (Houlton Architects), Ashmi Thapar (Bell Phillips Architects), Barbara Campbell-Lange (Bartlett School of Architecture), Ben Gibson (Gibson Thornley), Ben Hayes (Bartlett School of Architecture), Bob Allies (Allies and Morrison), Charles Walford (Stanhope), Daisy Froud (Bartlett School of Architecture), Dan Bridge (Royal Docks team, GLA), David Kohn (David Kohn Architects), Eleanor Hill (Parti Architecture Studio), Forbes Massie (Forbes Massie Studio), Freddie Phillipson (Freddie Phillipson Architect), Gavin Miller (MICA), Jack Self (Real Review), Jillian Jones (London Metropolitan University), Joanna Roberts (the Crown Estate), Joe Morris (Morris + Company), Joseph Henry Zeal (Greater London Authority), Kate Goodwin (Royal Academy), Katharine Heron (University of Westminster), Lee Ivett (Baxendale Studio), Lee Mallett (Urbik), Lydia Johnson (Citizens Design Bureau), Matthew Barac (London Metropolitan University), Maurizio Mucciola (PiM.Studio), Melanie Dodd (Central St Martins), Mellis Haward (Archio), Murray Kerr (Denizen Works), Niall McLaughlin (Niall McLaughlin Architects), Nicholas Olsberg (curator and historian), Paloma Gormley (Practice Architecture), Patricia Brown (Central), Paul Eaton (Allies and Morrison), Paul Karakusevic (Karakusevic Carson Architects), Paul O’Brien (Karakusevic Carson Architects), Phineas Harper (The Architecture Foundation), Rae Whittow-Williams (Project Orange), Richard Wentworth (sculptor and teacher), Roz Barr (Roz Barr Architects), Sarah Castle (IF_DO), Scott Grady (Haptic Architects), Simon Allford (Allford Hall Monaghan Morris), Simon Henley (Henley Halebrown), Stephen Rigg (CZWG), Steve Smith (Urban Narrative), Steve Tomlinson (London Legacy Development Corporation), Stuart Cade (MICA), Theo Games Petrohilos (Unknown Works), Val Rose (Lund Humphries), William Mann (Witherford Watson Mann) Design Reviews 2018/19 Alan Higgs (Alan Higgs Architects), Barbara Campbell-Lange (Bartlett School of Architecture), Catherine Du Toit (51 architecture), Charlotte Skene Catling (Skene Catling de la Peña), Eric Parry (Eric Parry Architects), Fenella Collingridge (Peter Salter Architects), John O’Mara (Herzog & de Meuron), Joseph Henry Zeal (Greater London Authority), Katy Marks (Citizens Design Bureau), Kevin Carmody (Carmody Groarke), Lionel Real de Azúa (Red Deer), Louise Palomba (Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners), Matthew Dalziel (Interrobang), Max Rengifo (WRAP), Michal Cohen (Walters & Cohen Architect), Oliver Goodhall (We Made That), Robert Mull (University of Brighton), Roddy Langmuir (Cullinan Studio)
Saturday Skills Club Beth Rodway (Royal Drawing School), Theo Games Petrohilos (Unknown Works), Eleanor Dodman (Architectural Association) Royal Academy Lecture Series, Bodies of Thought 2018/19 Curated and chaired by Vicky Richardson: Fumihiko Maki; David Kohn; Liza Fior Drawing Matter talks Tina di Carlo; Chiara Barrett and Phelan Heinsohn; Niall Hobhouse Wednesday Nighters Graham West (West Architecture); Morgwn Rimel (former director of The School of Life); Adam Nathanial Furman; Nigel Coates; Hugh McEwen (Office S&M); David Leech & Benni Allan (EBBA); Alisha Morenike Fisher (3°09 Design Collective); Alice Brownfield (co-chair of Part W) Mega Crit With the LSE Cities Programme, Public Practice and the Royal Drawing School Supporters A very special thank you to the practices, partners and patrons who have supported the school and made our work possible: Founding Patrons Niall Hobhouse, Crispin Kelly, Sir Terry Leahy, Nadja Swarovski Founding Practices Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Allies and Morrison, Foster + Partners, Grimshaw, IDOM, Orms, PDP London, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, Scott Brownrigg Founding Partners Kingspan Insulation, Stanhope, Savills, Tata Steel Partner 2018/19 Minotti Patron Practices 2018/19 Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Foster + Partners, Grimshaw, Orms, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, Carmody Groarke, Hawkins\Brown, Founding Benefactors Richard Collins, Martin Halusa, Sir Peter Mason, Davina Mallinckrodt Foundations The Garfield Weston Foundation, The Schroder Foundation, The Drake Trust Strategic Partners Caro Communications, CulturalAgenda, Drawing Matter, Makerversity Ambassadors Carolyn Larkin (Chair), Charlotte Skene Catling, Eleanor Hill, Kate Stirling, Matthew Claudel, Rohan Silva, Theresa Simon, Tom Leahy Alumni ambassadors Aleksandar Stojakovic, Alexander Frehse, Chiara Barrett, Daniel Lee, Fiona Stewart, Phelan Heinsohn, Raphael Arthur, Milly Salisbury, Maeve Dolan, Dawa Pratten, Andrea Nolan, Fearghal Moran
Graduates 2019 Abiel Hagos, Alessandro Carlucci, Alice Hardy, Annecy Attlee, Cameron Lintott, Christina Persa Tzemetzi, Craig Page, Cristina Gaidos, Eloise Rogers, Fraser Morrison, Jaahid Ahmad, James Clarke, Joe Walker, Josh Fenton, Katie Oliver, Maelys Garreau, Matthew Barnett, Matthew Him Lo Man, Maxim Sas, Michael Cradock, Nelli Wahlsten, Nicholas Shewan, Oluwaseyi Adewole, Philippine Wright, Pierre Longhini, Robert Buss, Roni Zachor Barak, Samuel Nicholls, Sara Lambridis, Simon Banfield, Tim Rodber, Tobias Parrott, Tom Badger, Vojtech Nemec, William Bellamy, Zivile Volbiknite Practice Network 51 architecture, 5th Studio, ACME, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Alan Baxter, Alan Higgs Architects, aLL Design, Allies and Morrison, alma-nac, AOC, Apt, Ash Sakula, Assemble, Astudio, Aukett Swanke, BAT Studio, BDP, Beasley Dickson, Brady Mallalieu, BuckleyGreyYeoman, Carl Turner Architects, Carmody Groarke, C.F. Møller, Chris Dyson, Citizens Design Bureau, Clive Sall Architecture, Coffey Architects, Coppin Dockray, Cullinan Studio, Dallas–Pierce– Quintero, David Kohn Architects, daykin marshall, De Matos Ryan, Dow Jones, DSDHA, Morris + Company, Erect Architecture, Eric Parry Architects, EVA Studio, Farrells, Foster + Partners, Gensler, Grimshaw, HAT Projects, Hawkins\Brown, Haworth Tompkins, Henley Halebrown, Henning Stummel Architects, Herzog & de Meuron, Hesselbrand, HOK, Hopkins Architects, HÛT, IDOM, IF_DO, Interrobang, Jan Kattein Architects, Jestico + Whiles, John McAslan + Partners, Karakusevic Carson, Liddicoat & Goldhill, Lipton Plant Architects, Maccreanor Lavington, Marcus Beale Architects, Marko & Placemakers, MICA, Mikhail Riches, NBBJ, NG Architects, One Works, Orms, PDP London, Penoyre & Prasad, Piercy&Company, Prewett Bizley, Project Orange, Red Deer, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, Scott Brownrigg, Scott Tallon Walker Architects, ScottWhitbystudio, Simpson Studio, Skene Catling de la Pena, SODA, Solid Space, Something & Son, Squire & Partners, Stanton Williams, Studio Egret West, Studio Weave, Studio Octopi, Surman Weston, SUSD, Takero Shimazaki Architects, Tate Harmer, The Klassnik Corporation, Tonkin Liu, vPPR, Walters & Cohen, Waugh Thistleton, We Made That, WHAT_architecture, William Smalley Architect, Wimshurst Pelleriti, Formation Architects, WilkinsonEyre, Freehaus Design, UnderCover Architecture, WestonWilliamson+Partners, Wright & Wright With a special thanks to our space providers AKT II, Alan Baxter, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Allies & Morrison, alma-nac, Brady Mallalieu Architects, Carmody Groarke, Chris Dyson Architects, Cullinan, Studio Large, Erect Architecture, Farrells, Foster + Partners, Grimshaw, HOK, HÛT INTBAU, Jan Kattein Architects, Karakusevic Carson Architects, MICA, Modern House, NBBJ, Penoyre & Prasad Architects, Pilbrow & Partners, Apt, Sheppard Robson, SODA, Squire and Partners, Studio Egret West
Schlüter ®D IT R A - H E AT electric und ertile heatin - E - D U O g and soun reduction fo d r walls and floors
Schlüter ®LI PROTE C lighting pro file techno logy
Schlüter ®T on-trend te RENDLINE xtured pro files
Schlüter ®K E R D I- B O ARD waterproo f, cement-fr ee tile backer board
Schlüter ®to complem P R O F IL E S ent tile and stone
Schlüter ®D IL E X movement joints
Schlüter ®BEKOTEC -THERM hydronic u nderfloor heating and modula r screed s ystem
PROBLEM SOLVED
Schlüter ®D IT R A 2 5 uncoupling and crack-br idging membrane
Schlüter-Systems When it comes to specifying tile and stone, early consideration of the right preparation and finishing solutions is essential. Since 1966, Schlüter-Systems has been the goto manufacturer for protecting tile and stone. Single-source solutions for waterproofing, drainage, edge protection and decoration, underfloor heating and managing movement make for installations that are designed to last. Backed up by expert technical support, whenever, wherever you need it. Making the decision to choose Schlüter-Systems even easier. To find out more call 01530 813396 or visit www.schluterspecifier.co.uk Summer 2019 |Citizen|173
An enduring dedication to protecting tile and stone
Schlüter-Systems is the market leader in essential accessories for tile and stone; its overarching aim is to ensure that you have the perfect support, protection and decoration for these beautiful materials. This global company has intensely practical roots, being founded over 50 years’ ago by master tiler Werner Schlüter. All customers benefit from Mr Schlüter’s time on the tools, during which he set out to solve the practical problems of the tiling industry. Today, the company is still family owned and firmly focused on innovating the everyday for the benefit of installers and specifiers. Its portfolio started with the simple yet game-changing invention of the tile edge profile, Schlüter®-SCHIENE, created to provide a neat and practical finishing touch to an installation. Fast-forward to 2019, and construction professionals can choose from over 10,000 products for a range of key applications:
> Leicestershire: The Application Gallery The Application Gallery is a key attraction at the head offices of Schlüter-Systems Ltd, showcasing where and how our products are used and the designs possible with tile and stone in the modern living and leisure environment.
> take our 360 VR tour Our Google 360 Tour with VR functionality offers a more interactive way to understand what we do here at Schlüter-Systems Ltd. From the comfort of your own chair, you can tour our headquarters, which are packed full of examples of our products in situ.
Balconies and terraces Wetrooms and waterproofing Underfloor heating Uncoupling and movement joints Tile-edge profiles
>> explore in-person or from your chair! To explore now, or request one of our Google Cardboard headsets to upgrade your experience to VR, visit www.exploreschluter.co.uk
>> London: 49 Leather Lane A collaborative showroom between Pentagon Tiles, SchlüterSystems Ltd and Ardex, 49 Leather Lane incorporates an exhibition space with tactile samples, a fully functioning wetroom and meeting rooms, as well as inspiration abound.
> read a great industry guide Schlüter-Systems is a key contributor to The Specifier’s Guide to Tile and Stone, a unique guide to the tile and stone industry. The publication contains over 30 articles that together cover the main products and trends that specifiers will come into contact with. To request a copy, email specifier@schluter.co.uk
Learn more at www.schluter.co.uk
>> here to support you at every stage >> build a knowledge base with our CPDs We have provided RIBA Approved CPD seminars for over 20 years, recognising the value we can add to projects across a variety of sectors. More recently, we have introduced a collection of Lunch and Learn sessions, which focus intensively on certain product ranges. Both our RIBA Approved CPD seminars and Lunch and Learn sessions are delivered by your local SchlĂźter specification expert, ensuring a solid learning experience.
>> RIBA Approved CPD seminars
>> lunch and learn sessions
Our suite of RIBA Approved CPD seminars educates on the techniques, standards and products to employ for long-lasting installations of tile and stone. Lasting around 45-60 minutes, each presentation focuses a key application area for the industry.
Our Lunch and Learn sessions concentrate on developments and products that have the greatest impact from an aesthetic point of view. Designed to fit comfortably into a 30-minute window, they are a more informal learning experience particularly suited to interior designers.
>> find the right solutions with our Specification Team
>> home in on tricky details with our Technical Team
The specialist consultants of our Specification Team are always on hand to assist with projects from conception right through to installation, and provide the first line of response upon contacting our offices. The team is carefully structured to provide an efficient and effective service â&#x20AC;&#x201C; each office-based consultant is matched with an area consultant out on the road and projects are handled from conception to completion by the same pairing. This provides you with a consistent, dual point of contact and immediate access to advice from consultants who possess a full working knowledge of what you are trying to achieve.
The particulars of each tile and stone project are unique; our first-rate Technical Team helps you to navigate the intricacies of the design process, offering a variety of services to ensure that no detail is left unchecked. These services include advising on NBS specifications, CAD and BIM, as well as providing on-site support for architects, contractors and main installers.
Ready to start your specification journey or looking for advice? Call our Specification Team on 01530 813396 or email specifier@schluter.co.uk. Learn more at www.schluter.co.uk
A view from the sticks
Victoria Glendinning celebrates London’s capacity to reinvent itself and imagines a future where its wealthiest enclaves are reclaimed by wild greenery and the dispossessed
The way we live now On the outskirts of London a new housing estate ends abruptly in a ragged field, doubtless soon to be built upon. Further in, street names refer to lost landmarks, and bluebells persist in gardens unaware of the long-ago destruction of their woodland habitat. Cities are fluid, and ever-expanding. It was ever thus, and there is no ‘one size fits all’ theory of how to solve the problems of the world’s mega-cities. They have evolved differently. Their populations are different. There can be no template. Where I live now, in a small town in south-west England, there is a preponderance of what Victorians called ‘middling people’. There are struggling people too. We have food banks. But there is not the shameful pressure of obscenely gross economic inequality. Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, in the mid-19th century, recorded lives more degraded than anything in London today. But not by much. For the other end of the scale, read Anthony Trollope’s masterpiece TheWay We Live Now (1875): it’s all there. The unscrupulous wealthamassing financiers, the stock market frauds, the venalities of those we now call trust fund kids – it is still ‘the way we live now’. Naturally, because global capitalism and social fairness exist in opposition. We can’t start again. The cities are already there – intractable, organically sprawling and spawning. The only constant is inconstancy. The ‘great rebuilding’ of the Elizabethan period in England rendered old urban housing stock dispensable. Ever since there were cities, there have been new buildings going up (and in our time, up and up and up) continuously; and older buildings demolished, continuously, unless they become designated as ‘heritage’. And the citizens? Whether nativeborn or immigrant, our lives there are as fluid as the city itself.York was my first city. Trips to London in my childhood started at York station – in itself, a universe.
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As the train neared King’s Cross, I was mesmerised every time by the rows of narrow, grimy terraced brick houses, each with its narrow, grimy strip of garden, lining the tracks. (All swept away, decades ago.) This was London? London was not serious, to the provincial child. It meant ‘seeing the sights’, and unfamiliar aunts. Real life happened in the north. Part of me still believes that. Unfaithful to York from young adulthood, I embraced other European cities before London took me in. And I, privileged by my work-life, took London in, liking its simultaneous anonymity and intimacy. I see a figure in black stalking the streets, no one knowing who or where I was, on my way to a club in a red-painted cellar, or to lunch with someone I probably should not have been having lunch with. And parties, from posh to
Unscrupulous wealthamassing financiers, stock market frauds, venalities of those we now call trust fund EDC ‘the kids – it isBY77still MARGARET STREET way we live now’ LONDON W1W 8SY T. +44 020 73233233 SALES@MINOTTI.CO.UK
sinister, and meeting enough extraordinary people to fill a bucket with pebbles were I to drop in their names. I did most of my writing work between 10pm and 2am. I had found my tribe. London is made up of intersecting tribes. Hence knifecrime, among other things. London has no equivalent word for the French quartier or the Spanish barrio, though the latter term has come to mean something other. Yet London remains a cluster of residual or notional ‘villages’, which give stability. I heard this week about a woman in Bermondsey who has never been north of the river. She just doesn’t see the need. My current London ‘village’, where I merely perch, is Borough Market, one stop from her Bermondsey. After the terrorist attack in 2017 there was an upsurge of solidarity – on behalf of our market traders, and of fellowresidents who, if they were in during the attack, were not allowed out beyond the police cordon for days; and if they were out, were not allowed back in. There were cats who had to be fed. This was ‘community’ in action. A return to normality meant women again crying out in the night (listen to Tracy Chapman’s ‘Last night I Heard a Woman Screaming’, best song ever); and homeless people lying outside London Bridge Tube at the end of my street. Yet it is so good to see bands of friends of mixed ethnicities and origins promenading on our Bankside. Brexit? You cannot put the clock back on this melding. I love too the shift to East London, and imagine in years to come the abandoned houses of billionaires in West London, reclaimed not only by wild greenery but by the dispossessed, and by the promise of change. For nothing is for ever. Nothing remains the same. Not even the same remains the same. Victoria Glendinning is a writer and critic, and the Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature
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