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sustainable placemaking forum 79 Parkway London NW1 7PP tel. 020 7485 8555 fax 020 7485 1232 |
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seminar proceedings |
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A seminar series organised by HTA Architects Ltd Report of seminar held on 'A sense of place: the role of innovation' on 19 April 1999 in London Introduction A sense of place was the theme of the first conference on sustainable placemaking, held on 19 April 1999 at the Royal College of Physicians in London. The event - organised by HTA Architects Ltd - was attended by more than 100 delegates from a wide range of organisations involved in planning, developing and managing housing and community development. The main themes that emerged were:
Government aim is urban renaissance - Nick Raynsford The Government wants to see more emphasis on creating places and less on building ‘housing’ estates, construction minister Nick Raynsford told delegates. "Creating places for people is one of the key themes of the draft new planning policy guidance on housing," he stated. "New PPG3 is a radical document with firm emphasis on placemaking. Indeed our overall aim is to achieve nothing less than an urban renaissance. The guidance is intended to ensure provision of sufficient housing so that everyone has the opportunity of a decent home." He listed as requirements for authorities under PPG3:
He said:" New urban areas can contribute to creating more sustainable patterns of development if they are located in the right place, have a well-planned transport infrastructure, are developed at appropriate densities and provide a range of local facilities. He stressed the importance of ‘urban extensions’ for development. The Government had backed the scheme at Stevenage because otherwise there would be a more diverse pattern of development throughout rural Hertfordshire which "would almost certainly generate more car journeys", and avoid the benefits of concentrating development around an urban area where there are existing amenities in place and employment opportunities as well". It was a sustainable and responsible - albeit controversial - response. He said that if planners and developers were to create quality communities where people choose to live, current practices would need to change. "How places are designed will be absolutely critical to their success," he said. It would require much more creative thinking about placemaking, making towns and cities more attractive and sustainable. Substantial remodelling would be needed in many existing places. Wholesale demolition and "starting from scratch" of the past failed to take account of the very real human need to feel a sense of belonging, a fundamental requirement of good urban design. Positive planning was about having a vision and a strategy rather than just a series of planning control policies. More sophisticated master planning skills would be needed. But he stressed that it was not possible to achieve regeneration without the active support of all the key stakeholders and taking the local community along. Consumer choice and flexibility are key - Ken Bartlett Innovation – "a very wide agenda" - means "changing our perspectives away from physical property provision and management and towards a preoccupation with the development of high quality places and the way they are served, places in which people want to live," Ken Bartlett, advisor to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, declared as he introduced the seminar theme ‘A sense of place: the role of innovation’. It meant changing from a centrally driven, supplier-dominated and rather homogenous mode, to something where there was local determination and flexibility, where there was consumer choice and diversity of provision. "It means eroding the existing public and private division which has been so damaging to the structure of our cities and has created geographical division between poor and rich people," Mr Bartlett said. Among problems he listed was the current urban scene which was dominated by ageing stock, with renewal blocked by the diversity of owners. "In the UK we have no mechanisms for land assembly, no systematic approach to identifying and assembling land in places where the houses have passed their sell-by date." This was in contrast to Germany and France. The issue was aggravated by land values that doubled house prices in 30 years. Construction prices in real terms had fallen slightly. "As a result we pay twice as much for houses now. That process creates a massive affordability problem," he said. "The UK market is protecting the interests of land values and owners and not those of buyers and affordability. We need mechanisms to pass on the benefits of cost reductions to consumers." He hoped that the government would hold its nerve on some of the ideas in PPG3 so that it did not simply become a wish list. An example was the hint in that there would be greater use of compulsory purchase orders in assembling land. He pointed to the need for change in regulation. "What we really need is leadership. The attitudes of regulators – building requirements and planning - is dominated by a series of outdated priorities." It included provision for cars and density levels. "There is a danger that in the reaction to the disasters that have been created by medium and high rise high density development we produce very low density which results in very low class, unexciting areas which are also economically unviable." On placemaking, Ken Bartlett said there was a need to avoid an obsession with the built form. "Somewhat reluctantly I have come to the conclusion or recognition that good houses in a bad place will not survive, but unfortunately bad houses in a good area change hands for large sums." He concluded with a plea to make places pleasurable. "Can we make cities places of choice?" he asked. " There are successful examples which we can use from other countries and also this country. We need to replicate those and develop them further." "People want to live in the cities and hear the birds sing – and why not? We can do that." Heritage must not be a barrier - Pam Alexander It is not money that stops us achieving a sense of place, Pam Alexander, chief executive of English Heritage, believes. "Through the 1990s, housing associations have had undreamed of amounts of money coming their way," she pointed out. "We reached 70 000 new homes in the mid 1990s. That was unbelievable but it didn't achieve quality. Of course there are some great developments that have come form that time but there is also a awful lot of housing that we are rather embarrassed about." She suggested one of the reasons had been a concern in some parts of government that if you created "lovely houses at affordable rents, demand would go up, with no hope of meeting it". She went on: "It is essential that productivity should not become once again quantity rather than quality. But there is also the emphasis on sustainability. Knowing we are heading for sustainable development which will create a sense of place, in turn creates the confidence which brings in the private investment that enables it to happen." Pam Alexander explained the role of English Heritage in understanding the character and significance of existing environments. "We mustn't see the heritage - the environment we are building in - as a barrier to what we are doing but as an opportunity as something that can add value to what we can now achieve," she said. "Understanding the stories, the layers, and the context is what enables us to appraise the character of areas and make sure that what we do adds more to the sum of the parts rather than becoming a dissonant part of that whole. And it also enables us to identify the opportunities - those parts of the environment that don’t add value, that are not valued by the community that are therefore are an opportunity for something new, something different which will add value for the future." Pam Alexander revealed that she has a personal aspiration to make English Heritage the Blue Peter of the built environment. "We have got a generation of young people who value the natural environment - they don't have told that recycling matters or the environment around them matters - they know it. They wonder we don't seem to know it. "No one's done that job for the built environment. If we could build a generation of young people who value it a great part of our job would be done for us." Grant should be linked to efficiency - Bob Millar No efficiency gain, no public money should be the simple rule or condition for any grant from a public source, according to Bob Millar, director of Miller Homes. Presenting a private sector developer’s view he said: "I can see no reason why the Improved Efficiency Agenda cannot be tied directly in to public grants. There is a simple reason for it – the effectiveness of the use of public grant is increased if the efficiency of the housebuilding industry improves." His ‘bottom three’ defining features of the industry were:
Mr Millar said there were signs of improvement such as the Millennium Village and Allerton Bywater in which his company was involved. But the response from the industry was at best patchy, and the process was painful. "By painful I mean that our main partner left the team halfway through because the new thinking was just too much for them. "We have got a fantastic scheme, we will learn new tricks and we will be better for it. When you hear senior people in the housebuilding industry saying they were actually glad that they did not win the competition, then I really do believe that reflects sadly on them." He suspected that housing developers are not ideally organised to optimise performance in urban regeneration. Miller Homes had concluded that it was likely to be a very large market. The company decided it required a breadth of expertise and skills including housing, finance – including PFI – commercial development and construction. On Norfolk Park, Sheffield where Miller Homes is lead developer, with North British HA, HTA Architects and Enterprise plc, he said: "We are requiring people to behave differently. We having to work hard at this relationship," Mr Millar said. "We have written down, for the avoidance of doubt, how we will all behave. A colleague of mine has labelled it ‘corporate maturity’: this is all about openness, communicating, working together meaningfully, mutual understanding and certainly mutual trust and respect. "We are combining the right blend of human and financial resources. It’s a community creation, or re-creation process, with key provision of training, health, education and several other important aspects. It is a placemaking process. The longer it takes our competitors to realise these facts then the happier I will be." Bob Millar called for changes in planning. "The planning system is clearly inefficient and continues to waste time and money, and actually hides inefficiency within the industry," he commented. "By and large most successful housing developers have a good land bank which means they bought cheaply and have massively increased its value via planning gain over time. "These developers when reporting profit, never segregate out the gain from the profit they make from actually building houses. It is this which does useful things like create jobs. Performance inefficiencies can easily be masked by massive uplift in land value." Time to share success - Clive Clowes The innovation and quality agenda is about joining in and sharing experience, to avoid reinvention and find out who is doing what, Clive Clowes of the Housing Corporation told delegates. After presenting a rundown of the various bodies and their relationships he recommended organisations should join the Housing Forum. "Can others learn from you?" he asked. "Are you doing it right? If you are, submit your projects to the Forum as demonstrators. Let other people learn from your good work." He presented examples such as the partnering agreement between Hanover HA and McCarthy & Stone which is trialling lightweight steel structures, and the Amphion project using timber frame. But he urged people to look at wider issues. "All of those are project based," he pointed out. "A sense of place also needs to recognise wider aspects. In the Corporation's scheme development standards in August 98 we placed greater emphasis on location and site issues and also recommend the use of Housing Quality Indicators; the NHF (National Housing Federation) standards in quality and development provide additional guidance. "HQIs are out for piloting and not the finished article yet. Use them and tell us how they need to be used better. "You all know the successful schemes - benchmark those. Equally benchmark those you'd prefer to forget. See from the profile where things are starting to go wrong so you can improve them." He advised care when selecting partners. "You have got to be very careful. What are their aims and objectives? Can you work together? Are they going to share information - is it going to be 'open book'?" Among other initiatives he pointed to Constructionline, the DETR based register of contractors and consultants, and BRE Calibre which can aid productivity on site. Clive Clowes concluded: "It's a changing scheme. Keep on building on the best. Do little things quickly - Neil Litherland MLTQ - many little things quickly - is the lesson Neil Litherland, director of housing for the London Borough of Camden, has learned in the approach to rebuilding communities. "There is a tendency certainly among strategists to look for the big idea, the big vision and the grand plan," he said. "Sometimes it takes you so long to develop and polish it that the world has moved on. Doing the little things quickly can bring about more important and rapid change than the grand schemes." In a presentation based on looking at an existing community, he explained that Camden has a very diverse profile with extreme polarisation from the richest to the poorest people in the country. The borough has 47 deprived neighbourhoods with 17,000 homes and is the seventeenth most deprived borough. "The most wicked issue is the consequences of the shortage of affordable accommodation and the huge chasm between housing association and council rents, and private rents which are five to seven times as high," Neil commented. The council still believes in developing new social housing, to maximise investment in private and council stock and catch up with disinvestment and backlogs in repairs. "Our ability to change the mix of tenure is very limited, because our new development tends to be shoe-horned into new schemes on brownfield land," he said. "The idea that we could wipe the slate clean by creating new communities does not hold water." Camden is now concentrating on tacking social exclusion and how it should change from service provider and landlord to become an agent for social change. The message that had come from the Borough's recent Building successful communities allocations review that people could put up with the backlog of repairs but spoke "very powerfully" about their communities not being able to cope with the growing concentrations of need. Emerging views including a more localised view of lettings with 'sons and daughters' policies, away from statutory and traditional views of needs. Neil Litherland described how housing management had been about "fairly negative, disjointed, episodic interventions" which were high on input but low on outcome when dealing with people creating problems. Professionals had their own rules and worked within their own boundaries. The transitional phase involved better co-ordination but still very much reactive, and intervention when problems were well advanced. "The phase we need to move to is about innovation, redefining boundaries, by being more people-based rather than looking at issues in boxes - that's a housing issues, that's a police issue - and instead devise solutions, try to anticipate problems and bring other players into the process much earlier. "We started by thinking it was about communities and focussing on places that work. No single answers are emerging, but a plethora of ideas and ways of looking at things. There is more culture change required from all professionals." Tenants pay for others mistakes - Sabina Emmanuel Regeneration is a brilliant idea but it is a bitter-sweet pill for tenants: they get the benefits but they also pay for the mistakes of the professionals, according Sabina Emmanuel, the resident's representative on. the Peckham Partnership, one of the biggest regeneration projects in the country. "Unfortunately we were not listened to enough in the beginning," she said "And so mistakes were made. Ultimately we end up paying for it through higher rents and service charges. We lose whichever way you look at it." She called on professionals to take proper notice of tenants. "It was not easy to talk to people with paper qualifications. It is not easy for them to accept that those without the paper qualifications have the practical living experiences - they will know whether a theory of yours works or not." Failures in the early days included inadequate sound-insulation. She highlighted indignities tenants had to suffer such as being forced to reapply for income support when they moved to their new homes. Yet computer breakdowns and failure to respond adequately had led to people being threatened with repossession. "My members will not be criminalised, she declared. "If you don't pay the rent they get a possession order. It can mean a court order against you. Life becomes more difficult because you cannot access the bank, or services for your children and life becomes harder. "I tell all the bosses that they need to instruct staff. You'll decide on something but it doesn't go down to the people who actually carry out the tasks." She praised the Peckham Partnership for holding a mid term review. "There is a new regime now and we work very well with the other partners. They are actually accepting our comments and working with us to improve Peckham. I think that is a very positive step. And if we had to learn those lessons in order to move on and for everybody to enjoy life better, then I say ''well done'." Summing up, Sabina Emmanuel said: "We are talking about a sense of place. This has to go with a sense of community, and a sense of well-being. It must accept the fact that we are in a place we want to be, where we are happy to be. It must reject the negative where somebody outside says that we are unhappy. "We should be able to make our minds up whether we are happy or not - that is empowerment. The whole idea is for us to go forward, to be positive and get what it is what we want out of life. And if that means just sitting down and being happy then so be it." Factors must be related - Abena Nsia We know about the sustainability of the fabric of buildings but are often unaware of the balance between sustainability of the community and the sustainability of people as individuals and as economic entities, Abena Nsia, policy officer at the National Housing Federation stated. "We need to know how these factors are related," she said. "We need to know how individuals relate to projects, how they relate to the existing community and how they will relate to the community we are trying to build. "If we don't start looking from that objective we will run into the problems we have seen on some estates of low demand, where people are economically inactive, buildings may be in disrepair and communities are dispirited with life generally." She explained that housing associations should be involved with innovation for a variety of reasons: the need to reassess the client base and perceptions of need; economic arguments; environmental imperatives and the advantages that technology could bring. These suggested a switch of focus from lowest tender price to other factors such as quality, location and - above all - customer needs. "Do customers want to live in this cheaper area which is run down, or up the road which is slightly more expensive," she asked. "It may be more expensive but in the long term this reassessment might encourage our clients to stay in our homes." Among a range of technological ideas Abena Nsia presented was the use of virtual reality, which she said had already been used to win planners over to a new scheme. It could help cut the number of meetings to sort out a development. Looking to the future she called for imagination. "If we don't have it we will not be able to implement the changes we might need to make to benefit our customers," she said Alongside this was the need to consider organisational agility. "Innovation is not just a means to an end," she concluded. "All agenda will continue to be connected. It must include people, the environment, business and money, ourselves as employers. It's all connected. We all have to be included." Public and private space must interact - Richard Burdett While there is tremendous potential for regeneration on brownfield development, there is also the potential that it could lead to the greatest cock-up ever in housing that this country has ever faced, Richard Burdett, of the London School of Economics and a member of the Urban Task Force, argued. "It is not enough to just to say 'let's make a piece of city and call it a community'," he said. "The great danger of that is that you will create clusters which are totally inward looking and don't relate to their surroundings. "Placemaking is about the relationship between a place and other places, between the bigger picture and a public space. "What is interesting is that brownfield sites are almost always by definition in the middle of somewhere else. It is either a railway site or a gasworks - previously developed land which by definition has a context. It is that relationship to the context that has to be looked at and understood more carefully." Communities needed public and private space which interacted, and he stressed that creating a genuine city which will only be proved 40 to 50 years later - "It will have all the possible conflicts but also all the possible advantages of informal interaction and getting together". Looking far beyond the boundary of the site, and understanding how places work in terms of the broader picture, was absolutely critical. Referring to the Greenwich Millennium Village, he pointed out that, at present, the site is an isolated development with no firm plans for the next phases. "It is a lot to do with the way briefs are written and the way that local authorities take responsibility for larger areas outside the boundary of a site. For all its laudable principles, how is it that one stops [the Millennium Village] becoming a one-off jewel, which might just end up having gates and TV cameras to keep undesirables out? "This is a very real problem that should not be brushed under the carpet because it's a politically high profile project. If there are lessons to be learned, it is exactly these questions that must be discussed." Richard Burdett discussed the need for greater integration of cars, buses and trains around hubs which should have all the social functions and resources that make communities in the real sense. He was concerned that if brownfield sites were all developed within existing density regulations, it might lead to inward-looking enclaves which might end up as gated areas if they were to survive. The core demand was no longer for traditional two children family's houses - most of the new households would be single person. Adaptable systems 'fundamental' - Ben Derbyshire Continuous adaptation is a fundamental prerequisite of place-making, one which the much maligned 1960s development did not allow for, said Ben Derbyshire of HTA Architects. He argued that streets and terraces such as the Victorians developed provided "a pretty impressive system" which was successful because it allowed for this. "They have survived because they have been adaptable to various different populations over time," he said. "A mistake in the past was to consider systems as an end in themselves. What is needed is systems which are adaptable rather than the inflexible approach of the 1960s," he added. It was this that has led HTA to develop its own ‘statement’ of principles of the vernacular: 'Buildings and places which employ systems which are in balance, systems which are readily available, open and therefore adaptable, renewable and therefore sustainable. 'These are systems which are in tune with the available technologies, appropriate to the local economy and successfully interact with the changing needs of the people who have employed them.' "That last point is paramount - people have to come first," he stated. "I do not believe you can disassociate a place from the way it is looked after, or from the way it is owned and managed. If you want to make place lasting and successful you have got to give people a stake in its ownership and management. "We are increasingly interested in the ways in which co-housing and co-ownership particularly in northern Europe has not only allowed people a long-term relationship with their homes but a long term relationship with the surroundings of their homes, something where we have manifestly failed again and again in this country." But there is no one template of what makes a sustainable place, Ben Derbyshire said. The past gave many highly individual solutions. But there were also very recent examples to look at. Seaside and Disney’s Celebration in Florida might be pastiche with everything ersatz but they were successful. People liked to live in them, though others preferred long established communities. "Successful place-making means working out why they work and applying the lessons, " he concluded This seminar series operates on a 'Chatham House rules' basis. However, many of the participants have already expressed their willingness to have their contributions credited to them. In the other cases, speakers have not yet given clearance - no inference should be drawn from this. Anyone wishing to quote the speakers should speak to them direct for their permission. For further information, contact Chris Bazlinton, Editor on 01279 771468. HTA Architects Limited 79 Parkway London NW1 7PP telephone 020 7485 8555 fax 020 7485 1232 email hta@hta-arch.co.uk ISDN 0207267 0061
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