Wed 27 Aug 2008
Places and Spaces
The term housebuilder is something of a misnomer. Much of what a housebuilder actually does is make places. While bad places can drain an area's lifeblood, good places will improve economic performance, enhance and support ecology and biodiversity, enable healthy living and foster local pride and community cohesion.Places are formed by the spaces between buildings. It is the way that these spaces are shaped and inhabited, textured and coloured, which potentially makes or breaks a scheme, defining whether on not people want to live there.
"Life between buildings is what attracts investment initially into a place whether it is people buying in or investing in other ways," says Ben Hamilton-Baillie, of Hamilton-Baillie Associates, a consultancy specialising in urban design and movement. "The critical factor is the public realm. The most important thing is to start with the creation of a sense of space; not merely leave the spaces that are left over after you have located and fitted all your housing onto a site."
Bob Tomlinson, founder director of Living Villages, has always been fascinated by what makes spaces work, and the company now has a track record of developing in a way that encourages good neighbourliness and a real sense of place and belonging.
"What we do is different to what a lot of developers do. They will look at the spaces between the buildings and employ a landscape architect to come and put their devices in there to create the public space. Ours is much more attuned to a very detailed observation of what happens locally," says Tomlinson.
"We look at local areas and experience the surprise and delight of the best areas. Then we look at the way they are configured and use those elements to recreate a place on our site. At our St Mellion development in Cornwall, we have taken the best of a dozen or so villages and said 'that's a nice little corner and somebody's put a seat in and there's a tree, let's look at the elements that go into that particular space and recreate it'."
Quality landscape design, when integrated with development proposals from the outset, can create sustainable, functional and beautiful environments that become the public image of the place, explains Jamie Farnell, senior landscape architect at Nicholas Pearson Associates.
"Good quality public realm is, by its very nature, multi-functional, used for movement, for events, for concealment of essential infrastructure. It also provides opportunity for social interaction, for improved health and wellbeing and for nature and biodiversity to bring life to urban areas. The more appealing public places and spaces are, the more they get used and the more appealing they become."
The creation of new public realm and associated squares and courtyards has been a key consideration in the development of Barking Central by Redrow Regeneration. This is the first ever UK scheme to win the European Prize for Urban Public Space, beating 175 entries from 26 countries. Designed by landscape architects MUF, the project is part of the Mayor of London's 'Top 100 Public Spaces' initiative, which aims to create or upgrade public areas by the 2012 Olympics.
The public realm within this mixed use scheme will be larger than the area of Trafalgar Square and is made up of four distinct areas: an arcade, a piazza, an urban arboretum and a folly wall.
In the eight metre high, 80 metre long, arcade walkway, thirteen gold coloured 'chandeliers' by Tom Dixon, former head of design at Habitat, bring a more human scale while chequerboard terrazzo tiling echoes the front paths of the area's long lost Edwardian villas.The most unusual space within the development is the arboretum. The design is stimulated by the original floor plans of the 1930's council chambers of the Town Hall, which demonstrate flexibility in the use of conventional space. Drawing inspiration from the enchanted forest of A Midsummer Nights Dream, it will feature trees, shrubs, wild flowers and benches to create a dramatic centrepiece to the development.
According to Alison Crawshaw, architectural assistant for MUF, it "adds mystery and helps to reduce the wind-tunnel effect that was previously associated with the square".
Public realm will also play a key role at Wellesley Square in Croydon, south London. A public square will lie at the heart of this mixed-use scheme by Berkeley Homes which includes a landmark 44 storey tower and seven and thirteen storey apartment blocks. The landscape and public realm designs were provided by HTA Landscape Design to complement the buildings designed by Rolfe Judd.
"By realising the importance of public realm and integrating it into a project the look of the development can be controlled and the sighting of blocks perfectly integrated," explains James Lord, director of HTA Landscape Design. "A high quality pedestrian public space should enhance the value of the development for residents, the public and the developer. Furthermore the space is controllable and provides opportunities for effective long-term stewardship because it is public realm on private land."
According to Lord, the design of the public realm is based on an approach of layering function across the site in order to "build up a legible functional and beautiful landscape design". The most influential element in many schemes is often the way the spaces are connected by roads, paths and tracks but many place makers are frustrated by inappropriate infrastructure decisions forced upon them by local authorities.
At Living Villages, Tomlinson says that some local authorities are much better than others but concedes to having had some extraordinary conversations about regulations. "We just go for non-adoption, really that is the only way we can do it. That then gives us the opportunity to be more reflective of what actually has evolved over time rather than being dictated to by highways regulations."
According to Hamilton-Baillie most streets are the product of about twenty to thirty different agencies. "It is very rare to find any coherent approach to streetscapes. What you find, and the reason why most housing is so poor, is that the streetscape is an accumulation of uncoordinated decisions."
One of the reasons that local authorities are cautious about experimenting with new concepts is because of sensitivity to risk and the perception of a rampant compensation culture and health and safety regulations. This is something that CABE (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) has considered at length.
CABE argues that public spaces should be exciting and varied, and a clear design vision for a development can manage, or even celebrate, risk rather than try to eliminate it. Evidence shows that where an element of risk is allowed in schemes for streets and public spaces, people become more aware of their surroundings and take greater responsibility for their own safety.
Public art is one means of injecting interest into schemes and it has played an integral role in the creation of Ravenswood, a development by Bellway on the former Ipswich airport, the largest new community in East Anglia. The brief stated that the artwork at the entrance to the site 'will evoke a symbolic sense of place on the threshold of the new development' and one of the earliest pieces to be commissioned was Formation by sculptor Rick Kirkby, featuring six flying ladies. Wayne Hemingway, who is the chairman of Building For Life and is collaborating with George Wimpey on The Bridge development at Dartford, Kent, points to the fact that in the past the open spaces included in developments have often ended up as wasteland.
"You have to put in things that people can actually use. We just try to think what the important parts of life are: eating, playing with your kids, reading."
As a consequence, the sites Hemingway has been involved with include barbeques, tables for food preparation, trees to provide shade, places to sit and grass to lie on because "lying on grass feels good".
At The Bridge, one of the first sights to confront visitor is clusters of lopsided telegraph poles topped by bird boxes. "That makes a statement about the attitude to what's going on there. That was important to us, it kind of set the scene, you're in Dartford but it's quite an ecologically rich site so that was very important."
This sense of fun and adventure continues. The bollards that stop cars parking on pavements require a second look: they are at odd angles so appear as though they have been partly knocked over.
"That's the serendipity and the art of it," says Hemingway. "You go around another corner and come to a pocket park and see that there are public barbeques and there are places to sit and talk. It feels very different and you know you are not just in a bog standard development!"
Posted by Show House
in Alison Crawshaw, Bellway, Ben Hamilton-Baillie, Berkeley Homes, Bob Tomlinson, Features, George Wimpey, Hamilton-Baillie Associates, HTA, James Lord, Jamie Farnell, Living Villages, Nicholas Pearson Associates, Redrow, Rick Kirkby, Rolfe Judd, Tom Dixon, Wayne Hemingway on Wed 27 Aug 2008
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