Placemaking

The crucial importance of planning the space between buildings when creating new communities, was the overriding message from the second CABE Europan seminar, which was attended by an audience of young designers preparing to enter the competition.

The talk addressed the subject of Placemaking and was given by Ben Hamilton-Baillie, an expert on urban design and transport, and Matthew Turner, senior regions advisor at CABE.

Hamilton-Baillie began by saying that the layout of streets in many recent developments had been 'shockingly bad'. Competitors must try to bring the best of European thinking to bear when creating their designs, he said: 'Somehow the points made by the Danish urban thinker Jan Gehl in his seminal work, The Life Between Buildings, haven't filtered through to the majority of professionals working in the housebuilding industry.'

Even experienced architects often misjudged the space between buildings. He set out a number of tips for how to avoid the pitfalls and embrace the best thinking on creating vibrant streets:

  • Begin by setting out what your principal external spaces are
  • Then decide how the buildings can be configured to define that space
  • Ensure that they are properly connected. The place needs to link in with transport routes, important local services, and sites of local history and distinctiveness
  • Above all, avoid the sense that your buildings have dropped from the sky onto the site with no thought to the spaces between them

Competitors must aim to get the amount of connectivity right. If a development is too porous then there could be an increased risk of burglaries, and the sense of movement and vibrancy would be spread too thinly, he argued. In short, the size of the grid needed to match the density of movement.

Streetscape has an important role in giving life to a community. But there is a huge cultural divide in the way streets are regarded, he said. While bodies like CABE and English Heritage want to see streets where space is shared between pedestrians, drivers, cyclists and others, there is a stubborn philosophy amongst organisations like the Department for Transport and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, to keep people out of the road.

Highway engineers want streets to be:

  • regulated
  • impersonal
  • linear
  • single-purpose
  • consistent
  • predictable
  • state controlled.

Whereas, public realm experts want streets that are:

  • culturally defined
  • personal
  • spatial
  • multi-purpose
  • constantly changing
  • unpredictable
  • shared with local ownership

Hamilton Baillie advised competitors to throw out the transport manuals which propose overbearing signage, claustrophobic barriers and overly restrictive intersections. 'If you treat people like morons, they’ll behave like morons,' he warned. He urged designers to look to Holland, where during the late 1960s and early 1970s in places like Delft, Gouda and Eindhoven, urban thinkers developed the notion of "woonerf". This translates as 'living yard' and redefined the street as a shared space, the term "home zone" now being in wide use in the UK. Cars could no longer hurtle through a community as if it didn’t exist and residents could use the street as an expression of their community. Today this originally radical idea is becoming the new orthodoxy. The following principles need to be followed to create better streets:

  • Design streets to be shared spaces rather than highways
  • Do not allow traffic engineers to define the street. For example, make sure the width of a street is determined by human factors rather than a traffic manual
  • Ensure that human presence and a range of activities is maximised
  • Lighting should respond to distinctive local sites, rather than be linear
  • Mark the transition between public and private space with practical features like benches

Architects would be wise to accept the reality of car use. What was needed was to make drivers respond as human beings to their environment. Specific design measures could be used to control car use and help drivers see that they were sharing the space with others. These include:

  • the removal of pavements
  • narrowing of roads
  • the incorporation of trees in the road
  • the use of tight corners
  • attention grabbing installations that link the street with local residents

Discussing the examples of poor placemaking that Hamilton-Baillie had cited, Matthew Turner stressed that well designed buildings were not enough by themselves: 'Looking at the shocking examples we’ve seen it's clear that it's not the architecture that's at fault, it's the spaces between.'

He pointed out that each of the three Europan sites has different uses going on, and new uses being planned. He urged competitors to think hard about the different activities that would be influencing their sites.