CONTENTS DIARY OF EVENTS - The Urban Design Group

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LEADER TOP TRUMPS As the season of awards, conferences and the Urban Summit unfolds, it is worth reflecting on the lot of the local authority urban designer. This issue is dedicated to these often unsung heroes of the planning system, who typically don’t have another design colleague within miles to compare notes with, and yet face sometimes fierce and long running battles with developers and their designers. One of my trophies from the Urban Summit was a pack of Top Trumps from George Wimpey. This card game is great, not only because it still appeals to children and grandparents alike, but because this version is about built development projects. The categories include: • Density (dw/ha) • Time to achieve planning (weeks) • Proportion of affordable homes (%) • Average SAP rating • Customer recommendations rating (%) • S106 contributions, plus • A key photograph of the built scheme (aesthetics?). The GW Challenge Game is designed to show George Wimpey’s ability to deliver a range of developments from rather swanky looking urban apartments to thatched cottages and executive homes. However, as the introductory card says “…as with many things in life, there are always some trade offs and its up to you to decide which objective is the most important and which site is best”. And so here we have it: the policy vs market game is laid out before us, and we can set the rules according to how we want to play. Is a high density score good or bad? What about affordable homes? Energy efficiency? Does it matter if it looks good or could be anywhere? Perhaps this card game explains why the development process can be so fraught with communication problems, where ‘aces’ can be high or low depending upon whether you are the developer, planner, designer, occupier or local community neighbour. The only category where perhaps all players would agree is on the Time to Achieve Planning, where everyone hopes that the first proposals are the best, and can be delivered swiftly – apart from the consultants on a time charge basis perhaps? LOUISE THOMAS Urban Design EDITORIAL BOARD Sherin Aminossehe, John Billingham, Matthew Carmona, Tim Catchpole, Richard Cole, Margaret Downing, Peter Eley, Bob Jarvis, Karl Kropf, Liezel Kruger, Sebastian Loew, Judith Ryser, Louise Thomas EDITORS Louise Thomas (this issue) and Sebastian Loew. louisethomas@tdrc.co.uk sebastianloew@btinternet.com MATERIAL FOR PUBLICATION please send text by email to the editors, images to be supplied as high-resolution (180mm width @300dpi) preferably as jpeg 2 | Urban Design | Spring 2005 | Issue 94 ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES should be directed to Cathedral Communications Limited High Street, Tisbury, Wiltshire SP3 6HA Tel 01747 871717, Fax 01747 871718 Email ud@cathcomm.demon.co.uk PRODUCTION Cathedral Communications Limited DESIGN Claudia Schenk PRINTING Optichrome © Urban Design Group ISSN 0266-6480
How Can Urban Designers Save the Planet? HERBERT GIRARDET ON LIVEABLE CITIES IN A SUSTAINABLE WORLD, THE GALLERY, LONDON 19 JANUARY 2005 Subsequent to the launch of his book Cities People Planet, Herbert Girardet discussed his ideas with the Urban Design Group. He deliberated his thesis that sustainability must be our key preoccupation for the 21st century. As his main points were presented in the book review (see Urban Design, Winter 2005, Issue 93), this article focuses on the debate which followed Girardet’s analysis of the state of our planet and his vision of where it should be going. Some of his assertions seemed overoptimistic, such as the possibility of establishing worldwide common values to sustain the planet, whilst maintaining acceptable lifestyles. For example, is the smell of ecological human waste treatment near housing areas acceptable? Will urban agriculture in the fast growing Chinese cities be able to resist development pressures on urban land? Is it wise to abolish allotments and displace growing food to the city fringe, where it will be pushed outwards until it is divorced from the inner urban workforce? Girardet sees the ‘compact city’ as the sustainable model of urban development. However, can it reconcile the contradiction between the unsustainable skyscrapers often required to make up the necessary density to support an ingenious transport system as in Curitiba? Can a sustainable compact city be market driven? Commercially driven high-rise Hong Kong may be great for sustainable mobility, but its fabric remains very vulnerable to earthquakes, power cuts, and terrorism, and elsewhere the free market produces low density urban sprawl. Can sustainable intermediate solutions such as impregnable historic European hill towns accommodate our contemporary lifestyles and individual mobility? Density and design may well contribute to a sustainable urban fabric, but land valuation mechanisms, powerful stakeholders, economic order and political expediency often override sustainable design considerations. Is building in the flood plain of the Thames Gateway sustainable in terms of resource consumption, aside from the financial cost or the merits of growth concentration in the South-East? Is the sustainability objective of the mayor’s London Plan compatible with confining development to London’s administrative boundaries - except where a competitive airport hub expansion is deemed indispensable for a global city? Can environmentalists reverse a reality which produces ever bigger airplanes such as the latest airbus A580, which demand outsized infrastructure and produce congestion in the terminals and cities around them? Or will these ‘white elephants’ become extinct, and smaller more nimble aircraft ferry people direct to their destinations? Even Girardet admits that his flying schedule as an international film maker and campaigner is not exactly sustainable. This raises the question of individual behaviour. If governments themselves are not willing to sign up to targets which might save the planet, nor impose legal restrictions on resource squandering, how can they expect commercial corporations, other interest groups or individuals to curb their unsustainable lifestyles? For every piece of scientific evidence, there seems to be a counterargument. While air travel is adding to global warming, current global dimming may protect the earth from the adverse effects of the sun (and so reduce the causes of global warming). Focusing on the role of designers, even if we propose public transportation as an inherent part of all ecologically designed development schemes, funding restrictions are likely to defeat them. Similarly, market forces may reject high density living and continue urban sprawl; and residents may not accept the aesthetics of even the most advanced ecological building technologies. So the question arises: aside from proposing sustainable solutions for physical development, do designers need to change attitudes towards innovative sustainable urban design too? With their ecological base, technical infrastructure and economic global superstructures, cities are not natural systems but ‘superorganisms’ in Girardet’s view. These eco-technical systems are the power stations of the global economy. Still dominated by the developed world which uses 110 and 60 ‘economic slaves’ per unit of output in the USA and Europe respectively, competing cities rather than competing countries face contradictions, perhaps because capitalism may be incompatible with sustainability. Designers must help to translate sustainability into real urban development and regeneration projects, albeit with a better understanding of sustainability than we have so far. Top Barcelona solar power station Bottom Urban metabolism Designers must help to translate sustainability into real urban development and regeneration projects Prompted by the ‘energy crisis’ of the 1970s, many researchers attempted to devise equations for the whole energy lifecycle of buildings, without conquering the complexity of the task itself. Attempting to understand the meaning of a whole sustainable urban area as a basis for integrated development may well be beyond our reach. But this should not rule out the careful use of resources, even with commercial short term-ism hampering rather than fostering sustainable cooperation. The only way around this is to convince us all that sustainable behaviour is in the self-interest of each and every one of us. Otherwise only a mega-crisis will kick powerful organisations into action, driven by their belief that they can be spared. Judith Ryser Urban Design | Spring 2005 | Issue 94 | 3 NEWS AND EVENTS
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Page 7 and 8: Do Codes = Quality + Delivery? PAUL
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