Smithfield Buildings, Manchester (Urban Splash)

5.2 Smithfield Buildings, Manchester (Urban Splash)

To ensure full consideration of the factors considered essential for increasing the sustainability of development at the urban design scale, the ATEQUE view of the range of participants involved is too limited and its conception of the design process as being carried out by a group of professional actors must be expanded. Discussion of this third pole must take account of the view that more people are involved and that their activities are not all easily codified. The following paragraphs therefore divide a larger group of actors into ‘insiders’, who can expect to be closely involved with official decisions, and ‘outsiders’ who are affected by these decisions, but must make their case for inclusion within any particular design process. The ways these types of actor work will differ, so design processes can have a variety of structures and include different kinds of decision.

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The following paragraphs therefore also discuss different types of decision-making ‘gate’.

Designers need to undertake assessments as they progress their work, to inform themselves of their success in meeting the objectives set for their design, or to persuade those for whom, or with whom, the design is being produced, of its virtues. The pole of design may be quite broad. ATEQUE lists only five actors: designers (architects and engineers), technical consultants, town planners, landscapers and economists (in the United Kingdom these would usually be surveyors). But this list is too restrictive. The poles certainly overlap in Britain, for example. Whatever the composition of the urban design team assembled (and this will vary in different parts of Europe), its members will normally find themselves collaborating both with actors inside other poles, and also with groups who are outside the list of poles altogether. They have to be able to express their ideas in ways that these others can understand, and come to terms with the need to establish confidence in their way of working. Using a common language and adopting a common protocol for the assessments which are needed can be steps in this direction.

Urban design is a flexible process and has a variety of outcomes. Who are ‘insiders’ and who ‘outsiders’ will vary according to the context. As a generalisation, however, those listed in the design pole will interact regularly with some of those listed in the operational decision-making pole (such as development companies and infrastructure owners, whose approach is discussed in Chapter 4). Together these actors form an ‘insider’ group, and for them a process of negotiation will seem the everyday way of working. We can think about passing through ‘soft’ gates, where provisional agreements are reached on the appropriate strategy to be adopted, before the team proceeds to considering the succeeding stages of design development.

‘Outside’ this group will be two other groups. The first group of ‘outsiders’ is formed by representatives of the pole of collective interest (government agencies, regional and local authorities, elected representatives, consumer associations, etc., including those mentioned in Chapter 3). In some types of administrative or financial partnership, actors concerned with the pole of project carry-through (development control and building control officers, cost accountants, construction managers and component manufacturers, such as those whose evaluation criteria are discussed in Chapter 6) will also be involved. This group will expect formal presentations of progress in the design team’s thinking, and may wish to, or have to, operate ‘hard’ gates, where formal approval is required before the design team can continue developing an urban design concept.

The second group of ‘outsiders’ is formed by social actors in the pole of use (users of buildings, users of transport and utility services, the managers of buildings and services, and insurers, whose interests are mentioned in Chapter 7). Even if they can be identified during the design process (and this is a question in situations like town expansion on newly developed land) they may not be in a position to control any ‘gates’ at all. Their only reaction may be that of ‘voting with their feet’ if, when implemented, the scheme fails to meet their expectations. Much of the academic and practical concern currently being expressed about the need to reform urban governance, such as in the suggestion by Oestereich (undated) which is noted below, focuses on the possibility of altering the position of this second outsider group. Some commentators would have them join the other ‘outside’ group, and become active participants in the control function. Others would have them join the ‘insiders’ and be fully consulted at all stages of the work of the

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design team. British examples of experiments in making this happen can be found in community design workshops and ‘Planning for Real’ events. In France, Germany, Italy, Denmark and so on, best practice differs.

URBAN DESIGN AS A DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITY

An interest in the design of cities began at the turn of the nineteenth century, with the City Beautiful movement in America, the publication of Camillo Sitte’s treatise on the Continent and the enthusiasm for garden cities generated in Britain by Ebenezer Howard. This interest in large-scale neighbourhood design was given a major impetus in the 1930s by le Corbusier and other members of CIAM with the ‘Charter of Athens’. However, the origin of urban design as it is thought of today, that is to say as more of a process than a product, can be found in Gropius’s 1956 discussions at Harvard and in Llewellyn- Davies’s teaching at University College London in the 1960s. In the Kassler Memorial Lecture at Princeton in 1980, the latter answered the question: ‘Urban Design: what is it?’ as follows:

An essentially practical subject, concerned with that negotiation between long- and short-term interests which occurs as the built environment is developed.

The first step in a process of physical development, identifying possible uses for a plot of land, is often carried out by planners, as described in the previous chapter, and can require negotiation between officials at various levels in the planning hierarchy. There is little doubt about the importance of such negotiations if sustainable development is to be achieved. Money may not always be at stake directly at this stage, as the issues are likely to be geographical and aesthetic, but behind these may well lie financial questions. They may include the need for new infrastructure or the desirability of inward investment, and such questions may not always be simply answered by adding up direct costs and calculating expected rental returns. There may be a decision which is ‘hard’ in the sense that a proposed allocation must either be allowed or refused, and some of the arguments which will provide evidence to influence the negotiation should come from a multidimensional assessment process, as discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. Innovative urban design will often stimulate a great deal of public interest, as was the case at the time proposals were made for developing the Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank (Figure 5.3).

The second step in the development process is the assembly of land under a single ownership, and this can also involve numerous parties in a complex negotiation process. Each party has to decide what they are prepared to pay, or accept, as a price for their interest. To do this they need quite accurate estimates of the short- and long-term costs and benefits of being party to the development of a consolidated site. This is exactly the situation described by Llewellyn-Davies and often depends on three-dimensional sketches of the built environment which might be created being available. These sketches have to be sufficiently accurate for the types of space use and quality of construction and services possible to be clearly understood. An element of the competition which comes

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into the financial negotiation could be ‘imperfect knowledge’ on one side or the other, as the skill and imagination of the design team responsible for exploring the potential of a particular site will probably give the buyer or the seller a hidden advantage. The architect Richard Siefert made himself an enviable reputation for being able to assess the architectural possibilities of particular sites better than any other practitioner during the London office-building boom of the 1960s and negotiating highly favourable ‘hard’ permissions.