Urban Design and Planning has as its core interest, what we do about place. Over a century after town planning's founding fathers started to get their hands on the levers of the machinery, we are all perhaps less optimistic, maybe more realistic than they were about the extent to which planning and design can solve the majority of our urban ills. Yet 21st century planners and designers do still share a central belief that it matters how our places work look and feel; that we can do something about it and that there is a public interest here that cannot simply be left for the market to evolve.
Britain's great provincial cities are showing what this consciousness means in practice. For many years a locus of apparently endless decline, they are now showing the power of central place, and of imaginative reshaping to capture the people and businesses key to growth in the coming years. Having and showing confidence in urban future is a theme particularly in one such city, Birmingham: we review in this issue a brash celebration of the last two decades great turn-around in ‘Brum's’ fortunes and form.
Place has indeed recently been discovered by the British Government too: in the sense of a new stress on ‘place-shaping’ as an important role for local government. The sense here is broader than just the spatial and physical — but nonetheless, it is a welcome recognition that ‘where’ and ‘how’ matter as well as ‘what’ and ‘for whom’, in urban policy.
The last ten years have of course seen some interesting and illuminating research aimed at trying to describe and even quantify some of the relationships involved. CABE (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, in England) have funded seminal studies which explore the ‘value’ of spatial and physical form – including green space. In North Eastern England, a study to assess and value ‘quality of place’, and then monitor it over time as projects come through, is under way by Colin Buchanan & Partners and Tribal's Urban Studio team.
These underlying questions about how the place interacts with society and how people respond to their places – questions asked a century ago by Howard and Abercrombie in Britain, by Berlage in Holland, or Ernst May in Germany: therefore still resonate today. Nicola Dempsey's paper looks at how the quality of the built environment can influence social cohesion – it shows that we may be making less sweeping claims than our predecessors, but none of these issues have gone away – nor will they.
It's clear that this is not just a UK agenda. Rob Atkinson's paper takes another aspect of place – the idea of ‘neighbourhood’ – and sketches out how it fits within the conceptions and approaches applied by colleagues in Europe as a whole. Urban policies tackle a lot of similar challenges, but varying political, legal and geographical contexts produce some different ideas of what the right (or deliverable) responses are. ‘Suburban’ place in England has an entirely different connotation from France's banlieue; this is not just an issue of translation, but reflects the subtle variations in how different cultures perceive place – and thus, its urban policy significance.
At a time when the world's economy, the British and American housing markets and the prognosis on climate change sometimes seem to be combining to announce our imminent doom, such a focus on places, their quality and what we can do about them might almost appear trivial.
There are perhaps two responses to this;
One is Field-Marshal Haig's in the First World War: ‘the news from the front is never as good, and never as bad, as when it is first reported’. Our last decade of ever brighter sunlit uplands was of course a delusion – but too apocalyptic a take on the next decade is not likely to be right either.
The other response is one borrowed from Ove Arup, who (reputedly) did not make a speech at his 90th birthday celebration, but said to the assembled staff only ‘Do good work, boys'. We can make places better; we can try to understand how that will help with value, cohesion, growth; and we can aim to design with care, intelligence and sensitivity for the places and communities we serve.
