Glasgow’s new Transport Museum designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) is the latest in a series of buildings intended to be key parts of the regeneration of the River Clyde corridor over the last 30 years.  Starting with the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre (SECC) in 1979, the developments include the Clyde Auditorium or Armadillo, an addition to the SECC complex by Foster and Partners in 1995, the Glasgow Science Centre by BDP in 2001 including the striking Glasgow Tower by Richard Horden and the BBC Scotland studios originally by David Chipperfield but completed by Keppie Design in 2007.  The Glasgow Arena by Foster and Partners is expected to open in 2013.  During this period, the Clyde Corridor hosted the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988, become home to the International Financial Services District and has seen the construction of new bridges at Finnieston and Tradeston.

For many exhibits in the Riverside Museum this will be their fourth home in fifty years.  Kelvingrove Museum, the Tramway and latterly the Kelvin Hall all housed major elements of the collection but this latest and presumably permanent location in theory can display far more of the collection than previous venues.  The riverside location provides an appropriate transport and movement context in abundance.  There are railways, ferries and the seaplane terminal, the buzzing of helicopters, the noise from BAE Systems downstream building Westminster’s warships and the constant background noise of the Clydeside Expressway.  Despite all this movement, the museum’s context is dereliction and the current recession may ensure that it will stay that way for many years.

Interestingly, Glasgow City Council considered three approaches to the provision of a Museum of Transport:  1) constructing a cheap shed on an accessible site and spending more on interior display and curation, 2) housing the collection in an appropriate historic structure – for example a disused shipyard building or perhaps a tram shed or 3) housing the collection in a new icon building.  Clearly the lure of the third approach won, potentially weakening curation and display, secondary research opportunities and floorspace.

Approaching the building by road or on foot is a disappointing experience.   The latest modifications to the Clydeside Expressway have ensured that the Riverside Museum has few convenient connections with surrounding areas.  The access road has the feeling of a motorway off-ramp to a retail park.  With bitmac footpaths and pin kerbing in abundance around the rudimentary car park, this is a value-engineered environment.  Buses roar backwards and forwards from the city centre carrying two or three people in each while the car park (pay and display) overflows with visitors.  Clearly innovation has stopped at the outside wall of the new building.

Well that isn’t strictly fair on Gross Max who designed the public realm around the building. Gross Max, one of Scotland’s brightest and most accomplished landscape architects have produced a sequence of spaces around the curves of the building with token misters for the kids and green mounds and silver birch trees integrated into a simple paving treatment.  Here it is possible to see a nod towards the aesthetic of scrub and spontaneous landscape that is common to the post-industrial Clyde Corridor.   Is it the intention that the maturing of this landscape would see ZHA’s building in a glade of scrubby silver birch?  Who knows – it is hard to find any sense of landscape in the various visualisations of the building.  One thing is certain though and that is that Gross Max did not anticipate the vast consumption of junk food from three temporary outlets around the new building or the consequent overflowing rubbish bins and tomato ketchup staining around the picnic tables.

The building itself is another of the metal clad genre common to the Clyde, very photogenic and certain to join the family of other recent buildings that have become the postcard face of the city.  Like the Science Centre, Armadillo and the recent bridges, it is flattered by blue sky and vacant surroundings which help to point up its other-worldliness.  Purely by being interesting enough to be photographed, the building becomes a location that is unique and worth a visit.  It establishes a significant place on the river – even if it is disconnected from anything else.  And we may be seeing it at its best because once the Scottish property market recovers and starts to roll out more junk developments, especially to the west of the Riverside across the Kelvin, the setting of the building will be altered for the worse.

There are few clues from the outside as to what is happening in the building.  Its crisp exterior of zinc and dark glass, flawless cladding and signature roofline create a memorable if severe aesthetic.  From across the river at Govan, the presence of the SS Glenlee berthed alongside the Museum presents a slightly uncomfortable visual moment which flatters neither object – the effect may be similar to your granny turning up at your graduation wearing a Crimplene dressing gown.

Inside the building, the atmosphere is chaotic and redolent of a 1950s toy garage.  Presumably there were three phases of appreciation of the building: as an empty cathedral-like space with no exhibits, as a completed building with everything in place except for the ‘customers’ – these two being very important to people living in the architecture bubble – and finally, the crowded and complete environment we see today with kids trying to break exhibits and folk bumping into each other.  It’s a happy place though with much smiling, patient helpful staff and reminiscing.  Almost everything seems very familiar yet very special too.  The curation is crowded and for some, overcrowded or cramped, lacking space for contemplation or research.

Although it may be a minor work in terms of ZHA buildings, it will surely be an excellent investment for the Council, hugely popular and extremely positive for the marketing of the city.  But despite the merits of the building, it can’t escape its surroundings and disconnection with the city. So it would be unfortunate if any euphoria surrounding the Riverside obscured the fact that this un-crowded stretch of ‘world class waterfront’ is actually a world class failure in terms of the production of contemporary city and certainly one of the worst waterfront developments in Europe.  If landscape articulates a politics as well as an aesthetic then this waterfront is a consummate neo-liberal landscape of public waste, private greed, risk aversion and an environment for ‘customers’ in which communities, their economies and potential are completely ignored.  It’s not that the individual public sector funded developments have not succeeded – indeed they are mostly highly successful in their own terms – but the external environment of each development is a total failure and after adding in the sterile private sector developments and their accompanying over-designed roads infrastructure, the cumulative effect is nothing more than junkspace – the Clyde Corridor’s default urbanism.

Hopefully ZHA’s building will be the final moment of iconicism on the Clyde.  For the creators of this waterfront, the first steps towards a change of approach – involving recognition that there is a problem – will be difficult and painful.  For the private sector, to own so much land yet achieve so little and to be unable to string together any sort of cohesive urbanism whether traditional, Modern, contemporary, futuristic or parametric is a profound failure and would make anyone wonder about the skills at play or what those involved were actually trying to achieve.

The point is reached where there has to be a genuine acknowledgement that a different approach is required:  that doing small things better might be more constructive than more mega-million stones on the shiny metal necklace.  That joining things up with decent infrastructure and good public transport  - rather than stinking noisy buses – might actually start to create a riverside of higher value. That growing existing communities to the river might also work – as a contra-notion to developing laterally along the river.  And that constructive employment and providing the circumstances in which economies and innovation might thrive and in which communities can be involved are more valuable aims than private greed and shareholder satisfaction and that all these things are more important than design as shape-making and object creation.

The galleries below include most of Jon-Marc’s images of the Riverside Museum taken in the late afternoon of 4 July 2011.

Interior views: 

External views: 

A pdf of the original article in the AHSS Magazine is available to download here (125kB).

More than ten years into the 21st century it feels strange to be writing about a new urban motorway but just such an entity was opened to traffic in Glasgow in June 2011. The motorway connects the M74 from Carmyle to Tradeston and Kinning Park then to the M8 heading for Glasgow Airport and the Clyde Estuary.  It skirts the communities of Rutherglen, Polmadie and Gorbals and is not so much a new approach to the city centre as a way of avoiding it.  The contrast between this new stretch of motorway and the well known M8 eastern entrance to the city could hardly be more marked. Where the M8 approach, like the M77, gently unfolds the landmarks and drama of the city, good and bad, the M74 extension is a particularly banal experience.

The debate about the M74 extension passed a long time ago.  It is now perhaps fruitless to discuss questions such as could this money have been better spent, do new motorways actually solve traffic problems, was the blight along the route necessary, what about the environmental pollution from the new road and wouldn’t it have been possible to build a respectable public transport system for the same money?  Instead it is interesting to focus on deeply unfashionable questions around the perception of the city from this enormous piece of infrastructure and how it changes the narrative of Glasgow for residents and visitors.

The classic book ‘The View from the Road’ written by Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John R Myer in 1965 was one of a number of important publications that focused on the perception of cities from behind the wheel.  This was also the subject of various publications by John Brinckerhoff Jackson and most significantly by Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown in ‘Learning from Las Vegas‘.  These works still have their place in the world of architecture, landscape and urbanism but they also have parallels in photography and film. Yutaka Takanashi’s ‘Toshi-e‘ (‘Towards the City‘) and Lee Friedlander’s ’America by Car‘ both examined the experience of movement in cities through photography: the windscreen and camera creating a frame within a frame.

Motorway design can reach high points of excellence as demonstrated by many parts of the American Interstates and Parkways and also in the motorway systems of most European mainland countries.  The creators of these roads had skills and insight which are sadly lacking in the design of the M74 Extension. The Transport Scotland website is of course overflowing with the supposed benefits of the M74 Extension and they include economic regeneration, environment, traffic, road safety and community regeneration.  But if we imagine just for a moment that these are all genuine benefits isn’t something else completely missing? If as Mark Cousins says, ‘movies make money as well as meaning’, why can’t projects like the M74 Extension provide meaning as well as other supposed benefits?  Why couldn’t the new motorway create some positive experience of entering the city?  Where are the views, the scenography and drama, the habitats, the communities, the compositions or the evidence of thought?

We can see the lonely landmark tower of Rutherglen Town Hall and Greek Thomson’s Caledonian Road Church but little else.  But most of all, where is the River Clyde?  There is a sign saying we are passing over it but along the entire length of the new road, the barriers, super-elevation, topographical choices, screens and ill-placed railings block views of potentially interesting features that would give some sense of place to the road.

While in the background we still see Glasgow, its tenements its towers and surrounding hills, the foreground is hidden behind what is effectively a 3-dimensional map of cost cutting, negotiation, compensation, risk aversion and managerialism stretching over a six mile corridor.  The banal reality of this new road may have appealed to Yutaka Takanashi’s sharp eye for composition but to most commuters and visitors, it is a poor introduction to the city and reflects a lack of interest in matters that might create genuine long term value for the city and its communities.

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As a follow on from the post here almost two years ago entitled Terrain Vague: place and landscape and Stephen Gill’s photographic work in the Lower Lea Valley, this video which has been around for a few months on Vimeo, draws attention to the destruction of land, common land, allotments and football pitches which are being cleared to make way for the 2010 Olympics. The story moves through the various people whose lives are being disrupted by the proposals and who point out that this land is not simply unused but provides an escape from the city.

As Iain Sinclair and others have pointed out, the breathtaking intellectual thinness of the proposed Starbucks landscape of the Olympics compares badly with the richness of the existing complex environment. This is not a plea for doing nothing – it’s more a wish that in the rush to create, to ‘deliver’ and to ‘drive forward a vision’ towards this dubious prize, designers, planners, procurement officers or whoever should work with what is there rather than scrape it away and produce just another piece of second rate UK property development. Post-Olympics the communities can have most of this back – except that there will be nothing worth having in comparison to the richness of what is already there.

Many of the issues raised here resonate with the work we did in Sheffield on the Council’s Rivers and Waterways Strategy, especially in relation to the disregard that development agencies have for existing character and their blindness to the ways in which this can be used to create contemporary environments that are rich, exciting and beneficial to local communities. The Sheffield – City of Rivers report is available below: (should be browsed fullscreen).

The Scottish Government has clearly taken urbanism issues seriously with a slew of publications aimed at increasing the standard of new development, a curiosity about how high standards are attained in other countries and initiatives such as Design Awareness Training for Council officers and elected members through the Improvement Service and the recent Scottish Sustainable Communities Initiative. The alignment with traditional urbanism and sustainability is aimed at improving the quality of development in new communities and in extensions to existing settlements although some of the ideas spill over into the consideration of new interventions in established urban areas.

The reasons for this adoption of traditional urbanism are fairly obvious. Firstly, volume builder residential developments are not improving and there is little sign that they will. Planners are usually unable to make significant positive changes to these developments despite a plethora of conditions, design briefs and codes. Many are wrong from the outset. Secondly, a proportion of sites allocated in Local Plans for housing are often ill-chosen in relation to their potential impact on the town, transport, intrusion in the landscape and on habitats and a standard product residential development will usually exacerbate these difficulties. Traditional urbanism is potentially more sensitive to context and place and has principles and methods of practice that create developments embodying much of what is regarded today as best practice in planning and urban design so even on a poor site, it may create a more sensitive response. Thirdly, experience from around the world says that traditional urbanism sells. The VINEX urban extensions in Netherlands such as Brandevoort, Leidsche Rijn and Haverlij designed by Rob Krier, Mulleners + Mulleners, Schippers Architects and others are all incredibly popular despite the country’s reputation as being ‘the most appreciative of modern architecture in the world’. It is the same story in the United States where New Urbanism is a major factor in selling new homes.

Looking at Tornagrain in more detail, it is remarkable for a number of reasons. The basic statistics are for a town of 10,000 people set out as three distinct neighbourhoods each with local centres, a town centre, central park area, green belts between neighbourhoods and a realignment of the A96. The basic plan form was created over an intensive ten day programme of public meetings and design sessions in a completely open process and incorporates all of the New Urbanism principles. These sessions dealt with regional context, business, transport issues, infrastructure, ecology, landscape, housing, social and economic issues. The plan has proved to be resilient and has only changed in minor ways between the charette process and the submission of the planning application to reflect new issues raised by the community such as the provision of allotments and other factors emerging during the preparation of the Environmental Impact Assessment. The plan includes a supermarket, primary and secondary schools, police fire and ambulance services, hotel, community leisure and sports facilities, a park, health centre and railway station set in a mixed use framework. The future development of the town is controlled using a design code and transect which regulates almost all aspects of development. One of the keys to creating this plan is that Moray Estates has been in the area for hundreds of years and intend remaining there and so can afford to take a long term view of the development. The current estimate is that it might take 20 years to complete so this is no short term business like most of the house building industry.

The parallels with Poundbury will not have gone unnoticed. Duany and the local communities around Tornagrain have produced a structured proposal for a mixed use settlement encompassing principles of walkability, variety of dwelling types, local shopping, schools and traffic attenuation. These are also attributes of Poundbury which has been successful in establishing a mixed use urban extension with successful businesses, employment and community facilities within a pedestrian orientated environment.

Of course the issue of most concern to planners and architects alike will be the architecture of the settlement and the chocolate box images which accompany the masterplan document. In the case of Tornagrain, like the parallel plans for Ellon, Cumnock and Poundbury, the landowner has set out to acquire a traditional settlement with buildings of a traditional appearance. Moray Estates maintain that over the twenty year development period for the town, it is inevitable that there will be variations in style but for now they are content for now to let the code produce a range of traditional buildings for the town.

What distinguishes this recent urbanism in Scotland is the emphasis on the principles of town making and urban structure, the inclusiveness of the plan making process involving local communities, the elevation of sustainability to the status of core issue and the de-emphasis of architecture as end product. Another factor common to all these developments is that they are all being promoted by major landowners who are in the developments for the long term.

These are all critical components of an urbanism approach. Getting the structure of the town right is the main objective and if that is done, planners shouldn’t need to interfere in design and the architecture debate can continue unimpeded in its bubble. It’s not about what things look like but how they work.

Architects may rail against New Urbanism for its association with the past and its chocolate box aesthetics, its perceived lack of radicalism, betrayal of modernism and a host of other reasons but for now, traditional urbanism seems to be the only game in town, in Scotland at least, and the work of DPZ, UDA and the Prince’s Foundation together with a few other practices are setting the pace in the design of new settlements and urban extensions.
Architects may consider urbanism to be an integral part of architecture – and it probably was once – but from the late 70s and early 80s in the UK, urbanism started to branch off and has become an established discipline in its own right while architecture has increasingly focused on the single building. Of course this doesn’t mean that architects and planners can’t or shouldn’t practice urbanism – they obviously do – but what it does mean is that a different agenda is being established in which the shape-making and form-giving that once passed for urban design or the underwhelming architectural masterplans for the property development industry wrapped up in elemental philosophy about space, sunlight and openness just don’t cut it anymore.

Love them or hate them, traditional urbanism plans like Tornagrain represent a quantum leap forward for the practice of urbanism in Scotland over what has taken place in the last twenty years but the sound principles of urban structure expressed in these plans need to be evolved by all those involved in building towns and cities. There is a danger that this strong foundation will lose direction through early institutional acceptance and become ossified, like planning and urban design, in statutory box ticking and standard solutions. Traditional urbanism should certainly not be the only urbanism practiced in Scotland. Instead, Scottish urbanism should be a broad movement that accepts that the production of the built environment should not just be the domain of the increasingly irrelevant historic professions, the landed gentry or the property development industry but should embrace communities in a wider social, economic and political agenda.

This post was previously published in Prospect (Architecture Scotland) magazine Issue 135 in Summer 2009. It has been updated.

The decision to put the building on the market and move all services to other parts of the borough was made by the PCT board, despite last-minute pleas from John Allan of Avanti Architects and John Cooper of Architects for Health. This decision has sparked concern for a broad range of reasons including:

• the cultural and historic importance of the architecture
• the historical symbolism of the building in terms of health care
• the view that the building is entirely saveable and is not a maintenance basket-case
• the likely future of the building and the site – for example private clinic or luxury flats

Consideration of any single issue on this list might lead to the conclusion that the building should be kept and used for its original purpose never mind taking a holistic view of all the points. But there is another issue that lies in the territory of spatial planning and social infrastructure.

There are many examples throughout the UK of health authorities and others selling off city centre land and facilities at attractive prices in order to fund the development of new facilities on land that is cheaper but less well located for the very people who wish to use these facilities. More often than not, these new facilities are accessed by poor public transport facilities or demand the use of the private car. See TCPA Journal (November 2007) by Graham Haughton and Phil Allmendiger. (link here to pdf)

Over the past twenty years, planning in the UK has become increasingly regulatory rather than visionary. There is evidence that this might be changing since the introduction of a new planning system that has a strong emphasis on spatial strategy. However significant property moves by health, port or water authorities tend to become the spatial plans, rather than being determined by spatial plans – in other words planning often has had to adopt the plans of others as fait accompli even though there is little spatial or placemaking evidence that they are desirable.

Integrated strategic spatial planning needs to play a much stronger and influential role in coordinating the work of organisations like health trusts and port authorities. The fate of Finsbury Health Centre seems sadly predictable – another casualty of the obsession with money and moral bankruptcy that Monin was referring to – part of a wider culture of philistinism and short-termism which is peculiarly endemic in UK organisations that once were public goods.

Meanwhile express your views and sign the petition – all may not be lost.

There are a number of levels at which this process is disturbing. One of these is expressed by Edinburgh architect Malcolm Fraser: “I suppose this is us learning to be a good service-economy: to give up our most fragile and valuable natural environments to allow the rich to helicopter in for a spot of golf with associated gated-luxury housing, all tartanised by an architectural style the worst volume housebuilders would recognise, a Trumpton-meets-the-Shining confection of pointy heritage bits”. The jimmy-hat architecture of the outline proposals speaks of these trivial and patronising ambitions.

In an article in the Guardian in June 2008, Simon Jenkins noted that, “The point of environmental planning is not to capitulate to short-term market forces but to channel them to the public good. There can be no public good in building over the Balmedie dunes.” and “The truth is that Scotland is a victim of another colossal Trump try-on. This project is primarily about luxury holiday homes, not fairways. Scotland’s gullible politicians have been taken in by a New York billionaire.”

Wikipedia’s current definition of a banana republic contains much that doesn’t apply to Scotland and much that does, for example, “…a banana republic typically has large wealth inequities, poor infrastructure, poor schools, a “backward” economy, low capital spending, a reliance on foreign capital and money printing, budget deficits, and a weakening currency – rings bells yes?.” Worst of all for planning and the future of Scotland is the absolute lack of confidence and dearth of ideas that this decision says about what the country could be and should be.

For an refreshing view and intermittent commentary on the whacky world of regeneration and economic development look at John Lord’s blog at http://yellowbookltd.blogspot.com.

See also an article in the Economist on 6 November 2008 on why the controversial golf development may not make much money entitled “Trump’s Scottish Venture – Birdie or Bogey?”

Update: since the original post was written, Gareth Hoskins Architects have been appointed to masterplan the development ‘from scratch’ but obviously within the terms of the planning consent. This appointment may help to answer some of Malcolm Fraser’s concerns above. The development has also won the coveted Pock Mark Award for the Worst Planning Decision in Scotland by a substantial number of public votes organised by Prospect Magazine.

These short film clips featuring Lewis Mumford, author of the City in History, were recently published on the Planum website.

Before the end of 1961 the New York publishing company Harcourt, Brace and Co. had the first edition of Lewis Mumford’s highly successful book The City In History ready for publication. Two years later, in 1963, the National Film Board of Canada funded the production of six documentaries, each lasting 27 minutes, for a series entitled Mumford On The City. The material for the films, based on the book, was prepared by Mumford himself. The director Ian MacNeill wrote the film script and produced the various parts: The City: Heaven and Hell, The City: Cars Or People, The City And Its Region, The Heart of the city, The City As Man’s Home and The City and the Future. In 1963 Mumford was 68 years old and agreed to appear as the presenter of the six films, expressing his personal view about the future of the western city, interspersed with pictures of places, cities, archaeological documents, works of art and architecture.

The City in History remains a classic text of urban design. Mumford urged that technology achieves a balance with nature and hoped for a rediscovery of urban principles that emphasised humanity’s organic relationship to its environment. Forty-five years on, the film clips look incredibly old and the message delivered in a rather morbid and factious manner (to quote Jane Jacobs), with a slightly ‘Outer Limits’ or ‘Twilight Zone’ ambience. Yet some of the key ideas promoted by Mumford have increasing resonance with the sustainability and green agenda of the early 21st century. In the increasingly praxis orientated and commodified world of urban design, whether anyone is listening or not is another matter.

The Spring 2008 edition of JoLA, the excellent peer-reviewed academic Journal of Landscape Architecture established by the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools, contains an article on the work of Gregor Graf which raises the question, “How do we read a city without signs?”. With a mixture of purist medium format photography and Photoshop, Graf has painstakingly deleted all traces of language and signage from view – as well as people and cars. His series of images featuring London, Linz and Warsaw are striking and unreal. It’s a wonderful collection of images linked here and on his site here (look for the Hidden Town link). The imagery is uncannily close to some contemporary techniques of urban representation employed by architects – minus the beautiful people.

His work is a step further in the direction pioneered by São Paulo where in 2006, city officials enacted a radical ban on almost all outdoor advertising. Photographer and typographer Tony de Marco documented the new ad-free world of São Paulo, publishing a sequence of images on Flickr. A city stripped of advertising with no posters, flyers or advertisements on buses or trains sounds like an Adbusters dream but it became a reality in 2007.

The implication of these unreal and real examples is that in the absence of signs, people need to re-learn what was once recognisable city terrain, marked out urban space, defined focal points and obvious boundaries. One of the São Paulo experiences was that it was initially easy for people to get lost when well known reference points – such as 48-sheet hoardings – were removed. Of course, residents were quick to re-orientate themselves around landmarks, buildings and urban form very much in the way that architects, urbanists and writers on the city would like them to behave.

Perhaps Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown have more to offer here than they are given credit for. Their book Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time explores Venturi’s recurring affair with pluralism, multiculturalism, symbolism, iconograohy and popular culture. It is an important work that dissolves professional boundaries and broadens our view of urbanism – often in a disturbing way.

While urban designers and town makers concentrate on producing legible urban form through sequences of squares, streets, edges and landmarks (after Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City), the easy-read of contemporary urban areas will often be through advertisements and signs. Looking at the freshness and clarity of Graf’s ad-and-sign-free images set against Venturi’s challenging and dissonant work it is hard to imagine common ground between the two. But that may be exactly what towns and cities need in the 21st century.

related links:

• Gregor Graf
• Business Week: São Paulo: The City That Said No To Advertising
• São Paulo No Logo – a new identity
• Adbusters: when the centre collapsed
• Venturi Scott Brown and Associates

The Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) has been particularly active in drawing attention to the merits of these Freiburg developments in its excellent revamped journal (only available online to members). Articles by Nicholas Falk on the general lessons of the developments (JTCPA Vol 76 no 10 October 2007) and Steve Melia focusing on mobility (JTCPA Vol 76 no 11 November 2007) provide an excellent overview of the developments.

The list of achievements at Rieselfeld is almost endless and mind-boggling from a UK perspective, it would be remarkable to achieve but a few of these. For example:

• the city council controls the process from the outset rather than responding to private developers
• the community is closely engaged in the development process at every level – there is a definite sense of pride and local distinctiveness
• planners allow individual designs within an overall framework of design codes – generally the design of the buildings is simple, contemporary and refreshingly style-free in comparison to the UK preference for pastiche
• there is a rich and diverse landscape with strong links to an adjacent country park – the overall feel of the development is green and open despite a grid layout and 3-5 storey buildings – and there is an integral SUDS which is an attractive central feature of the development (see top image)
• cyclists and pedestrians have priority throughout and there is a direct 7 minute tram link service to the city centre – in addition to this the speed limit is 18 mph (30 km/h) within the development
• there is a predominance of underground car parking throughout or carports with storage above – even housing blocks at the rural edge of the development have basement parking
• there is a wide range of community facilities include kindergarten, children’s centre, sports area, churches, gymnasium, meeting centres, primary and secondary schools, sports clubs and day nursery – the schools are the hub of the community
• there is a district centre with shops and a church shared by Protestants and Catholics
• there is combined heat and power throughout with connection to a district heating system combined with low energy building and considerable use of solar power

click on this image to enlarge | to close, ESC or click on X bottom right

At Rieselfeld, many aspects have combined to create something special. The masterplan and the physical aspects of the development are a major part of this – they are many years ahead of the dumb architect led masterplans so common in the UK. But the crucial elements lie beyond the physical plan. These are:

• a development culture in which the public sector plays a strong central role in contrast to private sector dominance in the UK
• small development parcels commissioned by groups of people who are going to be the occupiers rather than by developers who have no long term interest in the scheme
• the local authority controls the process of site release preferring to release small sites to groups rather than large sites to developers
• a considerable mix of tenures, house types and sizes throughout the development and these are indistinguishable from each other
• a different system for funding infrastructure such as transport facilities, energy and waste systems

Rieselfeld is not the only example of excellence in the development of eco-communities and sustainable extensions – Hammarby Sjöstad, a suburb of Stockholm is currently considered one of the world’s most sustainable communities as reported by the Guardian on 5 December 2007. There is a CABE case study of the development here. It is to be expected that many more of these developments will take place in Europe over the next few years. The UK has much catching up to do.

Useful links:
Freiburg Rieselfeld Photoset
Solar City Freiburg
Lessons from Freiburg – URBED
Solar Cities: European Habitats of Tomorrow
Rieselfeld Website