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).

The second part of the study looked at the infrastructure requirements of three city scenarios considered during the City Visioning and Local Development Plan process, to help understand the impact on public sector service provision (and the public purse) of different development planning strategies.

Although the mapping shown here relates solely to healthcare facilities, similar effects might be anticipated in relation to other public service infrastructure.

La CUB has considerable skills and talent in-house and has produced much excellent work so the task of the INTA Panel was not to reinvent but to explore ideas with the CUB Team and introduce commentary on their current thinking and suggest new themes and directions which chime with their existing strategies. I was part of the international panel which included economists, planners, urbanists and architects from Japan, the United States, Netherlands, Germany, Singapore and the UK.

The background to Métropole 3.1
Consideration of the Bordeaux Metropole 3.1 takes place at an important point in time when long established approaches to urbanism, especially those principally concerned with object-based urbanism, are being superseded by new modes of practice and organisation, not only by established professions but also by citizens, communities and others involved in the transformation of territory.

The past 15 years have seen considerable positive change in the centre of Bordeaux and its riverfront. This transformation has seen the city change from an area of decline with decreasing appeal, limited transport infrastructure and a derelict waterfront into a growing city with a World Heritage Site at its core, with a contemporary tramway system reducing car usage and structuring development, together with a renaissance along the Garonne that has created popular communal spaces and attracted new development.

In contrast, the dispersed landscape of Bordeaux outside the core suggests the outcome of a long process of suburban and extra-urban development in which an easy route to building anew has been taken instead of a more considered approach. The results of this process are not wholly negative however and the complex mosaic of built and un-built that exists today provides many opportunities for positive change.

Models of change
At the same time, there is a need to define a model of change (whether growth, stasis or decline) that relies on intensification and compaction rather than perpetual horizontal expansion. Intensification and compaction suggests the retrofitting of low density suburbs and extra-urban areas with limited and governed centres where public transport is a deterrent for car usage and where walking distance is a key factor in determining development extent. This is not to say that some centres or focal points don’t exist already – they clearly do but the roles and performance of many of them – the retail parks, disconnected business parks, remote factories, and standalone university departments – are suboptimal.

It is worthwhile noting some of the design and structuring principles which are appropriate at a metropolitan scale. These include:

• settlement hierarchy, ratio of built to un-built with an emphasis on intensification around centres
• connections to landscape – natural resources and existing historical assets re-usefood production – local produce, allotments
• energy and smart grid – including live monitoring of grid and energy use
• biodiversity, habitats, productive land and the third landscape
• sustainable transport – emphasis on pedestrians, cycles and smart public transport networks
• role, function and number of centres – governance and citizen involvement, typologies of centres and their specification

Current plans describing the spatial structure of the city already refer to a number of nodes or centres relating to public transport and roads infrastructure. These in turn relate to linear corridor developments linking inwards to the city centre along transport routes. It is entirely positive to define some locations for centres but the actual specification of what these might be remains unknown or underplayed. It would be constructive to regard this specification as part of policy rather than an accidental accompaniment to real estate development.


Towards a centres strategy
It would be appropriate if the 27 municipalities that make up the CUB each had a focus around a multi-functional centre. In this way, governance could be linked to spatial identity and the local town hall. This would help to connect emerging forms of community engagement, user-led innovation and new forms of direct citizen co-investment in change to established municipal arrangements.

Of course there may well be more than 27 centres and some will not have an administrative function. So a positive area of endeavour might be to develop typologies of typical centre components. At this strategic level, the architecture itself is unimportant but local centres could and should have many different roles and characteristics. These could be positive combinations of:

• transport hubs as a basic requirement – tram stops, cycle hire and storage, car club/parking, local governance and civic administration, town hall – including places of worship, civil and humanist weddings, civic spaces
• business space, shared offices, micro-industries
• food production – shared allotments, vineyards, food markets and farm outlets
• waste – recycling points
• social spaces – play areas and sports facilities + passive greenspace and gardens
• places to live – with shops, residential, special needs housing, community centres
• existing areas – airport, business space, transport hub, shared offices, research and science
• education – schools, redefined college campus, university departments
• connection to greenspace – parks and gardens, natural areas, water-space
• digitally ready – free wi-fi zones, digital information on transport, energy use and more

Design principles at a metropolitan scale
In addition to this, it will be useful to think about some of the design principles as well as some of the ambitions of a centres strategy. The design principles would certainly include:

• the idea of enabling process rather than fixed outcomes
• development based on performance and investment criteria
• performance rather than aesthetics, content over form
• relations rather than objects – building interfaces with the public realm, adjacencies instead of wasted space, landscape experience linked to food and energy
• embracing energy, biodiversity, food, waste and water

The benefits of expressing a new model of change through a specific centres strategy will relate to the economy, the environment and the quality of life for residents of La CUB:

• economy: innovation, talent attraction, start-ups, localisation, resilience and diversity
• environment: energy hierarchy, sustainable lifestyles, broad but light environmental footprint, food, waste, water, transport and biodiversity
• quality of life: low cost of living, landscape, heritage, community cohesion, leisure, health care and well being

Part of this definition of a new model of change should also deal with agriculture, greenspace and the third landscape.

The value of greenspace
The dispersed nature of much of Bordeaux outside the World Heritage Site means that the city already contains much greenspace in the form of agricultural land, woodland, designed landscapes (such as parks and gardens) or simple as space left over after development has taken place or is otherwise undevelopable land in flood plains. A greenspace strategy could be a critical element of planning for Bordeaux at a metropolitan scale with significant positive implications for the economy, environment and quality of life.

In terms of the economy at a metropolitan scale, greenspaces are important as they support the local economy through food production and fuel crops. They retain skills in agriculture, wine growing and production, forestry, woodland management and related countryside activities. Greenspaces are also instrumental in defining the character of the Bordeaux area.

As a conspicuous element of the environment, greenspaces are central to enhancing the diverse character of the landscape, improving opportunities for outdoor recreation close to home and therefore decreasing the need to drive. They are also critical elements in enriching biodiversity by providing, maintaining or enhancing a complex mosaic of natural and manmade habitats.

In terms of quality of life, greenspace networks encourage involvement with the landscape either actively through care and production or passively through recreation. They can provide a canvas for engagement by individuals and families through community projects and create opportunities for public occupation and a process-driven greenspace development.

For these reasons, greenspace networks should be expressed through metropolitan strategy and planned rather than occurring as the almost accidental bi-product or leftover from real estate development. Also, as development in the metropolitan area starts to intensify around centres and transport infrastructure, there will be opportunities for the creation of new elements of the greenspace network. In this way, it is possible to develop typologies of void (greenspace) as well as typologies of built (housing, business and education) which come together critically at local centres.

• green and blue networks containing
• crop areas for food, (wine) and fuel
• diverse habitats
• gardens and other designed landscapes
• open land not in agriculture or forestry use
• social spaces and their connections with built areas

The Third Landscape
This is very much in keeping with the work of the French landscape designer Gilles Clément who has asserted for years that there should be an acknowledgement of a third landscape – or areas in which nature has gradually reasserted itself. Le Tiers-Paysage is a terrain classification describing abandoned spaces such as former industrial areas or nature reserves which are prime areas for accumulating bio-diversity and because these landscapes are places of indecision, bio-diversity thrives, giving ecological value to otherwise neglected areas. This seems to be an appropriate and inclusive way of looking at the landscape of Bordeaux which allows for the creation of a range of greenspace typologies through citizen involvement and co-design.
Summary
Bordeaux has taken remarkable steps over the past fifteen years to change perceptions, especially in the historic core. Now the time is right to focus attention on the peripheral areas and bring more structure and meaning to them, creating a balance between built and un-built and optimising the city with fewer grand projets and greater attention to concentration and intensification of the peripheral fabric.

The final report and documentation of INTA’s week in Bordeaux is available in French as a pdf here.

Imagine a country with around the same population as Scotland that builds Metro lines and high speed rail links, that has the ambition to build a 50 mile undersea tunnel link to another country and is built around an extensive welfare state.

Imagine the same country regularly topping international comparisons of national performance in health, education and quality of life, as well as being the seventh most competitive country in the world.

Imagine its capital city, with a similar population to Edinburgh, with an extensive district heating system, the foresight to introduce a vacuum powered district waste disposal scheme that eliminates bin collections and which is extending its tram based public transport system with six major new lines over the next few years.

Helsinki is a city of 480,000 people with a surrounding metropolitan area of around 1.3 million people. It is very similar in size to Edinburgh (478,000) and it also the capital of its country with a population slightly less than that of Scotland at 5.3 million.

It is a remarkable and beautiful city with big plans for the future which include a fast rail link to St Petersburg, promoting and developing its airport as a European hub to China and investigating a 50 mile tunnel link to Tallinn in Estonia. This is a city in which seventy percent of the land area and almost all development land is owned by the City Council. This is a city with big plans and the ability to implement them.

The city also has ambitious plans for its own expansion, particularly on to waterfront areas previously occupied by docklands and inner harbours which have moved out to a new complex at Vuosaaric on the eastern edge of the conurbation. It is expected that an additional 100,000 people will be accommodated in these new developments. A key factor in planning these new development areas is integrated public transport by Metro in part but mainly by tram.

Helsinki’s tram network is one of the oldest electrified tram networks in the world. It forms part of the city public transport system organised by Helsinki Regional Transport Authority and operated by Helsinki City Transport. The trams are the main means of transport within the city centre and 56.6 million trips were made back in 2004, which is more than those made with the Helsinki Metro.

The Finnish capital has 12 tram lines and six more on the way | pic: Creative Commons

The first tram network was established in 1890 and electrification took place in 1900. In common with many other European cities, the tram system was under threat from buses in the mid 20th century and the city decided to close the system in the early 1960s. However this decision was reversed during the early 1970s and by 1976 the network was being expanded again. Today the tram is a key part of the city’s infrastructure.

The city has a current total of twelve lines with a further six lines planned over the next few years. As well as owning almost 70% of the land area of the city, the Helsinki authorities also own the public transport system and critically, the energy company that supplies power for the tram network. This degree of ownership of the core elements of the system means that it is relatively easy to extend the network and guarantee connections to new housing areas without having to haggle with different land owners, developers, public utility owners and contractors.

Another aspect of infrastructure provision in Helsinki is the way in which it seems to happen efficiently and painlessly. Not for them the contractual disputes, delays in implementation or flaws in construction which are leapt upon by a triumphant public and trumpeted in the media elsewhere.

Perhaps it is in the dour uncomplaining Finnish character to just let other people get on with things in the knowledge that they will eventually be successful. Or perhaps they are just used to doing infrastructure provision really well.

Original article and comments

This short article was originally published in the Guardian Edinburgh under the title ‘Spotlight on trams: Bordeaux’. The Guardian has given up its local experiment so this post, together with a similar article on infrastructure in Helsinki may disappear at any time from the Guardian’s pages – hence they are republished here.

In the first of an occasional series looking at the experience of trams in other world cities, guest blogger Willie Miller finds that Bordeaux’s trams haven’t just moved people around, the ‘mobile social structures’ have changed the very development of the place.  Bordeaux is a vibrant city of 250,000 people serving a metropolitan catchment area with a population of 1.1 million and is one of the largest urban areas in France.  The city and its region are of course well known for wine but this is also a city that makes things: optical and laser research and production, aeronautical and defence industries as well as pharmaceuticals, food and electronics.

It is also a significant administrative centre and a city attractive to tourists on the basis of the wine industry, the adjacent seaside resort of Arcachon and the city centre which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The built-up area has grown swiftly in the past decade and urban sprawl was considered to be a significant problem. In common with many other European cities, as Bordeaux expanded its periphery, industries around the core of the city declined most significantly along the banks of the Garonne.

The first Bordeaux tramway dated back to 1880. In 1946 the public transportation system had 38 tram lines with a total length of 124 miles carrying 160,000 passengers per day.

This system was abandoned in 1958 as a result of anti-tram arguments including the notion that trams hindered the flow of cars through the city.
Political change

In 1995 the city elected Alain Juppé as its new mayor. He recognised the need for action to counter the strangulation of the city by transport problems and, together with a number of other initiatives, the city adopted the tramway plan in 1997 with the support of Central Government in 2000 as a Public Interest Project. This is a very European example of a politician supporting a major project rather than disowning it. The tramway network currently consists of three lines built at a cost of EURO 800,000.

The first new line was opened in December 2003 and further extensions have increased the route length to just over 27 miles with more routes planned. The system is notable for using a ground-level power supply system in the city centre to placate the views of conservationists who considered that overhead wires would threaten the integrity of the World Heritage Site. The system is operated at the moment under a five year contract by Keolis, the largest private sector transport group in France.

The overall transport system (bus-tram-rail) sees some 300,000 passenger journeys daily of which 165,000 are on trams. On average, 45% of journeys on the combined bus and tram network of the TBC are by tram. In 2008 the trams carried 54.7 million passengers. The Bordeaux tramway is one of 16 towns or cities in France running a tram system integrated with bus and rail.

Wide impact on structure
The impact of the tram on the city should not be seen just in terms of moving people around. It has had a much wider impact on the structure of the city and the way in which new development is allowed to take place. On the periphery of the city, the three tram routes define growth corridors along which development can take place. The new routes have defined new parts of the city where people live and work.

Tram stops become the focal points of new squares, the centres of new mixed use areas where employment and living space are co-located or the best way of getting to some of the city’s remarkable new spaces such as Michel Corajoud’s breathtaking Mirior d’eau opposite the Place de la Bourse on the banks of the Garonne. The tram has also allowed many traditional city squares to become areas of calm like the spaces around the Cathédrale Saint-André de Bordeaux or around Richard Roger’s Palais de Justice. Many of these spaces sit atop underground car parks so while the car can still penetrate the inner historic core, there is precious little evidence of its presence.

In Bordeaux the tram infrastructure enables easier orientation within the city. The tracks, overhead cables and stops are now permanent features of the city’s streets – predictable and stable unlike bus routes. So the tram informs and helps people to formulate a clearer image of the structure of their city. It is a feature of their communal public space.

Tram stops in the city are typically focal points in the urban fabric where local shops, bars and cafes cluster or where students meet on the way to university. This perhaps sounds like UK Regeneration speak – and it probably is – but the defining of city spaces by public transport is a part of European urbanism that predates Lord Rogers and his Urban Renaissance by a century or more.

Mobile social spaces
Bordeaux’s trams are also mobile social spaces in a way that buses can never be – the arrangement of seats and standing space seems to encourage conversation. The tram is smooth running so that café au lait need not be spilled and the discussion started at the tram stop can continue without interruption.

Trams in Bordeaux have also created more walkable streets. There is little if any evidence of a city centre traffic problem whereas before their reintroduction, there was traffic chaos. Generally, trams attract heavier usage than buses so their introduction and development has created a virtuous circle of improved diesel-free environments for pedestrians, more walking and increased use of public transport.

The brave steps that Bordeaux took at the end of the 20th century to reconfigure its transport system have effectively restructured the city and provided a new network of communal public spaces and a pedestrian priority city centre of which it can be justifiably proud. It is an excellent example which many UK cities should follow.

Original article in Guardian Edinburgh

Our starting point was that tourism development is no longer simply a case of increasing visitor numbers and footfall figures in particular locales. It is concerned with ensuring that the Council is able to improve opportunities for bringing direct economic and other benefits to local communities, raising awareness about important global environmental issues (particularly in the case of a World Heritage Site) and managing sensitive built and natural environments.

Also the Council can contribute in the widest sense to the future well-being of the area by nurturing local traditions and culture as well as being responsive to an ever more discerning traveller whose choices are increasingly boundless and whose tastes and expectations are ever more diverse and demanding.

The scope of the commission included research and audit, consultation, policy appraisal, activities and product review, funding appraisal, strategic theme development as well as management and implementation.

We held workshops with the Harbour Commissioners and a range of public and private sector bodies and discussed a range of strategic propositions from which we developed some conceptual ideas for the future development of the harbour lands. The broader strategic concept is based on three principles:

a) to position Coleraine within the wider inter-regional maritime context

b) to establish a strategic vision for the Lower River Bann as a major economic and tourism driver for the region
The spatial concepts for the harbour lands themselves indicate how a range of development scenarios might be considered from a largely maritime industrial complex to a more significant reappraisal of the existing Dunne’s site as part of the development mix. The concepts are meant as tools for further consideration of the site’s future, not as development solutions and they provide the basis for further discussion and investigation. From left to right, options A to C – click to enlarge:

Option 1: Develop Marina at Cushowen

The initial site appraisal and financial appraisal looked at a 100 berth marina with the full complement of storage and maintenance facilities situated on and around the Cushowen site at the most northern end of the Harbour
lands. Further discussions, both at the workshop and the board have indicated that this may not be the most suitable location, in terms of operational viability and in commercially realising the assets of the site. (left diagram)

Option 2: Develop Marina beside existing Dunnes site
This option starts to free up more land for leisure-based activity and development options. This option would necessitate agreement on the lease with T-Met or be part of a longer term plan post 2021. This option also allows for additional pontoon berths at the Cushowen site for larger vessels and allows the storage, maintenance and boat lifting facilities to be positioned at the top end of the site, this releasing more land for re-development. It also permits a more strategic approach to the development and the ability to bring in periphery sites in public and private ownership as indicated in he centre diagram.

Option 3: Develop Marina on existing Dunnes site
Option 3 takes the principals of Option 2 another stage further and is the most ambitious of the three. It positions the marina on the existing Dunnes site. Again, this would require a partnership with Dunnes and re-location of the existing store, perhaps to one of the new retail developments in the town centre. The advantages of this option are three fold. Firstly, it further optimises the land for redevelopment, both within the existing site boundary and in the surrounding area. Secondly, it provides a possible solution to the navigation of the old bridge by incorporating a lough gate and thirdly, it goes the furthest in realising the ambition of creating a “River Town” where the harbour lands and the town centre are fully integrated. This will have positive economic benefits for the commercial viability of the harbour itself and the wider town and region. Studies have shown that the most successful marina developments are those which have the best linkages to the town they serve.

Clearly there are a number of delivery issues which the Harbour Commissioners are well aware of including clarity and certainty about future ownership of the harbour lands, the future direction of the Port’s maritime activities, future land use directions and the necessity of partnership working. Nevertheless, we hope this short strategic exercise has helped to raise awareness of the broader issues around the future of the harbour.

KEY ISSUES AND FINDINGS

We noted in our proposal for this work that there was a striking contrast between the centre of the town and its peripheral areas – almost as if the centre mattered but the rest didn’t. We had a strong feeling in Stromness that there was a need to re-learn how to build places – not so much in terms of architecture but in relation to the basic components of the external environment, the siting of development and the overall form of settlement. Our anticipated headline issues were:

• the presence of the past
• a distinctive sense of place
• learning how to build anew
• localising urban design
• traffic by design
• sustainability – a fundamental theme

These are the basic foundations of the urban design framework. If anything the contrast between the old town and the surrounding areas was more marked than we thought. There is a strong sense that the old town is regarded, like the library, as unfit for purpose in the 21st century. The decanting of uses to Hamnavoe and Garson is evidence of this while the Pier Arts Centre seems to represent the very opposite view – a well received triumph of careful design and function in constrained circumstances.

At the same time, the quality of the old town deteriorates in a myriad of small ways – vinyl street signs replacing old painted versions, unnecessary parking restrictions, inappropriate ‘heritage’ street lighting, vacant property and insensitive repairs to buildings and the public realm.

In parallel with this is the sense that Garson is used as a convenient place to site things that can no longer be accommodated in the old centre. So the town has no real structure or cohesion. This was recognised in the brief for this work which stated that the purpose of the study ‘is to establish a strategic framework and vision which would direct future proposals towards a coordinated and legible urban form’.

While preserving and enhancing the historic core has been an objective of the Council for some time, changes in land use patterns, changes in the type and location of housing, the relocation of important community institutions and the growing rate of vacancies in the historic core suggest a need to ask some very basic questions about the future of the town. Some of these are:

• What is the purpose and role of the town?
• What is the future of the historic core and what function might it perform?
• What are the roles of the various other parts of the town and can these areas work in an integrated and holistic manner?
• Are there too many proposals competing for scarce resources and might fewer stronger proposals help to fulfil more integrated spatial objectives?
• Should the unrelenting drift to the north be channelled into a new spatial structure for North Hamnavoe?
• Is there a positive future for Garson other than as a home for things that can’t be accommodated elsewhere?
• What can be done about the low quality of design of new buildings on the edges of the town and in the surrounding countryside?
• What size should Stromness be? Is building 140 houses by 2010 (as per the Local Plan) sensible or just very un-ambitious?
• How do we build urban form in such a low demand environment – is low density a realistic option?
• Each of the character areas described needs attention of some kind – the 4th and 5th tier areas have the most potential for change but how should these be improved?
• Can the town put its energy and sustainability research credentials to work for the Stromness environment?

These questions are answered to a greater or lesser degree in the report below. The culture of Orkney and Stromness is very project orientated and there was significantly more interest in implementing these rather than addressing strategy and policy which would in turn produce more appropriate projects than the current batch. There is also enormous resistance to change on the part of the local community and widely differing opinions about what should actually happen in the town.

The inevitable result of this is compromise and our report reflects that. However it has opened up wide ranging discussions about the form and function of the town and set out some new thinking, especially in relation to the form of peripheral development in the stunning Orkney landscape. The final report is shown below:

The study team comprised WMUD (lead), Yellow Book (economic strategy), Drew Mackie Associates (consultation), Hamilton-Baillie Associates (traffic and movement), Jacobs (Strategic Environmental Assessment and Strategic Flood Risk Assessment) and Leslie Burgher(architecture).

Public Policy

The Scottish Government wants to create a more successful Scotland by increasing sustainable economic growth. The Government acknowledges that a high quality environment is an important part of achieving this. Highland Council’s ambitions for its population are expressed in the Single Outcome Agreement, and link back to the Government’s aim of creating a wealthier, fairer, healthier, smarter, greener and safer Scotland. The Single Outcome Agreement aims to promote sustainable Highland communities, safeguard the environment and create a competitive, sustainable and adaptable Highland economy. It also aspires to a healthier and fairer Highlands with better opportunities for all.

These aims have implications for the type and form of place that Inverness should become. For example, how successful is Inverness in catering for a broad range of expectations? How well are the Single Outcome Agreement’s ambitions being met? How well does the city cater for everyone’s needs? Is any section of the community disadvantaged? Retention of the local population, in particular the 16-35 age range, is important for Inverness and the surrounding Highland communities. However, it is this age group that tends to be attracted elsewhere – so it is important to provide what is needed in order to attract and retain them.

A new city vision

One way of shaping a city future is by agreeing a vision which describes the necessary ingredients of a settlement in terms of quality of streets, buildings, spaces and sets out an image of the kind of city that Inverness could be. Over the next few months, Highland Council will be facilitating a visioning exercise for the City of Inverness. This is part of the process of preparing the new generation of planning documents for the area. It is is a different way of planning. It involves working with everyone with a stake in the future of Inverness and develop a shared vision. We will be doing this at a series of special Future City Events from Wednesday 20th January to Friday 22nd January 2010 for people from local communities, businesses and the public sector.

The City Vision team
We have been appointed by Architecture and Design Scotland to work with Highland Council staff in preparing the spatial content of the Vision. Nick Wright Planning has been commissioned to work with the residential and business communities in Inverness in the lead up to the Future City Events as well as consult widely with a range of public sector agencies. Highland Council have set up a blog which records the process and provides a wealth of background information. The British Council has run the Future City Events have a webpage here which describes the process.

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.