Learning Point 100
How to live more sustainably? Aligning Personal and Professional Values
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INTRODUCTION
Image: Co-production of housing the ‘Tübingen Image: Reclaiming public spacesresidents. - the red carpet way’ - space is shared between Typically, ‘Stadlounge’ (‘City Lounge’) in St Gallen. Switzerland. the British view outside space as a personal Shared space urbanoff design aimed at commodity toisbeanfenced and concept ‘defended’. integrating motor vehicles, pedestrians and other road users into ‘people oriented’ public spaces
WHAT ARE LEARNING POINTS? Learning points share what people have learned from their experience in regeneration - from people working or talking together, or from research into issues and evaluation of what is happening. Learning points can help people and organisations to improve their practice through identifying what works and what doesn’t. The views described in learning points do not mean that the Scottish Centre for Regeneration (SCR) or the Scottish Government necessarily support them. They simply reflect what has been debated and what those involved in the event considered useful learning and lessons from their perspectives. WHAT IS THIS LEARNING POINT ABOUT? This Learning Point captures the key points from the presentation given at the Design Skills Symposium in Stirling on 28 September 2011 by Stephen Hill. Stephen is a surveyor, and Director of C20 futureplanners. He is also a regular contributor to the Integrated Urban Design summer school founded by Ove Arup at Cambridge University.
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1. THE CHALLENGE - making places that enable us to live more sustainably Making neighbourhoods, communities and places that people want to live in is more about how we commission them and bring them into being than about how we design them. We need to get the right clients, and in particular give groups and communities themselves the opportunity to be actively involved in schemes if not commission them directly. Planners should realise that they can express their values and their community’s values as part of their role in the process of making places. These are all aspects of the ‘design process’ which should not be a value-free process that takes place in an architect’s head or on a drawing board. With the process regarded in this way we will start to make places of better quality that work better for their users, and meet sustainable principles, whether of adaptability, low energy use or higher social capital. ‘Planning is not a value-free activity. Planners have to understand how their values affect the choices they make in both choosing how to look at an issue, and how to turn the results into reality.’ (Professor Bill Peterman) Image: Houses at Ashley Vale, Bristol, which grew from local opposition to the original development. The site, formerly a scaffold yard, has attractive streets with a ‘rural feel’ which inlcludes and it’s own nature reserve 3
2. BACKGROUND: why do we not do things like this at the moment? Since the decline of house-building by public authorities, developers have had the strongest role in creating housing, and planning authorities with little knowledge or skill or no clear idea of what kind of developments they wanted to see have been exploited by developers. This is backed up by housing audits carried out by CABE, in particular Stephen’s analysis of the recent review of the HCA-funded Kickstart Housing Delivery Scheme. Stephen concluded that the schemes rated as worst in this review
were carried out by the largest house-builders and in local authority areas without strong design leadership, policies or skilled staff in place. Attempts to improve this situation have tended to focus on design, rather than process or procurement, with a plethora of design guides and codes, most of which are there as limiting rather than enabling instruments; Stephen interprets the focus on design itself as a focus
Image: Some developments in the UK have been critisiced as being superficial attempts to replicate successful European sustainable exemplars such as those in Vauban, Germany.
Image: Large developers scored particularly poorly in CABE’s review of the Kickstart Housing Delivery Scheme
on control. In his view this approach leads to environments which are ‘uniformly depressing’, the verdict of one developer declining to work in an English growth area project, with such a design code. He also claims that too often we treat place and space as a separate commodity rather than something with an integral human value. 4
3. How we can change what we do Stephen’s answer to the question ‘What makes a sustainable neighbourhood?’ is ‘A good place to grow up in’ – and a place where we can develop a good relationship to our physical and social surroundings. The key ingredient of the schemes cited by him as being successful, sustainable communities was an individual rather than a standardised approach to the making of places and neighbourhoods either where the community themselves were in control of the process, or where a very individual approach had been taken to the making of that place, attuned to the characteristics of the place itself and/or its occupants, with a more diverse range of developers, in terms of size, product, price and relationship with prospective occupiers. Places grow out of a process – ‘you can’t specify that a place will be sustainable’ - that is usually gradual and evolving over a long period of time. The creation of new places needs to be done at a finer grain than most current developments, allowing for variations, adaptability and the unexpected over time; not to be confused with just having many different architects and designs. Image: Colin Ward was a leading anarchist thinker and writer with a history of squatting
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4. FIND OUT MORE The support for a new approach that already exists – policy, knowledge, practice
mainly family groups whose focus was ‘secure by living together’. This process is now accepted as mainstream practice in Germany.
For someone focused on process and practical delivery of development, it is not surprising that Stephen had no policies or research to cite, only practical examples, some recent, some from 50 years ago.
Sanford Housing Co-operative, London. The 130 rooms and six flats were purpose built as a single person’s co-op in 1971 by a core of founding members. Using savings from their repairs budget they have recently invested over £1m in major repairs, and biomass and solar energy for the houses, to support their commitment as a group to reduce their carbon footprint by 60%.
SPAN housing (first created in the 1960’s). The ‘market version’ of co-operative housing, where most attention was paid to the space between the houses, and where residents control the management company that looks after the place. Ilôt 13, Geneva. In a process stretching from the 1970’s to the 1990’s the residents first got themselves a place around the redevelopment table and then later devised their own housing programme as an alternative to first the city council’s masterplan for area redevelopment and later the Europan scheme that was being proposed. The scheme was cheaper than others and has brought additional benefits such as the creation of a lot of small businesses in the area.
Springhill Cohousing, Stroud. 34 households together developed the site (awkward and unusable for a ‘standard’ developer) into housing that ranges from one bedroomed flats to five bedroomed houses. There is also a communal house where people can cook and eat together and other shared facilities including a workshop and play-room. Cars are kept on the periphery, creating a high quality environment where public space and private space flow into each other, and where the sense of community provides its own security.
Image: Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects describerd (‘something like’) Ilôt 13 in Geneva as her dream commssion. Ilôt 13 developed organically with a mixture of squatters, students, cooperatives and private sector housing, new and old.
Karlsruhe, Germany. The local authority set up an arm’s length company which eventually enabled development by 10 ‘building groups’, 6
In the USA, cohousing groups are beginning to make deals with ‘mainstream’ developers to be the ‘early adopters’ of new sites, sharing a profit in the later, more ‘normal’ development of the site, showing that even what seem to be ‘alternative’ models can have a place and a role in the mainstream. Community Land Trusts in the USA and now also in the UK are demonstrating alternative models of more usercentred development, based on social values that enable the land value component of house
prices to be held out of the market in trust for the community. Stephen cited 8 ingredients that groups such as Sanford and Springhill reckon make their places work: community membership, building social capital, good life in the spaces between the houses, a resilient social organisation, satisfied residents, a mix of income and tenures, value for money, and medium and high density. The presence of people in a place is the best
Image: Sanford Co-op in London is currently engaged in a large scale project called C60 to reduce their carbon emissions by at least 60% in line with 2050 government targets. They are already well on the way to achieving this. 7
marketing a development could wish for. Cohousing provides people in a place because they choose to be there; they share some common values, even on what in mainstream terms may be considered difficult sites. Once these communities are in place, other communities can form around them, and may or may not form part of the co-housing structure. Co-housing is one picture of ‘places that people want to be in’ or ‘a sustainable community’ because it is based on the shared values, choices and social decisions of a group of people. If you cannot create the process that enables a group of people to make this decision, then you have to be careful about talking of such places in language such as ‘places that people want to be in’. The idea of a ‘sustainable community’ needs investment, which requires proactive planning, and commitment over time . Sustainable development has to be deliverable, so the question should always be ‘how’ and how developers of all kinds demonstrate they know ‘how’.
Scottish Government Architecture & Place Division This document is published by the Scottish Government. If you would like to find out more about this publication, please contact Geraldine McAteer in the Architecture and Place Division of the Scottish Government. Scottish Government APD. Area 2 J South, Victoria Quay, Edinburgh. EH6 6QQ T: 0131 244 0548 E: geraldine.mcateer@scotland.gsi.gov.uk www.scotland.gov.uk The views expressed in this Learning Point are not necessarily shared by the Scottish Government.
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