A good city has industry: A talk by Mark Brearley

We should embrace urban industry, welcome the economic diversity of cities, push back against de-mixing and suburbanisation. 

In this punchy talk Brearley observes the diversity of London’s industrial life. He celebrates its responsiveness and buoyancy, and points out how that city's fast growth and insatiable demand for housing are hollowing out some of what makes it most interesting, vibrant and resilient. Listen well, London is eating itself, an unfortunate side effect of success. Urban industry, including manufacturing, is especially fragile, under threat from a fast moving land market and the floppiness of planning. 

The case is made for ensuring a filigree of industrial accommodation right across London, for a city able to embrace its aggregates, its builders merchants, its waste re-use and its just-in-time production, its hirers, it’s showmen, it’s stock holders and deliverers. 

A good London would be proud of it’s many hundred car menders, of Ford and Caterham, Brompton and Mylands, Tate & Lyle and Dunhill, the Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda depots, the Yodel, UPS and Parcel Force sheds, the scrap metal, glass and paper, the jewellery and leather goods crafters, the dress makers, cleaners, the scaffolders, the metal fabricators. 

Brearley argues that the city we want would let us see all these things, walk past them, on the way to elsewhere, appreciated and respected. In the city we want we would know about the diversity of industry, perhaps choose to enter that world because it is normal and everyday, choose to help make it stronger and therefore our city the richer.

This talk was recorded at the two day ISOCARP Congress session in Antwerp, October 2015, the first of several public airings of this engaging 35 minute run-through.

http://www.isocarp2015.org/themes/ant...
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/20...
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesi...
http://justspace.org.uk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW4GA...

Mark Brearley is a professor at The Cass, Aldgate, London. He heads the Cass Cities initiative, is the proprietor of a manufacturing business in Peckham, and is busy telling the world about over 2000 manufacturers in London (see Instagram: @madeinlondon.uk). 

Contact Mark Brearley at mark@mboffice.org.uk

http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/faculties/...
http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/faculties/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkCHz...
http://websta.me/n/madeinlondon.uk
http://www.kaymet.co.uk
http://www.real-craft.co.uk/section76...

Cycling in London

A few weeks ago a young man was cycling across London Bridge, in several busy lanes of traffic. He was turning right, so was riding in the far right lane. He clipped the central reservation, lost control of his bicycle, fell into the path of an oncoming car and died instantly. His name was Chris Tandy and he was only 28 years old.

Typical of most people who cycle in London, he was a young professional who lived in Hackney, he cycled regularly and had no doubt experienced lots of 'near-misses' before in his life as a cyclist. But I happen to know that he was a careful, risk-averse person who always wore a helmet, followed the rules of the road and was just very, very unlucky on this one occasion. But you only have to be very, very unlucky once and suddenly there's 200 people in your school chapel sobbing at the futility of your disappearance. And that's what happened to Chris.

Method of travel to work: bicycle. Red indicates greater density of respondents.

 Source: http://datashine.org.uk

Every day I cycle to work along the Whitechapel Road and this week I have seen two cyclists almost get squashed by lorries. In both instances the HGVs couldn't see the cyclists as they pulled in, or turned left with scant warning. No-one was really in the wrong, and in both incidents nothing serious happened. But cyclists are totally vulnerable, we have nothing to protect us from a lorry wheel so the idea that we share space with huge, deadly vehicles with very poor visibility, especially at the low level a cyclist occupies, it completely ludicrous.

Most people are put off cycling in London because they are afraid of death or injury, or just find the whole experience deeply stressful. If it wasn't for the extreme convenience of cycling, those factors would put me off too. It doesn't have to be that way, some very simple design ideas and changes to interchanges would make all the difference. Different solutions would be appropriate indifferent circumstances, but the time has come to stop scapegoating cyclists.

For example, every morning I have to turn right at a huge junction. This involves me sitting in the centre of the junction, a vulnerable unprotected human being, while lorries and buses squeeze past on either side, then racing to turn right ahead of a stream of impatient traffic. A simple solution would be for bicycles to 'proceed with cauthion' and turn at major junctions while pedestrians are crossing. On the very odd occasion when a cyclist proceeded with insufficient caution and bumped into a pedestrian, the worst that would happen would be some injured pride, and perhaps a bruise or two. But death or life changing injuries would not be on the agenda.Similarly Chris Tandy should have been in a dedicated bike lane, separated physically from motorised vehicles. The pavement on London Bridge is very wide, there could easily be a bike lane there.

Bicycles need to be prioritised on London's roads, so we can move forward as a green, cycling city...  the oil won't last forever, it's obvious that the car is unsustainable and we should be world-leading in finding better ways to move about in urban areas.

I am writing this blog entry because I am angry that a young man who I knew and liked has died for absolutely no reason, leaving behind a tragic scene of devastated friends, parents and fiancee. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but if we had decent cycling infrastructure in London, there wouldn't have been wrong time, because he wouldn't have been in the wrong place. Come on people, this needs to be fixed.

Link to the Evening Standard article [tip: don't read the comments]

A nice, thoughtful comment from <http://road.cc/content/news/126000-tributes-paid-cyclist-killed-london-bridge>

Not sure where he was. ES article says 'after getting off a train at London Bridge' which suggests he would have been heading North.
However, the photo on their story shows Police vehicles here (google street view link) which is the Southbound carriageway. http://goo.gl/933nJX
Regardless - no separate, safe, cycle facilities in either direction.
Parked cars allowed on southbound carraigeway outside rush hour so heading South you are often push near to central reservation by buses .
If he was heading north (but fell into southbound carriageway at that point) it would seem highly likely he was following cyclecraft, behaving like a car, and taking the lane in order to go straight ahead. Perhaps a fast close pass from behind by a vehicle pushing through angry at him being 'in the middle of the road' causing him to lose control? Suspect the car in question wouldn't even have stopped.
Again saw cars travelling at well in excess of 50mph on a 30mph residential street in South London today (speed sign stops reading at 45). It's a road that's meant to be a backstreet cycle route, part of LCN 25. Exactly what we're going to get as 'Quietways'

The Big Meet: Addressing the National Place Leadership Gap

Last Thursday (17th July) I spent several exceedingly hot and sweaty hours in a big tent in the quad at UCL discussing the findings of the Farrell Review of Architecture and the Built Environment, "Our Future in Place". The conversation was focussed on two key questiones posed in the Farrell Review: Do we need a 'Place Alliance'? and would 'National Place Leadership' be beneficial?

To see tweets from the event search for the hashtag #bigmeet. There are some good ones, and there were some very interesting conversations on Twitter relating to conversations in the room. The findings will also be published later as part of the Evaluating the Governance of Design UCL research project.

"As a follow-up to the Farrell Review, The Bartlett School of Planning is holding a high level ‘Big Meet’ of cross-sector organisations with an interest in place design at UCL’s Bloomsbury campus on Thursday 17th July.

Drawing on current AHRC funded UCL research into questions of design governance and Professor Matthew Carmona’s recently published suggestions for how to build on the place leadership recommendations of the Farrell Review, the Big Meet will take forward this aspect of the review and seek to formulate a common manifesto or set of principles for advancing this agenda at the national level. The Big Meet will be followed by a meeting with the Minister for Culture, Ed Vaizy MP."

We were organised around tables of 8-12 people, arranged rather like we were at a giant wedding (the white marquee added to this effect). To promote discussion, Carmona had authored a short discussion paper, entitled 'National place leadership: three steps to filling the gap in England' suggesting a route to promoting the importance of place in the husbandry of our built environment. First, the 'Big Meet' with cross-sector discussion about the desirability and viability of a politically sanctioned emphasis on place. Second, the formation of a Place Alliance to bring together 'key players' to speak with one voice for the built environment. Third, the establishment of a cross party, politically independent Place Council for England led jointly by government and industry with its own non-governmental funding and objectives. This would be something a bit like a more independent version of government-funded CABE (which existed between 1999 and 2011, and UCL research suggests did a good job at improving the built environment, but didn't make many friends in the process).


What is the Farrell Review?

The Farrell Review, predominantly funded by Farrells, and commissioned by the Dept. for Culture, Media and Sport, examines the way the built environment is planned and designed, across agencies and stakeholders. It then makes recommendations for ways this could be improved. Primarily, it concludes that "...the built environment is extremely complex and that this complexity must be recognised within all our education systems, within the broadest professional life and within government at all levels." Astutely, the report recognises that what brings together this complexity into one arena is place - which is a combination of topography (buildings and streets) and society (people, their lives and interrelationships) as well as invisible institutional, legal and administrative structures tied to specific locations.

The heat is not apparent in this picture. It was, however, very hot.

Towards a Place Alliance

It was generally agreed that a Place Alliance (PA) has the potential to  advocate for places, above the competing interests of organisations and institutions who have a stake in them (ie. everyone). In terms of what the Place Alliance might actually do, this was as far as consensus was reached. How and where this advocacy ought to occur, by whom (are members of the PA invited, appointed or voluntary?) to whom (the public, government, industry?) and how the outcomes should be measured (in money, in 'well-being', in participation?) and then enshrined in what kind of policy (planning? economic? how do we control what developers build?) all remained up for grabs. This seems to be a taster for what is to come in such an organisation - the prospect of getting so many competing interests to speak with 'one voice' seems nigh on impossible, and also undesirable. It seems to me that rather than discussing the administration of such an organisation we would be better to begin with ethical questions, such as those asked at the London For All afternoon by Rachel Laurence of the NEF: what are places - who and what do they serve.

In the Review, as well as place being an ordinary word, place is also converted into an acronym: Planning, Landscape, Architecture, Conservation, Engineering, as the outline structure of a 'method', or a toolkit, for understanding and dealing with place. Alternatively, encompassing the 'concept' of place, the acronym Politics, Life, Advocacy, Community, Environment is suggested. As pointed out by Matthew Carmona, the possibilities for acronyms are almost endless: Particular, Location, Area, Conversations, Economy to name just one example. I fundamentally disagree with the abstraction of the word 'place'  because in its deepest essence, a place is not a concept. A place a concrete thing, rather than an abstraction, within which concepts can be accommodated, but which are always specifically connected to a particular location and geography. To frame it as such means the conversations around it get conceptual and abstract, rather than concrete and specific. This was a problem with much of the discussion, from which places themselves were wholly absent.

National place leadership

Introducing the second session, Carmona made some excellent points about the lack of collaboration at present in the highly fragmented built environment 'sector' (I would argue that it is not a 'sector', it is the underlying foundations of everything - in a very real way -  but let's put that aside for the moment and proceed with the jargon). He argued that the fetishisation of design, the tyranny of the market vs. regulation the NIMBYs and the BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone - I love it) compete in an unfruitful way, to the detriment of actual places. Rather like the first session, the second was dominated by questions of governance, funding etc. and studiously avoided questions of what the purpose and approach of the Place Council for England could actually be.

Comments

According to Farrel in his opening address, the Review seeks cultural change, focussed on well-being as an indicator of success. This is an oft-repeated trope and fails to address the key finding of the review: that places are complex, while 'well-being' is so simple as to be almost meaningless. The complexity of places is so deep that it seems rather grandiose to suggest that they can be managed and advocated through a single council. It also promotes the spectre of some kind of pattern book for good places, divorced form the real-life negotiation of civic conflict.

A successful urban structure of adaptability is the cause, not the symptom, of an apparently 'good' place. This is not something which can be achieved through aesthetically-focused design. Instead, it is the capability of the urban structure to moderate and organise the inevitable competition between the different interests of groups and individuals in civic society. It is tempting (as occurred at London for All) to focus on civic questions solely on the economy - particularly at the small scale. But urban structure is also composed of other kinds of institutions which contribute to the negotiation of conflict. The civic city depends on the people, their relationships with each other (embedded in place), sometimes more than on the organisations, particularly the global-scale organisations who are frequently those with the biggest financial stake in the creation or improvement of place.

The initial purpose of the Place Alliance should therefore be to establish an agreed ethical basis which would guide the activities of the Place Council for England, so it does not become the flagship for the present leader's personal aesthetic or BANANA based whims. Measuring the non-economic value of places is difficult or impossible, so success should focus on the extent to which a place enables the participation and commitment-to-place of the people who inhabit it. In order to do this, I propose that the organisation should be embedded in a network of actual places - in the dirt, the bin-collections, the piss on the street and the physically located conflict between councils, churches, clubs, SMEs and internaional corporations.