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.

London for All: Opening up Debate on London’s Economy

For more details about this event see this link:

http://justspace.org.uk/2014/07/21/debating-londons-economy-can-the-global-city-be-a-city-for-all/

Yesterday afternoon I attended London for all: opening up debate on London's Economy, hosted by the Bromley-by-Bow Centre and organised by Myfanwy Taylor from UCL Department of Geography, collaborating with Just Space - a London-wide network of voluntary and community groups working together to influence planning policy. If you want to look up the Tweets made from the event, search #londonforall and #justspace.

Divided into three quick fire sessions, with speakers talking for a maximum of ten minutes, yesterday afternoon was a thrilling discussion about the many facets of London’s economy: its present, future, and how should we measure the value of what it contains. A main theme emerged: the dysfunctional relationship between The Economy (a global-scale phenomenon in which constant growth is desirable, and is measured in money) and the human-scale building blocks of that economy - the small and medium businesses that fill every nook and cranny of London’s industrial estates and high street hinterlands.

James Meadway, New Economics Foundation

It was generally agreed that the London Plan places too much emphasis on housing growth, at the expense of industrial land. The NEF's James Meadway described the huge inequalities of wealth in London, with simple but powerful graphs. The phenomenal house prices (a house costs 10 x average earnings) leads to a ‘wealth effect’, job creation and pressure on the housing stock, in a self-reinforcing system of unsustainable growth. Roy Tindle from LTGF also criticised the conflict between industry and housing, in which housing tends to win. London relies on its industrial estates for almost every system of distribution and it is this infrastructure that underpins our massive and hugely successful service sector.

Michael Bach from the London Forum astutely pointed out that impact assessments are lacking in the drive to increase housing density in London. The economies of most boroughs are based on small businesses, which require spaces that are both appropriate and affordable. While technically the London Plan is accountable (it is consulted on), Opportunity Areas are not accountable, resulting in the construction of something in the region of 250 new residential towers in the coming years. Although planning policy often stipulates mixed use at ground floor, residents do not want noisy or smelly work taking place at their front door. Similarly, as Sue Terpilowski from the Federation of Small Businesses pointed out, business cannot be forced to locate in inappropriate locations or premises, as exemplified by the doomed schemes where the ground floor remains resolutely unoccupied. This is no problem for the developer, who has already reaped their profit from the lucrative enterprise of house-building, but disastrous for place and the local economy.

The London Plan also ignores other key issues. Dianne Perrons of the LSE argued that supporting reproduction and gender equality through child- and elder-care produces growth comparable to construction of new roads, which is also contained within particular geographic area (and local commitment is a prerequisite for ethical city-making). The Women’s Budget Group highlights the issues nationally, but Perrons argued for a specific focus on London. The Chair of the London Assembly Economy Committee, Jenny Jones, pointed out that for Lloyds of London and Price Waterhouse Cooper’s, climate change will be the biggest factor impacting the future of London. It is a systemic issue, which will affect everything (from food, to land, to production), yet it is notably absent from the London Plan. She pointed out that we need measure of adaptation, not mitigation, to cope with the spectre of climate change, but that nothing is happening because “Boris doesn’t believe in it”.

An unusual mix of academics, business owners and other interested parties attended – and its rare to see these people in the same place. It was great to hear from the owners of small businesses in the second session, who have an embedded and embodied experience of what it means to run a business in London under growing pressure from increased rents – and whose voice is often absent from the debate. Truman Brewery is due to lose its Hackney premises in 5 years as the landlord plans to develop the site as housing. Patria Roman-Velazquez from Latin Elephant made the excellent point that much ‘regeneration’ (developer-led house and flat-building) is taking place in areas where migrants have settled (Hackney, Harringay etc. – this is particularly true of Tottenham). Migrant entrepreneurs contribute approximately £30 billion to the UK economy, and nationally migrants start 1 in 7 new businesses (in London this figure is much higher, I’ve met few UK born traders in the survey of small businesses on Tottenham High Road). Yet migrants also lack power and a voice, and their businesses and the places they have collectively crafted are undervalued by local authorities, in the face of the tempting potential for gentrification.

‘Where do we go from here?’ focussed on potential solutions. Jones suggested that land should be set aside for informal, community-led industries and economies, particularly those with low carbon impact. Ben Rogers from the Centre for London argued that London is THE global city, and that we should seek to maintain this position, as it is it hugely beneficial to all. To facilitate this, he suggested more autonomy for the London government, such as the ability to set property taxes appropriately (and gave the shocking fact that the penthouses at 1 Hyde Park pay about £1600 annual council tax). Terpilowski pointed out that accelerated growth is actually bad for small businesses, it is better to grow slowly and sustainable, and ‘scruffy is good’ ie. it’s what’s behind the façade (the human lives and their commitment to their work) that matters. It’s easy to confuse the symptom of economic and ethical success (tidy, nicely painted shop fronts) with its cause (positive, fruitful and sustained interrelationships between people and place).

Considering the London Plan is about spatial planning, space and place were not discussed concretely, although their presence underpinned the majority of the presentations. The small businesses who spoke clearly had a grasp of spatial issues, and how they are embedded in a particular place. According to an individual from the GLA, planners do not understand these issues, as they are reluctant to leave the office. As Tindle suggested, you need to visit your local industrial estate to truly understand what is at stake. From my own experience, you need to speak to business owners to comprehend the rich metabolism of which they are part, because disparate scales of economic understanding are brought together through the physical place and the topography of the city.

This was most well understood by Rachel Laurence from the NEF, who is undertaking a research project exploring new economics in practice. The problems we face are integrated, but the solutions we are devising are ‘chopped up’ between many different agencies. She presented a series of succinct and powerful diagrams, showing the ‘pizza’ of the economy, with concentric rings representing places, society, institutions and the myriad of other bits, connecting between the micro and the macro scales. She argued that in order to devise systemic solutions you have to beg

Rachel Laurence, New Economics Foundation

in by asking: what do we want the economy of London to achieve?

Planning is reactive, rather than proactive, allowing destruction of the delicate balance of the micro-economies of London and replacing them with mono-thematic developments. As a contrast to this, the ‘traditional’ high street is almost endlessly adaptable, with typologies and depth of block that can accommodate almost any enterprise. A 2 bedroom high rise flat can only ever be a 2 bedroom high rise flat – it can never be a solicitor’s office or an off license.

It is deceptive to look at flows of goods and wealth and consider economic growth as a good measure of the value of a city. The economy is not just about flows and movements of commodities, but of human lives, families, relationships and commitment to place. Well-being should be the focus and measure of the success of economic planning, rather than growth. Ultimately, the problem is that planners and government – both local and national – do not have the resources to build the city, and rely on private interests to do it instead. We need to find ways to moderate and control this process to the advantage of all.

Twitter survey - where is Dalston?

I am about to launch a scoping survey to define the edges of Dalston, on Twitter.

What I'd like people to do is name the roads which form the edges of Dalston on each side, as they understand it. Then I can see if there's any major discrepancies, or if there is general consensus about where the edges of Dalston lie.

Your participation is much appreciated.

Reply via Twitter to @Jane_Clossick. If you have no access to Twitter, please reply via email jane.clossick@gmail.com

Thanks!