Stitching Centres Back Together by Kevin Logan

Director of our Urban Studio, Kevin Logan looks at ways addressing urban challenges. 

Urban centres have historically formed integral and integrated components of our cities, towns and villages. They were mixed places, places of commerce, places of exchange, places of gathering, places of entertainment, places to dwell, places of production, places of interaction, places of opportunity, generative places to prosper. However, through time they have become less mixed, less integrated, actively zoned and retail focused, resulting in mono environs that are much of a muchness. All too often, urban centres are invariably formed from standardised approaches, constructed from the same retailers, car borne and set within exclusive car focused highway infrastructure. The distinct and bespoke has been bled out through time, with limited thought and investment given to the spaces that connected our emporiums of consumptions given that they don’t contribute direct financial value to a single entity.As a result of years of reductive investment urban centres invariably lack depth and thus resilience. In the face of being battered by the ongoing retail structural changes storm and wider trends, their honed raison d’être is undermined resulting in some questioning their relevance and their very existence.However, if urban centres are considered wholistically, they represent a major opportunity to positively address wider issues facing society, and to play a fundamental role for communities by delivering opportunities, health, wealth and happiness, and we should resist forgoing them at our peril. Rather than allowing a spatial and social de-growth approach to manifest, where contraction and shrinkage are favoured, we need to look at urban centres as places of re-growth. An approach of re-growth, where centres are utilised as a frame to grow back into, to aid their viability and vitality, whilst simultaneously responding to inherent opportunities and issues that they face and society as a whole. Key issues include the climate and biodiversity emergency, health and well-being, issues around inclusivity and issues attributed to social isolation and loneliness, together with the housing crisis. The active working into, intensifying and remixing of urban centres allows us to proactively engage with these issues and contribute through design and spatial interventions to create positive responses and improvements.

Urban centres need to be fundamentally transformed to be pluralist and remixed, rich, and textured. Drawing on their past role, combined with a transformational approach to structural, societal and planetary challenges. Places in their own right, places where we can grow the resources, infrastructures, both hard and soft, for our communities and societies to flourish.

Value based approach

A central tenet to this approach is looking comprehensively and working interdisciplinary, thinking long-term and through time, considering all actions through a wholistically value-based lens, whilst accounting for negative externalities. Focusing on costs alone potentially limits opportunities, and conceivably undervalues the adaptation to deliver enhanced ecosystems that deliver benefits across social, spatial, environmental realms.

Instead, we need to move beyond traditional metrics of success such as viability, footfall and dwell time augmenting and expanding on these to reflect the breadth of factors communities value. We need to view value through nested lenses of the multiple actors in our urban centres – residents, businesses, investors, fauna – and assessing it beyond pounds and pence, expanding our lexicon of currencies to include amongst others public health, wellbeing, happiness, and pleasantness. In addition, the true costs of negative externalities need to be layered in, to demonstrate the wider costs to society of any decision, rather than leaving society to deal with these costs long after the investment that created them has disappeared.

Building into and intensifying

Building back into urban centres to deliver dwellings is an obvious starting point and addresses one of the primary issues, the housing crisis. Urban centres represent opportunities to create desirable liveable urban neighbourhoods that are centrally located, well-connected by public transport and able to provide amenity in close proximity. The equitable redistribution of space, from cars to people, combined with the active re-use and adaptation of the built fabric that can be re-use and intensified to provide homes offers a resource and carbon efficient mechanism for broadening the vitality of the centres. By liberating space from cars, combined with compact urban growth, we can redistribute this space to layered, shared liveable infrastructure for all, pivoting from exclusive to shared and inclusive. Compact regrowth back into existing centres adds value for multiple actors across currencies, creates more attractive places in which communities can dwell and work, and drives distinctiveness.

Key to successful housing within urban centres is access to resources, amenity and the integration within the wider area. Synergy with the public realm and supportive infrastructure is imperative to create desirable and liveable environments, that are layered and distinct. However, it is important to acknowledge the added value of building back into urban centres provides, through creating critical mass of residents, further diversifying the mix, and contributing towards vitality.

Our work in Canada Water typifies this approach, where an out-of-town retail format with surface car parking was transformed to deliver the intensification of an urban centre enabling the diversification of uses, delivering new integrated residential, and a people focused public realm to create a unique setting for 21st century life.

Resilience

The need to transform urban centres to create resilient and desirable places, which positively respond to the climate and biodiversity emergency is paramount, and will underpin their long term vitality and vibrancy. Working positively towards a regenerative future, using nature-based solutions to reshape our centres as parks, places of resource and energy, productive places to dwell, share and connect, as opposed to places of consumption or continued resource extraction. Thus, ensuring they remain habitable, attractive and relevant to their communities.

Romford is a historic market town and a metropolitan centre in east London. Like many major centres over the past half century Romford has focussed almost exclusively on commercial consumption, internalising spaces to maximise expenditure and delivering infrastructure design to maximise access by private car at the cost of walking, cycling and public transport. Running through the centre of the town is the culverted and canalised River Rom. The river is hidden from the town it gave its name to, has limited ecological value, and its engineered construct adversely contributes towards flooding.

The Romford Town Centre Masterplan develops a series of layered strategies designed to transform the centre through time to be a distinct mixed regional town centre that competes rather than emulates. Central to the delivery of the vison is the renaturalisation of the River Rom, which is considered to have multiple benefits and is a mechanism to drive value.

Taking a multifaceted value-based approach, the masterplan sets out how the renaturalised river can become a centre piece of the transformed town centre. Forming a unique linear park that alleviates flooding, increases resilience, contributes towards amenity and play, delivers ecological habitats and biodiversity, forms part of an active travel network, creates a unique proposition for real estate investment, which all together contribute towards distinctiveness and will encourage greater usage by the communities that surround it.

Urban orchards within centres

The response to the climate emergency can deliver multiple wider benefits and opportunities to reinvigorate our centres, in particular through innovative strategies to adaptation of the public realm. Birkenhead is a Georgian planned new town on the Wirral peninsula in Merseyside, laid out on a grid form that was never fully built out.

An overarching strategic framework, an area wide design guide, and neighbourhood masterplans have been created for the transformational regeneration of Birkenhead, designed to create a series of integrated mixed liveable neighbourhoods, and a revitalised town centre. Central to the design guide is the formation of a vision based on inclusive growth, that builds on the character and role of the town whilst looking forward to improve the socio-economic opportunities for communities. The vision melds liveable city principles with Doughnut Economics to create the Birkenhead liveable doughnut.

Within the town-wide approach Wirral Council’s climate change strategy includes a commitment to plant more trees and increase woodland cover. The design guide establishes a strategy to tree planting, utilising them along with urban greening to create liveable streets. They form a positive intervention into the town’s streetscapes, breaking down the hard paved and rigorous street patination, to create slower, greener more

people centric spaces, and foster informal social interaction. Further added value benefits include improved air quality, sequestering carbon, tree canopy reducing the urban heat island effect, creating linked ecological mosaic spaces, enhancing biodiversity and improving access to nature – which has widespread health and well-being benefits.

Despite the significant wider added value of trees, the maintenance of these was a concern, with a siloed system approach to costs not allowing for consideration of the wider value as part of its decision-making remit. Working with the Council, maintenance was proactively considered. Given concerns over budgets, strategies where maintenance was not a cost perceived in isolation but was a positive act in itself were actively explored. One potential solution was the proposition of planting all trees to form an urban orchard, drawing inspiration from charities who already collect unwanted fruit from trees in people’s gardens. We developed the concept that the maintenance of the trees could be undertaken by a third party, or a community company, that would harvest, collect and utilise the fruit from the trees. This could be put into food systems either through traditional means, working with local food organisations, or utilising the fruit to create unique locally grown Birkenhead products. The concept being that the act of harvesting and collecting the fruit was a means to inadvertently maintain the trees whilst deriving larger or wider scale societal value for numerous actors through a series of lenses.

Such approaches further increase the benefits from those usually associated with increased green space and urban planting, helping address food poverty, urban food deserts and increasing healthy living – as well as creating new ‘economic’ opportunities that can create sustainable income for third sector agencies. However, to realise these benefits a much more integrated approach to decision making is required, expanding involvement beyond the individual Council’s department, who are ordinarily configured to think in narrow terms, to include for example health, climate and economic development specialists, taking an interdisciplinary approach, to ensure the true value is recognised and captured.

Playful inclusion

Research demonstrates play is crucial to development and has positive health and wellbeing outcomes. Equally, research shows clear linkages between access to natural green and blue environments and improved physical health and social well-being. It is also recognised to have positive impacts on the attractiveness and success of urban centres. The adaptation of urban centres, to include green space and playable environments, breaks down the spatial and socio-economic inequalities that restrict access for some groups whilst also layering in further reasons to visit and dwell within centres. Therefore, including such spaces in urban centres increases the potential catchment and creates environmental, commercial and societal benefits. Allied to this, there are wider issues around health and wellbeing which urban centres can and should be responding to, these include inclusivity, social isolation and loneliness. Social isolation and loneliness are increasingly being recognised as a serious public health and policy issues, with the UK government establishing a loneliness strategy in 2018. Social isolation and loneliness have huge individual and societal ramifications, which through good design we can positively be contributing to tackling, resulting in improved lived experiences and lessening the burden on health services.

A pluralist future

Central to urban centres future is their transformation, repositioning, and remixing – learning from their pluralist past to positively inform their future. Layered interventions in the public spaces that ‘glue’ this new urban mix together, creates the opportunity for urban centres to not only function better as places of consumption but contribute more significantly to increased social cohesion, enhanced climate resilience, positive health and well-being outcomes and a whole range of other societal benefits.

Positive enhancement through diversifying their role, enhancing their ecosystems, intensifying them socially and spatially can enable them to become the focal points and the community nexuses our society needs. Reinvigorated urban centres, with more equitable public space at their heart, have an integral role to play in creating mixed cities, towns and villages that are pluralist, form sustaining and characterful centres, are liveable and workable, and ultimately provide opportunities for all to flourish.

The benefits are clear, the value is tangible across a series of currencies, for a diverse array of actors; therefore, it’s a question of why we wouldn’t transform them and cherish them.