T9 Lecture #3 What went wrong with the Thames Gateway?

Having hoped to learn more about the Thames Gateway developments, I was slightly disappointed when leaving the lecture still relatively unenlightened, and not quite sure where the ‘rip it up’ of the scheme was. This first half of the lecture series is all about critiquing schemes and analysing some of the problems faced, before the ‘start again’ of next term’s series. Considering there were members of the audience who have worked on, and have knowledge about the scheme, I felt hard done by. The first half/three quarters of the lecture instead were more biographical, mapping the developments of DFL, which though interesting, we had already heard a lot about in a previous lecture. Nevertheless, some of the theories touched upon, and graphics by DFL started to evoke the ideas of the northward expansion of development from the Thames that is currently underway. Perhaps searching for specific information about a case study for an area that is so large in scope is difficult to summarise in an hour long lecture.

I did find the idea of the propositional document ‘river places’ an interesting one, setting a ‘design code’ or framework for future developments on a large scale area. A tool for developing my own site in Tottenham/Odessa perhaps?

The second half of the lecture by Geoff Shearcroft veered to a large scale depiction of the whole Thames Valley (clarified as the area in which any drop of rain that falls on the surrounding hills and down to the river touches) and proceeded to talk rather generally about the city’s layout around its main waterway.

It also became evident how much an architect’s past influences their design approach during their career, as Geoff’s affinity to suburbia and car park use dominated the latter half of his lecture. Ideas of sustainability were challenged and hierarchy of scale in terms of grandeur of buildings to create a diverse architectural environment, which oddly is quite different to the norm of suburbia.

T8 Lecture #2 What makes up the contemporary city?

In a precis on his book 'A Guide to the new Ruins of Great Britain' by Owen Hatherley, the lecture flitted around 12 cities of the UK, describing and critiquing its architecture with a notion of 5 phases England has encountered:

England 1: The quintessential, ceasing to earn its own living ie Oxford.

England 2: The industrial - steel works, mills, rail, mean lower class housing ie Sheffield.

England 3: Suburbia. Leisured industrial capitalism

England 4: Socialist England in between 1945 and 1979 - council estates, new town campus units.

Engalnd 5: Bright colourful developer lead housing blocks.

In one of his final answers, when propositioned about how we can better the Local Authority housing blocks in Hoxton, Owen Hatherley pointed out that the first course of action would be to better educate the public on the attributes of architecture, and how to appreciate it so that more of a demand would be created for better buildings, as stated by Nigel Taylor:

‘Town planning (and architecture) is not generally perceived as very significant in our society…even though most of us live in cities, and even though most of these cities are unpleasant to be in.’¹

T7 Urban Design Roles

Following a discussion (Proposition 14/10/10) distinguishing the definition of urban design from spatial planning, and whether urban design encompasses a smaller/detailed or larger design than spatial planning; it was then discussed whether in fact the term 'managing' should be related to the role of an urban designer.

‘public spaces overall will only be as good as the processes by which they are created and managed and that, therefore, process as well as products need to be studied.'(1)

More thought into the collaboration between varying professions and urban design led to research into influencing consulting bodies:

Politicians

Public Administrators

Private Developers

Architects

Managers

Public Relations and Marketing

Brand Designers

Environmental Consultants

Planning Officers

(1) Public Space, Stephen Carr, Mark Francis, Leanne G Rivlin, Andrew M Stone, General Editors: Daniel Stokols, Irwin Altman, Cambridge University Press, 1992

T6 Urban Design Definitions

To create our own urban design definition, as a group (me, Emma, Nik) we started by highlighting the key words from all three of our initial definitions of Urban Design. From my original:

'Urban Design - Strategically creating a set of rules or ‘framework’ on a wider scale that, through analysis of context, user groups and infrastructure, protects existing attributes and culture, yet allows for the development of new routes, public and private architecture, and the spaces inbetween.'

From this we developed the following definition:

'To look at the city at its varying scales, studying the roles each part plays to protect existing attributes and culture, yet allowing for the development of new routes; public and private, and the spaces in between.'

Realizing that our use of the word 'part' perhaps wasn't elaborate enough, we then used the spider diagram to map what we believed formed the constituent parts of Urban Design.

(insert diagram here)

Further research into the definition of Urban Design, both in critical literature and in practicing 'urban designers' marketing statements led to the following definitions:

‘Public space is the stage upon which the drama of communal life unfolds. The streets, squares, and parks of a city give form to the ebb and flow of human exchange. These dynamic spaces are an essential counterpart to the more settled places and routines of work and home life, providing the channels for movement, the nodes of communication, and the common grounds for play and relaxation.’(1)

'Since real life is never linear, a strong vision and a flexible approach give master plans the resilience they need to guide development over time. Whether they’re for a city or community or an individual developer or property owner, successful master plans are robust enough to overcome the push and pull of the unforeseen, while creating added value at every stage of implementation.

Gensler’s planners work globally on a broad range of projects, from new urban districts and developments to suburban and exurban campuses, centers and communities. Sustainability is an important focus—with equal concern for the socio-economic health of the community and for its environmental quality. As urban designers, we know how to bring forward the experiential attributes that make a place memorable and attractive.'(2)

Smart urbanism is our working methodology for enabling change and delivering complexity in our towns and cities. It is how our ‘thinking’ and ‘tools’ can be applied to fix the ‘broken’. It could be termed ‘emergent’ urbanism or ‘open source’ urbanism or even ‘sustainable’ or ‘collaborative’ urbanism and certainly has the qualities of all.

Smart Urbanism has its roots in the belief that uniqueness of place is reflected against the backdrop of a clearly defined urban order. This order, in turn, provides the necessary framework for urban variety and provides the palette for the “city of a thousand designers”. While the underlying strategy is to extend and elaborate the structure and intensity of the city, there is a recognition of its implicit unpredictability.

Smart Urbanism has seven drivers to foster emergence. All are overlapping and self-reinforcing. All are essential:

• COMPACTNESS: Places that capitalise on the collective and collateral benefits of closeness, contiguity and concentration.
• COMPLEXITY: Places that offer the rich, varied and cumulative benefits of evolved mixed use development.
• CONNECTEDNESS: Places that offer a choice of movement modes that are a consequence of coherent networks.
• COLLABORATIVE: Places that foster civicness, sense of community, cohesiveness and build social capital.
• CO:EFFICIENT: Places that factor in local environmental capital in all aspects of daily life.
• CO-PRODUCTIVE: Places that are open to emergence and change by facilitating individual and collective actions.
• COOLNESS: Places that are comfortable, creative, confident that have a strong sense of identity, ethics and values.

(1) Public Space, Stephen Carr, Mark Francis, Leanne G Rivlin, Andrew M Stone, General Editors: Daniel Stokols, Irwin Altman, Cambridge University Press, 1992

(2) Gensler website

(3) Urban Initiatives http://www.urbaninitiatives.co.uk/init.php?init=1

T5 Site

Unit 10: Tottenham Marshes/Odessa

Though we're not sure where exactly our site is at the moment, Emma and I have split the research work surrounding our site (Tottenham Marshes) and are researching the two separate borough's planning policies and proposals that currently exist around the area.

Information found for Waltham Forest is as follows (Emma is covering Haringay)

General information on the Tottenham Marshes in the Lee Valley Park:

http://www.leevalleypark.org.uk/en/content/cms/leisure/nature_reserves/marshes/marshes.aspx

Planning Context for the Lea Valley Park:

http://www.walthamforest.gov.uk/leabridge-pf-ch02.pdf

LBWF Planning Context:

http://www.brind.tv/marshes/con5/index.html

Supplementary planning document addressing infrastructural links

http://walthamforest-consult.limehouse.co.uk/portal/pp/supplementary_planning_documents/bhl_planning_tariffs?pointId=1211297274370

Blackhorse Lane Area proposals - including improving the connection between Tottenham Marshes and The Reservoirs. Includes information on the Sustainable Communities Plan, The London Plan, The Unitary Development Plan, and Local Issues:

http://www.walthamforest.gov.uk/bhl-ippf-area.pdf

pg 41 - MOL Lea Valley Green Grid Plan

http://static.london.gov.uk/mayor/strategies/sds/docs/spg-east-lon-green-grid-08.pdf

T4 Lecture #1 What is the city for?

In the first minutes of the lecture, I started associating Peter Carl's words to the discussions and film seen previously that day. The recalls memories of Koyaanisqatsi. However, references to Heidegger and 'the city giv(ing) structure to nature' sees human effect on the world in a more positive light.

Allegories of good and bad goverment, Sienna - Violence vs Urban peace

T3 Film #1 Koyaanisqatsi

Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1982, Godfrey Reggio)

The first thing to strike me about the film was that the first third of the film was uninhabited; only natural landscapes, and intense slow moving imagery. The first people we see interact with nature in a jarring image of a sunbathing family on the beach, oblivious to the huge power plant and dirt road behind them, a metaphor perhaps for humans ignorance to the effect we are having on the natural world.

Screen city methodology

An article by Cambridge Professor, Francois Penz, describes a way in which films about the city can be analysed, using three modes:

Film Genre Context

City Symphony: A typical city symphony would loosely follow the course of a day in the life of the city, creating a unity between space and time. Koyaanisqatsi almost seems to follow the structue of a day in the life of the United States, using a cyclical montage of imagery to describe the natural and urban landscape of the country over the period of a day. We are taken from early morning over the canyons and dunes to the sunset reflecting on the sharp glass edges of city buildings, to the evening lights of the city traffic and the large moon sliding behind a skyscraper. The city symphony, described by Penz(1), ‘its form – montage – was to prove critical to the history of cinema, and essential to any understanding of the relationship between cinema and the architecture of the city.’ We can see a similarity to documentary due to the films rhythmic, non-fictional framework, observing the outside world, as Charles Musser(2) states, ‘the shift in cultural outlook associated with documentary is also evident in the cycle of city symphony films, which […] took a modernist look at metropolitan life.’ Almost metaphor for the evolution of the planet; starting with nature, initial effect of mankind, the industrial revolution (large factories and production lines), modern office culture and consumerism.

Manipulation

The style of the film is effective in portraying the temporal city and its inhabitants. As we see the films 'real life' actors performing for the cameras, we get a sense of the fashions and dynamic of the decade in which it is set.

Digital City

The use of music throughout the film sets a pace at which we see the differing landscapes and city of the US. The inclusion of chants in the hopi language adds meaning to this musical backdrop, though a meaning we only learn in the credits at the end of the film.

The film in its entirety is a document of the social and natural impact we, as a western world make. Fields and fields of cultivated flowers, and booming industry, an exploration of mankind’s effects on nature, going from nature to mining, power plants, aeroplanes, trucks, tanks and atomic bombs. In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means "crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living".

(1) See Francois Penz, ‘Architecture and the Screen from Photography to Synthetic Imaging’ in Architectures of
Illusion, ed. Maureen Thomas & Francois Penz, (Intellect Books, 2003) pp.144-145

(2) Charles Musser, ‘Documentary’, The Oxford History of World Cinema: The definitive history of cinema
worldwide, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) p.90

T2 Manifesto #1

Having lived only in rural Wales and Cambridge, my third year studio project, dissertation, and year in practice gave me the opportunity to acquaint myself with London. Observing the diverse architectural styles and people’s interaction with London’s dense urban fabric, I enjoy the contrast to my farming background in Pembrokeshire.

Recording the transition of the city of London, particularly its previous ‘edge territory’, the Lea Valley, was the theme of my dissertation at Cambridge, in which I compared the films of Patrick Keiller (‘London’) and Paul Kelly (‘Finisterre’, ‘What Have You Done Today Mervin Day’) alongside movements of social realism in British Cinema, seen in the documentaries of the 30’s and Free Cinema of the 50’s. The films’ realist and aesthetic qualities provided an insight into the social, cultural and political climate of the modern city. I suggested that Paul Kelly’s films capture the essence of today’s London, a tool that can be used to reflect on the city’s current architectural situation, and encourage its future regeneration.

My final year project at Cambridge triggered my interest in urban design, following a workshop held with Arup in which, as a group, we considered the formation of an ‘urban framework’ for our site in North Woolwich for the commercial redevelopment of the area. This strategy included new transport links, modernising nearby warehouses for largescale creative production, a new public realm, walkway and leisure centre all linked to the office hub (the focus of our third year portfolio).

My previous work experience at RHWL Architects covers a mixture of scales of commercial development and masterplanning, from a CAT A office refurbishment of ‘Senator House’ near St Pauls, to a rework of an Urban Initiatives masterplan for Salford, Manchester. I have also worked on masterplans in Stoke, York and Sunderland, tower and mini masterplan in Amsterdam. My experience in a commercial team has begun to cultivate my approach to urban design, though an approach that I am already cynical of, as communication with developers and planners is often littered with ‘jargon’ alongside ‘tick box’ drawings and 'nett to gross' values. I also dabbled in FFE selections and stage curtain design for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Aylesbury Theatre (before jetting off to South America for 6 months to discover a different continent, with a sketchbook in hand, and the aim of learning Spanish.) My previous studio city trips include Barcelona, Paris, Rome, Rotterdam and Berlin.

I would like to integrate my interest in art and design into my Urban Design work to add an aesthetic quality to the images produced. My hobbies are to teach music (flute, piano and saxophone) and paint my native coastal landscapes using plaster and acrylic which I sell in a few small galleries at home, though the paintings are simple, I would like to carry the idea of using texture and colouring into elements of materiality and landscaping when thinking of public space design. Though I have few preconceived ideas in my approach to design, my past projects have been relatively traditional, playing with simple forms, materiality and light to create spaces with a human, physical quality. I would like to approach Urban Design with a similar mentality, introducing rigorous research and analysis to strengthen the scheme.

T1 Glossary #1

Planning – Setting of parameters that define how a built form is developed, in consideration of its historical context and current surroundings.

Spatial Planning – Improvement of a space used by the public, from small to large scale, assessing its social use and movement patterns, to optimise its environment.

Design – Creative thinking regarding all facets and use of an object or space, allowing for ease and comfort when experienced.

Urban Design - Strategically creating a set of rules or ‘framework’ on a wider scale that, through analysis of context, user groups and infrastructure, protects existing attributes and culture, yet allows for the development of new routes, public and private architecture, and the spaces inbetween.

Context – Researched information regarding the surroundings of a site, that can be approached from many aspects: historical, environmental, social, economical, political.

Edges – An area or border line that exposes a contrast between contextual issues ie Religious boundaries, old and new, rich and poor.

Scale – The ratio at which an area is observed, that dictates how detailed the observation is, and how large an area is viewed.

Urban – Classification of a type of settlement, different to a rural area due to an increase in built form and public space and amenities.

Aesthetic – How an object, graphic, building or any visual is evaluated in terms of its appearance.

Infrastructure – An arrangement of services connecting to feed a space or building.

Façade – Materiality of the external envelope of a building.