Socially Restorative Urbanism

The theory, process and practice of Experiemics

Kevin Thwaites, Alice Mathers, Ian Simkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134113330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The need for a human-orientated approach to urbanism is well understood, and yet all too often this dimension remains lacking in urban design. In this book the authors argue for and develop socially restorative urbanism – a new conceptual framework laying the foundations for innovative ways of thinking about the relationship between the urban spatial structure and social processes to re-introduce a more explicit people-centred element into urban place-making and its adaptation.

Focusing on this interplay between humans and the built environment, two new concepts are developed: the transitional edge – a socio-spatial concept of the urban realm; and Experiemics – a participative process that acts to redress imbalances in territorial relationships, defined in terms of the awareness of mine, theirs, ours and yours (MTOY).

In this way, Socially Restorative Urbanism shows how professional practice and community understanding can be brought together in a mutually interdependent and practical way. Its theoretical and practical principles are applicable across a wide range of contexts concerning human benefit through urban environmental change and experience, and it will be of interest to readers in the social sciences and environmental psychology, as well as the spatial planning and design disciplines.

PART I

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BEYOND BOUNDARIES

Developing the concept of socially restorative urbanism

Introduction

In too many cases, we design for places and people we do not know and grant them very little power of acknowledgement … This floating professional culture has only the most superficial conception of particular place. Rootless, it is more susceptible to changes in professional fashion and theory than to local events.

(Jacobs and Appleyard, 1987, p. 115)

In 1987, Jacobs and Appleyard warned about the potentially damaging consequences that might arise from an increasing influence on urban place-making from a professional culture which seemed to be increasingly distant from the urban inhabitants who used it. Their perspective, delivered as part of an attempt to draft out an urban design manifesto, highlighted that the delivery of urban environments in the latter part of the twentieth century had increasingly been perceived as a problem requiring professional solution. In consequence, urban dwellers were seen as recipients of aesthetic and technical expertise and less as acknowledged participants in the generation and management of places that they used. Some 22 years later, Lord Rogers of Riverside expressed a similar concern about one of the cornerstone challenges facing progress towards an urban renaissance in the UK. ‘Many of the current problems in English towns and cities lie with the development professions and businesses, alongside those who regulate them. We have tolerated a lazy over-use of off-the-peg designs and layouts’ (Urban Task Force, 1999, p. 50).

In a recent evaluation of the Urban Task Force impact after its first decade, Punter singles out ubiquitous apartment developments as representing a particular failure:

Undoubtedly the biggest design failing has been the medium and high-rise apartment buildings, which have been widely criticised for their poor architecture, build quality and urban design, lack of energy efficiency, inadequate space standards, amenities and management … many have had problematic impacts and presented significant failings in terms of liveability, streetscape and neighbourhood amenity.

(Punter, 2011, p. 16)

In too many cases in recent years we seem to be witnessing an increasing number of urban developments that exhibit few of the social ideals embodied in the now widely accepted ‘liveable cities’ concept (Figure PI.1).

Some argue that we should not perhaps be surprised about this because of a continuing theoretical vacuum in urban design. Cuthbert (2007), for example, suggests that urban design, because of its state of being situated inbetween architecture and planning, has so far been characterised as a fairly chaotic, anarchic, unfounded sequence of creative ideas bearing little or no coherence with each other, and has consequently failed to establish a relationship between design and societal processes. Furthermore, it has failed to create meaningful relationships with important disciplines such as social sciences, economics, psychology and geography. In response is a call to draw on the social science disciplines that have not been brought into mainstream urban design thus far. Urban design, in Cuthbert's view, needs to respond to the fact that the organisation of cities reflects the organisation of society, and space cannot be separated from its social production in specific urban forms.

One of the aims of this book is to offer reflections on how we might make some of the processes of urban place-making more orientated to the human element. There is, of course, nothing particularly new or novel in this aspiration. Indeed, much of the development of urban design theory in the Western world could be said to be characterised by such an aspiration, with many influential and enduring

Figure PI.1 Striking icon of urban regeneration but what about liveability, streetscape and neighbourhood amenity? Salford Quays, Manchester.

contributions taking an explicitly socially responsive approach in theoretical development and practical advice. By no means an exhaustive list, but among those of particular significance to us here would include: Kevin Lynch (1960), Jane Jacobs (1961), Gorden Cullen (1971), Christopher Alexander (1979), Ian Bentley and colleagues (1985), John Habraken (1998), Karen Franck and Quentin Stevens (2007) and Jan Gehl (2010). In Part II of this volume, we will present a summarised account of a wider review of work relating in particular to the conception of transitional edges, one of the principal components of socially restorative urbanism. In writing this book we acknowledge a deep debt of gratitude to this body of knowledge and how it has inspired and shaped the development of our own ideas. We hope that our own contribution here may usefully add to this by drawing some common threads into sharper focus and possibly introduce some new interpretations.

In pursuit of this aim, one question which continues to crop up time and again in various facets of our work is, why it is that, with the benefit of such influential, evidence-based and generally consistent wisdom, we do not see more contemporary urban development with these human-orientated qualities? It seems that in spite of the presence and application of well-intentioned approaches, concern remains about a lack of sufficient human understanding embedded in the mainstream of urban place-making. This seems to now take on additional significance in light of a growing attention to localism, which aspires to deliver social as well as material and economic solutions, and requires greater degrees of community empowerment.

It seems from our own research and inquiry, however, and from our interpretation of the work of others, that the central issue lies with the relationship between professional processes of urban place-making and the capacity of urban inhabitants to experience a sense of belonging within it. Trying to explore, therefore, the nature of the boundaries that inevitably arise between the professional delivery of urban form, essentially a design-related matter, and the processes of occupation and use, an essentially social matter, provides a benchmark for our enquiry. We begin in the South Korean city of Daegu.

Chapter One

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New Age-ing Cities

In search of a new discipline for socially orientated urban design

Introduction

In 2011, in the UK, the BBC broadcast a short documentary series presented by journalist Andrew Marr called Andrew Marr's Megacities. The programmes were meant to highlight the unique challenges and opportunities to come from the ‘greatest social experiment that humanity has ever undertaken’: that of unprecedented migration from the countryside to cities. Marr highlighted that this has now accelerated to such a pace that the world is seeing the emergence of increasing numbers of urban agglomerations of more than 10 million inhabitants. Whether these megacities serve humanity for good or ill depends on the decisions we will take in shaping, managing and using them.

One of the things that Marr talks about in this respect is that, despite the huge size of their collective populations, megacities seem to work best when they can operate and be experienced as interconnected accumulations of village-scale communities. Where this happens, the overwhelming, and potentially isolating, impact of the megacity is tempered by a sense of belonging to a more localised collective with its own sense of identity and purpose (Figure 1.1). Marr highlights that this is not necessarily related to contemporary notions of economic prosperity, the drive behind much of our approach to urbanisation, but has more to do with the need to cooperate and share, sometimes to mitigate crushing desperation and poverty, or to simply satisfy a need for social contact and affinity with those around us.

Figure 1.1 Two faces of modern Daegu. The sterility of form-dominant city-edge residential development (left) and the kaleidoscope of tradition and cultural expression in the city market (right).

As Marr points out, these opportunities can be all but obliterated by often wellintentioned, but heavy-handed, planning interventions which see the solution to urban growth and development as purely a matter of decision-making by state or commercial agencies with highly professionalised and bureaucratised levels of control. Through numerous examples, Marr suggests that this can lead to sterile machine-like solutions that, at extremes, have a profound impact on the social and psychological well-being of inhabitants as well as the scale of resource consumption, waste and energy management. In contrast, however, are examples of small-scale enterprise and creativity, of social innovation occurring in hidden corners of the urban fabric, for the most part untouched and ignored by the larger political and development infrastructure, pointing the way to more socially and environmentally sustainable solutions. Marr highlights that optimising the chances that the growth of megacities will lead to socially beneficial outcomes requires identifying the delicate balance of top-down professional levels of control with bottom-up locally generated levels of control.

Against this background, and in the interests of stimulating debate and new directions of thinking, we were delighted to have the opportunity to accept an invitation to convene a special symposium at a conference called ‘Continuity and Change of Built Environments: Housing, Culture and Space across Lifespans’, hosted in Daegu, South Korea, in October 2011, jointly by the Architectural Institute of Korea and the Housing and Culture and Space in the Built Environment networks of the International Association of People-Environment Studies. Through convening this small symposium we wanted to begin to explore what those concerned with urban design decision-making could contribute to achieving this delicate balance. In particular, are there spatial dimensions to this balance of control that we can identify, describe and ultimately apply that will give the greatest social experiment of humanity a better chance of delivering socially sustainable outcomes?

The symposium was developed and organised by me (KT) and Ombretta Romice, Director of Urban Design at the University of Strathclyde and, at the time, President of the International Association of People-Environment Studies (IAPS). We called the symposium ‘New Age-ing Cities’, reflecting that social value in the contemporary urban habitat may need to reconnect the form of the urban environment with processes of evolutionary growth and adaptation: a more time-conscious form of urban development amenable to ageing through time, rather than one delivered intact through processes akin to industrial manufacture (Figure 1.2). In many ways a development from our earlier book, Urban Sustainability through Environmental Design: Approaches to Time-People-Place Responsive Urban Spaces (Thwaites et al., 2007), the symposium theme and its contributing papers sought to show that this requires a radical rethink of priorities for design in the urban environment; for the way we understand the urban human-environment relationship; and for the professional agencies that currently

Figure 1.2 Mounting global evidence of cities no longer seen as settlements evolving and changing with time. Clarence Dock, Leeds (left); Java Island, Amsterdam (centre); Daegu, South Korea (right).

deliver our urban habitat. We hoped to be able to begin to address the hypothesis that making towns and cities more responsive to social processes may also mean that they become more adaptable in consequence. Through this we sought to promote the restoration of a kind of urban realm characterised by localised change and adaptation through time: a reflection and expression of the social forces that help shape it, rather than simply the static expression of the designer imagination.

We began by defining the concept of New Age-ing Cities as a symbolic antidote to some of the potentially dehumanising consequences of prevalent approaches to urban design, often characterised by: the large scale of development interventions; the commercially led and rapid pace of delivery; a focus on lifestyle over community; and increasing levels of professionalised control in design, delivery and management. Our central assertion was that whatever benefits might initially accrue from these solutions to urban development, they will soon be outweighed by threats to social value.

Central to the concept of the New Age-ing City is the idea of social absorbency, an exploration of urban morphology and the processes of its generation that can increase, rather than decrease, the capacity to attract and hold social activity. Achieving this, we believe, requires disciplinary re-orientation away from the currently segregated architecture, landscape architecture and urban design disciplines towards a professional position in which these fields can become better integrated and recast to embrace wider sociological and psychological aspects of urban human-environment relations. The contributors to this symposium began to provide a foundation from which such a re-orientation might take place, and some of the emergent themes relevant to this book are summarised here. We are, of course, indebte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Beyond boundaries Developing the concept of socially restorative urbanism
• Part II In Search of the Edge
• Part III Experiemics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index