Community Architecture (Routledge Revivals)

How People Are Creating Their Own Environment

Nick Wates, Charles Knevitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134618965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

First published in 1987, this title was one of the first to explore the emerging popular movement of Community Architecture, championed by Prince Charles, which gained momentum throughout Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. The conceptual framework rests fundamentally on the principle that the built environment is most effective when those who live in a particular area are actively engaged with its creation and daily administration. A work that has influenced policy makers and planning legislation, Community Architecture remains one of the key reference works for student architects and planners.

Chapter 1

Rebuilding Communities

Introducing Community Architecture

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society, but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) US President (1801–9) and architect.

The crucial issue today is how to give people more pride in their environment, involvement in their housing and more control over their lives, all this leading to increased confidence and hope, a development of new organisational skills and a consequent flourishing of new enterprise. We are talking about the regeneration of thousands of local communities, and this is the really essential point about the whole thing. How can we achieve such an aim while ensuring that it isn’t pie in the sky? The fundamental point to stress is the urgent need for partnership between the public and private sector, between local politicians, community groups and nonpublic sources of finance. To restore hope we must have a vision and source of inspiration. We must sink our differences and cut great swathes through the cat’s cradle of red tape which chokes this country from end to end.

HRH The Prince of Wales, 13 June 1986

I am convinced that, after the fundamental question of preserving peace, it is the form and organization of urban areas that is now looming up as the greatest social challenge for the world for the rest of this century.

Colin Buchanan, Professor of Transport, Imperial College, London, 1968

On the night of 6 October 1985, violence erupted on the Broadwater Farm estate in north London. As families and the elderly cowered in their homes, gangs of youths – armed with bricks, knives, bottles and petrol bombs -confronted hundreds of police armed with riot shields and batons. What had been thought of as a model housing estate on its completion only twelve years previously became, for several hours, a battleground. By the end of the disturbances, 223 police and twenty civilians had been injured. One policeman had been hacked to death. The senior police officer for the area described them as ‘the most ferocious, the most vicious riots ever seen’ in Britain.

Over the next few days, an agonized debate began. Was there some-thing wrong with young people that they could behave in such a way? Were Britain’s cities doomed to become ‘no-go’ areas in which decent people feared to walk the streets? Was there a fundamental design fault with housing estates like Broadwater Farm, whose deck-access walkways were used as launching pads for missiles against the enforcers of law and order? Were the riots really a law-and-order issue – or the manifestation of environmental, economic and social grievances which had not been heard? Had the billions of pounds poured into housing, unemployment benefit and social welfare nationally since the war been of no avail? What, precisely, was going wrong.

For the eruption at Broadwater Farm could not be dismissed as an isolated incident. Alarm bells had been ringing since 1981, when for days on end the nation’s television screens showed scenes of looting, violence and arson by uncontrolled mobs in deprived inner-city areas in various parts of the country: Brixton, south London; St Pauls, Bristol; Toxteth, Liverpool; Handsworth, Birmingham; Moss Side, Manchester. Destruction of property alone ran into tens of millions of pounds. The social cost was less easy to quantify.

Most of the public debate in the aftermath of these urban riots had initially focused on the need to improve and strengthen the police force and to devote more government money to housing and welfare services. Steps – albeit limited – were taken on both fronts.

But the Broadwater Farm incident was a forceful indication that these traditional remedies for urban unrest were not getting to the root of the problem, and increasing attention was paid to another aspect of the problem, one which had previously been little noticed by those in authority. This was the possible link between social unrest and the degree of control that people have over their environment.

In his public-inquiry report for the Home Secretary on the Brixton ‘disorders’ in 1981, Lord Scarman, a former High Court judge and Chairman of the Law Commission, had included the following recommendations:

Local communities should be more fully involved in the decisions which affect them. A ‘top-down’ approach to regeneration does not seem to have worked. Local communities must be fully and effectively involved in planning, in the provision of local services, and in the managing and financing of specific projects... Inner-city areas are not human deserts. They possess a wealth of voluntary effort and goodwill. It would be wise to put this human capital to good use ... It is essential that people are encouraged to secure a stake in, feel a pride in, and have a sense of responsibility for their own area.¹

This aspect of Scarman’s findings went unreported and unremarked at the time. But after the Broadwater Farm incident it was rediscovered and given prominence by a movement which, in the intervening period, had emerged as a powerful new force in environmental politics – an extraordinary coalition of community organizations, academics, environmental professionals, politicians of all parties, church leaders and the Prince of Wales.

The Community Architecture Movement

The movement is called ‘community architecture’. It is an umbrella term which also embraces ‘community planning’, ‘community design’, community development’ and other forms of community technical aid’. It emerged from a growing realization that mismanagement of the built environment is a major contributor to the nation’s social and economic ills, and that there are better ways of going about planning and design.

The modern urban environment in Britain, as in many other parts of the world, has become widely recognized as a disaster story characterized by ugliness, squalor, congestion, pollution, wasteland, vandalism, stress and the destruction of communities. ‘Development’ has come to be regarded as ‘a bad thing’, and the demolition by controlled explosives of housing estates built at vast expense only a few years before is almost commonplace. Conventional architecture and planning, rooted in the paternalistic and centralized creation and management of the environment by experts, have clearly failed; the ideals behind them have been lost, the visions have faded, the policies lie in tatters.

In contrast, a handful of pioneering development projects all over the country have demonstrated that it is possible to escape from this disaster: to build housing that people want to live in; to give people a sense of pride and reinforce their identity with their local community; to build social facilities that are needed and properly looked after; to develop neighbourhoods and cities in ways that enrich people’s lives by being genuinely responsive to their needs and aspirations.

Contrary to popular belief, the magic solution is not simply vast quantities of public money. Although more investment in the built environment is desperately needed, the crucial task is to improve the way resources are used. The key is to get the process of development right: to ensure that the right decisions are made by the right people at the right time. And the main lesson to emerge from the pioneering projects (and backed up by an increasing volume of theoretical research) is that the environment works better if the people who live, work and play in it are actively involved in its creation and management. This simple truth – the core principle of community architecture – applies to housing, work-places, parks, social facilities, neighbourhoods and even entire cities. And it applies to both capitalist and socialist economies, whether rich or poor.

Discovering how to make it possible for people to be involved in shaping and managing their environment is what the community architecture movement has been exploring over the past few years. Starting with architects and planners working with, instead of against, community groups, it has grown rapidly to include a new breed of professional organizations providing technical aid to the community: new enabling schemes started by professional institutes and voluntary organizations; decentralization programmes by local authorities; and a variety of partnership programmes involving the public sector, with developers and financial institutions, working closely with the voluntary sector. New prototypes for development of housing, social facilities and neighbourhoods have emerged in which the people are no longer the consumers of what others provide, but are in control.

It has been a hard – and often heroic – struggle, marked by bitter campaigns and frustration. Those in the vanguard of change are rarely welcomed or appreciated initially, and the traditional development industry and planning system have, over the past fifty years, come to be based on an entirely contrary principle: that managing the built environment is far too complicated to be entrusted to ordinary people and should be left to the experts. Despite its becoming increasingly obvious that this does not work very well, those promoting community architecture have had to fight every inch of the way: against bureaucracy, professional institutions, the property industry and political dogma of all shades. For every successful community architecture project there have been dozens of attempts which have fallen by the wayside.

The breakthrough for the public perception of community architecture in Britain came on 30 May 1984 when the Prince of Wales spoke out on the subject. In a speech at Hampton Court Palace at the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Royal Institute of British Architects, he started with a bitter attack on the architectural and planning professions. Reducing some of the audience to tears – some of joy, some of sorrow – he declared that: ‘Some planners and architects have consistently ignored the feelings and wishes of the mass of ordinary people in this country.’ He went on to praise community architecture as one of the few new ideas giving optimism and hope for the future.

To the consternation of much of the architectural profession, the government and many of his own palace aides, he followed up his remarks by visiting more than a dozen community architecture projects throughout the country, inviting community architects to private dinners at Kensington Palace, becoming patron of the first award scheme for community architecture, commissioning community architects for projects on his Duchy of Cornwall estate and making several more outspoken speeches over the next three years.

Through his royal endorsement, Prince Charles gave the community architecture movement the respectability and credibility it so badly needed to overcome the obstacles confronting it. It marked its breakthrough as a popular movement. As architect Rod Hackney, the movement’s most able politician and propagandist, commented at the time:

It was dynamite. Suddenly, the future king has come along and said that the way to work isn’t the way most architects are working but is the way community architects work. That means that the image of community architecture has suddenly leapfrogged over a lot of establishment figures who have been opposing it. He didn’t just close the door on architecture, he opened the door for the way out. He has shown the direction. The Cinderella of the profession has at last found its prince, and the RIB A and the Government will now ignore it at their peril.²

The effect was soon felt. Projects in the field suddenly found it easier to get funding and approval from authorities. The media started running stories on it. Senior politicians in all the main political parties began to take a serious interest in it. So did the professional institutes, which performed double somersaults in their attempts to convince the Prince that they were doing what he wanted. Such is the influence of royalty.

A second breakthrough came on 1 December 1986, when it was announced that Hackney had won a ballot of the whole membership of the Royal Institute of British Architects to become its next president. Civil war over the direction which the architectural profession should take appeared to have come to an end, with a decisive victory for community architecture.

Lessons of the ‘Quiet’ Revolution

The growth and recognition of community architecture in Britain has been paralleled – perhaps less sensationally – by similar activity through-out the world. In the United States, for instance, where the movement is better known as ‘social’ architecture, it was sparked off by urban riots in the 1960s: since then its development has followed a very similar pattern to that in Britain, including overcoming institutional objections from both within and outside the professions. In developing countries, based on the success of architects and planners working closely with the inhabitants of shanty towns from the late fifties, it is now widely accepted that it makes more sense to improve and upgrade than to tear down and rebuild as was the general policy only a decade ago. The importance of people participating in the planning of their own homes and neighbourhoods was a central theme which arose out of the United Nations Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver in 1976. It united delegates from both First and Third World countries, and has increasingly shaped the development of international policy and co-operation on human settlements ever since.

From this worldwide environmental revolution, often referred to as the ‘quiet’ revolution, some conclusions are beginning to emerge:

1. That when the people who inhabit any environment are effectively involved in its creation and management, it ‘works’ better. It is likely to be of higher quality physically, will be better suited to its purpose, will be better maintained and will make better use of resources -finance, land, materials, and people’s initiative and enterprise. Also, the process of involvement, combined with the better end product, can create employment, can help reduce crime, vandalism, mental stress, ill health and the potential for urban unrest, and can lead to more stable and self-sufficient communities, and to more contented and confident citizens and professionals.
2. That for such a process to work effectively, there has to be a fundamental change in the roles of all the people involved in the development process. For professionals – w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Lord Scarman
• Authors' Preface
• 1 Rebuilding Communities Introducing Community Architecture
• 2 The Breakthrough A History of Community Architecture
• 3 Cities That Destroy Themselves The Bankruptcy of Conventional Architecture
• 4 The Pioneers The Community Architecture Approach Explained
• 5 Why Community Architecture Works The Natural Laws Governing the Relationship between Human Beings and the Built Environment
• 6 Making It Happen The New Organisational Frameworks, Trchniques and Roles
• 7 The Way Forward What Needs to be Done Next
• Appendix 1 Services Provided by Community Technical Aid Centres
• Appendix 2 Workload of a Community Technical Aid Centre
• Appendix 3 Concise History of the Community Architecture Movement
• Appendix 4 Directory of Information Sources
• Appendix 5
• Notes
• Bliography
• Index