The joys of privatized land, part MDCXLI

I have often railed at what seems to me to be the wholly-inappropriate siting of the Mayor of London's office in the More London development, which includes a raft of shiny offices and restaurants.  Not that there's anything wrong with the location; no, the problem I have with it is that More London is private land.  That nicely-maintained 'public space' along the south bank of the Thames that people stroll along?  You think you have free rights to access it?  Think again.  It's private space, and don't think of locking up your bike there, or skateboarding, or panhandling.  The private security guards won't stop tourists taking snapshots as they walk along the river, but try setting up with your tripod to take pictures of the buildings and you'll soon find out that there's a very real difference between public space and this.

Of course, the fact that it's private land means that folks could be excluded from it without any rhyme or reason, at the whim of the freeholder.  Which means that there is no right of assembly or protest outside City Hall.  Sure, the powers that be could let people demonstrate outside City Hall.  But they could just as easily have protestors charged with trespass.

I'm not the first person to mention this; a quick Google search will throw up plenty of photographers' rants about More London, and it's been getting my goat for years.  But I thought it would be a good preface to something I read this morning in the Guardian:  "British Airways strikers face terminal five ban".  It turns out that Heathrow's Terminal Five is on private land, so strikers against British Airways can't picket there.  There are only about seven sites in Heathrow where picketers *can* stand, including the police station and Hatton Cross tube station, according to the story.  Needless to say, since voyagers don't tend to either go to the police station or to Hatton Cross on their way to or from a flight, I doubt the pickets will be much use to anyone.

So, we in America and Britain continue to privatize land willy-nilly, creating only pseudo-public spaces, worshipping land value and retail spend, at the expense of real public spaces where all have the right to congregate and express themselves.  Is it any surprise citizens feel disconnected from their democracies?

Icons and anti-icons

Architectural photographer and writer Dan Hewitt has just blogged about architectural icons. It's an interesting and provocative piece and well worth reading.

The word 'iconic' gets bandied about to mean 'oh that big building that everyone notices', and particularly 'that big building that defines city X'. But of course this simply makes an iconic building 'one which stands out'; in other words, perhaps, one that ignores its context. It ignores the fact that an icon should perhaps have some sort of meaning: either as an archetype for a class of building, or possibly imbued with some other social, economic or political meaning.

It is in this respect that I find the current crop of starchitects' buildings lacking. Not that I don't like 'em - well some of them, anyway - but let's take Rem's CCTV, or Zaha's...er...anything, or Gehry's Bilbao, or even the Pompidou Centre, and ask how they are iconic: How does the form express the meaning? Well, we can imagine that the Pompidou's form could have particular meaning, given that the idea of putting the services on the outside should, in theory, make for a more flexible set of spaces for viewing art on the inside. And perhaps the idea of the continuous loop in CCTV could have some sort of redefining functional aspect. But aside from their 'wow, look at me' factors, how is MAXXI an icon - or of what could it be an icon?

We should perhaps be introducing another term. For if buildings can be iconic, and if they can be anti-iconic - let's assume so, at any rate - then there must be a middle ground: the non-icon. Caruso St John's efforts in Nottingham strike me as neither iconic nor anti-iconic, but as simply one that fits into the city around it, fits its purpose unobtrusively, and confers a sense of beauty and delight to those who choose to notice it. Surely this should be the point in a post-crash era, however fleeting it may be?

What's next?

Last night, while chatting with Greg Fisher of Pinnacle Global Strategy, our conversation turned (as usual) to complexity theory.  During the Modern era, much planning theory and practice was a result of the idea that everything about cities and the built environment could be known and understood, giving rise to the notion of planner as all-seeing, omnipotent technocrat.  The backlash to this came with the rise of postmodernism, as the pendulum swung the other way, and theorists told us we could know nothing and that power must be vested in the many, not the few:  This ties in with a notion of chaos in the built system.

So what do we have today, with the rapidly expanding amount and quality of urban informatics and virtual modeled environments?  Have the academics who wrote over the last few decades about the networked society, about infrastructure, about actor-network theory all heralded a slow move towards applying complexity theory to the built environment?

[As an aside:  Much is being written about resilience in cities, and following natural and man-made disasters of recent years, the concept is getting a lot of attention.  I'm not sure that we are ready to understand what it is that makes urban systems resilient, as we don't yet really understand the complex interactions which characterise those systems.  But, as I keep saying, I'm not interested in examples of failure; they will teach us less than examples of near-failure, when systems that should have failed didn't - the problem is finding them!]

Some sense on public space!

Boris Johnson's administration has just published a new strategy for public space, London's Great Outdoors (yeah, it's a cheesy name).

It includes these obvious, but very welcome, sentences:

There is a growing trend towards the 

private management of publicly accessible 

space where this type of ‘corporatisation’ 

occurs, especially in the larger commercial 

developments, Londoners can feel 

themselves excluded from parts of their 

own city. This need not be the case. At 

Kings Cross it was agreed that the London 

Borough of Camden will adopt the streets 

and public areas. Elsewhere unrestricted 

24-hour access to the area has been 

agreed. This has established an important 

principle which should be negotiated in 

all similar schemes. 

Many of London’s larger public parks are 

fenced and locked at night. This can create 

severance as sections of the city are  

literally decommissioned. It can also turn 

many surrounding streets into inactive  

cul-de-sacs. The main reason for locking 

London’s parks at night is fear of crime and 

antisocial activities. However many parks, 

such as Highbury Fields and Streatham 

Common, are not fenced or gated. This  

suggests that 24-hour access could be  

made to work in more of our parks and 

green spaces with the right design and  

right lighting and management regimes.  

High quality, creative lighting can increase 

feelings of safety and encourage  

ownership and use. 

Right on!

Santana Row

Just back from a trip to California, and I spent part of an afternoon in San Jose's Santana Row.  It's a perfect example of the place-maker's art...mixed-use development including a range of retail and entertainment, rental housing, even disguised big-box retail!, a boutique hotel, well-hidden parking lots, all at high density; shared pedestrian/car spaces, good plantings....

Here's the thing, though.  This is not a piece of real townscape.  If you've looked at the link above, you'll quickly realize it's a single-developer shopping mall, a very clever one which has won a few awards and is - according to Wikipedia - the fourth-highest ranking mall in California, and the highest-ranking in the Bay Area by sales per square foot.  

That Wikipedia article says:

When presenting the award, judges from Builder Magazine noted the street’s European atmosphere that was achieved by employing a variety of architectural designs for the structures as well as sophisticated landscaping details. These details focused on the use of mature oak and palm trees, shaded grassy plazas, courtyards, and fountains, intimate public seating areas, extra-wide sidewalks and street medians, and multi-use destinations such as Park Valencia, which hosts live music, a farmer’s market, and other public gatherings.

Ah, no wonder it's a commercial success:  Of course people would rather spend their money in stores on streets which have a Yoooropeean Atmosphere than in another one of the endless strip malls lining the highways.  I know I would.  If I want to go to sit outside in a cafe for a cup of coffee, I'll take the one on the nice street with the pretty flowers and a few cars driving slowly by, not the joint on the corner of two highways.  Heck, if I had the choice of living in featureless condominiums in the middle of nowhere or in a place overlooking some tree-lined, well-tended streets, I know which one I'd pick in a heartbeat.

Santana Row isn't anywhere.  It's not in downtown San Jose.  It's...well, it's bounded to the north by a large distributor road and a massive Westfield shopping mall; to the east and south by major freeways; and to the west by another access road.  No-one walks to Santana Row.  But then, this is the Bay Area ex-urbs.  No-one walks anywhere.

Is that all I'm whingeing about?  Surely it's better to have a little bit of decent urban development in the middle of a lot of poor-quality built environment than to have none at all, right?

Except Santana Row isn't urban development.  It's a shopping mall.  Looks deceive:  It is anti-urban.  This isn't public space, it's private space.  There are no bums or homeless people.  There are no kids having fun or hanging out in the plazas.  There's definitely no skateboarding.  There's certainly no right to protest, and photography is prohibited without management approval (see this flickr page for example).  What it is is a carefully-calculated simulacrum, another bastardization of the ideas we all have about what makes a good urban environment.

And it's a darned good one.  Which is why I find it a bit difficult to criticise:  As long as I didn't think too hard about it, I really liked it.

Now, there are good guys out there.  The Crown Estate, for example, is working with the local authorities to dress up Regent Street, much of which it owns, knowing that its investment in the public realm will have long-term financial benefits.  But what does it say when most of the pleasant new developments I can think of - be they Santana Row or Xintiandi in Shanghai - remain private space, with all that entails?  Am I the only person who thinks this is a problem?  And if not, how can we create tools that allow developers and retailers to cede control of these highly-managed private spaces to the public sector, without losing the ability to maintain their attractive qualities?

Urban lighting or dark skies?

Design Observer has published a fascinating conversation between a friend of mine, New York-based lighting designer Leni Schwendinger of Light Projects, and dark-skies activist Susan Harder, on the question of urban lighting.

The article is in two parts:  Read it here and here.

At last - a private institutional rented sector in Britain

A recent news article in Building points to mounting evidence for the rise of the commercial rented sector in the UK.  This is something I've been banging on about for years - and very welcome indeed.  In this case, the pension funds are finally getting in on the act.

I'm becoming convinced that one of the great problems for the built environment in the UK is that land values are too high; that another issue is the relative balance of homeowners to renters; and that the two are related.  First, the British culture of homeownership fuelled the drive to see the house as a repository of household savings; then, the good people who had seen the value of their houses rise thought 'if one house is a good investment, surely two houses is a better investment!' - and thus were born the hordes of small-scale buy-to-let landlords whose speculation led to the building of masses of small, poor-quality and badly-designed city centre flats, built for childless professionals without a nod to social infrastructure, in cities such as Leeds.  Over time, the population's distrust of traditional investments, leading to complete reliance on housing to create value and savings, has led to a property bubble of astonishing proportions.  Soaring land values have fed back into the mix, with the result that new-build housing in Britain is some of the smallest in Europe.  Even the current economic climate and concomitant falls in house prices have not brought property values within reach of first-time buyers.  And many British city centres continue to be largely child-free zones, as new parents head straight to the suburbs for an impression of safety and good schools.

There is another way, though.  Look to the rental-heavy property markets in Continental Europe, where large investors - insurance companies and pension funds, for example - add long investment horizons and the ability to fund large capital costs to the mix.  Their objectives are not quick profits but steady cashflow and lasting value, massively increasing the importance of high-quality, re-usable, adaptable buildings and good social infrastructure.  They know that in order to build assets which will continue to perform, with minimal maintenance costs, in 50 or 100 years - and while private individuals won't be concerned with such a criterion, what pension fund wouldn't? - they will need to get it right the first time.

Could the institutional private sector be the way forward to bring house prices down and invest in a more socially sustainable, higher-quality built environment?

Update on Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 10:00 by Eli

Of course, the story isn't necessarily as simple as that.

In some cases, positive intervention in cities is only made possible when a single enlightened developer gathers together a sufficiently large parcel of land to foster a large-scale intervention, e.g. King's Cross Central in London; or technical improvements, for example to energy distribution and consumption, only become feasible with scale.

But one could also argue that many of the problems to do with the built environment in the US and Britain are actually a result of having large corporate landlords - take megamalls, for example, or the rapidly-growing category of mono-use 'managed' quasi-public-but-really-private spaces, which quietly subvert the priorities afforded to civic space for profit.  That's a topic for another post, though...

The furor over CCTV

So it turns out that each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London has only been responsible for solving one crime. Justification for the continued use (and expansion) of video surveillance comes from the Home Office ("[cameras] help communities feel safer") and from the police, with the BBC reporting "more needed to be done to make the most of the investment."  Meanwhile, Michael Cross, writing in the Guardian, brings up the not-very-new idea that we could make all CCTV camera feeds freely available to the entire populace, resulting in some sort of democratic surveillance.  (Surely this assumes that we've all got unlimited time to spend on virtual curtain-twitching - although with the impending end of Big Brother in the UK, perhaps now all the poor souls who were habitual viewers would relish the opportunity to tune in to their local high streets.)

These revelations (not that an odious reality television show is being cancelled, but that London's CCTV systems aren't as useful as has been routinely made out) return me to another debate, about the relationship between lighting in public spaces, surveillance, and crime

It would seem common-sense to reason that improved natural surveillance reduces crime - this is a fundamental tenet of the CPTED (crime prevention through environmental design) crowd - and that better street lighting, which improves natural surveillance, would reduce crime.

A 2002 UK Home Office research study by Farrington and Welsh, which collated the results of a number of other studies, appeared to show the improved street lighting reduces crime, while another study appeared to show that CCTV surveillance isn't very effective. See HORS 251 and 252 for the papers. The outcomes were pretty widely reported in the press.

However, the research linking street lighting and crime is actually a bit inconclusive. The problem comes up with close study of the reports and the statistical evidence. ICLEI and the British Astronomical Society give a good overview, so I won't repeat their claims here; the britastro website is obviously heavily biased towards the 'dark skies' perspective, but does raise some good points.

My personal view is:

1. That the statistics don't say much partly because crime statistics are notoriously flawed. The many variables in the ways in which crime is reported (or not) and how data is handled, the complex socio-economic differences between areas, and factors in urban and architectural design all make it incredibly difficult to make comparisons between areas and crime-reporting jurisdictions; and

2. That street lighting is likely to be a deterrent in certain circumstances, for example where there is already some (but not necessarily much) night-time activity on a street, and thus where good lighting will enable easier natural surveillance on the part of passers-by and residents. Where there is no life on the street - i.e. in purely industrial/commercial areas, closed or overshadowed places etc. - I would imagine that no improvement in lighting would have a substantive effect on crime; if the criminal, be he opportunistic or scheming, knows that there's no-one around for miles, then the light will simply aid him. What this would mean is that we should be looking at lighting as part of our approach to the way we build our towns and cities: Harking back to Jane Jacobs and countless other thinkers from many schools, we need to remember the benefits of truly public, easily navigable space, of mixed uses, and of reasonably high density.