The great and the good

What can we learn from the winners of the annual Urbanism Awards? Nicholas Falk investigates

Hebden Bridge won this year’s Great Town Award

With a choice of 75 shortlisted places, it is surely time to draw lessons from the Academy of Urbanism’s annual awards for the policy issues now facing the UK.

In particular the candidates in the fifth series all seemed to express a community spirit that could provide a tonic for Britain as it enters the ‘age of austerity’.

In extolling the Big Society, the coalition government wants to shrink the state in the hope that community and business enterprise will take its place, thus enabling the public debt to be substantially cut.

In assessing the ‘great towns’ category, urban designer Willie Miller highlighted the common ingredient of the three towns (Hebden Bridge, Stroud, and Westport) was the evidence that people did things for themselves, rather than relying on government. But these are quite small towns (5,000 to 12,000), and unlike the bulk of places in the UK that grew much larger in the 19th century. They draw people because of a combination of natural beauty, a fine heritage and relatively cheap properties in commuting range of larger employment centres. These qualities invoke huge loyalty and appeal to specialised market segments, like creative people, gays, and foodies (which may well be interrelated!). Hence, we need to go beyond ‘figure ground’ drawings and first impressions if we are to uncover what can turn hidden gems into polished diamonds.

WHY EUROPEAN CITIES GENERALLY WIN
The great contrast between European and Anglo-American cities is not just their densities, or the higher quality public transit systems they support, but the way in which their citizens value the public realm. From the original winner of Copenhagen, through Freiburg (and its competing cities of Bordeaux and Valencia) to this year’s winner Glasgow, cities that do best, do so because they win the hearts and minds of their residents. Glasgow’s great slogan Glasgow’s Miles Better was forged when there was relatively little to show in a city that once was at the heart of the British Empire. Now with a host of great projects and places, Glasgow once again reveals its similarities with Continental cities and its differences from most of its rivals in the rest of the UK.

The most basic ingredient of a great city is ‘high connectivity’, not just with other cities but internally. Here efforts to upgrade public transport and streets may take years to pay off, but pays dividends. Cultural life follows naturally, and the great cities do not just build ampitheatres, but create whole quarters where people from all over the conurbation can enjoy what they have in common. In turn this generates demand for urban living, and high density housing, such as that in the New Gorbals, can succeed in attracting a rich mix of residents. Both Bordeaux and Freiburg demonstrate how public investment in good transit systems can tame the car. Copenhagen also shows that the uplift in land values can even pay for a new metro system (in this case being one of the few cities to apply the principles of land value
taxation).

WHAT SMALLER TOWNS DO BEST
Smaller towns and cities have neither the transport assets nor the range of jobs or cultural facilities of larger towns. The best – like Ludlow, Westport and Hebden Bridge – have largely escaped redevelopment because property values were never high enough. Instead they attract community entrepreneurs who invest in bringing empty buildings back into good uses, as the Pennine Heritage Trust did in Hebden Bridge. In other words, like the great cities they managed to tap into the rewards of development, but for the good of their own town, not external bankers.

Initiatives such as Gloucestershire Land for People, one of the first community land trusts which is now developing a hospital on the edge of Stroud, or Springhill Cohousing, situated near the centre of the town, show the importance of organisational and financial mechanisms that channel a community spirit into tangible assets. It is the smallest towns in the UK that have grown fastest, and the real challenge is to find new futures for the many more smaller cities that suffered when industry collapsed. Scarborough’s renaissance through investing in quality shows that even seaside towns with bad images can find new futures, given a combination of local leadership and substantial public funding into projects (in this case turning the old Sitwell family home into a design and enterprise centre).

GETTING UNDER THE SKIN OF GREAT NEIGHBOURHOODS
Judging by appearances is misleading – what counts is the progress that has been made in addressing particular challenges. Empty buildings and dead streets are a symptom, not a cause, of decline. Where neighbourhoods have found a new role, it is not just by adopting the label of a ‘creative quarter’, but by seizing hold of assets that might otherwise have gone to waste in some ill-conceived grandiose development scheme. That is why all the success stories seem to involve some form of development trust (of which Coin Street in London is probably the best known). Like lifting up a stone, creative people occur in the most unlikely places. Hence we need the tools to see when community enterprise might thrive.

We also need to go beyond simplistic feasibility studies if we are to avoid the disappointments when well-intentioned community enterprises expand only to fail when bad times bite. The success stories may have been lucky, but there were generally have strong foundations, and do not rely on a single use. We need therefore to understand the kinds of mix of uses that is mutually reinforcing and not divisive, and to adopt planning policies that will sustain, not impede their growth.

VALUING THE COMMON WEALTH IN GREAT STREETS
For regeneration to be truly ‘bottom up’ it has to start in streets that are on the edge, but that can turn into living places. Their vitality normally comes from being the opposite of ‘clone towns’ with plenty of small, independent shops. Public investment can help in changing patterns of movement, supporting events like festivals, and even sponsoring the first shop upgrades. Of course the connections revealed through ‘space syntax’ matter but equally important are a common set of values and interest, exemplified in places such as Brighton’s North Laine or London’s Exmouth Market. Unfortunately renaissance is often short-lived as rents and rates rise, and the pioneers are squeezed out (as in London’s Covent Garden, for example).

Rising property values are only therefore one indicator of success. Of course we need to tap into mechanisms like business improvement districts and the potential for tax increment financing (to copy two American devices). But we also need trusts that can impose covenants to secure a good mix, as landlords like the Howard de Walden Estate still does in Marylebone High Street. Instead of simply valuing individual possessions (reflected for example in measures such as gross value added per capita) surely we also need to value co-production and to measure and value the vitality of streets at different times. One measure I would like to see is the use of CCTV cameras to analyse the mix of people, and also whether they are smiling and spending time (as well as money).

BUILDING SUSTAINABLE URBAN NEIGHBOURHOODS
Perhaps inevitably at first Academicians have tended to vote for the places they know best, and to pick those with the most historic ingredients. But we should also be able to find relatively new places that work as communities, like the post-war Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury, for example, if we look hard enough. Even where the shop units may be quite large to attract retail investment, street markets can be used to provide the qualities urbanists love, (and also a useful source of income for a community trust). So instead of simply abolishing planning structures and public expenditure we should surely learn from past and European success stories, and invest in what will lead to long-success.

Urbed director David Rudlin and I coined the term ‘sustainable urban neighbourhood’ or SUN to bring together three concepts that perhaps might make the Big Society less of a fantasy. The first is Ruskin’s principle of building to last. The second is the idea of the compact city (or what Wulf Daseking, Freiburg’s director of city planning, calls the ‘city of short distances’, and which should offer a better quality of life than the suburbs. But the third, and most important of all, is that of ‘neighbourhood’, that is the idea that people have common interests from living or working close together. At a time when digital wonders seem, to favour the virtual over the real, surely it is time to rediscover what makes communities work?

Nicholas Falk is founder director of Urbed, a not for profit urban
regeneration consultancy.

2011 Urbanism Awards finalists:

European City of the Year
Budapest
Glasgow (winner)
Helsinki
Great Town Award
Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire (winner)
Stroud, Gloucestershire
Westport, Ireland
Great Neighbourhood Award
Cathedral Quarter, Belfast
Northern Quarter, Manchester (winner)
Pollokshields, Glasgow
Great Street Award
Exmouth Market, London (winner)
St. Patrick Street, Cork
Union Street, Aberdeen
Great Place Award
Princesshay, Exeter
St. Andrew Square, Edinburgh
Tobermory Harbour, Isle of Mull (winner)