This essay was originally published in the Spring/Summer 2005 edition of About Wales info

LINKS

WDA, Creating sustainable places (www.wda.org.uk)

WWF, Building a future for Wales (www.wwf.org.uk)

Planning Officers' Society for Wales, Model development guide for residential development in Wales (www.dcfw.org)

Building for life Wales

Centre for Education in the Built Environment (School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University)

Planning Policy Wales

TAN 12: Design (pdf)

Planning: delivering for Wales

Where do we want to live?

Apartment living at Sovereign Quay, Cardiff Bay (Picture: Matthew Griffiths)

Three recent publications have tackled the thorny problem of how to get good, sustainable design for the places where we live and work. Two, from the World Wildlife Fund and the Planning Officers’ Society, focus on housing. The WDA’s booklet sets out the WDA’s expectations for regeneration and development projects it is asked to support and on land it sells, but has a more general resonance. The agency is currently being absorbed by the Assembly Government, while the Planning Officers’ Model design guide bears the Assembly Government’s imprimatur, and takes the 2002 TAN 12 on “Design” as its point of departure.
   All three can be downloaded as Acrobat (pdf) files from the web, and will cost you nothing. Each is interesting, and each has a relevance to the voluntary sector. The Model design guide is by far the most detailed, and as it is intended to be adopted as supplementary guidance by local planning authorities, who are invited to extend and refine it to fit the local context, it is likely, for better or worse to have the most influence. Given the generally routine nature of housing projects in Wales, large or small, especially from the private sector, it may have come over the horizon just in time.
   Creating sustainable places does not aim to be a comprehensive design guide, but to “set out key design and sustainability principles familiar to any good designer”. In his introduction, First Minister Rhodri Morgan emphasises that “sustainable development is not an option that will go away”; it is the only way forward, and good design is central both to sustainability and social diversity. Given the key role the WDA plays in projects throughout Wales, this guide, even if it is rather broad-brush, could well be pretty influential. Meanwhile the WWF’s Building a future for Wales majors, in great technical detail, on the theme of sustainable housing design. It’s a product of Cardiff University’s Centre for the Built Environment, and undeniably wears academic colours; but its purpose is to contribute to the “One million sustainable homes” campaign launched at the Johannesburg Summit in 2002.its target is any organisation with a housing strategy, and it is backed up by a technical manual.
    Each of the three has something useful to offer to those of us who want to see standards of design and development improve in Wales.
    It is probably in the housing sector that the need is most urgent. For example, much recent private sector building has been mediocre in quality (although it is often said to be what the public wants). The volume house builders themselves know that they can do better. The “Building for Life” campaign (bringing together the House Builders’ Federation, the Design Commission, and the Civic Trust) has created a web site that showcases the best contemporary housing schemes in Wales in order to offer a quality benchmark for consumers, developers, architects and planners irrespective of tenure and type. The case studies identified are discussed in detail in the Model design guide.
    The WDA document is, of course, about more than residential development. It commits the agency’s projects to partnership-working and the engagement of communities, and provides a link to more detailed advice in its “Community regeneration tool kit”. It sets out simply the objectives and actions that are needed for success in sustainable development, amongst them protecting and enhancing landscape quality, developing the quality of the local built environment, and protecting and enhancing historic features. This is a basic, but useful aide mémoire. The guide then deals in turn with the design process and the content of masterplans and design statements, including the ways in which the main design considerations that should underpin projects can be addressed.
    The WWF’s strategy for sustainable housing is focused on a subset of these issues, in particular the impact house builders have on the environment and society through waste, and the consumption of energy and materials. It features its own case studies amongst which there is no overlap with the Building for Life examples. Whereas the Model design guide is anchored in TAN 12, the starting point here is the UK energy white paper and problems such as fuel poverty, home energy efficiency and transport impacts. However, following detailed discussion of the economics of sustainable house building, the focus shifts to issues of site, density, biodiversity and community. Integration of new development and existing communities is emphasised.

“The gated communities and mono-culture professional ‘ghettos’ on one hand, and ‘sink estates’ and social exclusion on the other, with the trend towards two tiers of services and infra-structure, is not sustainable. Neither is the promulgation of low density urban sprawl with its lack of efficient land use, social cohesion and transport congestion problems.”

Brief consideration is also given to “heritage” issues, largely seen as related to development in rural communities; the report suggests the creation of “appropriate modern vernacular architecture” to reinforce a sense of identity. These issues, however, are not developed; the greater part of the report considers issues of construction, energy usage, and maintenance rather than expands on urban design and aesthetics. As a route in to the technical aspects of energy conservation and sustainable building techniques, however, this is a very useful document for the otherwise uninitiated.
    The Model design guide is the most ambitious and most accessible of these documents. It is also graphics rich and should help community groups articulate their expectations and aspirations as well as steer developers and planners in the right direction. Its aim, as part of the Assembly Government’s “Planning: delivering for Wales” programme, is to give councils a “comprehensive structure for managing the design and development process”, at the same time as it offers certainty to developers about what planners are going to expect from them. Whether we like it or not, its status means that it is going to influence the shape and appearance of all our communities. In fact, it does read as a practical tool to meet the good design objectives of Planning policy Wales and to amplify the design intentions of TAN 12. It should also fulfil its intention of clarifying the expected content of the compulsory design statements that now have to accompany planning applications. If the approach to design in the Welsh context is to be criticised, then doubts will ultimately derive from the TAN itself, which has seemed to some to be over cautious and conservative in its approach to designing in context.

Steffani Court, Cardiff. PCKO/Pentan for Cardiff Community Housing Association (Matthew Griffiths)

    Compared, however, to the crying need to transcend the off-the-shelf house designs and estate layouts that typify most medium and large residential developments in the private sector, this is a relatively minor concern. So far, no one seems to have uncovered any satisfactory exemplars for this dominant segment of the market. The Royal Society of Architects Welsh Housing Awards have been unable to do so, neither in 2002 or 2004, and not one of the Guide’s Building for Life case studies achieves this. Instead, middle and up-market city and waterside apartment living is well-represented – Cardiff’s Brewery Quarter and Sovereign Quay; together with some posh flats at Barry’s seaside. Coronation Terrace, Penarth offers a strikingly good, and radically inventive approach to infill within a modest Victorian street, while Drybridge Gardens, Monmouth, Plas Gwenfrewi, Holywell, and Steffani Court all show off what housing associations can do well to meet a variety of needs. Again, flats predominate.

Award-winning apartments at Cold Knap, Barry. Capita Symonds for Barratts (Picture: Matthew Griffiths)

Coronation Terrace, Penarth. Atkins DE2 for Andton Properties (Picture: Matthew Griffiths)

    It is not the fault of the authors (Exeter-based LDA Design) that they have had to draw on the case-studies repeatedly to illustrate the design approaches recommended in the main text. Otherwise issues such as compactness, legibility and frontage are treated through representative diagrams or older developments, such as the grid-pattern of Edwardian Cardiff. The Crickhowell “televillage” is trotted out as an example of the use of traditional materials and design features in the context of a small country town.
    In other words, the design approaches taken in the Guide are fine, and clearly explained, but it has not been able to illustrate them that effectively in a Welsh context, and examples from elsewhere that might enrich the text have not been included.
    This is a shame because the text is very good. This starts from a restatement of TAN 12’s aims for housing design and layout (top of which are the principles of places for people not cars, and respect for local distinctiveness). Detailed discussion of design objectives is followed by a consideration of the design process itself, and explanations of what is to be expected in planning applications and associated design appraisals.
    The discussion of design objectives is clear and informative. Issues of urban design as well as detailed design treatment are covered. The themes of integration with the natural heritage and landscape protection, compactness, accessibility, legibility and permeability are well-covered. The section on character and context is especially encouraging, urging respect for locally distinctive patterns and forms of development, landscape, culture and biodiversity. Development should reflect and respond to context, but should not repeat past mistakes. New identities can be made where the legacy is one of failure. Design should encourage the creation of character and visual richness. The argument that modern materials and aesthetics can work well in older contexts is made effectively. Character and context are not just functions of “style” but of factors including building setback, plot width, building height and verticality. Moreover, the “public realm” is not an add-on; it should be integral to the development and clearly separated from private space, its design fitting with the built form.
    Stress is also placed on opportunities to achieve a variety of uses and a mixture of tenures, though it will take more than gentle encouragement to persuade developers to emulate the success in doing this that is so often seen in Europe. Cardiff Bay is the apartment capital of Wales, but mostly investors have chosen not to provide for small retail units (bars, grocers, newsagents and the like) at street level. The result is an absence of street-life outside the honey pot of the Inner Harbour and the general lack of any real sense of community, however visually striking some of the buildings.
    The discussion of energy use and resource efficiency is comparatively limited. However, the section on the design process offers sensible guidance, and expands, for instance on what is meant by character appraisal, and what might be usefully be aimed at in terms of community participation.
    If developers are going to be asked to follow the checklists for applications and design statements then the relevant sections will be essential reading for civic societies’ planning sub-committees.
    Will all this make a difference? The lessons that can be learned from smaller-scale private schemes and from innovative design by housing associations are well-illustrated and we can readily expect developers and clients who feel a sense of community and social responsibility to treat the Guide as a source of good ideas. But of itself it is probable that the Guide is not going to persuade a larger scale developers (still less a local wide boy aiming to get rich quick) to go the extra mile by investing in design quality away from premium sites. This will only happen when it has been translated into supplementary guidance and local authorities have stuck their necks out to insist on respect for its principles by refusing applications that don’t match their expectations.
    Perhaps this is an over-pessimistic response. Maybe instead it makes sense to reflect on how far we have come from the days when planners were told that they should not consider design issues in assessing planning applications or producing local plans. The Assembly Government’s Design Initiative, together with the Delivering for Wales programme has been imaginative and inclusive. It deserves to produce results.

Matthew Griffiths

(28/09/2005)