Paper
presented to the 2002 Urban Design Alliance Conference
19 September 2002
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Urban design and Welsh communities
Matthew Griffiths
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The purpose of this talk is less to review achievement (though there will be some pretty pictures in a moment or two) than to look at some of the contexts and opportunities for pursuing a successful urban design agenda in Wales. It has been written, not from the point of view of an urban design professional, but of a consumer, rather than a doer, a consumer who spends a lot of his life encouraging organisations in a voluntary network of civic societies to think hard about design issues. The Trust's civic societies are not a precisely targeted delivery system, but they are an enormous and often frustrated source of enthusiasm, concerned with character and sense of place, and full of good hunches about what is right and wrong in the local context. If one of the themes of this meeting is the question of communities and partnership, then the experiences of civic societies may have something to tell us, and later on in this talk I will say something about some of these.
This should give you a hint that above all I will be concerned with empowering communities, and doing so in a Welsh context. Ways and means to democratise the planning system, and engage local people in the making and shaping of the places where they live and work are at the heart of my concern, as an agenda that needs to sit alongside the parallel goal of raising client aspirations and enabling professionals in the public sector to prioritise design issues.
I'll start, then, especially for the non-Welsh here, by looking in very general terms at urban character in Wales, and some examples of urban design past and present. It'll be a whirlwind tour, and very partial. I then want to examine the context that government is helping to set for urban design in Wales. There is a positive context here, not least the opportunities that planning reform signals to involve communities in validating plans. But there are also obstacles to be overcome, if our government's own goal of social inclusion is to be addressed. That will lead to some thoughts on design and culture in Welsh public policy and national life, and directly to the issue of empowerment. In my view, and in the view of the Civic Trust, this needs to be addressed, at least in part, through approaches to the education of adults and young people. It is the educational flag that I want especially to run up the mast of this conference.
Historical
The Welsh here will have to be a little bit patient as I set the urban scene for the visitors.
That's
one conventional image of Wales. But a very selective and misleading one.
Historically, Wales is a nation of small towns, and very few villages. Our cities and big towns are young, peripheral, the product of the railway age and Victorian industrialisation. Outside the industrial valleys of the south, small market towns, little ports and seaside resorts are typical, and upland settlement scattered. Maybe this explains the fact that while there has been a lot of discussion about "design" and character amongst the chatterers in Wales, we have not (or at least government has not) focused on the theme of "urban renaissance" in the same way as our friends in England. This is simply to say that an urban design agenda in Wales needs even more than in England, relevant not just to ambitious city centres and waterfront zones, but to the ordinary high street and neighbourhood, and housing estate, and to smaller communities as much as larger towns.
The fact, too, that much settlement growth has been unplanned, shouldn't obscure the reality that we are not without some experience in urban planning and design.
Edward I left us with a fine collection of bastide towns - from which the Welsh were excluded for several hundred years. Later on, places like Tremadoc and Llandudno were unquestionably designed by their patrons. The first decade of the last century saw the creation, just outside these doors, of one of the finest civic centres in the British Isles, and the 1930s gave us Portmeirion.
In the 1950s Wales got its very own New Town in the valleys above Newport.
This is, as I said, very much a whirlwind tour, and leaves a lot out. But here, perhaps to stimulate some debate, are some recent examples of urban design schemes.
Swansea,
whose 1982 marina development was masterplanned by the former City Council,
and where the recent Castle Square project brings life to the city centre
during day and night time.
Caerphilly
- where town centre renewal earned a Civic Trust Centre Vision Award in
2000, for an integrated programme of retail development and urban design
led by the County Borough Council, and involving Boots plc and the WDA.
And
closer to home, public realm schemes at Mill Lane. Cardiff. and Cardiff
Bay.
In
my town, Barry Waterfront, where some excellent structural landscaping
awaits the housebuilders.
Another
Civic Trust winner, the Baglan Energy Park development which is remarkably
successful as a speculative factory development, and a fine gateway feature,
as well as being incredibly sustainable thanks to the input of the Welsh
School of Architecture.
Lastly,
Pembroke Dock's Royal Naval Dockyard: where regeneration of the public
realm accompanies restoration of the dockyard buildings in a major THI
scheme managed by the county council's quality team.
I guess the Welsh conferees will have their own views on some of these examples, and will also be well aware of some obvious omissions. Suffice it to say that we have some urban design to talk about.
Positive contexts
I would also argue that we have some positive contexts for future achievement as well. One key context is the policy framework being set by the Welsh Assembly Government, and by an Environment Minister who is a planning professional, has taken the lead both in promoting a consensual approach to policy making and has championed the Assembly's Design Initiative. Thus we have as outputs from this process
• Updated planning guidance, all in one book, that is friendly to
design, even if the phrase "urban design" seems to be absent
from its lexicon, and emphasises the role of design, amongst other things,
in promoting local distinctiveness and social inclusion, requiring clear
policies for design from unitary development plans and supplementary documents,
and demanding design statements alongside all planning applications.
• A Technical Advice Note on Design that should see the light of
day pretty soon now
• A Design Commission, announced in May this year
• And a home-grown counterpart to the Planning Green Paper that is
plan-friendly and eschews things like Business Planning Zones
All of these founded on the Assembly's commitments to sustainability, social inclusion and equal opportunities.
Obstacles and blockages
But not everything in the garden is rosy. I leave aside the economic climate in Wales, and the skewed patterns of investment that marginalize you if you live too far away from the M4, simply to reflect first of all on problems within the planning system itself. A lot of the following points are those that have been made by planning professionals in Wales, and some are based on the research evidence from a study Sam Romaya and I made, two years ago, of conservation area management and urban design in Wales. Thus, in no special order, we have issues relating to:
• Severe and worsening resource constraint, and
• A scarcity of professional skills, especially within the smaller
unitary authorities that came out of local government reorganisation in
1996.
• Some councils lack key specialists, or are unable to integrate
them into effective multi-specialist teams
• Professionals compartmentalisation, and difficulty in getting all
the actors in a project to pursue a single shared goal
• Lack of cash means perceived problems in communicating with the
public and developing a dialogue with communities
• I could also mention highways engineers, but I don't want to upset
anyone…
These problems are not universal. Some authorities have unlocked large amounts of cash. There have been successes for instance in pursuing linked conservation and urban design strategies. Some councils, are making real progress in fusing investment in the public realm with Townscape Heritage Initiatives to put the surrounding historic fabric in good condition. In Pembrokeshire, the Quality Pembrokeshire Unit is a multi-disciplinary team that has produced its own public realm design guide, and is leading the scheme to regenerate the Royal Naval Dockyard at Pembroke Dock.
But the capacity of local authorities to engage with and deliver an urban design agenda is one side of a more complex equation.
Civic societies are simply an aspect of voluntary sector engagement with the built environment in Wales. But their achievement can sometimes be startling, and their opinions worth noting if we are to get a sense of how communities can feel.
On the achievement side, one might mention the society that worked with Snowdonia National Park and brought in a visiting Slovenian urban designer to work with the community on design proposals for Dolgellau. Or one might think of the society that is currently bringing to fruition a feasibility study for the regeneration of the waterfront in Menai Bridge. Others have recently got stuck in to unitary development plan enquiries, and parried blows with consultants and barristers in an effective and informed way.
And when we got civic societies to respond to the Delivering for Wales consultation paper on planning reform, we got a plethora of well-thought out submissions that responded positively to a lot of government's proposals and supported professional views on obstacles to successful planning at the local authority level.
However, we also got a distinctive perspective on the way in which the planning system can marginalize and disenfranchise communities and interest groups. Some planning authorities are much more accessible than others to community groups and third parties. Local inquiries can be confrontational and intimidatory to non-professionals who represent community voices. We need to give some creative thought to how non-professionals can access the planning system and play an effective part in making and shaping the places they value. We need to find ways of addressing imbalances within a system that is biased towards those with cash and resources, and which talks a language full of special codes.
All of this is made more urgent by the agenda for planning reform and a new planning system that is going to demand more effective engagement with communities as part and parcel of the process of plan making, action planning, brief writing, master planning…and so on. The need for community validation of plans and briefs may seem like an opportunity, but in practice the aspiration to inclusivity is vague and aspirational.
One response has to be professional thinking about methodologies of participation that transcend the caravan exhibition and the response form, but that's for another discussion. But the onus shouldn't always be on the professional, we also need a laity who are literate in design issues, can articulate what they want and what they need, and can engage as partners in the collective duty to make better places.
Cultural policy and design education
The answer in the longer term has, I would argue, to do with cultural policy and education in design and the built environment. If we can make progress in these areas, then we will be making a sustainable difference to the extent to which people and communities are empowered to be actors in the urban design process.
First of all, some thoughts about cultural policy. And a quick comparison with Scotland.
In Scotland, as in Wales, government wants to promote good architecture and good urban design, and has produced guidance for planners. In Scotland design has been approached, not as a specialist subject, but as part of a wider National Cultural Strategy. Design is placed alongside other cultural expressions, as part of the fabric of social and communal life. Culture is found everywhere, not just in theatres, galleries and museums, but also in the landscape, the neighbourhood, the pub, the club and the home. It's a democratic vision in which everyone can be a maker and a participant, and it places an engagement with conservation, architecture and urban design at the centre of public policy. It's a vision that celebrates the old and welcomes the new, and it's a political agenda that gives key roles not just to planning authorities and conservation agencies, but to the school curriculum. Architecture and design are both a manifestation of national cultural life, and key delivery systems for policies for social betterment, modernisation and inclusion.
In Wales, we also have a spanking new cultural policy, Creative future. To be fair, it begins with a holistic vision of cultural life that, to quote the culture minister, “cannot be parcelled up separately from the rest of living. Rather it infuses everything… We must seek to extract new cultural value from all that we do - whether building a school or a hospital, or planning our towns and cities.” It goes on to express an ambition for joined up thinking in which language, landscape and the built environment are recognised alongside the arts, media and sport, and it is suggested that there could be a new focus on design in children's education and lifelong learning.
But Creative future seems to me to miss the boat that the Scots have caught.
Theory and practice are not welded together, and most of the document audits present activities rather than sets out an agenda that will make a difference. Design seems something for Sue Essex, not a genuinely shared project.
There are no proposals to turn into reality the possibility of a place in the sun for design and the built environment within the curriculum of schools. This does not seem a priority for the Education Department within the Assembly. There the focus is currently on the theme of sustainable development, taken forward in a way that marginalizes built environment and design issues. Moreover, it seems to me to be making a strategic error by setting out to tell teachers to preach up sustainability as a new topic within the crowded arena of personal and social education, rather than to look at how sustainability issues could be addressed through the existing curriculum.
When the Civic Trust set up an informal group a couple of years ago to try and interest the Assembly in built environment education we made the tactical mistake of assuming that our objectives could be met within this sustainability initiative. We were interested both in how design appreciation could be progressed as an entitlement for children to rank alongside art, music and literature, and how design issues could be addressed in the context of lifelong learning with adult audiences. Both these goals are relevant, and it seems to me time for another effort to gain them some recognition. They seem to me to remain at the root of achieving a civic awareness that takes a direct and proprietorial interest in the public realm and the built environment, as well as, in Bob Croydon's words, “promoting the joined up thinking that is essential for a sustainable future”. Communities are a sustainable resource, as much as energy supplies, food, and land. We need to fuse thinking and learning about the built, the natural and the social.
I have no business plan for all of this, but I have the feeling that now is the time to resurrect this agenda. And I have a personal view about how, in the first instance, it could be done. I have a very personal hunch as someone who once underwent teacher training, whose partner is a teacher, and who was this week re-elected chair of a comprehensive school governing body for the fourteenth year, that it won't be achieved by loading yet more into Personal and Social Education, or making design an footnote to Citizenship. What is needed, in the first instance, is to look at the many opportunities that there are within the existing curriculum to draw on the built environment as a learning resource, and to offer teachesr resources that are cheap and cheerful for them, that are activity-centred, and which they can use to add value to existing schemes of work. At the other end of the scale, there might be an architecture and design centre, physical or virtual, but in the mean time the web is there to be exploited as an effective and economic, and interactive, means of publication.
That's one way in which we might entice children, perhaps especially primary-age kids, into design literacy. There is another agenda to be thought through for adults, it's something that engages me too as a teacher of mature students, and this is something that the Civic Trust, with its network of civic societies, must have a special duty to develop and which it regards as an urgent priority. Both targets need to be addressed if, to quote my trustee Paul Vanner, “we are to demystify and to democratise design”, and if we are to empower every community, however hum-drum, to be partners with professionals.
Conclusions
To conclude. There is a whole area of professional good practice that needs to be developed through the public and private sectors that is one aspect of enabling communities. There is to my mind also the necessity to ensure that everyday places, especially in a nation that is economically weak, and has appallingly high indices of child poverty, get the benefits of creative urban design. But the theme I want to labour is that of education for empowerment as a theme that politicians, professionals and the voluntary sector can come together to make real. The creation of places of humanity and purpose in which to live and work and play cannot simply be a duty on public-sector professionals, or something to be wished on private sector clients, but should be a shared and collective aspiration that is part and parcel of a sustainable, an inclusive and a confident Wales.
September 2002
I am grateful to the officers in local authorities across Wales for their responses to my invitation to contribute their thoughts on urban design to the research behind this paper. Little of their input is reflected here, but a more considered discussion of this theme that will draw in detail on their evidence will be published in the next edition of About Wales. Meanwhile we thank the following for the opportunity to use their photographs in this presentation:
Swansea City and County Council: Castle Square at night; Cardiff County Council: Mill Lane; Vale of Glamorgan Council: Barry waterfront; Pembrokeshire County Council: Royal Naval Dockyard, Pembroke Dock. Other copyrights are acknowledged in the title tags to thumbnails..
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