Matthew Carmona's Blog, page 2

103. Urban renaissance to Office for Place

25 years on

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Urban Task Force report and the decade long sequence of policy, practice, and investment interventions that followed.  At the heart of the initiative was an attempt to turn our suburban nation into an urban one while simultaneously solving the housing crisis.  On the former, to a good degree, it succeeded, on the latter, it failed.

The famous yellow book

Its key success was to awaken us to the great value and potential of under-utilised urban land and to use place-based design strategies to encourage us to embrace urban living.  On that front, across its 100+ recommendations the report espoused many of the essentials of the latest incarnation of those ideals, the 15 minute city.  In doing so it encouraged a new wave of investment, both public and private, into our larger cities which, over time, also led to their densification; sometimes designed well and sometimes not. 

Its failure was in Government timidity, then as now, to tackle the national housing delivery model that throughout the 1980s and 1990s had become ever more reliant on a few large national house builders whose rational interests as market players have rarely been served by maximising housing output.  Instead, there is often a preference for drip feeding new housing on to the market to maintain sales values.  And this too often goes hand in hand with avoiding building too much social housing and infrastructure, or housing environments of a better quality than absolutely required.

25 years on and looking at the prescriptions lined up in the famous yellow book, it is hard to see many that aren’t still relevant today and which an incoming government might like to revisit; albeit now we might expect to see a far greater emphasis on zero carbon, nature recovery, health and well-being, and affordability.  

A new kid in town

On the design front, while the Urban Task Force did not recommend the setting up of CABE, that organisation emerged as part of the larger policy response and as a key entity charged with delivery of Urban Task Force recommendations, and notably with raising design quality ambitions across England.  History tells us that the austerity years and everything that came after quickly swept all this away, and 15 years on we are reinventing the wheel: first through the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission report, and now the Office for Place.

The Office for Place is a new arms-length agency of Government with around 25 staff and a base in Stoke-on-Trent.  It was formally launched with a fanfare in March, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to its inaugural conference, ‘Places at Pace’. 

While the mood music around the Office for Place is clearly different to CABE – beauty, popular design, community engagement, digital technology, and a context of ongoing austerity – I could not help feeling a strong sense of déjà vu around the sorts of ‘tools’ that the new organisation plans to use.  These include support to local government, publication of advice and best practice, training, research, and an initial focus on design coding that CABE also played a critical role in championing during its middle years.

‘Places at Pace’ conference, Stoke-on-Trent

The major absence is the omission of any design review function.  CABE inherited its national design review role from the Royal Fine Arts Commission before it, but in many respects, it was always its Achilles heel, with many of the architects and developers who had fallen foul of its design judgements increasingly critical of this role and ultimately delighted at CABE’s demise.  Curiously, there is now more design review, more widely spread than ever before, albeit not a national panel for which there seems little demand or potential any time soon.  

My own research showed that CABE was a remarkably effective organisation in much (although not all) of what it did.  Reflecting this, the Place Alliance and others made the case for re-establishing a national organisation to champion design quality in the immediate aftermath of the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission which, like the Urban Task Force before it, had not recommend setting up such an organisation.  I am therefore delighted to see that after an extended period of gestation it is up and running.  

My more recent research has shown how critical such advocacy and leadership of design quality can be at both national and local scales, notably for ensuring that a culture of design quality emerges and that this informs policy and place-based decision-making across the scales.  

Wishing every success

Whether the Office for Place is as effective as CABE was, and I truly hope it will be, will depend on many factors, not least (one suspects) the attitude of the Labour Party.  Notably it will depend on the place of design within their plans to (yet again) reform the planning system, something about which we have heard little.  

Now that the Office for Place has been let off the leash of direct Government control, my hope is that they can capture a little of the spirit of renaissance that infected, in a positive sense, the CABE years.  Ultimately the Office for Place needs to become the sort of challenging, proactive, and innovative driver of change that we so clearly need.  It also, despite the predilections of some Ministers, needs to avoid being associated with a prescribed national style or any mechanism that might, rightly or wrongly, be seen to be imposing one.

There is now the potential to quickly gain momentum and after a decade and a half of hiatus, to become a strong national voice on design quality, helping to lead the national conversation (as CABE did) and drive change locally.  In doing so, one hopes, it will feel able to speak truth to power – something that CABE struggled with – not least on the point of our national development model that for decades has been broken.  Unfortunately, until we fix it (and that means much more than tinkering with the planning system) we will never get great design as a norm, never deliver enough new homes, and never complete the still much needed urban renaissance.

Matthew Carmona

Professor of Planning & Urban Design

The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL

@ProfMCarmona

102. Bridging the design / finance divide

Financial mechanisms and urban design governance tools

Urban design aspirations do not exist in a bubble.  The most creative design solutions will be of little value if economic systems fail to allow for their implementation.  Urban design outcomes and processes will always be shaped by the availability of economic resources and the nature of financing instruments for projects.  But the governance of design has the potential to use financial (and other economic) means alongside or as part of the urban design governance toolbox to incentivise good design and discourage poor design.  

The Urban Maestro project examined the use of urban design governance tools across Europe, summing up the types in a nine-part typology.  One strand of the project – recently published in a new journal article – focussed on how the tools of urban design governance interface with financial mechanisms.  Looking across Europe, the research revealed that at a basic level, financial means can encourage the production and use of particular urban design governance tools through the allocation of support funding for such activities.  More significantly, however, finance can be used to encourage the delivery of public design aspirations as captured in the formal and informal tools of urban design governance.  Used in this manner, finance is a formal incentivisation mechanism.  

European typology of urban design governance tools and its relation to financial mechanisms

While any financial mechanism might, in theory, be used for that purpose, in practice some are far more commonly used than others.  These can be classified across two meta-categories encompassing, first, the ‘Raising of finance’ through subsidy and direct investment and, second, ‘Managing investment’, variously involving process management, indirect economic stimulus and partnership working.

Classification of financial mechanisms

A design / finance gap 

A Europe-wide survey of state-level government administrations as part of the Urban Maestro project suggested that while all the financial mechanisms included in the classification are used across Europe, awareness of the potential to link between financial approaches and design tools was low, suggesting in turn that the association remains underexploited.  For example, follow-up in-depth research revealed that few built environment professionals could fully unpack the economic rationale and business models associated with specific urban design governance tools.  

If the critical task for the state is not simply to incentivise development, but to incentivise high quality development, the research suggested that currently many administrations are attempting to do this without critical financial tools (or even understanding) at their disposal.

An obvious conclusion was that European urbanists need better training as their understanding of real estate dynamics is often poor and without such an understanding it is difficult to engage real estate interests by bringing ‘asset values’ as well as ‘potential values’ to fully bear on positively shaping places.  The reverse is also true, that real estate actors – including those working in the public sector – need better means of accounting for ‘place value’ and not just economic value.

But not everywhere …

Despite the gap in practices and awareness, the Urban Maestro project found numerous examples of design quality tools working directly with financial mechanisms to drive up quality thresholds, many of which are described in the project’s website, and brought together in the article that underpins this blog.  Four cases demonstrate the variety of these practices, the first two from the ‘raising finance’ and the second two from the ‘managing investment’ meta-categories.

The Stadmakers Fonds (Citymaker-Fund)  was created to address the difficulties that non-conventional place-making projects encounter with securing finance from traditional sources. The fund acts as a matchmaker between place-makers and investors with an emphasis on projects that contribute to delivering a clear social as well as economic return.  In 2019 it received its first investment of €1 million from the City of Utrecht, following which the fund began to fund schemes.  A subsequent partnership with the Triodos Bank exponentially increased the capital available.  The fund charges a low interest on loans and advises and assists potential recipients to make a case for funding.  The initiative combines direct private financing and direct public investment with urban design governance support tools. By&Havn  is a development and operating company jointly owned by the City of Copenhagen and the Danish state, By&Havn sells building plots to investors and housing cooperatives and actively participates in urban living initiatives from the initial planning phases until neighbourhoods come to life.  The revenue from its activities helps to fund major infrastructure projects in Copenhagen including the development of the metro as well as urban spaces, quays, jetties, parks and initiatives in the new urban neighbourhoods.  The initiative operates on a commercial basis supported by both direct financing from land value capture and direct public investment, while using support, information, persuasion, and rating design governance tools.Today Copenhagen’s waterfront is a haven for walking, relaxation, contemplation, and exercise (of all sorts), providing the city with an animated blue lung Concept tendering .  Instead of using a direct award or a bidding process (where price is the deciding factor), concept tendering brings to the fore the qualities of place by making them a key decision-making factor equal to or even more important than price.  Evaluation matrices are applied to ensure transparency. The concept tendering procedure was first developed in the 1990s in Tübingen, and since then German cities have been able to use a variety of different and diverse criteria, enabling them to compare the quality of submitted projects, some based on complex point matrices and others on unweighted lists of criteria.  The mechanism is based on indirect financing combined with incentive and rating tools of urban design governance. Oslo waterfront regeneration  is a collaboration between Oslo City Council and Bjørvika Utvikling (a joint private / public entity).  Quality is secured through a combination of formal and informal tools including a clause in the head agreement which stipulates that each square metre of property sold should yield a defined sum towards the development of public space.  A further clause prescribes how finance will be supplied to the project without the municipality taking on any direct financial risk while the coherence of the area is shaped through extensive guidelines and a set of indicators. The regeneration process encompasses a steering mechanism based on the public private partnership and analysis, information, and support urban design governance tools.The buildings and public spaces of Bjørvika reflect the public / private delivery model that gave the municipality an inside seat on all key decisions.  Here the distinctive barcode buildings that featured in an early development phase

A design / finance chicken and egg

A chicken and egg question arose during the analysis of the various cases examined during the research.  Does the availability of finance incentivise good design or does the promise of good design incentivise the finance.  In most of the cases the two worked together, with a key ambition to create better projects leading to a desire to develop approaches that will deliver on that ambition, approaches with clear finance and design components, albeit at a cost.  Such processes, however, require a pre-existing ambition, and this is only likely to come if a pre-existing culture of design quality is first nurtured.  Equally, once up and running, the cases explored by Urban Maestro showed that the finance and design sides remain mutually reinforcing, with quality delivered reinforcing the case for and delivery of more finance and more quality.

Of course, financial incentives will be only one of the many incentives created by urban design governance tools.  A design competition, for example, may give a very small financial incentive but have a large reputational one with long-term economic consequences for those who take part and are successful.  There are also indirect financial impacts from the use of urban design governance tools.  For example, a tool that supports the delivery of good design through facilitating the provision of design expertise to either a public authority or development partner, even if it does not give money directly, is de facto a form of financial incentive because the assistance provided translates into lower costs and may (in time) deliver higher revenues from projects.  Many of the quality delivery tools, particularly those associated with support and exploration, will have indirect economic consequences.

There are also many real estate actors (public and private) that are already motivated to produce high quality development for combinations of economic, social and environmental reasons.  They may not need a financial incentive to do so but engaging with the tools of urban design governance can potentially provide them with means to turn their aspirations into reality, and to inculcate other parties (perhaps public authorities) into that vision.  This reflects the notion that much development occurs within a system of networked governance in which motivations are complex and intertwined and will not always be straightforward or always stem from expected sources.  In such complex governance environments, Land Value Capture and Public Private Partnerships have particular potential when shaped via urban design governance tools.

Adding ‘design strings’ to the finance of urban development

What was apparent from examining the panorama of practices compiled by Urban Maestro was a strong pre-existing desire to ensure, either that specific developments would be of high quality, or that future (as yet undefined) developments would be.  The various financial mechanisms were then used to ensure that ‘quality’ as an objective was written into the operating system that would subsequently deliver those projects.  This has a number of powerful effects:

It ‘locks in’ quality, because in order to access the money and the development opportunity, a high-quality development becomes a pre-requisiteIt sets a high bar early in the development process, ensuring that the decision-making of all actors factors-in clear quality ambitions from the startIt expands the notion of value beyond a purely economic one to one that might be encompassed in the concept of ‘place value’, namely that projects should maximise economic, social, environmental and health benefits to be considered successful, and that the quality of place is fundamental to this It utilises informal urban design governance tools as the means to establish the quality credentials of projects and ensure their subsequent delivery combines these with formal (and sometimes) informal finance mechanisms.

In this way the hypothesis that formal financial and informal urban design governance tools are potentially complimentary was strongly supported by the research.  There is no direct financial incentive in the production of a design guide, for example, but the moment public funding is committed or permission to build development is made conditional on meeting its principles, the financial dimension becomes both apparent and powerful.  Most of the formal financial tools have an explicit incentive function; in essence they offer funds conditional on specific design attributes being delivered, where the definition of those design attributes are typically established in what the European typology of urban design governance defined as ‘quality culture tools’ before being further defined and applied care of ‘quality delivery tools’.  All these tools, with examples, are discussed in some depth in the book Urban Design Governance, Soft Powers and the European Experience.

While combining financial mechanisms with informal urban design governance tools – funding with design strings attached – appears to be very effective at delivering high quality sustainable outcomes, this does not mean that such a linkage is always necessary nor necessary in perpetuity.  Because informal tools create a culture within which design is prioritised, over time the need to incentivise design quality through other formal and financial means may fall away, leaving actors that are intrinsically motivated to deliver design quality and who will continue to do so given that the expectation is now established.  In such circumstances urban design governance may revert to the use of informal tools in isolation as a means to continue nudging all actors to do even better and to prevent any backsliding if other factors, notably the economic context, changes. 

Matthew Carmona

Professor of Planning & Urban Design

The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL

@ProfMCarmona

101. Design coding – it’s the law!

Legislation with a focus on design quality is rare.  Only two times, that I know of, has design quality been singled out for a mention in English planning legislation.  Usually, it is a matter for policy and guidance only, perhaps reflecting the ambivalence that successive governments have demonstrated towards the subject, or maybe a sense that design quality does not require the stick of legislation.

Almost exactly fifteen years ago I wrote a blog with the title Good design – it’s the law!  The piece focussed on the first occasion that design quality found its way into legislation, care of the 2008 Planning Act (which amended the Planning and Compulsory Purchase act of 2004).  Amongst other things, this laid down a legal requirement that the Secretary of State, when setting out national planning policy, and local authorities, when exercising their development plan functions, should “have regard to the desirability of achieving good design”.  The instigators of these late amendments to the then Planning Bill in the House of Lords had hoped that local expectations would be raised and that hence forth good design would be viewed as an obligation rather than part of a wholly wish list never actually delivered.

Unfortunately, the provisions were never publicised and were soon forgotten in the turmoil of the financial crash and the austerity years that followed.  These swept away much of the urban design governance infrastructure (nationally and locally) that would have been required to put any enhanced practices into effect.  The result was initially a lost decade when design quality declined and then stagnated as (too often) de-skilled local authorities allowed (too often) disinterested developers to deliver mediocre and poor quality housing development across the country.  This was followed by five years in which we have witnessed a gradual re-engagement of government in design and some attempt to row back on the ‘lost years’.  Late last year it culminated in provisions of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act that for a second time (amongst many other things) sought to use national legislation to focus greater attention on design quality.  

So will a legislative approach be any more successful this time?

The 2008 amendments amounted to little more than a rather amorphous and undefined assertion which local authorities (and the Secretary of State) could interpret in many ways – or effectively ignore.  The new legislation, by contrast, is more specific.  Under the heading ‘Design code for whole area’ it states: “A local planning authority must ensure that, for every part of their area, the development plan includes requirements with respect to design that relate to development, or development of a particular description, which the authority consider should be met for planning permission for the development to be granted”.  The implication is (although it never quite says it) that each local planning authority should produce an authority-wide design code.

Once stated (sort of), the requirement is immediately watered down with two provisos:

that there is no need for design requirements for every description of development for every part of a local authority areathat there is no need for requirements in relation to every aspect of design.

Like the previous legislation, there is a lot of interpretation in all of this.  To my mind this is actually quite sensible as I have always argued that authorities should concentrate their limited design resources and efforts where it matters (preferably on key sites) and on the issues that are most important locally, starting with what they already have in place and building from there.  At the same time, it results in a system in which every authority will understand the requirements differently, opening the possibility that some hard-pressed local authorities will see the provisions as an invitation to ‘business as usual’.  In other words, to doing little or nothing beyond their existing, too often ineffective, policies and practices that are failing to deal with poor quality design outcomes.

Perhaps anticipating this, the Act gives the Secretary of State powers to intervene where a local planning authority “fails to ensure design code”.  But does this simply lump discretion (what it means) upon discretion (where it applies) upon discretion (what form it will take) upon discretion (is it good enough)?  The danger is that there is enough wiggle room for another 15 years of mediocre and poor quality design.

So will the legislation ensure better design quality?

The lesson from 2008 is that, in isolation, the new legislation will not deliver better design.  So what is different this time?  The answer is the ongoing engagement of government that, in order to deliver on its objectives, will need to back the hard legislative provisions with soft persuasive efforts. 

This seems likely, at least in the short-term, as the current government is four-square behind the requirement that design codes should be produced.  The opposition (on current trends the next government) has also made overtures in this direction, suggesting potential for support over the long-term as well.  Thus while in 2008 the then government did not instigate the legislative provisions and interests quickly and progressively moved away from a concern for design quality, in 2024 government and its new offspring, the Office for Place, are actively using their soft powers (information, persuasion, support, guidance, etc.) to help to ensure delivery – at least of the design codes.  And design codes, evidence has suggested, can be very effective means to help deliver better quality development.

I conclude this blog with exactly the same words that I concluded the 2008 one.  “As we know, good design is not something that is readily available off-the-shelf, it requires a skilled infrastructure on both sides of the development process, allied with a willingness to invest in the necessary time and resources to ensure its delivery.  If we want it, we will need far more than lines on paper, no matter how influential, to deliver it.  Nevertheless, as a further piece in an ever more sophisticated national framework that is pursuing better design, this legislation is to be welcomed.  One can only hope that over time it has the profound impact on local practice that its originators desire to achieve”.  

In 2008 my optimism was misplaced.  Let’s hope that in fifteen years from now this really is a turning point and, at that time, we can look back with a far more positive story to tell.

Matthew Carmona

Professor of Planning & Urban Design

The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL

@ProfMCarmona

100. Talking the talk: 20 years and 100 blogs

Just over twenty years ago Nick Matthews, Editor of Town and Country Planning, asked me if I would write a quarterly column for the magazine.  I called it Urban Design Matters.  A little later, and rather late to the blogging party, I began publishing the contributions in an obscure corner of The Bartlett website and after that at https://matthew-carmona.com (where you are now).  This contribution makes 100 blogs and provides a good excuse for a bit of reflection.

The back catalogue, 99 previous blogs

Talking the talk

Urban design emerged out of parallel physical and social agendas, and these have been moulded, extended and melded over decades, although at no time faster than the last twenty years as successive crises – climate, ecological, financial, health, and demographic – have shaped thinking on how cities should respond.  In the time I have been writing this blog, place quality has risen up the agenda in many parts of the world; the diaspora of urban design (if such a thing exists) has become ever wider; and the agenda that urban designers are concerned with has grown almost exponentially.  

Sustainability, healthy cities, social justice, liveability, urban ecology, and smart technologies were clearly on the agenda twenty years ago, but their foregrounding in recent years has increasingly shone a spotlight on the potential of urban design to contribute to multiple policy priorities at once.  All this can be seen in the policy agendas of different tiers of government around the world and on up to pan-national priorities of bodies such as the European Union and the United Nations.  Each have realised that how we shape and thereby use urban areas is critical to our response to crises, and more positively, to how we build just and sustainable cities.  Unfortunately, while we increasingly talk a good talk, we less often walk a good walk. 

Walking the walk?

Although the challenges have become ever more critical, our responses have often remained the same in that more often than not we persist in building patterns of development that are profoundly unsustainable, unhealthy, inequitable, unliveable, ecologically barren and plain dumb!

Unsustainable, unhealthy, inequitable, unliveable, ecologically barren and plain dumb

On the whole, we know what we need to do to shape more sustainable urban places – the evidence is very clear.  We need to build more dense (up to a point), connected (locally, strategically and electronically), mixed (typologically, socially and functionally), characterful, self-sufficient (low carbon) and green (bio-diverse) places that are both flexible and resilient through time.  And we have long-standing exemplars that we can confidently point to, to show us the way.  The problem is that none of this is particularly sexy in narrow architectural terms, which perhaps explains why new developments come along from time to time that are hyped as paradigmatic, but which turn out to be (quite literally) built on sand. 

Exemplars are well known, but not (in narrow architectural terms) very sexy

The latest is The Line, the proposed 170km linear city to house nine million in a single 200m wide, 500m high, mega structure stretching through the Saudi Arabian desert.  As a student in the late 1980s I remember being captivated by the drawings of Archigram.  Now, Archigram’s veteran frontman, Peter Cook, is enjoying a new lease of life leading what in any other location would be viewed as a flight of fancy, but which given the Saudi bank balance, may just happen!  Personally I love both the Blade Runner and Dune films, and the images released suggest a blending together of the two.  But architectural fantasy, like science fiction, might be best left on the screen.

The Line, Blade Runner and Dune combined!

In Saudi Arabia, the question apparently being addressed by this new development is: What is the new model of development that can house a growing population in a sustainable way?  On the face of it a highly laudable subject for enquiry and experimentation.  But in a country that has spent the last fifty years growing its cities into some of the most sprawling, low density and unsustainable cities in the world, I wonder if a better question might be: How can the opportunity provided by a growing population be harnessed to make existing cities more sustainable?  This is a question we need to ask in many places (not just Saudi Arabia), and essentially means delivering the qualities already listed: more dense, connected, mixed, characterful, self-sufficient, bio-diverse and resilient.  How to do this in different parts of the world is a conundrum that could certainly benefit from the Saudi Billions.

Going round and round

Of course one of the wonderful things about writing an urban blog is that one can safely carp from the side-lines while others get on with the job of actually making things happen.  Walking the walk is inherently more challenging than talking the talk!

For my part, I have undoubtedly written plenty of stupid things over the years in this blog and elsewhere.  Fortunately, words generate little carbon, and while in this electronic age they are endlessly searchable, most, like old fashioned newsprint, are quickly forgotten by new words and new (or recycled) ideas.  What we build, however, has a much longer impact, both locally and globally, and, like academic ideas, we need to subject it to proper interrogation and critique before breaking ground.  

In this sense architectural intuition and big bang vision-making is not enough, and where we have tried it, it has often let us down.  Instead, we need more incremental change, driven by constant innovation and creativity, but also by a profound learning along the way about what works and what does not, and a deep understanding of both physical context and human needs.  Our great cities continually show us the way.

Some projects are based on a profound engagement with place over time 

Looking back at the 99 previous blogs, I notice that I have become more verbose and probably more grumpy too, both, no doubt, a consequence of age.  Age, on the one hand, builds confidence, meaning that I feel more secure in saying what I wish to say without worrying too much about who is going to criticise it.  On the other, age gives experience.  Not (unfortunately) in the sense that I am any better at making arguments now than before, but, in the sense that many of the issues that come up now I have seen before.  Issues and approaches seem to come round on a cycle, often in some shinny new wrapping, but in essence representing the same thing.  

This seems particularly so in the UK where the policy context is somewhat fickle.  Indeed, many of the contributions in this blog have attempted to track the tos and fros of English design governance, a story full of fascinating twists and turns for aficionados like me (perhaps just me!).  The same, rather more dramatically, goes for development projects.  Linear cites, for example, are hardly a new idea and have been continually rejected on the basis that their rational functionality is quite the opposite to what the greatest cities offer, namely places that are messy, complex and forever changing (more like Peter Cook’s Plug-in City than Le Corbusier’s Radiant one).

For me, the experience of writing a blog continues to be intensely cathartic (if also a bit messy), and over the years Urban Design Matters has provided me an outlet to variously: let off steam about something that stimulated or  me; try out ideas before developing them into something more significant; reflect on experiences (usually trips overseas) in a structured way; ponder new trends and policy positions; and generally do what professors are supposed to do – profess.

As there is always more to say, I will continue to say it.  All I can ask is, please bear with me!

Matthew Carmona

Professor of Planning & Urban Design

The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL

@ProfMCarmona

99. Urban design with Chinese characteristics

An unimaginable transformation

Recently I was invited to join a panel judging the results of an international design competition for a new urban centre in Hangzhou.  Travelling to China is always fascinating, but having not been for a few years, it was possible to recognise some major changes and new trends since I last visited.

To give some context, Hangzhou is a modern, dynamic city close to Shanghai with a long history, a population of around 10 million people, a growth rate that has seen it double its population in twenty years, and with plans in place to double again.  A consequence of this is that almost everything you see is new (or at least built in the last twenty years), with even historic areas often re-built in pseudo-traditional styles.  

For most Westerners this represents change on an unimaginable scale, for the Chinese it is simply a necessary investment in their urban future.  For example, while we endlessly prevaricate around a single high speed rail line in England and new underground lines in London take decades to plan (let alone build), in Hangzhou high speed rail now radiates out in all directions from the city while its 13 metro lines have all been built since 2012, with another 12 lines or line extensions planned for delivery in the next five years.  

An austere urbanism

If the scale of the ambition and of the delivery is truly mind-blowing, there are downsides.  One side-effect of this rapid growth are critical shortages of housing and its prohibitive cost for many (problems we are all too familiar with here at home with a fraction of the growth rate).  Given the current slowdown in the Chinese development industry this may take some time to rectify.  

Another downside has been the building of a city in which everyday spaces and living environments can all too often feel austere.  Hangzhou is not unique in this as four trends characterise much contemporary Chinese urbanism:

Oversized roads carve up many Chinese cities, including in Hangzhou’s CBDFirst, the inhuman scale of street spaces.  Despite its truly impressive local and national rail systems, Chinese cities have been planned around the car at a scale that emulates many American cities.  A consequence is the interlacing of urban areas with elevated arterials while, down on the ground level, oversized multi-lane roads turn walking and cycling into a challenging experience.  At the same time the acres of tarmac act to further heat often already overheating cities.  The inhuman (and deserted) spaces of Hangzhou’s second urban centreSecond, the inhuman scale of public spaces and buildings.  Urban squares are not a traditional feature of Chinese cities which have instead been structured around streets and private courtyards.  In recent decades Chinese cities have been building new business, civic and retail centres, often accompanied by an over-scaled formality, including overly large new public spaces that are too often uncomfortable to use (given local climatic factors), lack purpose, and which are therefore underutilised by residents who instead flock to the introspective air conditioned spaces of successive building complexes.Identikit residential towers make up many Hangzhou neighbourhoodsThird, the regimented uniform nature of residential environments.  The speed of construction that Chinese urbanism has supported, and the densities required, have turned large areas of Chinese cities into highly regimented environments in which identical utilitarian towers establish instant neighbourhoods without local differentiation, character or ground level quality.Large parts of Hangzhou are gatedFourth, the gating of urban areas.  Traditionally Chinese cities have featured large areas of gated compounds connected by streets with a fine-grained network of paths and courtyards inside.  As the scale of development has increased, gating has been retained as the norm, initially for reasons of control and more recently as a marketing feature of new neighbourhoods.  As a result, getting around has become a fragmented and inconvenient experience for many pedestrians who need to navigate large impermeable urban blocks.   

All this has created cities which, at their worst, can be stark, unliveable and unrelenting, not helped by a system of planning that relies on strict zoning and regulation without the discretion to negotiate better design quality.  Thus, while land uses, quantum of development and height controls are strictly enforced, it is largely up to individual developers what they produce within those constraints, with the overriding emphasis for both public and private actors firmly fixed on achieving quantity over quality.  

Signs of a more liveable future?

If all this seems rather bleak, in Hangzhou I saw clear signs of a change, and of a turn towards a more human-centred future for Chinese urbanism, built on a greater focus on place quality.   

One very obvious change with a direct impact on the ground level experience of cities is the revolution China is seeing in the use of electric cars (far outstripping the West).  In Hangzhou and Shanghai my crude assessment was that approaching half of the cars I saw were electric vehicles (easily identifiable by their green numberplates).  While all cars are carbon emitters and undermine more active modes of travel, the huge benefits of a reduction in local vehicle pollution was noticeable.  This left streets smelling and felling cleaner, despite being just as heavily trafficked as a few years ago.

The design competition that I was asked to judge another indicator of a new direction of travel.  Design competitions are used regularly in China as a tool of urban design governance with a proven track record of focussing attention on design quality, thereby helping to overcome some of the short-comings of the planning system.  Often these focus on individual buildings and can lead to a ‘beauty parade’ of more or less extraordinary architectural compositions.  Likewise, master planning competitions have frequently delivered needlessly formalistic and representational projects.  But the latest competition in Hangzhou portended something different.

Hangzhou already has two centres.  First, a historical centre on the iconic West Lake and second, a new Central Business District, dating from 2007.  A third is now proposed as a focus for the burgeoning tech sector in Hangzhou (which is home to the tech giant Alibaba).  While the second centre is focussed on a monumental axis across which sit buildings that represent a sun and a moon (I am not sure why), the brief for the new centre was carefully put together, refined and promoted by one of my former students at UCL in a manner that deliberately attempted to move away from such extravagant gestures.  Instead, it emphasised human scaled spaces and distinctive urban design to reflects its Chinese context.  

Although not every submitted scheme took these messages to heart, the most successful schemes clearly did.  The results, I hope, pave the way for a very different sort of place to be constructed if and when the project is realised, and perhaps an exemplar for elsewhere.

The competition brief encouraged the design of human-scaled and distinctly Chinese typologies

A final form of evidence was already apparent on the ground in the form of a minority of recent projects that have been taking on board the message that the comfort of humans should be at the forefront of our considerations.  Examples include Renzo Piano’s Oōeli Complex, a development of 17 beautifully detailed buildings covering a Hangzhou superblock to define a mixed-use oasis from the surrounding roads and traffic.  

Oōeli Complex, Hangzhou

A second was Vanke Liangzhu Bir Land, a new artistic commercial centre for the Liangzhu Cultural Village.  Rather than building an inwardly focussed and air conditioned mall, the developer here attempted to learn from the scale and forms of traditional Chinese commercial streets to create a relaxed focus this huge new neighbourhood.

Vanke Liangzhu Bir Land, Hangzhou

Chinese characteristics?

So what is urban design with Chinese characteristics?  Is it the finely grained traditional streets and courtyard houses of the pre-Communist China; is it the over-scaled Modernist roads and regimented blocks of more recent times; or is it something new that combines new technologies, connecting public transport infrastructure to rival the best in the world and a more human place-based urbanism in which to live, work and play?  The jury is still out, but Hangzhou showed some welcome signs of a more liveable and also sustainable way forward.

Matthew Carmona

Professor of Planning & Urban Design

The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL

@ProfMCarmona

98. Urban design coding as a wireframe for a place-focused urbanism (Part 2)

Continuing from the previous blog, and building on extensive evidence brought together in a recently published paper, this blog continues the conceptualisation of design coding.  The previous blog identified the value of codes as a distinct urban design governance tool that can establish a ‘wireframe’ of essential urbanistic elements with the potential (although not the inevitability) of optimising place value.  

Distinguishing the content of codes from the tool delivering it

Such a wireframe has the potential to contain all the ingredients for what William Whyte characterised as “a social fabric of stifling monotony”, just as it might also contain the ingredients for a sustainable, inclusive and fulfilling place-focused urbanism.  But rather than focusing on these larger urbanistic considerations, much attention has instead focused on the association between coding and the neo-traditional outputs of the New Urbanist movement in the USA and places such as Poundbury here.  As a consequence, codes have more-often-than-not been associated with the stylistic predilections that often accompany such developments.  But, just as the choice of a programming language in computing does not determine the nature of the project being coded, in the built environment it is not the tool that defines the outcomes.  Instead, it is the content – the components and parameters – that are loaded into the code.

Speaking from the perspective of a master developer, Graeme Philips has noted “A good code is a filter through which only well-resolved and compliant proposals will pass, but it should also be expressive of the overall design vision”.  The vision may be ‘traditional’ in feel (as is often favoured in the USA) or contemporary (as is typical in continental Europe).  More significant is likely to be the potential for codes to coordinate site or area-wide strategies that have nothing to do with style: connections and movement, green space and biodiversity, public realm quality, the distribution of uses, variety of building forms and types, walkability and so forth.  Ultimately, codes are a designed product and will be value laden just like any strategic planning framework to which they relate, or architectural project that they may help to deliver.  

Borneo Sporenburg, Amsterdam, in this development, the code allowed considerable architectural freedom within a unifying framework.  The code defined by West 8 controlled height to the eves, number of stories, height of the first storey (4.5 metres) the roof (it should be flat), and the pallet of materials

A wireframe used at different scales

Turning to the scale and sequential implications of coding, here we need to consider three scales (‘a’ in the figure below).  At one end of the spectrum, typically some form of spatial planning at a ‘strategic’ scale will determine factors such as the distribution of development, infrastructure, the mix of land uses, and so on.  At the other end, individual ‘projects’ are designed in three-dimensional detail and are subject to a range of regulatory processes.  While the project scale ultimately defines what is experienced on the ground, project-level design is not necessarily the most important level at which design occurs.  By setting the wireframe within which the ‘place’ is defined and matures, the intermediate level place-design has the potential to define the most important relationships in which the greatest public interest resides. 

The use of coding by scale and in combination

Unfortunately, despite its importance, coherent place-level design is often missing in contemporary development practices because, while place creation is not possible without projects, project creation is possible without place-level design.  When it is delivered, typically place and project-level design are given the big bang treatment through a single detailed blueprint masterplan (‘b’ in the figure), although such approaches have been criticised because of the association with what Nick Falk refers to as ‘big architecture’ projects through which designers, incorrectly assume that “if you can visualise everything, you have solved the main problems of development.  

Equally, strategic, and place-level design can be unified in a single detailed strategic level tool (or tools) (‘c’), such as a city-wide zoning ordinance.  The New York zoning ordinance provides a case-in-point which, a century after its original 35 pages were published, had grown to 900 pages covering a very wide range of detailed coding, nuanced across the city according to local contextual circumstances, and enforced through complex formal regulatory processes.  While born of a very different planning system to that in the UK, the approach is akin to practices in England from the 1970s onwards when authority-wide residential design guides and county level highways standards guided much local place-level decision making (not altogether successfully).  

In contrast, countries such as Denmark and The Netherlands have long retained a clear distinction between establishing the urbanistic parameters of places (through forms of coding) and that of masterplanning and strategic level design.  Codes operating at this mid-level of design (‘d’, ‘e’ and ‘f’) are indirect in their impact, establishing the ‘decision-making environment’ within which others subsequently design final projects.  The challenge, in an uncertain development environment or where projects are being built out in phases over long periods of time, is to deliver a more flexible approach that nevertheless has the potential to add both certainly and quality.  It is this that the use of place-level codes attempt to achieve either by themselves (‘d’); acting together with a masterplan (‘e’); or used in a staged manner (‘f’).  This final use of codes in combination implies the use of place-level codes, either with strategic coding above and / or with project level coding below, the latter for smaller development parcels or at the plot level.

Plot passports are being used at Graven Hill Village, Buckinghamshire, to guide the design of self-build plots.  These offer a good degree of architectural flexibility within a common urbanistic wireframe provided by the village design code

Following the logic path (with flexibility)

This blog post began by comparing coding in the built environment with that used in the field of information technology.  While computer software can ultimately be boiled down to a series of 0s and 1s (to binary code) and the fabric of the built environment to solids and voids (figure / ground), coding in both fields is hugely complex in order to accommodate the numerous languages, delivery tools and, of course, objectives – what coding is attempting to achieve.  The need is to have a clear vision of what is intended and to write the code in such a way that it will be delivered without fail.  Just as a computer must follow its coding – it can’t (yet) decide to simply disregard it if it doesn’t like the direction of travel – so also should a good urban design code lead inevitably and irreducibly to the outcomes defined by and in the code.  It should be easier to follow the logic path defined by the code than to ignore it.  In the built environment, ideally this should deliver a more desirable set of outcomes than would have been secured without the code, although crude coding can also materially reduce the quality of designed outcomes, delivering the default: unsustainable sprawl.

In England, design codes are being used to deliver a more design focused planning system in the belief that better designed development will be more acceptable to local communities who will thereby be more accepting of new development in their areas.  Here design codes are seen as adding greater certainty and reducing the discretion inherent in British planning systems.  In countries with a zoning tradition, various forms of coding are being introduced with two purposes.  Either to be more responsive to the specificities and nuances of sites – beyond what is possible in a broad-brush zoning system – or to offer greater flexibility to changing market circumstances by coding separately and sequentially for different phases of development – beyond what is possible in a blueprint masterplan.  Codes have therefore been linked both to reducing flexibility and to increasing it.

A path towards place-focussed urbanism

With the current drive in England towards the production of authority-wide codes (strategic level coding), there seems to be an alignment with practices in the USA where many form-based codes have been produced as alternatives to, or replacements for, city-wide zoning ordinances.  The evidence discussed in the paper on which this blog is based suggests, however, that the real prize remains the production of site-specific design codes (floating-zone codes in the USA) that represent a continuation of the practices that have guided the best development projects in the UK since the 2000s and which are closer in type to the site based regulatory plans found in continental Europe.  

Such codes deliver a greater degree of place-specificity that is only possible at a smaller scale involving a design team directly focusing on the site and its potential rather than applying standard types to a remote and abstract site.  As I have argued previously, there are many paths to successful coding because codes are not a single tool or process.  At the same time, conceptually at least, the ideas (underpinned by practical evidence) in this blog and the last suggest a common framework for the wide range of codes that are currently in use internationally.  

Many paths to coding converging on a common process for code creation

As Raymond Unwin noted over a century ago, “communities are seeking to be able to express their needs, their life, and their aspirations in the outward form of their towns, seeking, as it were, freedom to become the artists of their own cities, portraying on a gigantic canvas the expression of their life”.  In this sense codes clearly put public authorities (representing those communities) on the front foot, lending them the power to shape a desired outward expression in a proactive and positive manner through a robust and holistic wireframe for a place-focused urbanism.

Matthew Carmona

Professor of Planning & Urban Design

The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL

@ProfMCarmona

97. Urban design coding as a wireframe for a place-focused urbanism (Part 1)

In a recently published paper I explore the nature and use of coding in urban design.  Drawing from practices on both sides of the Atlantic, and from two English design coding pilot programmes (17 years apart), the work points to the value of codes as a distinct urban design governance tool that can establish a ‘wireframe’ of essential urbanistic elements with the potential to optimise place value.  This blog and the next set out a few of the arguments.

Coding (two types)

Today, the term coding is most often associated with information technology, with the activity of programming software, websites, apps, and the like.  Load the terms ‘code’ or ‘coding’ into a search engine and page after page of search results will reveal an almost exclusive focus on computing.  In a broader sense, however, the term coding simply means the assigning of a code to something for the purposes of classifying it and codes can be found everywhere: in science, nature, genetics, literature, art, security, human language, fashion, social interaction, law, public policy, and, of course, the built environment.  

In the world of computing, ‘code’ refers to the set of instructions written in a particular programming language.  Coders may innovate by writing new, previously undefined pieces of code, but will always work within the rules of languages and will often take sequences of code from a pre-existing source where it is proven to perform a particular function.  These ‘software design patterns’ are then strung together to create new products.  

Likewise, urban development follows recognisable languages which are most obvious in the architectural forms and styles that vary from place to place and through time and which, until the 20th Century, predominantly defined a street-based urbanism.  Increasing in scale from architecture to the more expansive and complex field of urban design, these can be understood as pieces of code.  They might involve new and innovative elements, but more-often-than-not are constituted from well-established codes already in use elsewhere.  

The urbanistic language of Elizabethan London (a) was quite different to that of Georgian London (b) just as Georgian London and Georgian Bath (c) had their own distinctive qualities born of the materials used, the first being predominantly brick and stucco and second predominantly Bath stone.  Each can be viewed as the consequence of a unique combination of urbanistic codes

Components and parameters

Just as programming languages are defined by syntax (form) and semantics (meaning), codes in the built environment can also be conceptualised to constitute two elements that equate broadly to form and meaning.  First, a series of ‘components’ that together constitute the physical kit of parts that will define a particular place.  These sit alongside ‘parameters’, or instructions for use to ensure that the key relationships between the components are correct.  

In the past the choice of components and the parameters dictating their use would have been largely automatic; it was just how things were done in localities where technology and governance practices had not ‘advanced’ enough to do things any differently.  Today, however, more-often-than-not, external policy and regulation will impose codes on projects that may be generic rather than place specific.  Likewise, developers can employ a wide range of modern construction methods and urbanistic approaches which encompass systems of codes that are very different from local vernacular traditions, leading to an almost infinite range of possibilities.  The result, some argue, is the need to limit choices through imposing a designed code with the potential to generate some coherence and an appropriate responsiveness to local conditions.

Good codes, bad codes, contested codes

However imposed, all human-made environments, when broken down into their component parts, will constitute recognisable codes and it is how they are put together that gives rise to particular distinctive ‘urbanisms’.  In turn these might be described in stylistic terms (e.g. avant-garde, traditional, etc.), by their relative urbanity (e.g. urban, suburban, etc.), or in terms of their response to their localities (e.g. contextual, contrasting, etc.).  Whatever their origin, such codes are brought together to create new places in a manner that responds to external factors (client instructions, contextual qualities, site constraints, community engagement, local policy / regulations, budget, etc.) and a defined design and / or development processes (briefing, visioning, iterations and refinements, testing, and so on).  Arguably it is the combination of codes and how they react to these external factors that determines the nature of the places that are ultimately produced.

In computing, despite sharing much of the same code, applications can be innovative, elegant, functional and appealing, or alternatively unremarkable, crude, dysfunctional and unnecessary.  In the built environment, the selection of the right codes, in the right places and combinations will determine whether they generate attractive, fulfilling, and sustainable places or unattractive, alienating and unsustainable ones.  A particular component may typically lead to poor urbanistic outcomes, for example blank facades at street level, but if modified by the right parameters relating to its use, the impact can be ameliorated, perhaps by wrapping big box formats or ground floor parking with active uses.  

The logic behind the increasing use of ‘coding’ as a deliberate activity of code generation and a particular sub-set of urban design governance practices, reflects a broad belief that the intelligent and sensitive pre-determination and subsequent application of the right codes in the right places is likely to increase the chances of better design outcomes being achieved.  But, as Kim Dovey has observed, “One person’s right might be another’s travesty.  Codes are … social in origin, subject to agreement and negotiation, the outcome of contestation and negotiation”.  In other words, they are political, designed entities, and therefore inevitably subject to opinion and challenge.  

All these developments are underpinned by codes (of sorts).  The codes on the left prioritise highways, parking and value engineering, while those on the right prioritise landscape, public realm and walkability

Vision defining or vision delivering

In relation to the built environment, the term ‘code’ has been used to capture almost any type of design-based regulation or standard that might shape urban areas.  I, however, am using the term more narrowly to mean “a distinct form of design guidance that stipulates in an illustrated, directive, and precise manner the three-dimensional components of a particular development or place and the parameters for how these should relate to one another, without prescribing the overall outcome”.  It follows that ‘coding’ is the process of generating codes.  

In this example code prepared for San Jose in Northern California the principles of lot (plot) and build-to line and the relationship with the street are clearly, succinctly, and graphically presented.

Unpacking this a little further, I have previously defined ‘design guidance’ as a “generic term for a range of tools that set out design parameters with the intention of better directing the design of development”.  In the case of codes, four key terms nuance this: ‘three-dimensional’, ‘illustrated’, ‘directive’ and ‘precise’.  While not every element in a code will be all (or perhaps any) of these things, when applied to the whole code, they point to a form of guidance that is likely to be more prescriptive than most and articulated by predominantly graphic rather than written means.  

Just as computers following a programme will track the logic path established in its coding, so (in theory) should the users of coding in urban development.  This can be done either through applying codes to a site or place through the creation of a masterplan, or discrete architectural, landscape or infrastructure intervention that follows the code.  Or it may involve using the code to articulate further and in detail an already established design vision such as that represented in an urban design framework.  The former reflects a ‘vision defining’ role and the latter a ‘vision delivering’ one.  In both, and as reflected in the definition of codes used above, codes are emergent in the sense that choices about how they are applied, and how they are supplemented by the articulation of non-coded elements, can lead to very different design outcomes. 

Safety-net or springboard to excellence

In both worlds (urban and IT), the creativity and technical mastery of coders in knowing how and when to apply codes is likely to be critical, including how to adapt existing codes and create entirely new ones when necessary.  But there will also be many fundamental principles that simply have to be followed to create anything that makes sense at all.  In computer programming this means, for example, understanding how to use and manipulate variables, data structures and syntax.  In urban design it is likely to relate to some of the well understood and widely accepted normative principles of place-focused urbanism such as an integrated street structure, clear public / private interfaces, the integration of natural elements into built space, and so forth.  Theorists, practitioners, and activists have been arguing in favour of these sorts of qualities since at least the mid-twentieth century turn against Modernism and, more recently, against what is often viewed as unsustainable suburbanisation.  

As they are pre-defined in a code, such elements will inevitably limit the choices and freedom of designers and developers as regards how they choose to design and develop.  The trade-off is that in doing so they help to ensure that a defined set of public design aspirations are met as part of the larger place-shaping process.  The aspiration being that the resulting project is more likely to be successful by achieving at least a minimum level of acceptability for regulatory approvals.  This might be described as a ‘safety-net’ approach.  From there to the next level of achieving an inspiring, innovative, or exceptional design will most likely require more than a code (by itself) can achieve, including an exceptional client and design team with a determination to build on the defined (coded) parameters through a creative design process.  The code, in such a scenario, can act as a ‘springboard to excellence’.

A common journey from generic to specific

Unlike IT, where the coding of new applications is a given – nothing will work without them – in the urban realm the creation of codes as an explicit tool (or phase) of development is hit and miss.  Codes are always applied, but the deliberate stage of designing them to elevate large-scale development outcomes in the public interest is often missed out.  Where used, however, codes are utilised in similar ways across North America, Continental Europe and the UK, albeit in very different systems.  Essentially, they are delivery mechanisms for securing defined physical design quality outcomes:

In North America, form-based codes exist at different scales.  First, as a root and branch mandatory replacement for, or parallel and optional alternative to, a city-wide zoning ordinance.  Second, as what is referred to as a ‘floating-zone code’, or a code associated with the delivery of a particular ‘planned unit development’ (suburban development).  In each case they establish physical parameters to replace what some see as crude as-of-right regulations applying to an entire municipality.In Continental European planning systems, regulating plans of various types and associated codes (either generic or specific) typically define the urbanistic parameters for developments at a site-specific scale.  These sit as part of the lower-tier (local) planning arrangements, underneath and subject to conformity with a higher-tier strategic spatial plan.In the English planning system, design codes reduce policy discretion by establishing clearer design parameters for decision-makers over and above the more generic policies found at the national scale or in local development plans or authority-wide design guides.  Typically, they have been site-specific tools designed to provide greater certainty in a system still characterised by a good deal of regulatory discretion.

Systems have generally (although not always) been on a journey from more generic to more specific forms of coding, with steps along that road representing a greater potential for local refinement and adaptation to the contextual circumstances of sites or places.  In each case this narrows the ‘opportunity space’ within which developers and designers operate to define a more coherent urban design structure while, ideally, still leaving scope for what Marcus Wilshire has been characterised as “a rich variety of distinctive and memorable interpretations”.

A wireframe analogy

Returning to the association between coding in the world of information technology and that in the built environment, ‘software architecture’ refers to the fundamental structural choices inherent in any piece of software.  Once set, these are difficult to change, but more importantly they dictate how the software operates and how all the constituent parts relate to one another and function together.  Coding in the built environment can be seen in a similar light, as the means to define the ‘architecture of urbanism’, not in the sense of designing buildings but in the sense of laying down the underpinning structure of places.

Such a structure can be equated to a ‘wireframe’ – to offer another information technology analogy.  Wireframes are used as a schematic rendering of a computer interface to demonstrate functionality, features, content, and user flow without specifying the visual design of a product.  They are used in website construction, in CAD and graphics renderings, and in any products requiring some form of human-computer interaction.  Wireframes demonstrate desired outcomes as well as process.  

Shaping, positioning, supporting

In fact, the term was taken into IT from the artistic realm where artists sometimes use a skeletal framework to represent three-dimensional shape and volume, notably sculptors who sculpt with soft materials and use a metal wire armature to frame forms before layering them with other media.  The wireframe positions and (at least initially) supports the structure being created, defining its meta-shape but not the final treatments that are applied to the piece.  Likewise, in urban development, codes (in theory) define the publicly significant components of a proposed urban environment – those that maximise place-value – by:

Shaping – through the choice of individual urban design components such the pallet of buildings and block types, materials, or public realm elements, so that, as the ensemble fits together, there is a coherent relationship of components to each other and to a growing whole.Positioning – of urban design components in relation to each other through parameters that establish appropriate and desirable relationships, such as street walls that adequately define and contain space while allowing room for sustainable movement, street trees and social activity.Supporting – the creation of something that is greater than the sum of the parts by nurturing (over time) how new places come into being in such a way that they are not partial, piecemeal, or fragmented but instead are integrated and coherent, exhibiting what Christopher Alexander famously described as ‘wholeness’ at all stages of their development.Wireframe as an analogy for coding

Used in this way, a code establishes a type of ghost wireframe that exists only conceptually and on paper, but nevertheless shapes what can happen where and how.  This notion also captures the emergent nature of urban codes that specify the parts, and their relationships, but not the whole of what is being created.  The next blog continues the argument, like this, building on the extensive evidence brought together in an extended paper: Coding urban design: Constructing a wireframe for a place-focused urbanism.

Matthew Carmona

Professor of Planning & Urban Design

The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL

@ProfMCarmona

96. Can we deliver place quality by ticking boxes?

‘Right’ analysis, wrong conclusions, again

Better Places is the latest output from the influential right leaning think-tank Policy Exchange.  The big idea, as reflected in the report’s sub-title, is a matrix for measuring and delivering placemaking quality.  The result is captured in a ‘PAX score’ (appropriating the Latin word for peace) for new developments that would feed into development management decision-making.

In two previous blogs – ‘Right’ analysis, wrong conclusions 1 and 2 – I explored other recent reports from the ‘Building Beautiful Programme’ from which this report emanates.  Like those, Better Places receives strong endorsement from the Secretary of State, Michael Gove who describes it as “no less than a detailed instruction manual for how we can create the good places of the future”.  High praise indeed!  So what is thisPlacemaking Matrix?

The Placemaking Matrix is what is known in urban design governance as an ‘indicator tool’.  In my recent book indicators are defined as tools that “seek to measure and represent aspects of performance – in this case design quality – in a manner that can be easily shared and understood”.  Better Places defines this new matrix as “what we believe to be a ground-breaking attempt to develop a universal tool capable of measuring how successful developments will be, (or are) at placemaking for the very first time”.  

Unfortunately, the tool is not nearly as original as the report and its endorsement make out.  Indicators of this type are part of a tradition that goes back a very long way in urban design.  Rarely are they as ground-breaking or useful as their authors believe them to be.

One of many indicator tools

An early indicator tool was The Scanner, produced in 1966 by Gordon Cullen as a part of a series of pamphlets commissioned by Alcan Industries.  This 24 page brochure included a two page matrix to encourage designers to systematically ask: “Have I considered …” all the critical human and physical design elements of urban settlements.  Since then, indicator tools have regularly appeared with different forms, emphases and degrees of detail.  Almost always they contain:

some form of desired checklist of issues to be considered when designing, accompanied bysome means of scoring the outcomes to ‘indicate’ the level of quality being achieved.

One of the best known tools of this type is mentioned in Better Places, the Place Diagram of New York’s Project for Public Spaces (PPS), “a tool to help people in judging any place, good or bad”.  PPS have used this over decades to structure their analysis of places and to promote their brand.  Nationally, the report draws attention to various indicator tools that are used either at the individual building scale – BREEAM, Energy Performance Certificates, The Well Building Standard – for transport planning – PTALs – or beyond the built environment altogether, notably Energy Efficiency Labels and Ofsted Ratings. 

It notes “we live in an age where either the state or the private sector has established an increasing array of scoring systems to determine the quality of all manner of functions and activities pertinent to public life.  This has not yet happened with placemaking”.  This seems a curious statement given the existence of numerous indicator tools that significantly overlap with the new Placemaking Matrix, including some that overlap to the point of replication (in intention if not content).  

1. Building for a Healthy Life (BHL) aims “to help those involved in new developments to think about the qualities of successful places and how these can be best applied to the individual characteristics of a site and its wider context”.  BHL has been around in various incarnations since 2003.  It is explicitly mentioned in the National Planning Policy Framework and is formally adopted by Homes England as the quality benchmark for the allocation of public funding for social housing.2. Placecheck has been in existence since 2000 and in its current guise consists of 21 questions and 131 extra prompts to evaluate the quality of places or projects.3. Gardencheck is a specialist form of Placecheck focussing on the quality of gardens.4. Place Standard offers a simple framework based around 14 sets of issues to structure conversations about the physical and social qualities of place.  Developed for the Scottish Government, this tool is now being adopted elsewhere in Europe.5. Healthy Streets focusses specifically on the quality of streets to make them more healthy places for users.  The tool has been central to the development of street-based policy and standards in London, but its framework of ten criteria for healthy streets is now used internationally.6. The Design Quality Indicator (DQI) was launched in 2002 by the Construction Industry Council as a process based on the Vitruvian principles of Firmitas (durable), Utilitas (Useful) and Venustas (Beautiful).  The tool enables design quality to be measured throughout the development process.7. Design Quality Indicator for Health 2 was commissioned in 2010 by the Department for Health and is a specialist DQI for healthcare settings.8. Spaceshaper was developed in the 2000s by CABE, originally from the DQI system.  It is an indicator tool designed to evaluate and represent the qualities of public spaces in a manner that can be used and understood by anyone from professionals to communities.9. BREEAM Communities evolved out of the internationally recognised BREEAM assessment tool, but rather than focussing on buildings, it assesses environmental sustainability at the neighbourhood scale.10. LEED for Neighbourhood Development provides an assessment and certification scheme similar to BREEAM Communities.  It emanates from the USA and is designed to encourage the development of more sustainable and connected neighbourhoods.11. A Housing Design Audit (and previous audits) are not indicator tools but have at their core indicators to allow ready comparison between developments at the place-based scale.  The recent Place Alliance audit used seventeen criteria, each interpreted through two or three sub-criteria.12. Pedestrian Environment Review System (PERs) offers a proprietary means of recording the quality of the pedestrian environment in a systemised manner as part of a walking audit.Twelve place-level quality indicator tools, none of which are mentioned in Better Places

While each of these has their own particular focus, means of representation, levels of sophistication and costs (from free to expensive), like the new Placemaking Matrix, they provide a framework for evaluating different aspects of place quality that extends across the tangible and intangible qualities of place.  

So what is special about the Placemaking Matrix?

Turning to the content of the new matrix, questions are divided into three groups, relating to the ‘physical’, ‘socio-economic’ and ‘psychological’ elements of new development.  Each group carries one third of an overall PAX score and are further subdivided into 12 sub-categories with different weightings “according to the impact of the said category and the extent of autonomous control the developer would be able to exert over it” – I will return to this.  Subcategories are further divided into questions – 274 in total – each needing to be scored on a scale from 0-4, with the final weighted score out of 100 equating to ‘outstanding’ (>70%), ‘good’ (60-69%), ‘average’ (50-59%+) and ‘poor’ (<49%).

It is here that the report claims “a pioneering departure from conventional placemaking practice”.  It argues that “while it is relatively easy to define physical attributes and, to a slightly lesser extent, socio-economic ones, no previous study or standard has attempted to quantify the psychological content of places and yet these are arguably the most important when assessing their human impact. The PAX system does just this”.  

Again, this seems wide of the mark, as each of the pre-existing place-based indicator systems include a range of psychological factors.  The Scanner, for example, was long ago based on the idea of creating urban fabric that could elicit an emotional response.  Factors were divided between physical factors, described as “the mould into which mankind is poured”, and human factors that elicit profound emotional reactions of “happiness or sadness, fulfilment or despair”.  

The reality is that such issues are messy in the sense that they cannot easily be articulated, evaluated, or pigeon-holed as our sense of psychological well-being stems from multiple overlapping aspects of the socio-physical environment, many of which only become truly apparent after a project is complete and in use.  The new matrix, unintentionally, reflects this messiness.  Issues relating to ‘crime & safety and ‘users and inclusivity’, for example, are included in the main socio-economic category, but they might equally, and perhaps more appropriately, be included in the psychological category.  Likewise, many factors included under ‘sense of place’ in the psychological category are largely aesthetic and might easily have been placed in the physical category.  The point is that academics and practitioners have been grappling with this as long as we have recognised that this was a field that needed to be grappled with.  Universal truths or original thinking in this space is rare indeed. 

Less (questions) is more (informative)

So if this aspect of the Matrix is not its unique selling point then what is?  The tool certainly wins the prize for the most questions included in such an indicator tool, by some distance.  

When it was first published in 2000, Placecheck consisted of a list of around 100 questions, offering a comprehensive checklist for communities or practitioners to evaluate their surroundings.  The result was a rather stodgy set of issues for users to wade through in order to get to some conclusions about the quality of their projects or places (I know, I used it!).  Perhaps recognising this, in recent iterations headline questions have reduced to 21, with a set of more detailed prompts to help if needs be.  Building for a Healthy Life, likewise, has been on a journey from more to less detail across various incarnations.  These began with 20 (Building for Life) questions in 2003, reduced to 12 (Building for Life 12) questions in 2012, and these were refined further in 2020 for Building for a Healthy Life.  Other indicator tools typically have a clear and simple normative framework at the core of their analysis.

The core frameworks underpinning various indicator tools

The experience of undertaking A Housing Design Audit in 2020, likewise, suggested very strongly that consistency of interpretation required less rather than more criteria.  In that case, 17 design considerations were each carefully defined and tested prior to elucidation through a maximum of two or three sub-criteria.  By contrast, the Placemaking Matrix involves 12 sub-categories of the three main categorisations, some with up to 76 sub-questions in which literally everything but the kitchen sink forms a legitimate focus for enquiry.

The result is that many questions duplicate issues; others will be almost impossible to evaluate in a consistent manner (e.g. Do any privately owned public spaces maintain public character?); or reflect particular stylistic preferences (e.g. Do street facades generally maintain a rhythm of vertical articulation?); while others are almost impossible to understand (e.g. Does the public realm management plan have the capacity to market or promote the development in areas outside the development?).  Yet others are about design process rather than design outcomes (e.g. Was public polling undertaken at any stage of the design, planning or development process?); some don’t concern design quality at all (e.g. Is free public Wi-Fi provided across the development?); or, depending on the scale of the project, may very well not be relevant (e.g. Has communal gym equipment been provided in public spaces?).  A few are simply impossible to answer, including the final question, Does the development promote a visual brand, motif or logo?.

Avoiding pseudo-science, cliff-edges and bias

Assuming that the 274 questions posed in the Placemaking Matrix are illustrative only, and that further refinement, explanation and considerable consolidation was undertaken, it remains important not to give the impression of being too pseudo-scientific with such tools.  The seemingly definitive nature of the assessments that indicator tools provide, particularly those that end in a single number or descriptor rather than a profile of qualities, can be misleading.  In this case, a very exact percentage is given to two decimal places.

Interestingly, Better Places references the Ofsted rating system that is used to evaluate the quality of teaching in English Schools.  In that system, an exhaustive Inspection process, often over several days, is summed up in a single headline rating: ‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’.  This is despite the fact that the report backing up these judgements has all sorts of nuances that are quickly lost in the crude headline.  The challenges of such a system with its cliff-edge assessment categories have recently been in the news.  Partly to address such problems, the UK-wide Research Excellence Framework (REF) that every five years or so is used to evaluate the research strengths of UK universities moved in 2014 from a system summed up as a star rating (unclassified to 4*) to a published profile in three areas: ‘outputs’, ‘impact’ and ‘environment’.  To some degree the move took the heat out of the results.

To explain its approach, three trial cases are included in Better Places: a huge and unfinished mixed use mega-development in London (scored 46.16% – poor); a small bespoke and well matured housing scheme in Cambridge (scored 73.33% – outstanding) and an ongoing regeneration of an historic ex-mining village in Scotland (scored 66.33% – good).  The problem is that these schemes are profoundly different in scale, architectural style, state of completion, socio-economic context, mix of uses, presence of historic assets, and so on, making comparison almost meaningless.  Despite this, the results and the discussion suggest that they have been subject to a credible, authoritative and universal assessment, resulting in a definitive comparative statement of quality.  They serve to demonstrate the danger of a simple percentage and textual summation as well as the challenges of bias.

Nine Elms / Battersea and Accordia Cambridge were compared in Better Places

On this final point, the comments accompanying the trial cases clearly show a dislike for high rise buildings and avant-garde architecture that are respectively described as “unwarranted incursion” and “a shocking array of the architectural aberrations”.  The danger of any tool that allows architectural taste to hold sway is that the resulting evaluation will be a foregone conclusion before it has even begun.

More (bureaucracy) is less (creative engagement)

Better Places recognises that impartiality and objectivity may be a problem, and to overcome distortions stemming from personal preference the report suggests that schemes should be assessed on two separate occasions, the first formative in nature, during the design process, and the second summative, submitted with a planning application.  Planners assigned to projects for development management purposes, it argues, should not be trusted to make such assessments, and instead a separate officer, urban designer or architect should be appointed to the task, alongside two other PAX assessors.  These, it suggests, could be from the development team, local authority or community.  In total some 1,644 questions would need answered across the three assessors.  

Given this, it is odd that the report argues that the Placemaking Matrix “has been designed to ensure that it does not unduly add to the frequently onerous list of bureaucratic compliances that the planning process already imposes on proposed residential developments”.  Why other aspects of planning are bureaucratic, and this is not, is not entirely made clear.  What is clear is that the resource implications of the suggested process is not really considered, not least the work that would need to be foregone in order to tick all the PAX boxes.  

More time spent by local authority design staff (who are in short supply) answering a long list of standardised questions is surely less time available for the sorts of proactive and creative inputs that the planning system lacks, namely time to prepare positive site-specific design guidance and to negotiate and improve projects on a case-by-case basis.  Personally, I can’t imagine many design officers relishing the prospect of time spent completing PAX assessments, and this sort of work will quickly be devolved to administrators (as it is in many as-of-right zoning systems) or result in a rapid exodus of urban design officers in search of more stimulating ways to fill their days.

The dangers of reductionism

Ultimately in a discretionary planning system which, for better or worse, we still have, the quality of decision-making comes down to:

the professionalism and skills of those who operate it (the planners and design officers)the time they have at their disposal to do a thorough job (on the design front that means time to analyse, guide, evaluate, challenge and actually design), and the backing they receive to do their jobs from local and national politicians.  

Perhaps because we have a discretionary system, we seem to spend a long time inventing tools that will somehow make those processes more scientific, streamlined and objective when, in reality, they never will be.

While other countries use indicator tools (including LEED Neighbourhoods, BREEAM Communities and the Place Standard), nowhere invents them with quite the frequency and relish that we do in the UK.  Indeed, my recent research examining the use of informal tools of urban design governance across Europe found very few examples of such tools outside the UK, despite a continent-wide survey.  It also revealed a widespread perception amongst European professionals that such tools are essentially reductionist, reducing complex judgements that need to be weighed and balanced by skilled staff down to simplistic questions.  This was perceived to be a particular problem in relation to the more intangible design considerations where qualitative judgement is required, as opposed to those where a quantitative assessment is possible, such as energy efficiency.  Many of the issues identified as ‘psychological’ in Better Places fall into this category.

It is notable then that the most widely used place-based indicator tool in the UK, Building for a Healthy Life, has recently moved away from a question-based format to one centred on written and visual prompts.  This, it was argued, was “a tactical shift in emphasis.  Questions demand a quick response whereas good design requires more time, analysis and thought”.  By contrast, the Placemaking matrix is structured entirely though questions.

So what are place-quality indicator tools good for?

In a complex multi-dimensional field such as urban design that cuts across physical, social, aesthetic, economic and other realms, it is inevitable that design indicators will be reductionist.  Despite this, they have value in a number of important situations:

The first is as thinking and conversation tools, helping to structure a formative discussion about what is desirable in connection with a proposed scheme, or alternatively what is successful or unsuccessful about places that are already built.  This is the essential purpose of many of the simpler indicator tools such as the Place Standard and the Design Quality Indicator.  The second is as a basis to reward projects and project teams.  This might be part of an awards programme or a means to give projects the status of a particular label or rating scheme.  LEED and BREEAM are of this type but have a bias towards the technical aspects of design that are more easily evaluated through such tools.The third is as a backstop where a tick box tool is used in the absence of a skilled evaluation process.  This often occurs in as-of-right zoning systems where evaluation is largely a bureaucratic process rather than one based on professional judgement. The Healthy Streets tool offers a case-in-point.  Its use in the highly regulatory field of highways design has been able to bring a design sensibility to an otherwise purely quantitative evaluation.  Planning, in the UK, has never been such a field.A fourth (related) case is where an assessment needs to be made in one field of competence (e.g. design quality) to establish a benchmark for the release of funding in another (e.g. social housing).  In England, the use of Building for a Healthy Life scores prior to the release of funding for social housing is an example.A final case is when indicator tools are used as part of a larger summative audit process in which a stocktake of quality is being undertaken across many schemes.  In such cases the challenges of using indicator tools are offset by the numbers of assessments made, with inconsistences in individual interpretation and judgement evened out across such audits.

Separately, there may also be a role for a checklist as part of a design code for use during the evaluative process.  Critically, however, these should not be generic lists like the Placemaking Matrix, but should emerge out of and summarise the code itself.  In turn the code should be generated out of a profound place-based understanding of the site or place to which the code relates.  Ultimately, interpreting a design code (just like a planning application) involves judgement and not a simple tallying of scores against an inflexible framework.

No substitute for design skills!

The real danger lies when indicator tools are seen as a substitute for design skills.  In a field like urban design where the subjective is mixed with the objective and value judgements are rife, indicator tools can all too easily become value laden, generated through personal or collective preference, rather than on the basis of evidence.  

In the Placemaking Matrix, the weighting of ‘public transport’ and ‘crime & safety’ as worth just 40% of ‘building appearance’ is an example of this.  According to the report, this is because they “do not fall directly under the developers remit”.  But downplaying such issues only acts to excuse the development of locations that are clearly unsustainable and should not be developed at all, no matter how beautiful the resulting development might be.

Ultimately, no amount of box ticking can ever act as a substitute for a creative publicly engaged design process.  If we are too mean or too short-sighted as a society to train and employ enough urban designers and think that a box ticking exercise will do instead, then we deserve everything we get.  This is about where we invest our time, limited resources and creative energies.  For me, that should always be in the process of design, with indicator tools kept in the urban design governance toolbox as an occasional support to, but not a substitute for, design-led place-shaping.

Matthew Carmona

Professor of Planning & Urban Design

The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL

@ProfMCarmona

95. 15 minute city: branding, conspiracy and a surrogate for density

An alternate reality

Recently The Guardian published Policy Institute analysis that examined conspiracy theory beliefs amongst the UK public.  Among the top conspiracies was the belief that 15 minute city plans are an attempt by government to surveil people and restrict their freedoms.  Quite unbelievably, a third of respondents felt that this was either definitely or probably true.  It seems that the way we design our cities is finally reaching a level of national consciousness.  Unfortunately, it is doing so for all the wrong reasons!

Conspiracy beliefs among the UK public (Guardian graphic based on a Policy Institute survey of 2274 adults representative of the UK population)

To pedal back a little, anyone likely to be reading this blog is also likely to be familiar with the concept of 15 minute cities or the closely related notion of 20 minute neighbourhoods.  Both argue for shaping urban environments in order to allow people to live lives that are supported by all necessary facilities and amenities within a walkable or cyclable distance of their homes.  For such an entirely reasonable and one would think uncontentious idea to be caught up in the alternate realities of the conspiracy theorists is difficult to comprehend.  

This, the Policy Institute inform us, is a consequence of the manner in which we all now consume our news.  Notably, an increasing number of us are choosing no longer to engage with media outlets that, to varying degrees, attempt to air alternative viewpoints, in favour of those that only seek to represent narrow worldviews.  Taking that path, one can all too easily disappear down a rabbit hole of interlinked conspiracy theories where even the most innocuous of policy approaches is seen as a sinister plot against personal freedoms.  That, it seems, is where we have got to with 15 minute cities.

The idea of responsive neighbourhoods

In this post-truth world, the idea of 15 minute cities somehow became embroiled in the UK in controversies over the introduction of low traffic neighbourhoods (LTN).  These attempts to reduce street space and inter-connectivity for drivers in favour of pedestrians and cyclists have been seen by some as a direct attack on what they see as an inalienable right to drive wherever and whenever they wish.  Others have come to believe, quite literately, that the intention is no less that to pen populations into their neighbourhoods and not to let them out!

Such mentalities may very well reflect a hangover from the covid lockdowns that, to varying degrees around the world, imposed such restrictions on us.  More likely, LTNs and 15 minute cities simply became conflated as both ideas rapidly gained traction in a post-pandemic world in which many of us have been opting to spend more time in our home neighbourhoods and rightly have come to expect more from them. 

As an idea, 15 minute cities and 20 minute neighbourhoods are nothing new, but are instead a re-branding designed to catch the attention of politicians; which they have done in spades.  Perhaps the best known example is Paris, home of the originator of the term 15 minute city – Carlos Moreno – and where Mayor Anne Hildago made the concept a centre-piece of her successful 2020 re-election campaign.  This was clever politics, according to some, as Paris is ostensibly already a 15 minute city, making delivery of this election promise very easy to deliver.  And anyone who knows Paris, also knows that this particular 15 minute utopia is hardly a dystopia of surveillance and control as the conspiracy theorists would have us believe. 

Paris five minute map from 2021, showing areas with a five minute walk to three daily convenience store types: a baker, a chemist and a newsagent (Paris Urbanism Agency, APUR) 
Key: blue, all three reachable in five minutes; dark pink, two of the three reachable; light pink, one of the three; grey, areas where residents (4% of the population) need to walk further than five minutes to reach at least one of the three 

While many traditional cities, just like Paris, have tended to grow organically on a neighbourhood model, the idea of deliberately designing localities in which there is good convenient access to meet all daily needs goes back to the origins of neighbourhoods as a planning idea.  Famously, this included Clarence Perry’s influential work a century ago on ‘neighbourhood units’, which, just like the 20 minute neighbourhoods of today, contained certain critical elements: an elementary school, open and play space provision, local stores, and a configuration of building and streets that allowed all public facilities to be reached safely on foot.  

Even more famously, campaigning in the 1960s to preserve her equivalent of the 15 minute city – the mixed city – Jane Jacobs opened the worlds eyes to the critical social bonds that liveable localities can support.  Her fight for traditional neighbourhoods and against the imposition of top-down Big Government programmes to re-shape cities in favour of the car, was the polar opposite of what the conspiracy theorists argue today.  For them, the hand of Big Government is seen in attempts to preserve the integrity of the small and the local by taming the car and seeking to transform neighbourhoods into liveable places.  But instead of making their case through evidence and reasoned argument (Jacobs-style), these new advocates reach for wild speculation and unsubstantiated rumour to make theirs.

Time as a surrogate for density

Underpinning the 15 minute city concept (or brand) is the use of ‘time’ as a simple surrogate for a whole series of factors that make for a good city.  These include: density, diversity, mix, and connection; all long-held shibboleths of the urban design cannon since the days of Jacobs.  But taken literally, time travelled can be quite a crude measure of place quality.  

Scotland, for example, is in the final stages of introducing Planning Guidance focussed on Local Living and 20 Minute Neighbourhoods.  As the name suggests, this takes 20 minutes from the home as the measure “to meet the majority of daily needs”, “by walking, wheeling or cycling” (wheeling meaning by wheelchair or mobility aid).  However, where you can get to in 20 minutes on foot compared to 20 minutes on a bike is very different.  The average pedestrian will walk around 3-4 miles per hour (say 1 mile in 20 minutes), mobility aids may be slower or faster depending on how propelled, while cyclists will travel about 12.5 miles per hour (say four miles in twenty minutes).  But as many people cannot or choose not to cycle for all sorts of reasons (particularly women), a twenty minute travel distance for one person on a bike will be a one hour twenty minute journey for someone walking, making the measure less than useful.  

In Edinburgh a 20 minute walk will get you along the Royal Mile from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse (or between most points in the City centre), while a 20 minute cycle will take you from Holyroodhouse out to Edinburgh Zoo (or between the City Centre and many of Edinburgh’s suburbs)

The great benefit of living in an urban areas is that they provide all the amenities we need, reflecting the fact that what will be a critical daily need for one person, such as a hospital visit, may not be for someone else.  The trade-off is that these needs will be met at different distances from our homes.  The corollary of this is that while we absolutely need to focus on the local, it is not the be-all-and-end-all (as a 15 minute city may unintentionally imply).  We also need to focus on those vital intermediate and longer distance needs that the good city should meet.  

Also, when we consider the local, rather than starting at 15 or 20 minutes, we should begin at 5 minutes from the home.  Home Comforts, the Place Alliance study undertaken during the first UK lockdown showed that people quickly became more dissatisfied with their neighbourhoods after a five minute walk distance had been breached.  Thinking in this way, we might need access to parks and local shops within a five minute walk; primary schools, good public transport provision, personal services such as haircutting, a pub or café, and local health services, within 10 minutes; larger town centres, emergency medicine, social facilities, and a diversity of work opportunities within 20 minutes; and access to more specialist hospitals, universities, public administrations, and so forth, within 30 minutes (this final category traversed by any mode of sustainable travel).

Ultimately, what this all really comes down to is density.  Indeed, Carlos Moreno always heavily caveats his many presentations of the 15 minute city concept with the need re-shape cities around ideas of poly-centricity, proximity and diversity. 

Paris, for example, has an average density of 86 persons per hectare explaining how much of it (as already illustrated) is a five minute let alone a 15 minute city.  London is less dense, but still has an average density of 69 persons per hectare, while across the UK the average urban density is 37 persons per hectare.  The implications of this is that in most UK towns and cities, people will need to walk roughly twice the distance that Londoner’s do to get to the sorts of amenities that are dependent on having a large enough population to justify them, such as shops or a GP surgery.  Outside of London, new suburban expansions are often built at considerably lower densities than even this, explaining why, in many cases, residents in such areas choose not to walk, and instead (if they have one) take the car.  At 37 persons per hectare, assuming around 2000 people are required to support a corner shop, 54 hectares of land would be required to house the population for a single shop.  At such densities, most facilities (including public transport) would most likely exceed a 15 minute walk.

Time for a re-brand?

Unfortunately, even the most innocuous brands can quickly become toxic if enough disinformation is thrown their way.  Despite its shortcomings, it will be a great shame if that happens to the 15 minute cities idea given the ability of this “mundane planning theory” (as Oliver Wainright described it) to cut through to policy makers, around the world.  In England, we have had many initiatives to try and containing sprawl and building more densely, including, in recent decades: urban villages, millennium communities, urban renaissance, sustainable communities, eco towns, garden communities, and gentle density.  So, if that occurs, no doubt another similar brand will come along soon. 

The new Scottish Planning Guidance anyway notes that we need to be realistic that remote rural locations may not be able to achieve the aspiration for residents to meet the majority of their daily needs within a 20 minute walk.  In fact, without dramatic changes to their structure and density profiles, many suburban locations, including many of the UK’s suburban expansions of the last 30 years, also fall into this category.  The challenge, therefore, is a more fundamental one than making provision for a few additional local facilities where they do not exist.  Instead, where it is both possible and desirable (which isn’t everywhere), it is about connecting-up, retrofitting and densifying existing places.  This is a much more wicked problem, and one (like LTNs) that is unlikely to have universal support!  Perhaps we need a sexy brand to sell it, I know, how about 16 minute cities?

16 minute cities (cartoon adapted from Louis Hellman’s original)

Joking aside, as a starting point, ensuring that newly built neighbourhoods are built at sufficient densities to support day-to-day needs locally, while connecting into wider sustainable transport provision for longer distance requirements, must be a first step to creating decent, well-provisioned, healthy neighbourhoods for all.  Elsewhere, a strategy of gradual densification by stealth has much to recommend it: investing in public transport, densifying around nodes of activity, proactively bringing forward small development sites, building adaptably to allow changes of use at ground floor level, and gradually reducing parking, while all the time hoping that those conspiracy theorists don’t notice!

Matthew Carmona

Professor of Planning & Urban Design

The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL

@ProfMCarmona

94. Six ‘C’s, the fundamentals of urban design governance

My new book, Urban Design Governance, soft powers and the European Experience, stems from the Urban Maestro project, a unique collaboration between UN-Habitat, BMA (the Brussels Bouwmeester or city architect) and UCL.  The book, which is available as a free download, takes a deep dive into the governance of urban design across Europe.  

I discuss the book’s coverage and content on YouTube, but in essence the focus is on the use of soft powers to influence design quality with the aim of understanding the scope, use and effectiveness of the range of informal (non-regulatory) urban design governance tools that governments, municipalities, and others have at their disposal.  

Around Europe, the range of informal tools available to government across its different scales (national to local) are diverse.  When mixed with the formal regulatory tools of urban design governance and incentivised through financial mechanisms (a particular focus of Urban Maestro), the outcome is a hugely complex European landscape of varied and often innovative practices from which to learn. 

The diversity of informal tools reflected in a European typology of urban design governance tools

However this translates locally, the two years of discussions, sharing of practices and analyses that underpinned Urban Maestro suggested that governments might begin by reviewing six fundamental factors, the six ‘C’s of effective urban design governance.

1. culture of design quality

The quality of the built environment impacts profoundly on the social and economic opportunities available to citizens as well as on the health of the environment and local populations.  Nurturing a shared desire to see high quality architecture, streets and public spaces that support an inclusive urban life requires sufficient and predictable funding, a willingness to actively engage in shaping places, and an ability to persuade investors and citizens that such a commitment is worthwhile. 

Producing a high-quality urban environment requires a culture change across the many people and institutions that together shape places and spaces.  Places that have achieved it have typically worked to establish such a widely shared culture of quality, but a leap forward of this type is made of many small steps encompassed in numerous decisions associated with the delivery of individual plans, projects and spaces.  It requires a continuity of effort – well beyond the duration of any political mandate – as well as many short-term actions that combine to deliver more than the sum of the parts.  A culture change has been delivered when no one questions the need for design quality and when it is quite simply, the expectation.

2. Capacity for design quality

The most sophisticated governance of urban design starts with the public sector recognising its own huge potential to decisively shape new development and existing places for the better.  A first key step is to put in place the necessary administrative structures or organisations to deliver on the ambitions and to invest in people with the right capabilities and commitment to command trust and wield authority when negotiating design outcomes.

This may involve enhancing the function of existing structures and arrangements or creating new ones, but any arrangements need to be suitably empowered to challenge existing practices and bureaucratic processes, particularly if they are sanctioning substandard outcomes.  In doing so it may be wise to start small and build from there, selecting a single tool such as design review, design competitions, citizens juries, awards schemes, and so forth.  If a tool works well, it is necessary to commit resources to it and make it economically sustainable, adding other tools as and when resources allow.  Leadership is key and determining from who or where that is coming is critical.

3. Coordination of design quality

A culture of quality is underpinned by having the right tools in place that will enable city authorities to consistently encourage and require design quality.  Formal regulatory instruments are important, but so too are the sorts of informal and flexible tools such as design guidance, professional enabling, on-site experimentation, and so forth that can leverage on the expertise and creativity of motivated individuals and utilise the soft powers of the public sector to inform and actively engage key parties in the delivery of design quality ambitions. 

The most sophisticated approaches use a mix of tools, creating continuity in approaches with success coming from aligning a diverse set of tools towards the same quality objectives.  For example, traditional regulatory tools such as spatial development plans, construction regulations, and local taxation, can be given a quality dimension through combining them with softer approaches across the six categories of informal urban design governance tools (to the left of the typology diagram).  These are cost effective to deliver and when used in combination with financial mechanisms, can help to maximise value from public resources by encouraging more informed and effective public spending. 

4. Collaboration for design quality

A feature of much contemporary development is an imbalance of power in development processes.  Informal tools of urban design governance can be particularly effective at garnering and amplifying community voices, and for motivating private interests to both engage in a conversation about the future of place and to commit to playing a role in delivering public design quality ambitions and long-term visions.  The quality of these conversations is critical for enriching understanding and mutual learning.

For example, urban design processes can be seen as political or developer-led processes, leaving residents feeling side-lined.  Here soft power tools such as co-creation and collaborative management can help to legitimise processes and inspire better outcomes.  Similarly, economic resources and incentives can be fully integrated with design objectives when ambitions, methods and terminologies are fully aligned.  Demonstrating leadership on design is essential and soft powers can facilitate this, but it requires listening, garnering support and recognising diverse private and public interests.  

5. Commitment to design quality

Too often design quality is considered in a bubble separated from the economics of development.  There is huge potential to incentivise the delivery of urban design quality, while saving on public funding, by linking any direct or indirect public sector financial contribution – land, loans, remediation, infrastructure, knowhow, partnership, etc. – to the aspirations in informal urban design governance tools.  Mechanisms of land value capture and Public Private Partnerships have significant potential to make this link.

These tools offer tried and tested means to fill the public funding gap and align private actions to community-wide quality objectives.  They are not just concerned with capturing private sector finance, but also private expertise to compliment public and community knowledge and resources.  Tying design strings to such financial commitment can help to ensure that outcomes meet public quality aspirations and deliver long-term place value for all.

6. Continuity of design quality

Everywhere is different, and practices that might be right for one municipality won’t be right for another.  As Urban Design Governance, soft powers and the European Experience shows, there is great potential to learn from practices in cities that have made the transition to a culture of urban design quality.  In this respect, it is easier to transfer practices that use the soft powers of the state because usually they work independently of defined legislative and governance regimes and can be adapted to diverse and changing local contexts.

Soft powers can facilitate innovation, allow adjustment when outcomes are disappointing and the rapid commitment of more resources and political capital when practices succeed.  But there is a need to create space (and time) for experimentation, incorporating continuous learning and refining of practices.  Such local scale innovations – both inside and outside public administrations – can then be scaled up to inform more general and formal policies. 

The question is how to create a stronger drive in the public sector and maintain a continuous learning process.  In this context, adding to the six ‘C’s with which the book concludes, there may be need for what one commentator at the final Urban Maestro event defined as a seventh ‘C’ – “Come on!” – a motivational call to municipalities to get them going.  The book demonstrates how.

The six ‘C’s, fundamentals for effective urban design governance

Matthew Carmona

Professor of Planning & Urban Design

The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL

@ProfMCarmona