Without the state

Home Zones

I'm looking into the way in which home zone ideas have begun to permeate into other areas of traffic management and urban design. If anyone has some links, especially to project reports and/or photographs that they can point me to I would be very grateful. References to paper only reports is fine so long as they are still in print. I don't have easy access to academic libraries.

Dublin O'Connell Street

By the time I first visited Dublin's O'Connell Street, Nelson's Pillar was long gone - blown up by the IRA in 1966. The loss of the column or more probably the closure of all but one of the cinemas seems to have triggered a decline, with the street becoming "a garish strip of discount stores and fast food restaurants " and "a no-go area after dark due to drugs and street violence ". I can testify to the garishness, but not the other problems.

The response of the City Council was to produce an Integrated Action Area Plan for the O'Connell Street area. (Incidentally the list of plans at this link covers a huge part of the central area of Dublin with what looks like huge investment by both public and private sectors.)

The plan looks at an area wider than just O'Connell Street and takes in the adjoining properties back as far as Marlborough Street on one side and Moore Street on the other. In also extends north to include Parnell Square and south across the river to College Street, along with Westmoreland Street and D'Olier Street."

The focus of this plan is "the development of a range of uses that generate animation, vitality and the kind of atmosphere that draws all sectors of society into the street and makes people want to stay."

(See here for the latest published report on this project. )

A key part of the O'Connell Street plan is improvements to the area in front of the Post Office, a building with iconic status in the history of the Irish Republic. On my last visit this work was almost finished. The transformation is substantial with some very interesting approaches to the balance between traffic and people.

Key to the area is of course the 'spike', replacing Nelson at last, with a monument that is both beautiful and imposing. The changes that have the most potential impact however are at ground level. Two lanes of traffic have been removed and traffic management measures elsewhere seem to have reduced the volume of car traffic significantly – a side effect being that I still haven't worked out how to reach my normal hotel from the airport!

The whole area in front of the Post Office has been repaved. As the photograph shows this has been done with materials that almost entirely remove the difference between road and pavement. In this area, the pedestrian will be in charge. Traffic lights still exist, but when traffic has stopped the whole area becomes clear for pedestrians to cross at any point. The way in which materials have been used would I think be likely to give the average traffic engineer a fit, although it seems to build on ideas common in Holland and Germany which themselves developed out of Home Zones or Woonerf.

Trees have been planted creating an enclosed square framing the Post Office - note the square clipped shape. I assume the intention is for these trees to grow together creating a kind of aerial hedge. A similar device has been used in the new Wolf Tone Park, elsewhere in the City Centre. (I have some photographs of this park, which I will post another time.)

It is too early to tell how effective these measures will be in attracting the range of activities and uses the plan seeks. The signs however are promising.

For some images of the Spike under construction see here.

In Which It Comes To Our Attention That Many British Architects Are Schmucks

A trenchant (and pretty accurate) dissection of the way in which the architectural profession is obsessed with style above content.

It even includes an intelligible (and again accurate) quote from John Prescott!

I know that some of our leading architects have criticised [Poundbury], but I also know that it was architects who gave awards to the concrete monstrosities that were built as homes for ordinary people.

(To be fair to Prescott I think his problem is that his enthusiasm runs faster than his tongue. )

ADDENDUM

I followed up one of the comments to this post which came from a British architect. I don't know if this is because of an unfortunate experience (see the section on Upton in Northamptonshire) but the description of a design code doesn't entirely gell with my understanding of how they would work.

Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to progress to the second stage because two out of the two hundred houses on our plan were designed as three storey when the design code had specified only two 2 storey on that specific street.

If a design for a development of 200 houses has got to the level of detail where the layout of streets is known, it seems rather silly to invite submissions for a design competition to build those houses. Good practice I would have thought would require the spaces between the buildings to spring from the buildings, not the road layout. It looks more like a misapplication of the idea to me, unless I'm missing something.

Home and other zones

The idea of home zones (or Woonerf) is at last beginning to gain a foothold in the UK. This however is a report of a visit to locations in Holland and North Germany where these ideas are being extended and applied in much wider ways. It looks like we still have much to learn. (Registration - free - needed)

Good and Bad Manners 2

Following on from the previous post, just around the corner from that building is this. I could have asked for windows a little less like holes in the wall but in general it fits in comfortably. It certainly doesn't damage the wonderful calm quiet central square it faces.

Incidently this hasn't always been such a peaceful place - the corner of the park in the left hand photograph is where PC Yvonne Fletcher was killed by someone in the Libyan Embassy. The memorial to her was still covered with flowers when I visited the square on Monday.

Good and Bad manners

I've always felt that one of the ways in which much modern architecture (by which I mean post WW2) fails is that it is simply bad-mannered - it shouts out 'ME ME' and elbows its way to your attention without regard for anyone else around. Who ever thought such a crude box would sit happily in this context? Did it ever even enter the architects head to try? At street level it's even worse - look at the crudely detailed facade at pavement level. It is like the fat boy elbowing his way into the crowd around the food at a party.

(I'm sorry for the crude layout of this post, I'm trying to get to grips with the display options in Typepad.)

How many people does it take to change a light bulb

Anthony Cox reports on this on Black Triangle.

Unfortunately it isn't a joke (but do follow the linkand read the comments!) In one of Christopher Alexander's books (I can't track down the specific reference but I think it's either "The Timeless Way of Building" or "The Oregon Experiment") he reports on a design fault in the university building in which he worked (ironically the School of Architecture!) which led to the flourescent lights flickering constantly. The cost of remedying the fault was enormous because the design 'feature' was effectively embedded in the building - so they carried on flickering.

Too often the so called economies of scale are actually diseconomies - we should be trying to do things smaller not larger - and that applies to social architecture as much as with the built type. Didn't someone once say "Small is Beautiful"?

Trinity Centre Gateshead

I posted about the Trinity Centre here as part of a post on Owen Luder. It now appears to have been bought by Tesco (based on an adjacent site) after a planning application for redevelopment apparently failed to meet the needs of Tesco for relocation.

New Start magazine 16 April 2004 p6

Plans for the centre - pretty vague I'm afraid - can be seen here

Market Failure?

I’m going to a presentation next week, by Keith Hampton of MIT on community and ICT. From his web site I discovered this paper [pdf file] on how the internet affected community and social capital in an experimental wired suburb near Toronto. On of the outcomes of this study surprised me.

Essentially the experiment was a success – those ‘wired’ residents ended up knowing and chatting to more residents geographically scattered around the suburb. This interaction was not just social although that played a large part. The interaction via the neighbourhood e-mail lists even had a physical effect – residents of the ‘wired’ community appeared more likely to sit on their front porch than residents of similar neighbouring developments.

Over the two years that Hampton lived in Netville, one of his regular rituals was to drive and walk the streets of Netville and neighboring housing developments. In this time Hampton was able to observe a number of ways that Netville residents used public space to facilitate social interaction. Within the first year, he noticed a trend within Netville that did not extend across town or even to the homes of other housing developments bordering onto Netville. Despite the fact that many homes within Netville were built with spacious patios attached at the rear of the home (Figure 3), the majority of residents had moved a park bench, or a set of inexpensive plastic chairs, to the corner of their driveway or front steps (Figure 4). This happened even though the architecture and planning of Netville were not inspired by New Urbanism or neo-traditional planning, which advocates public participation and community surveillance through physical design. The space available on the front steps of Netville homes was only a few square meters, and was poorly sheltered from the sun. When chairs were added, they often blocked access through the front doorway. By contrast, residents of similar nearby developments almost universally chose to sit in their backyards. Scarcely any sat at the front of their homes.

The residents were particularly effective in mobilising to prevent the extension of the development.

Computer-mediated communication was especially useful in reducing barriers to collective action. Netville residents used NET-L to organize against the housing developer and ultimately against Magenta (see Hampton 2003 for a fuller description). Despite having housing problems that were routine for a new mid-priced residential development (e.g., the speed at which roads were paved, housing deficiencies, frozen pipes, faulty air conditioners), wired residents used NET-L to discuss housing problems, organize in-person meetings, discuss strategy aimed at pressuring the developer, and send representatives to town planning meetings.

This mobilisation had however an unexpected side-effect

Based on their experience in Netville, the developer, and one of the firm's owners each told us that they would never build another wired neighborhood.

So… on the one hand we have a product that is clearly in demand and which delivers clear social and community benefit while on the other we have the supplier of that product, the developer, refusing to supply it. Isn't this supposed to be impossible? - after all the unfettered market will provide everything won't it?

Brutal?

This man has suggested in the past that architects should be exempt from the need to apply for planning permission. I can't find a URL for this statement but this is what he looks like!

This is also the man responsible for this in Portsmouth:

and this in Gateshead:

I don't know the Portsmouth building at all but I know Gateshead very well. I can assure you that teh Trinity Centre in Gateshead is every bit as grim and unremittingly awful as the photographs show it to be. The car park above the centre may have a certain sculptural quality but the actual shopping level is atrocious. It is crudely detailed, badly constructed and GRIM. The circulation is confusing and the shops are poorly related to the existing centre - apparently a problem in Portsmouth too. They are probably even worse than the original Arndale Centre in Manchester, which is saying a great deal.

More pictures here if you really want to depress yourself. He is apparently trying to redeem his image by calling it cult architecture.. The web site looks like a fan but in practice it appears to be maintained by someone working for Owen Luder Design.

So - what do you think of his claim for architects?