no. 28, 29/1995 Joe HOLYOAK Regeneration framework Urbanism aties Great Britain Birmingham For two decades, from about 1955 to 1975, the inner areas of Britain's cities were siihjecled to a programme of doctrinaire replanning and redevelopment In Jew histoiical times or places has developmeiU or redevelopment been so sudden arid cataclysmic. This article is a description of one example of this process, in a part of imier Birmiiigham called La-dywood. Joe Hdyoak Projekt pre nove Ladyux>oda Prenova Urbanizem Mesta Velika Britanija Birrrüngham VobdobjLi 1955-1975Je bil izveden program doktrii^arrie prenove i]\ po-novi\ega nacriovaiya središč v britanskih nv2st. Malo Je zgodovinskih obdobij ali krajev kjerje bila prenova tako nenadjia in kataklizniiäia kot teh primerih. Tukajšnji prispevek obravnava enega od prisnerov tega procesa, to Je Ladywood v cejitral-nem območju Bimùnghama, The Ladywood Regeneration Framework For two decades, from about 1955 to 1975, the inner areas of Britain's cities were subjected to a programme of doctrinaire replanning and redevelopment. Before redevelopment, these areas were typic^ly composed of a network of streets, filled with densely-packed terraces of small houses, mixed togetlier wiUi industry, rows of shops, comer pubs, schools and churches. This fabric was essentially the product of tlie boom years of tlie late 19tli centLiiy, when industi'ial cities had grown enonnously. Hiese areas were unplanned, and laclang in green open spaces, and much of tlie housing was unsanitaiy and deficient in constmction. Huge numbers of working-class families lived in these poor conditions, but tlie environment had some compensating virtues: it was cheap, it was neighlx)urly, and it was convenient to the city centre and other facilities. It was a hai'd environment, and per-liajjs we should not regret its passing too much. But today it seems like a totally departed world. Hie doctrine behind the redevelopment was heavily influenced by tlie ideas of Le Corbusier and his con-temporaiies, but usually flavoured by an English pictiu'esqueness. It resulted typically in a drastic reduction in residential density (often from about 400 people per hectare to about 250),and in an environment in which Ihe familiar streets had disappeaj-ed and been replaced by a mixtLire of high-, medium- and low-rise housing placed among green public spaces. Through tlie method of compulsoiy purchase, tlie indusüy had mainly been moved out, and the vai'iety of privately-owned shops and otlier facilities replaced by council-owned facilities grouped in local centres. Middle-class residents like teachers and doctoi-s, who may have owned Uieir own houses, were often moved out too, as the compulsory purchase process was undiscriminat-ing, resulting in a unifonn, single-class. single- use urban environment. Picture 1: Road network andßgure / ground plan before redevelopnvint št. 28,29/1995 In few historical times or places has development or redevelopment been so sudden and cataclysmic. It was done witli the best of intentions on the part of government ministers, local authority coimcillors. town planners and architects, who believed they were building a new, better post-war society. It was also done with at least the passive support of many of the residents, who believed the propaganda and ti'us-ted that tlie experts knew what tliey were doing. But from tlie advantage of the perspective of the present day, we can see tliat there were two main deficiencies in tills process. Firstly, the new principles of urban design on which the redevelopment was based were untested and mistaken. Secondly, the residents of tlie redevelopment ai-eas were treated simply as consumers who had no choice; the expeils knew what was good for them, and the residents had no say in tlie way in which their familiar envlronnients were destroyed and replaced. A feature of the 1980s and 90s in British cities is the way in which these redevelopment areas built in the 60s and 70s are being redesigned in an attempt to coixect botli tliese major historical mistakes. This article is a description of one example of this process, in a part of inner Binningham called Laclywood. Up mi til the 1950s, Ladywood was the kind of inner area described above. It was a loose grid of streets, pierced by railway lines and canals, with factories and workshops mixed in amongst the housing. About 15,000 people lived tliere - mostlyin slum housing, including many in-sanitaiy blocks of pre-by-law back-to- back houses around small courtyards, although tliei i' were some terraces of good, sound iiouses too. Witli four otlier similar aieas that tightly ringed Üie city centre, i( was declared a Comprehensive Redevelopment Area in Uie 1950s. Eveiy-thing except a few factories tliat bordered the canal was swept away, and a new Ladywood built. The mistakes tliat were made when the new Ladywood and similar areas were built are now common knowledge. The sti'eet network that connected the whole area was replaced by disconnected suf>erblocks, fragmenting the area into separate estates. Plenty of open green space was provided, but mostly of a featureless, unfriendly kind that is pleasant to look at from the tower blocks, but is not very usable and often positively unsafe. Tlie legible, secure and neighbourly space of the street was replaced by a confusing and unsafe tangle of courtyards and culs-de-sac. 'Hie convenient land-maj-lcs of comer shops and pubs disappeared altogether, creating a Picture 2: Road neLivork andßgure / gmundplan ajier redevelopmeul no. 28,29/1995 monotonous and uniform landscape. In 1989, one of the local councillors representing I^dywood on Uie City Council told a stai^Ued meeting of Ladywood Community Fomm, the group representing ladywood residents, The planners got it all wi'ong in the 1950s. We are going to redraw tlie map of Ladywood." But he proposed that this time the Council did it in pai'tnership wiUi tlie residents, recognising that nobody knows better what needs fixing in an area than Uiose who live there. The Conunu-nity Fomm wisely realised that if residents were being invited to work alongside tlie Council, tJien they needed Uieir own advisers, just as tlie Council had its own architects and pl^iners. That was where my practice, Axis Design Collective, came in, at tlie invitation of tlie residents. llie first thing we did was to get tlie Forum to draw up a budget of anticipated costs, including our own fees, and submit it to the Council. If tlie Council was serious about residents being active pailicipants in the planning process, then it had a responsibility to provide them with tlie means to do it properly. This was agreed by the Council, and for the past five years we have been working for tlie residents, paid for with money provided by the Council, putting togetlier what is called the Ladywood Regeneration Framework. ITie proposed partnership between the City Council and the residents was a brave and enlightened move by tlie Coimcil, but it did not really know how to go about it. We made success on our tenns ceilain by making sure that the residents' side captured the initiative in the eai'ly montlis by setting Uie agenda for tlie improvements. We did this firstly by using the established technique of Planning for Real to make the "shopping list" of improvements tliat residents wanted done. Planning for Real Is a sbnple technique which employs a model of the estate at about 1:300 scale, and a laige Picture 3: Street comer in 1960 ixj'ore redevelopment selection of cards which contain descriptions of proposed changes. Our initial meeting attracted about 200 people, and the model was littered with hundreds of proposals. From this beginning, and through several other similar meetings, the objectives for the transformaUon of the estate were defined. Following the Planning for Real meetings. which dealt with the whole Ladywood area of about 2,500 households. we divided the area into eiglit smaller sub-areas, and held what we called Housing Design Workshops for the residents of each of them. Hiese made detailed proposals for the improvement of the housing, the redesign of open space, traffic management on the roads to deal wiÜi speeding and pai'king. identifying sites where new housing could be built, and many other things. Priority was to be given to the improvement of Uie existing housing. liiere was only one area of housing, of a}x)Ut 200 nats. where residents felt demolition should take place, because of the multiple pro- blems which that particular area possessed. Elsewhere, despite the deficiencies of the existing housing, improvement was seen as a better alternative to demolition. Residents wanted gradual improvement, nota repetition of the cataclysmic changes of the 50s and 60s, which disrupted the social fabric of Ladjnvood as well as the ph5^ical fabric. At this time, there was no money to carry out any of the work tliat residents were proposing. Beginning in 1990. the City Council has made three applications to the Government to boiTow money to spend on improving Ladywood housing under the Estate Action programme, each time with a programme of work which has been set by the residents themselves. Each time the application has been successful, and so far Ladywood has been gi-anted #36m from this programme. The housing which it was decided to demolish has ipeen sold by tlie Council to a housing association, which is demolishing it and replacing it wiUi new houses and flats with money ■ ■■ ii.- •• - St. 28,29/1995 t Picture 4: A Pianning for Real session no. 28, 29/1995 borrowed from the Housing Corporation. With the restrictions that the Government places on local authorities like Birmingham, this is Uie only way that new housing can be built. Hie tenants who have elected to stay will move from being tenants of the City Council to become tenants of the housing association. In addition, there have-been new children's play areas, improvements that we have designed to the local shopping centre, and a new health centj*e which we have also designed. Hie one part of the overall plan which has seen little progress is that dealing with roads and traffic. The City Engineer's Department, whose province this is, have been more reluctant than other depait-ments to make l^dywood a priority area, and little ti-afTic management has so far been done. We have learned a lot in the five years so far of the Ladywood Regeneration Framework. We have learnt that ordinary working- class residents, if they are given the con-fidence that improvement really will happen, given the resources with which to plan, and given expert advice to help them make decisions, are very capable of deciding what needs to happen to improve their environment, and how it should be done. When we were holding the iniUal Housing Design Workshops, we were concerned about how we were going to rank the eight sub-areas in terms of their priority for improvement, and place them in the three planned phases of Estate Action improvement We assumed that all residents would believe that their area should be top of the list. This was not so - we were surprised that residents could be very objective in their prioritisation. and there was very little disagreement about which sub-areas went into which of the three phases. ITiere has also been considerable agreement between residents about the content of the improvement schemes. People who live in a particular place have a shared experience of what it is like to live there and of what needs doing to make it better; they are the experts, and it is the job of the professionals to listen Picture 5: An aeiial view oJ'Lhe local centre št. 28,29/1995 Picture 6: Before anclAJler views ofa reriovated 1959 block qfjlats in Eslate AcLion Phase Oixe no. 28,29/1995 to what they say and to translate it into a process by which the improvements can be realised. A high priority has been improving security in blocks of flats and maisonettes, with concierges, door-entiy systems, and defensible space measures. In addition, better thermal insulation, new windows, and replacing defective flat roofs with pitched roofs have become standard ingredients. The improvements have not only been concerned with technical performance, but have been directed at changing the appearance and image of the buildings, from two-storey houses to twenty- storey tower blocks. We have leamt not to place too much importance on architectural style, that area where architects normally believe they have the right to impose their own strange ideas. Our clients are naturally consei-va-tive when it comes to the appearance of Üieii- dwellings - theyjust want them to look like eveiyone else's dwellings, and tliey certainly do not want to be patronised. There was an impleasant incident in Es- tate Action Phase One when an executive architect, directing a contract based upon the residents' brief, had balconies painted in loud and varied colours. The residents felt that the architect was amusing himself at their expense, and at considerable cost the balconies were repainted in more sober colours. We have leamt that, though they can be effective at tackling their own individual agenda of housing, roads, leisure, education and so on. City Councfl departments are not good at working together to produce a coordinated plan. They suffer from specialisation. Despite the CouncU's considerable resources of staff and finance, we on the residents' side found that we were often able to move more quickly and think more holistically, unrestricted by departmental boundaries, and therefore maintain the initiative in moving the Framework along. Moreover, because the Council's departments each were responsible for only one subject and none was responsible for coordinating them all together, we fotmd ourselves often adopting Picture 7 ; J 959 maisoneLte blocks about Lo be demolished in the Housing Association redevelopnieiU št. 28,29/1995 the coordination role ourselves, although this was not a role we were being paid to do. This coordinating role is of course one of the definitions of what an urban designer does. We soon realised that an urban design perspective was required in the regeneration of Ladywood, and that nobody would do it if we did not. The Forum applied to the City Council for extra funding for us to write the Ladywood Urban Design Study, which we published in 1992. It was necessary for two reasons. Firstly, in order to coordinate the various initiatives which were all being applied in parallel - housing improvement new housing, redesign of open spaces, play areas, shopping centre improvement, new railway station, plans for a new swimming pool, and so on - to try to make sure that the total environment was more than just the sum of the various parts. Secondly, in oixJer to attempt to shape the new initiatives so that together they could deliberately change the qualities of the urban environment of I^d3nA'ood from those which it had been given by the modernist redevelopment of tlie 50s and 60s. Tliis second objective was perhaps the more important one, but correspondingly more difficult to achieve. One of tlie starting points for the analysis was to look back to the pre-redevelopment fabric and identify the positive qualities it possessed which had been lost Tliese were such qualities as connectivity, legibility, convenienUy mixed land uses, and the vailety of commercial and social facilities tliat a high residential density can support. In tlieir place were disconnection and severance, disaggregation, land use zoning, a thinly spread residential density, and a shortage of all kinds of facilities. The analysis defined what was wrong with the townscape of Ladywood, and how new developments could contribute to changing it. Pai't of the advice was contained in a set of twelve rules, many of which summarise a revei"sal of the principles which were dominant in the 60s. Ti-qffic calming is to be mlrodiiced PiMic spaces are to haue enclosù\g wliow necessaiy edges Biiiklmgs sliould he asJar as possible Tli^ neLwoiic of public routes is to haue foin\ streets contmuity Picture 8: Four pairs of before and ajler drawings illustrating four of the twelve urbaii des^n principles no. 28, 29/1995 They concern such matters as the placing of buildings in relationship to each other, tlie overcoming of severance caused by wide dual-carriageway roads, the relationship of buildings to public open space, and the permeability and legibility of the routes network. The twelve rules are; 1. TraJTic calming is to be introduced where necessaty. 2. Buildings should as far as possible forni streets. Loweriixg Üte Micldleway cuicl alloiv-mg ]3ecicstrians to ciüss at gtmuid level separated /roni traffic Widenmg on exxsüi\g subway ùito an imderpass A better foim of surface crossiiig tlunx ÜTe present one Picture 9: Three improved ways to cross UieMidcäeRmg Road ojyl overcome severance 3. Old buildings are to be integrated with the new development. 4. Opportunities are to be taken to create more local places. 5. Unpopular pedestrian subways ai'e to be removed. 6. loìcàl places are to be enhanced by environmental improvements. 7. Buildings should have mLxeci uses where appropriate. 8. Premises should possess comprehensible addresses. 9. New buildings are to be lì|j,ì.ira-tive in composition. 10. Ground floors of buildings should generate activity. 11. Public open spaces are to have enclosing edges. 12. The network of routes Is to have continuity. In addition to Uiese global ruiles, tlie I^dywood Urban Design Study contains place-specific urban design briefs for all of the residential and non-residential sub-aj"eas of Lady-wood. These include such ingredients as sites for new housing on left-over land, the creation of new pedestrian routes, new and better crossing points on the dual-cai'-riageway Middle Ring Road, and tlie creation of defensible space aromid high-rise tower blocks.We were encouraged that the general policy of tlie I^djwood Urban Design Study - which can be summarised perhaps as "reiu'banisation" - is echoed in tJie European Union's 1990 Green Paper on the Urban Environment, 'fliis too condemns the fragmented, zoned and dispersed localities that were built in the 60s, and encourages the re-establishment of many older, more ti"aditional pmiciples of urban design - principles that have been tested over hundreds of years and whose robustness has been proved. We are encouraged also by the fact tliat in general our new/old principles of urban design coinciclé with the residents' descriptions of Uie kind of environment in which they want to live. However, tensions and contradictions between our views and tliose of tlie residents do occur. An example is residents' resistance to propo^s to build new houses on Lmdemsed pieces of green space. Although the benefits of a higher residential density - a livelier, safer public realm; more shops and facilities which can be supported; local schools more viable - are agreed in principle, there is great attachment to grass and trees and a reluctance to see tliem disappear. The debate about issues such as these is a valuable and ongoing part of a community-based regeneration process. A greater disappointment is the failure of the Ladywood Urban Design Study to be incoiporated into official City Council planning policy. Much of its advice has been translated into reality through the successful Estate Action housing improvement programme, and some of its strategy has been borrowed by tlie Cotmcil and incorporated into its I^cal Area Plan. But overall, tliere is still a lack of an officially recognised urban design framework which can be legally enforced in order to Iransfonn the urban quality of tlie ai'ea. But generally the first five years of tlie Ladywood Regeneration Fi-ame-work has been a success. AlQiough boUi sides in Uie pai-tnei-ship had little idea at tlie outset how to go about tlie task, tlie ladywood experience Is now regaixled by the City Council as a model for other com-munlty-based regeneration schemes in tlie city. From the residents' point of view, Ladywood is gradually being transfonned from a place whose reputation was a liability into a place where people positively want to live. Moreover, they want to live Üiere because it is not a place with subLirban values, iDut a real pait of tlie city centre. In addition, a large number of residents have, through tlie expei'ience of tlie regeneration process, become used to acting, not as passive consumers, but as active citizens, thinking and taking decisions about the forni and nature of the place where Uiey live. Tlie collective effect of that social change is incalculable, but It must be considerable. Joe Holyoak, Axis Design Collectives, architects and urban designers, Reader at Birmingham Scool of Architecture, UCE Captions.