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A Talk given by Jonathan Bevan, a Design Consultant from Cardiff Community Design Service, at the Home Zones conference in Stirling, November 1999 The transcript
of this talk is very long and therefore has been divided into sections
for ease of use. Click on a link
to fast track to the relevant section: Introduction So who are we? I'm an urban designer. I run a design charity which works mainly in Wales out of Cardiff Community Design Service and we do community projects. We provide community groups with professional services in architecture urban design and landscape architecture.And essentially what we do, to cut a long story short, is go in with the inception, the ideas, help communities formulate their ideas. Then we will design a feasibility funding options and then implementation of community projects from little play areas right through to buildings, in fact town studies as well. We do a pretty broad range of work and this is examples, just to show that we're on the right terrain here today, examples of what we did in the late 80s and early 90s in the Rhondda. It wasn't a Home Zone. They weren't called Home Zones in those days. These were little miners' terraces which couldn't handle modern living and the Highways Department actually initiated this scheme after the residents had got it going. They initiated a scheme of street schemes like these and these are all essentially community design, let's call it community design with us and then it was all fed into the Highways Department. And they are lovely examples of work that's just - it's actually worth going to see if you're ever in Wales cos it's 10 years old now so it started to be testable. It's no good creating designs that look lovely when they go, cos we've got loads of examples of them, like Redroad Flats in Glasgow. They looked great when they went up but we know they're not sustainable. So they're starting to be testable in terms of the long term practice. OK. Well I'll not say much about us. Last example. This isn't a Home Zone. This is just a tough old community in Cardiff that we're doing some work in now and this is part of how I conceive of Home Zones. This is what it's all about. There's these people gathering here. The streets are just rubbish. They're still rubbish because they're not part of the scheme yet, they're just starting to get worked up. What we've done is gone in and just done the basics. Put in boundary walls, started to find space and re-organise it and so you actually see, instead of kids running about and running through your garden and the ball being kicked in and so on, they're starting to actually define quite clearly where people are entitled to be, gather, and if you want to go into a garden, basically you're invited into that. And that's part of the definition of what I call sustainable living environments and before we were even finished doing that, transformation was taking place in this estate. People putting up unsustainable hanging baskets, but you know, there was that sort of feel of property possession, ownership that appeared right away. Communities
and Participation So what we're doing is - if we're being invited into a community, we might as well go in with a town that gets some results right away and so we just start to get a feel for what's needing to be done and look, start to target the result, they need to prioritise us with what's to do. We can achieve this, let's get on with it as part of the consultative process. Let's get the process moving and see if we can get something before a 12 months is out or at least see that we're gonna get something before 12 months is out. And so participative design - shout at me if these - I'm looking at them down here - if they don't look right from your end, just shout. It takes on all sorts of forms. I'm not prescriptive about it. Very close consultative meetings on housing estates. Detailed work with tenants, working up schemes, letting them see the nitty gritty of it. Then it starts to get broader. This is one we did in the Rhondda. We had somebody's house set up for a street scheme that we were doing. We had somebody's house set up for it. It was a nice day. We just brought all the boards out in the street and we managed to get every resident in the street down to see what the scheme was and work through it with them. So very much involved in the process there. And that goes on to much larger scales. This is actually after a big public meeting, big displays at the end of the process, I should say. Last thing I want to do at the beginning of the process at a public meeting, people start throwing things and blaming me for being on the Council and all that stuff. You know, or build up to big public meetings when we've actually got something to say that the community wants to hear or residents in the discussion. So that's what that is - that's the display that went alongside a presentation we did and it was based on very detailed working sessions with street committees, if you like, people on streets, individual streets or little groups of houses that were particularly involved in a traffic calming project or whatever. And the form of participative design can take all sorts of - it can take all sorts of forms and this is just a - we were in the middle of a process in Birch Grove, also in the Rhondda, community development project essentially. Looking at traffic calming. There's a couple of them in here. There's one there. There's one - I can't find it now - that's the play area at the bottom of the road there that we were starting to work up. What we did with that was, there's a community newsletter that they'd got together and we just said, well how about a centre spread in the newsletter to make sure everybody knows that there's something going on here, because for all the consultation we do, most people don't actually find out about it. So we tried to find ways of communicating. So that was a sort of centre spread on an A4 newsletter that we cobbled up quickly on the basis of the work that had been done so far. OK, so participation takes all sorts of different forms. I like to describe it as being a dialogue. The other thing about participative design is it's - I'd like to be open about this - I'm not going into a community and saying - right, place you a paper, what would you like? Which is a tendency that we've come to. The community knows everything. Well there's nobody goes into a community without an agenda. Nobody. I mean, even if you're the most died in the wool sort of right on community worker, you've got a way of - you've got a thought about how communities work and how they don't work and you have an agenda. I'm an urban designer, so I do - we design bits of town, we salvage bits of community that have been disasters and I want to have a dialogue with communities about that. When they say, I want back lanes to ma house, I say - you don't want them. I'm not gonna let you run away with back lanes to your houses or access round the back or whatever. I'm interested in having a dialogue about that. There are ways to do it. I want a community centre here. Why do you want it there and not here? I'm going down to Ratcliffe tonight after here. That's about them putting a big new thing in the middle of Ratcliffe. Actually there's a discussion to have about how is that going to be composed, why is it there and is it going to work, is it going to be sustainable. It would be absolutely brilliant if we pull it off in the first instance but we're really interested in what's gonna happen in 20 years time when we have all the same problems. So I'm interested in a dialogue. Constructing a dialogue. What's the dialogue about? Well it's about sustainable communities. Very, very difficult to start defining but at the moment, all we're interested in is a dialogue about and for the people that live in and use neighbourhoods. That's all. People that live in, part of their community, but also people that come into those neighbourhoods that use them. So that's what it is. The space that people live in and use. Community
Assets When we went down photographing down there, the local Neighbourhood Watch came out to see who the hell we were, taking photographs of their area. It's a really bad, bad environment. But a wonderful asset, like most communities, they've got very, very good assets around. It's just that they're generally not well used. And so what happens to them is all sorts of strange design features come in. The classic is the inward looking housing estate. This is a new housing estate just built on the edge of Ely and at the back of this is a school field, the main school grounds. So they've turned their back on that and of course because it's school fields, they put high fences up. And none of the houses look at the school, they all look at the front of the house in general. And so there's a tension already in the design between the new residential development and the school and it can only get worse. There's quite a nice little infill development where, on a corner, the houses actually face the street, front doors, still the same part of town, front doors actually make the corner - nothing brilliant about it - it's just doing the job that streets should do, and making them a bit safer and tighter. And then you've got these big open spaces where cars do wheelies and joy riders zoom through so the answer to that is to put up a few bollards. That stops that and then you create a dead environment where nothing happens. That's a sort of Home Zone. Not the sort of thing we design. How
Communities Function This is the Ely suburb of Cardiff I was referring to earlier. It was built on a garden city model where the main roads, that one there and that one there, were built off the main Towbridge road which was a historic avenue into Cardiff from the west. So when the garden village model was conceived or at least applied to this, the idea was that these communities should be spared through traffic. They're built off the main road. The problem with that is that the centres of these are wholly dependent on the people that live there and for all that we talk about high density and there are 30,000 people in the Ely estate in Cardiff, it's a town and a good size of town in comparison with some of the ones you know. It's a town that's different from other towns because that one there is completely dependent on local people to make the shops work, let alone justify a community centre and all the other things. So there's something about the relationship between the local structure and what I call global structure, the through traffic system. You have to have a handle on sustainable communities and right from the start this one was designed with a problem built it, many problems built in. And what's happened of course is that socially excluded estates, this is not absolutely the right acetate, but the socially excluded estates are still being built, social housing. I don't know who does it in Scotland but mainly Housing Associations in England and Wales. And these coloured bits are the new housing developments in Ely in the last 10 years and all of them put those in most need furthest away from the resources that they need to run their daily lives. And they're really buried away on left over bits of land. That's a proposed circle, that one and that one, so you can see even that one, it looks like it's well located, it's actually - that's why it's the wrong acetate. These are the main central areas of communities. So all social housing has been put away. So there's the first issue about designing a sustainable community. To quickly fill out what meeting basic daily needs is - again it's not my most brilliant acetate - but just to give you a flavour of the sorts of things there. In fact, they're not very good are they? Places to sit, clinic, big uses at the edge by the way so that you can allow permeable form, things should get easier to get from A to B by different routes when you get to the middle. A lesson about blocking roads by the way and closing streets which is the main one that we've got to pick up here. Post boxes, laundry, telephones, toilets, shops, schools, cafes, all sorts, pubs, recycling things. It's amazing when I do this exercise as a participative exercise, we always produce the same lists or very close to the same lists. They're quite easy to define. So that gives us some of the characteristics and qualities that we're looking for and inform our Home Zones. And so here we come into a classic Home Zone environment. In fact, straight out of Ken McMahon's book this morning. This is actually the state where I showed you the earlier picture - we've done the boundary walls. It's a cul-de-sac of cul-de-sacs and it's all owned by the Housing Association and they haven't got money to do Home Zones, that's the first problem. So they are concentrating on getting the properties defined. You'll note on this drawing there are no front gardens. Well there are now. You can see one big cul-de-sac and then lots of little cul-de-sacs off it. And this is a classic for dumping cars. And what you see here is just over there, about 250 metres, is the local shop. Unfortunately, to get to the local shop, you have to walk a kilometre and a half I think it is round the houses and actually you don't go to that shop, you go to another shop because you've walked all the way along the road here and it's easier then to go to the other shop. So a huge problem here. Of course, it's usually women with a pushchair and bags of shopping and a couple of kids behind the pushchair and a dog maybe or something. Trekking this enormous walk and also what you get here is dumped cars, 'cause you can't really afford to have cars, so you have a cheap car and then you've got to have a cheaper second car to get parts off for the first car, so you dump cars on the ends of the estate here and this is a dumped car zone up there where you've had all the bits and you don't know what to do with it, then just dump it. And that's the sort of environment that we're creating with cul-de-sacs and again, I'm willing to talk about that but it's overwhelmingly discredited in urban design theory for the last 5 or 6 years at least, overwhelmingly discredited. And we have to look at alternatives and I would suggest if you're thinking about designing Home Zones, you'd do your damnedest not to get involved in cul-de-sac approaches to them. They're easy but they bring a whole lot of other problems. Play
Areas So there's lots of fundamental problems and when we were in Ely, we did an exercise. This is not a design proposal, it was just an exercise, looking at street scapes and these two big avenues that you have in Ely, you could put a row of basketball courts down the middle of the road and not affect the traffic at all. What they've got is this big green thing down the middle of the road which is useless except to absorb local authority budgets 'cause they have to keep it cut and planted and pretty but it's actually an utterly useless bit of land, just wasted. And then you've got these enormous junctions. Here's Grand Avenue, one of the big avenues. You could put a basketball court in the middle of the junction and still have the traffic going round it. It would make no difference to any traffic room at all, not that there's a huge volume of traffic here or anything like that. That's the size - or a tennis court we did on a smaller junction. You could still get the traffic through there. Unfortunately, they've intervened in that one already. They've put a big expanse of tarmac and a big kerb edge round there 'cause it's quite a tight corner. Community
Design Well there's hundreds of them. What they actually got in Ely, they got some traffic calming - I don't know how long I'm allowed to put that up on the screen. It's just dreadful. It's unbelievable that they've done this sort of thing. Joy riding through the streets, so what the answer was - low budget -put a wall up in the middle of the road and so now this has become a place where actually small businesses run from here, you know, scrap and bits of stuff, 2 or 3 vans, big piles of stuff coming up here, 'cause there's no through traffic, there's no through access. So, you know, that's a sort of Home Zone as well not to be encouraged. The other problem we've got with our community design, again I'm not actually sure what's happening in Scotland. Do you have secured by design in Scotland? Is that a prerequisite. Here's a design of - as they are secured by design - what it's objectives are. Absolutely support all that stuff. It's safe for the big environments, defend space and all that. But that's not what this is. This is the model that we're working on. It's the cul-de-sac model. It's a great place for a Home Zone. Unfortunately it's nothing to do with society, and nothing to do with looking outwards, how do you fit onto the next bit of town? And it's nothing to do with economics either because the back of the slot is a permanent vulnerable part of the estate that doesn't talk to the next part of the estate and what you find often is you get two or three of these things and you can't actually get to one bit of community to the next. This is Knott town. This is the enclave and how far is it away from what St Angelese or Johannesburg closed white estates where you have a barricade. That sort of makes it really secure by design. You just have a gate entry at the front and everything will be alright with higher and higher fences and walls outside. So fortunately, there are other models on this and just to touch on one. A lot of nice work been done in Leicester and they've produced an alternative, I guess 7 or 8 years ago now, yeah. What's it called? Designing Outcome I think it's called, something like that. A lovely little thing that's looking at these very issues about how back gardens should be protected, houses should look at streets, public spaces should be overseen by houses, actually it's got more in that because the active streets bring people in. Because everybody has to go out onto the same street, it activates the street as well and makes them safer environments too. And that's codified and practiced by a lot of outstanding work done if you haven't come across the bible, it's responsive environments by Ian Bentley and others from the Joint Centre for Urban Design in Oxford. It was written in the early 80s and gives you all the basic principles of urban design and you can see here. This is what we're looking at - frontage - private back gardens and fronts that actively communicate with streets by looking at them, by having windows that make you feel you might be being watched, by having doors that go in and out and so on. And these are all part of making Home Zones part of the living environment. And then we went down to fine detail which is other work that we're doing since this is in progress now. Changing really terrible flats giving - this is a big blank gable end at the moment that faces the main entrance to the estate so we're doing a small job, we're only talking about - well let's say under £15,000, 10 to 15,000 to do that sort of work on the gable and start to enliven the public domain. And up here, we're just awaiting the funding announcement for a Home Zone to go in up here which is going to include play facilities and a pitong pitch which is what the residents were looking for. They wanted a little area to play boules and a barbecue that the man mentioned this morning. They had a lovely community, they'll be able to go out and socialise in the streets out there. So they want picnic tables and a barbecue and that's all under bid and I'm reasonably optimistic about that. Road
Design and Traffic Calming And that's how that applies to your village and I would say a lot of this is about the community as a whole. I'm not really interested in designing little bits. Obviously if I get paid to do it, I'll do it, little bits. I always say, no I have to look at the big picture and if I design a little bit here, how does it affect the way that the village works and so on. And of course a lot of this about is nothing to do with traffic calming actually or very little to do with traffic calming. The real issue is the vitality of the community. A lot of villages - what's happened to them - they're losing their village shops, they're losing their community resources. So what we're looking at is creating an environment in the middle of the village where villagers, where the shop can be supported. It's like our first thought when we go into a village is - and into a small suburban community - is how can we protect the local economy, the small shops and so on that are so important for local people. So it's that sort of discussion that starts us off and that leads us to trying to fit together space so that people are inclined to go. So, for example, if you look down here, there's a post-war development, 60s and 70s development that bears no relationship whatsoever to village life. There's a cul-de-sac been built round the back, everybody gets in their car and does their shopping in Somerfield or wherever it is you go. So that didn't help the economy in the village at all. It's the same on a lot of our estates. There's buried streets that don't actually help the economy, local life, social or economic. Well we'll see a few of these. I'm not gonna to linger on Trevignon. It's in most of our reports actually, putting the heart back into somewhere. A lot of the design is about trying to reconstitute the centre, the hub of the village and for those of you that come from the Stirling area, we're doing something in Ratcliffe tonight, that's what it's gonna be about. Where's the centre of your sub district? How does it work? How do the bits fit together? How can we make the economy, actually low density, despite the appearance of high density work? And I hope this is the last example from Trevignon. Traffic calming in all sorts of sensitive ways. This is one that we're applying in another village now. It's a little apron outside a church and it's a beautiful little thing. It's a Gilbert Scott church, famous architect. It needs to be brought out and really start to dominate the space so when you come into the village, you have this horrible cobbled thing and we want to put some little low hedging round it or something to really narrow the road. We don't need to put bollards up and a big traffic sign or anything like that. We literally want to give drivers a warning. This is a quiet little road about a hundred metres from the centre of the village, right next to a school. We just want to start creating an environment where you're in the village now, slow down, just get a grip. It's only 200 metres you have to put up with this and you can do it with very gentle interventions. Clearly in a lot of our estates, you have to put some pretty brutal interventions in. There are nice ways of doing it. Clydwelly
Traffic Calming Here it is, right in the middle of the community. A liability building, roads dominating the space. We've got other pictures of people having to walk up this very unsafe environment, right in the heart of it, all the shops are closing. We need to reclaim this so we've got a single lane road down there. It's not as if there's any traffic. We've got a bypass here and no benefits in the town. So here's a Home Zone in the centre of town, OK but it's not a Home Zone like we're talking about. It's the qualities of Home Zone I'm interested in. What sort of living environment are we creating and this is just about creating an environment where cars can stop, people can drive safely, pedestrians have a bit of space. In this case, they've got a buffer space if they walk down still very narrow pavements but we've actually narrowed the road. We used, for example, from Kenneth, which is one of the ones which I guess Lynne might have referred to earlier. That sort of technique there and big vehicles have to pass each other on the road. They do that now. They just bump over the rough bits. No problem with it. Just that the general environment is one that slows cars down. So there's that applied to central areas. Design
Guidelines So there's some general design criteria and of course the Home Zones work that's being done with the Play Council and Transport 2000 and others starts to point in the direction of other criteria. I don't expect you to read all this but it's down here. We talk about changes in priority and I think we've mentioned several times this morning, a lot of this is really cultural, deep ingrained cultural stuff and we just have to start the work and start making it work. I think Lynne was brilliant on that, answering the questions. We just have to get in amongst it but don't just drop in and do it. You have to really look at the big picture and there's a lot of good work going on to indicate that we can do this sort of stuff in communities and you can get money for it but you have to have a view of the big picture if you want to convince the potential funders. And there's drawings, example work being done long time ago. This is the National Children's Play Council I think. I guess this was produced in the 80s. Typical street. We're looking at little interventions. Two small little bits of equipment and some little planting in the street or whatever. This should be covered by revenue management but what we've found in certainly work in the 90s is that community groups are forming small businesses, little community environment groups, garden projects and the like and this is the sort of thing that they can take on. You have to have an authority that's willing to run with it but again that's changing the culture of how local authorities are looking at it. They are very, very hard-pressed, as many of you will know, to manage revenue. It's not a small issue. Let's start trying to shift it towards communities because communities do want to keep their environments nice and people will pick it up. European
Examples We produced a lovely poster that we brought back from the tour in the summer. It's a wee gem. Looking at how kids perceive space and how adults perceive it and you can just about pick this up. Here's the guy walking to work, crosses the road, follows the route and of course, what kids do is, we can't see him very well here, they do all sorts of strange things. Find diamonds in the street and twirl round lampposts and back up round the car and draw a line across the car. It's all exaggerated of course, but the odd nip over the steps there, balancing out along the wall, nip back across the roads, sleep walking, all those things. But of course the child does know, if she should cross the road or cross the zebra crossing so once she gets to the zebra crossing, she is properly doing that. But this is the sort of environment where you need a 10 miles an hour zone so children can do that sort of thing. It's what life's about as a child and that's the sort of thing we should be creating environments in which they can do it. And they've been doing it for a long time and I've seen loads and loads of brilliant examples of that. I'll just put this one up. Again it came out of community - this is Department of Environment staff that we produced years ago. All the myths and the talk about volume of traffic. If you work this out, you can see here at 20 miles an hour, a lot of traffic is about flow because so many cars have got to get cars through quickly right. And the way to do that is to clear the streets. This is segregation theory. Clear the streets, put fences up and the cars can go fast and therefore we can get more cars through. Well no. To do that you have to break the law. Although that's what they do, the actual theory is based on breaking the law because if you drive at higher speeds, then the distance between cars gets bigger, for safety. So, for example, if you're going at 30 miles an hour, I work on the rule 30 miles an hour, 30 metres, 40 miles an hour, 40 metres, just try it. Try it for a couple of days. Just do this for a few days. Leave the proper distance and start to see what it does to actually people turning in front of you and all sorts of things. The worst people are right up your back when you're driving, about 10 metres away and me doing 70. I get more and more conscious of this. You can get more vehicles through at 20 miles an hour than you can at any other speed, right, using safety criteria, right. So if there's issue about volume and flow, it's actually better if they go through slow, or run through slowly. It's much more safer for everybody and of course, if you go at 20 miles an hour and you knock somebody down, chances are they will not be killed. Whereas most of our residential streets, they are designed so that cars can go at 40 and they do go at 40 in most of our residential streets and if you hit somebody in a residential street, it's an 85 per cent chance you're gonna kill them. Sorry this evidence is a bit overwhelming, so let's just get down and do it. So, finish with some examples. I'll try and keep them as thin as possible 'cause you've seen quite a lot of them. This is one of my favourites on the top, in Rotterdam. This is busy, good, bustling, town. All sorts of things go wrong. Look at the priorities here. You've got to stop, you've got to let pedestrians across and let cycles go across. See these lines. There's no question about where the priority is. This is not quiet little Stirling or something like that. It's busy Rotterdam. They can do it there. In fact, it should be requirement of all highway engineers as part of their training, they should go to Amsterdam, be sent to Amsterdam and hire a bike and just cycle about in central Amsterdam. There, if you're driving along a road and you cross a junction, traffic light or whatever, you cross a junction, the lane takes you across and the cars are coming down to turn right, the cars stop and let you cycle across there. The roundabout's design, you notice if you're a cyclist and you've got a roundabout like that, absolute nightmare roundabouts. You can cycle for a mile round this one in Cardiff you know. A madhouse. Absolute madness. In Amsterdam, they have roundabouts where the cyclist goes straight across the roundabout. Just follow the line across the roundabout. It's a revelation. It's a joy to be part of. And of course the whole environment is designed with different priorities. Cars are very much secondary. For example, lovely public transport system. Trams in the middle of the road. Trams stop. You are not allowed to pass the tram. The tram stops, you have to stop and let the people off the tram, they have priority. You just have to wait. What's the big deal? Nothing actually. Nothing. You just have to wait. It's part of the culture now and those are the sorts of things that are there. They had a big referendum in Amsterdam, I guess 4 or 5 years ago now - do you want more cars or less cars? What sort of transport do you want? And the population just overwhelmingly voted for traffic calms, public transport environment and that's what they're getting now. And for all that we slag off the Dutch or the Belgians and all that stuff, they're doing so much lovely stuff, they're way, way ahead of us with all this stuff and if you get a chance to go on holiday, Amsterdam is such a wonderful place anyway. I know, I've been 2 or 3 times now. I get on a bike and I will look at the suburbs of Amsterdam, urban design because they did a lot of good stuff in the 20s and 30s. It's worth going for that alone, let alone all the traffic. Here's a village in the middle of France, I happened to find. I found a better one this year but somebody stole my camera so I lost my photo. This one you're bombing down through France, zooming about as I do and the enjoyment of this village was suddenly the road disappears. And you don't actually know where you're going. You just have to slam on the anchors. They've warned you already, slam on your anchors and you do. You come right into here and it's only when you get to about here, you realise that is the main road actually. It goes right through the village and takes you down there. And this is the market area. Unfortunately this was a Sunday afternoon and the French do something else on a Sunday afternoon. I don't know what it is but they're not out in their village but you can see the sort of environment they've created. Really stunningly beautiful. This is Like in the north of the Vondez if anybody's into that stuff. There's a better one in a place if you go down there called Caesar in Brittany which I discovered this year but as I said, I lost the photographs. What's
Possible? - A Look at Europe Here's Anderlach, very early ones in Germany. Home Zone designation and, well you can see the environment. They're still catering for cars, we're doing all the job. There's the example from Henef. I didn't really want to linger on Henef, just to say even in urban environments, the extraordinary things that you can do off main roads that just give the signals. If you're driving a car in here, this is not the best of them, there is another one, but there's no doubt about here what the signals are. This is not a big investment to do that. It's really not a big investment. We can handle that sort of stuff relatively easily. I'm gonna try and shut up. I could go on forever. There's the other one I wanted to show you. This is a better one in Rotterdam. What I think is better about this is when you turn into this street, you're actually having to cross the pedestrian domain. It would be even better if you just made it all pedestrian surfaces. You're welcome to drive your car in here, we can put little edgings on this or whatever but there's no doubt at all when you go in here what the signals are to drivers. You are going into a different environment here. You're welcome in but you have to drive slowly and I do think this is the sort of thing we should be looking a lot more at, where the main pedestrian route is prioritised and cars have to stop to let the pedestrians - before they turn left, and you know, in current Highways thinking, it's heresy to say that. You can't have cars stopping in the main road to let pedestrians by. They'll back up and people will bang into each other. I'm sorry. We're gonna have to start dealing with this stuff. Yes, it's no problem stopping like they do in the buses in Amsterdam. You just stop, let them do what they've got to do and then you go through. What have you lost? 5 seconds of your precious time and journey. We can deal with this. So loads of examples like that. And back to the classics. I'm gonna show this, the bottom one really. I'm gonna show this in Ratcliffe tonight again. One of the people that we're working with was saying, well look it's easier for us to do this little cul-de-sac and we've got these huge big streets into this estate. Tuttle Estate in Stirling for those that don't know it. This huge big estate where it's very difficult to do this sort of work. What should we be doing? Well actually, we should be giving the street to the people. There is no reason why we can't have a single lane road up these enormously wide streets. A single lane, a couple of passing places. If you see a car coming, you slow down, and let him by. There's just not enough traffic to justify huge roads and let's start reclaiming the environment. In some places, the community will come up with the suggestion that we put in some play areas here. I guess this - correct me - I guess this is where they interviewed the women. Sitting round the table. That's probably the table they were sitting round and we saw that on the video. It's a really lovely residential environment. You saw the qualities of it there and why shouldn't we be having that in our tough old estates where most of us find ourselves working an awful lot. This one's another one from the dreaded Maastricht. A sandpit. What we think about sandpit, dogs, what about the dogs? Well they've all got dogs in Maastricht and this works just fine. And the kids play in here and you'll see, car park right next to it. Car parking, children playing, traffic calming job done, creating a more pleasant environment, easy peasy. A few of our railway thingies sleepers, nice little job. Another one that's stood the test of time as well. Did you see that one on this year's trip? No? One of Graham Smith's favourites. That was the man that was doing all the talking on the video. OK. I think I'm going to stop. No I'm not. Will we ever be free of him? Two more to finish with. Right. This is one they did see this year. Where is it? Utrecht. This is a school playground, primary school playground, open. During the day it's under the supervision of the school, the rest of the time it's a public space. We're getting pushed by the security paedophile lobby to make all these things CCTV, high fences round them. It should be the opposite. We should be bringing them into the public domain and making people, ordinary punters on the street, supervise them. If you bury them in the back, then you need CCTV cameras. That's where we've gone wrong. If you bring them out to the front, people are watching them all the time. People that live there and work there, pass them. And this is just a fantastic bit of work to think that this is a school playground. We're doing this. In fact the Birch Grove one that I showed you the picture of earlier is precisely that. We've got an old Victorian school with a high wall round it and we've taken the wall down, opened the school playground up to do a job just like that. Highways
Department Now I know some of these are horror stories for some of you from Highways. They are very, very difficult things to deal with. I should say with this about the law and legislation. It's amazing how much you can do. In fact the biggest breakers of the rules are on our highways criteria or the Highways departments themselves. There are always ways of shoving the rules around but if I propose it then we get laughed out of court of course and we have a very hard time but we do a lot of work with Highways Departments and we just have work through these arguments. DB32 which is the - is that the bible up here as well - Design Bulletin 32 which is for residential streets has been re-written in the last 5 or 6 years I guess and it's an improve document. I don't know if it applies in Scotland. Well that's still in the dark ages and they've written it - the DETR has written another publication - I can't remember what it's called now - Places, People & Movement - which is giving you a way to take on the highways that are still in the original DB32 and they've got a document now that says really we can do this in lots of different ways. Frankly it's still very weak but it's a very, very good leap forward for us and it helps us a lot in this. So there's a lot of material around. Obviously we've got to try and partner local authorities and Highways Departments in particular and a lot of them - most of them, and I guess the ones that are not in this category, most of you are here. But most of them are still having a lot of trouble with this stuff and you have to start arming yourselves in the debate about it. But it's in these documents, Places, People & Movement. So a lot of work is coming out of Transport 2000. There's plenty there and frankly you can do almost anything you like. I would suggest you don't necessarily have to label it up as Home Zones. There's a lot of money in the public sector now in the Lottery funding environment where we can look at - what is it called - Community & Environment - new opportunities fund in particular where we can look at environmental improvements which actually do this sort of work. And those are the sort of funds we should be looking at. Our general argument is we should just be getting on with this. We should get on with it from communities upwards, look at it on a strategic basis, like how are we going to make the whole community work and how can we bring these qualities into different streets. It's not all about kids, it's about living environments for all ages and there's money we can access to do it now and if we can get it moving, then that's how we're gonna change the law. So if I shut up now it will let you get a chance to get a word in. APPLAUSE Click here to view the Question and Answer session which followed. Transcript of
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