New Geography

Author: Erin Chantry

  • Gentrification? Brixton’s Angell Town Story

    In the US, urban planners talk about the ‘redevelopment’ of a neighborhood. In the UK, ‘regeneration’ is heard more often. What is the difference, from both the planner and the resident perspective? Are they both synonyms for ‘gentrification’? Angell Town , a UK ‘estate’ in Brixton — it would be called a ‘public housing project’ by Americans — provides a good example of how these questions are answered in practice.

    In theory, meanwhile, the answers are… yes, and no. They overlap quite a bit, but the terms are not the same. In its simplest form, to redevelop is to develop again, which implies doing it over completely. Regeneration most directly means “rebirth or renewal”, implying that the entity remains throughout the process.

    The American Planning Association (APA) defines redevelopment as “public actions that are undertaken to stimulate activity when the private market is not providing sufficient capital and economic activity to achieve the desired level of improvement…. such as direct public investment, capital improvements, enhanced public services, technical assistance, promotion, tax benefits, and other stimuli including planning initiatives such as rezoning.”

    The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) defines regeneration as “a holistic process which aims to reverse the economic, social and physical decline of places where market forces alone will not suffice… balancing community, business, environmental and individual needs… as well as changes to the physical environment.”

    So — redevelopment focuses on monetary investment and physical changes. Regeneration focuses on the existing community and the “social decline” of a place, as well as economic and physical factors. Even further, it aims to “holistically,” address “individual needs.” Of course many redevelopment projects address the community, but because the APA distinctly says that “the private sector may initiate redevelopment projects without any active public involvement beyond the government’s traditional regulatory role,” I would argue that it involves less social investment than regeneration.

    Perhaps the distinct difference between the responsibility to act directly on behalf of existing residents versus the responsibility to investors stems from a large English planning system that is more politicized (and therefore receives more federal funding.)

    While in America, gentrification might be seen as an inevitable side effect of redevelopment, in England it is seen as a sometimes inevitable and therefore tragic side effect of regeneration.

    To illustrate this point, look at a true regeneration project: Angell Town, Brixton, London

    Problem (courtesy of Rudi):

    • Lack of public space for social interaction – derelict communal areas were unused.
    • The garages provided were dark and un-surveyed, and therefore, never used.
    • The estate was perceived as crime ridden, as the multiplicity of bridges and walkways provided ideal escape routes for criminals, often from outside the estate itself.
    • Litter accumulation resulted from removing the bridges (which gave access to the waste removal pick-up points), in an attempt to reduce crime
    • The estate came to epitomize neglect and decline
    • The estate became stigmatized a sink estate.

    Solution – A summary of simple urban design changes:

    • The first main part of the scheme involved re-orientating the existing deck-access housing into a more “normal” street format, based on terraced dwellings which related to the street through individual entrances.
    • Each dwelling was given an individual, recognized identity — surveillance on the street was improved, as windows now faced directly out
    • Terraced housing replaced the monotonous, unsafe corridors of entrances.
    • The pedways, which were perceived as unsafe, were removed so that the houses could be extended to face on to the street.
    • New central grassed areas were defined as focal points for the houses. These areas were separated from the new vehicular perimeter roads by railings, enabling children to play, away from the danger of traffic and dogs.
    • The unused garages on the ground floors were replaced with shops and community facilities, such as a bar, cafe, workshops, and even a recording studio in one area, to provide the previously, much lacked social amenities. This design measure also helped transform dark and bleak spots into animated facades of street level activity.

    Instead of only seeing Angell Town’s problems, the urban designer, planners, and architects looked at them as opportunities to build on the strong community that had lived there for decades. The project improvements didn’t eradicate every trace of the place that had become their home, but committed a large investment to renovate the buildings they could, and design the new ones to compliment the existing ones so well that you had to look hard to tell the difference between the two.

    Members of the community could still see where they came from. In other words, it still felt like home. Most importantly they could look again a little harder and see their bright futures. This might sound like I’m laying it on a little thick, but the success of this regeneration stunned so many, both nationwide and on the European continent, that it provoked intense project documentation. Residents who were interviewed realized what planners so often don’t: they looked to their physical environment to define their identity. With the existing bones of the original Angell Town Estate still in existence, they easily identified the physical improvements to be improvements in themselves.

    This outstanding result came from an intense and time-consuming community consultation process, a term that is distinctly different than public involvement. The lead urban designer was so involved with the community that he actually lived there on the weekends in a flat. While this is rare in any country, it certainly is to be commended.

    Perhaps the most powerful items in Angell Town now are the benches that, poetically, are made from the rubble of demolished parts of the old buildings, caged, with stone seats on top. People can actually sit on the physical representation of what was destroying their community. This was recited by residents often as what made the biggest difference to them. Don’t ever underestimate the power of poeticism!

    I would love you to share you comments on this story. I’ll also suggest: Consider the many similar public housing projects in America that have been completely razed and rebuilt to look like another place. How does it make people feel to have their homes be deemed so worthless that they are torn down and completely replaced, often with architectural rubbish?

    So, what will it be — redevelopment or regeneration?

    Photo: UK Government Web Archive: Angell Town – “Many residents also have private outdoor space.” Building for Life is run by CABE and the Home Builders Federation with Design for Homes.© Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE)

    A different version of this post appeared on Erin Chantry’s blog, At the Helm of the Public Realm. Chantry is an Urban Designer in the Urban Design and Community Planning Service Team with Tindale-Oliver & Associates

  • How To Build a Culture of Bike Safety

    As I’ve settled into life in Florida, I’ve found myself for the first time using a bicycle as a form of transportation instead of as a form of leisure activity. And, as an urban designer involved in a team that designs bicycle and pedestrian master plans, I’ve become increasingly aware of the factors that make urban bike use a feasible — or not so feasible — choice.

    The Risk & Fear Factors: While I might actually be safe riding my bike down a neighborhood collector road on a dedicated bike lane, when I’m alongside two 10-foot lanes of traffic I do not feel safe. Therefore, I don’t ride there. It’s a question of perceived risk vs actual risk. As it turns out, I am not unique. Linda Baker in Scientific American has suggested that, when cycling, women are more adverse to risk than men.

    The Gender Gap: Baker has also suggested that cycling to work impedes a woman’s ability to conform to social norms, including makeup, dress, and hairstyles. That issue would be a big bite to chew, so I’ll put aside addressing it here. But consider: While cycling has become a big grass roots movement through organizations like Pro Walk/ Pro Bike and The National Center for Bicycling and Walking, there is an enormous gender gap among users. Planner Jan Garrard states, “If you want to know if an urban environment supports cycling, you can forget about all the detailed ‘bikeability indexes’—just measure the proportion of cyclists who are female.” I personally can’t remember the last time or if I’ve ever seen a woman on a bicycle on the Tampa streets.

    Nearly all the new riders on US roads in the last 20 years have been men between the ages of 25 and 64. Taking into account the national demographics, this means that we are currently designing bike-friendly streets for a relatively small constituency.

    How can we provide cycling options in a way that reaches out to more users?

    The Infrastructure Factor: Substantially lowering the risk of cycling can be best accomplished through a change in infrastructure. Cycle tracks, like the one in New York City, are becoming more popular. Because of the complete physical separation from the threat of cars, all users perceive — and experience — a lower threat to their safety. The problem, besides the constant challenge of funding, is finding the right-of-way to accommodate bikes, especially in a car-centric culture like Florida. There has to be evidence of a high enough level of ridership to justify cutting out a lane from a congested street. It’s a chicken and the egg conundrum: there is not the required ridership now because a majority of 50% of the population doesn’t feel safe.

    A good compromise might be to allow room for a physical separation between a one-way bike lane and car traffic. Creative use of medians and plantings, as in Denver, is one example of this. Simply placing parallel parking between car traffic and the bike lane is another.

    The Get-More-Riders Factor: Building a bike culture is more than just infrastructure, but building appropriate spaces is an integral piece. As Billy Hattaway, a Florida DOT official pointed out to me, if we don’t create bike lanes that cater to a larger part of the population we might lose the justification to have bike lanes at all.

    At the Congress for the New Urbanism annual conference, Wesley Marshall showed evidence proving that the more cyclists there are, the more safe it is to bike. There is a belief by some transportation planning engineers that more cyclists and users in the road make it unsafe, but “safety in numbers” is true. It’s partly because drivers are more aware of cyclists when they see them more often; they’re on the lookout for them.

    The Land Use Factor: People will only choose cycling as a mode of transportation if it is convenient and efficient. Ridership in parts of the city without mixed-uses and with low density will be low compared with more urban areas with many commercial/residential/institutional uses nearby and close together. Riding to a local grocery store to get a gallon of milk is realistic. Riding to a Wal-Mart for your weekly shopping is not. But Marshall’s research showed that the biggest aspect of achieving bike safety is intersection density. The more intersections there were in a development, the safer it was for riders. At first thought this seems to go against common sense, because intersections are the sites of many crashes, but more connectivity = slower speeds = more awareness. Connectivity also allows for more mixed-uses and higher densities. Many cities put their resources into developing recreational cycling trails. While this is admirable, as a “wanna-be” cyclist, I’m a proponent of putting those funds into street design, instead. Putting the infrastructure on routes where people go in their everyday lives will lead to the biggest increase in ridership.

    A lot of factors need to come together to increase ridership and bridge the gender gap in cycling. I’m someone who would love to ditch my car in favor of my bike on my daily commute, but risk aversion holds me back. Providing a lane along the side of the road is not enough: we must examine the evidence and psychology behind riding in order to make it a real choice for the majority of the population. Otherwise, we will find ourselves losing the justification to provide cycling options at all.

    Erin Chantry is an Urban Designer in the Urban Design and Community Planning Service Team with Tindale-Oliver & Associates. She is also the author of the blog At the Helm of the Public Realm.

    Photo: Protected / Separated bicycle lane on Dunsmuir Street, downtown Vancouver, Canada, by Paul Krueger

  • CNU20: Shootout at the New Urbanism Congress

    I knew there was the possibility that this month’s Congress of New Urbanism — CNU20 — in West Palm Beach would be an exercise in brainwashing. While I was excited to be meeting some of the thinkers at the forefront of my profession, I certainly was aware that the founders of the movement were opinionated and outspoken. The number of attendees has way outgrown the close dinner group that began New Urbanism more than 20 years ago, but heavy hitters like Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Ellen Dunham-Jones, and John Norquist, to name a few, still have a big hand in the direction of the movement.

    I was pleasantly surprised to find just the opposite. The first session was a debate on theology between two very prominent urban designers, Daniel Solomon and Andres Duany, which set the tone of challenging our own and each other’s beliefs in what New Urbanism is and should be.

    During what is hopefully the worst economic downturn I will ever see there has been almost no New Urbanism development. The movement, along with the rest of the housing market, has stalled. When the market picks back up will developers and planners condemn the stringent LEED-ND framework, a prescriptive guide for sustainable development developed in part by the CNU?

    Daniel Solomon thinks so. In Solomon’s lecture, which he humorously titled “My Dinner with Andres,” he challenged the prescriptive and code-based turn New Urbanism had taken, saying that the movement’s implementation guide, particularly LEED-ND, “strangles and sucks the life out of the American economy.” He blamed Duany’s Smart Code and Manual, describing Duany as a man who was rigorous and defiant in his beliefs, and simultaneously as a man who questioned his own ideas constantly, saying “Andres Duany creates an intellectual straightjacket that others wear, but that he won’t even put one arm in.”

    I think I understand why people gravitate towards concrete codes and manuals. We live in a time that is full of challenges for our built environment. People feel comforted by a set of rules: Here’s a problem, and if I follow this, I can fix it. This equals confidence and control for urban designers and planners.

    But perhaps Solomon’s most striking argument was to call the New Urbanist code a “reductive certitude” that was no different than Le Corbusier’s Athens Charter. For the uninitiated: Just the mention of this document makes planners shudder. It is blamed for some of the biggest idealistic planning screw-ups ever. Solomon’s argument was that, like Duany’s Smart Code, Le Corbusier’s plan was written with certainty, and with little room for questioning. It was a quite a slam to compare Andres Duany, the founder of the very movement to which all in attendance subscribe, to Le Corbusier, often cited as the destroyer of city life. Man, were we in for a rebuttal.

    And we got one.

    I was eagerly watching the first row for the response of some of the New Urban heavies. Ellen Dunham-Jones leapt up immediately, cheering and loudly applauding. It was obvious that there was a divide in this union, but it existed in a context that welcomed it.

    Duany came out on fire in defense of his “straightjacket,” saying that the code allows for local calibrations and adaptations. His argument focused on the fact that the real world is a world of laws, not a world of opinions and ideas, and that the same system that was used to destroy the urban form can be responsible for fixing it. Disputing the notion that without a code planners will be free, he made the case that the building code is the default setting for US municipalities, it is not going away, and that we need to use it to make change. In short, don’t fight the system; use it to your advantage.

    Interestingly, Duany also defended those who love traditional suburbs. He described research exercises where people were shown a picture of an ideal New Urbanism development, and a picture of typical suburban scenario. The former usually contained a compact, dense cottage with a picket fence and beautiful streetscape. The latter contained a plain house with garage alongside the front door, sitting on a large, empty street. Despite the obvious attempt to sway opinion, 30% of people still chose the suburban scenario as their optimal place to live. He takes the stance that these people’s freedom to choose older-style suburbs must be protected, and that his smart code provides for that.

    I challenge you to watch the session here and ask yourself the same questions about New Urbanism that these men do. I look forward to sharing my response to the other sessions at CNU20. Stay tuned….

    Erin Chantry is an Urban Designer in the Urban Design and Community Planning Service Team with Tindale-Oliver & Associates, and the author of At the Helm of the Public Realm. A different version of this post appeared there. With a BA in Architecture, an MA in Urban Design, and an MSc in Urban Planning, she has served Florida Community Loan Fund, Townhouses at Henrietta, West Palm Beach, FL. Developed by New Urban League CDC / Urban League of Palm Beach County.

  • Erin Chantry Urban Designer