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Mumbles Pier
October 27, 2010
Mumbles Head Development Planning Application – Comments
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The blog is for ‘People and places; cities, towns, neighbourhoods, estates, villages; sustainable city and living environments’. It supports ‘Campaigning for ‘our city’, for people places, for ‘good town”. Author: Gordon Gibson, a South Wales based practising Urban Designer, lecturer and teacher, former Chartered Surveyor. Now writing up near 20 years of hands-on urban design practice, in and with communities and in the great cities of Prague and Johannesburg. For over four months in 2009, and five months in 2011, I lived in Manhattan, New York, not ‘working’ in the conventional sense, but being a supportive ‘bampi’ to our daughter’s young family, with a glorious opportunity to enjoy the streets of her neighbourhood, experiencing the daily reality of life in the Upper East Side, and of Manhattan. That is where the blog begins. It is a privilege both to experience again the joy of contributing to the early development of children and to observe and enjoy the city that so inspired Jane Jacobs for her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I recognise that my humble efforts are, in part, a homage to her.
Wales
Welsh Government Consultations Etc
National Assembly for Wales. A contribution to the Inquiry into the Regeneration of Town Centres
Preface The paper that follows endeavours to set out responses to the National Assembly for Wales’ Enterprise and Business Committee’s request for views on the following issue in particular: · The factors affecting the mix of residential, commercial and retail premises found in town centres – for example, the impact of business rates policy; footfall patterns and issues surrounding the night-time and daytime economies within town centres. This outline discussion also comments on the related issues: · The impact of out-of-town retail sites on nearby town centres . · The use of funding sources and innovative financial solutions to contribute to town centre regeneration – including the Regeneration Investment Fund for Wales; the use of Business Improvement Districts; structural funds; Welsh Government, local authority and private sector investment. · The importance of sustainable and integrated transport in town centres– including traffic management, parking and access. · The potential impact of marketing and image on the regeneration of town centres – such as tourism, signage, public art, street furniture, lighting and safety concerns. · The extent to which town centre regeneration initiatives can seek to provide greater employment opportunities for local people. Despite our experience in this field, we are not…
Swansea
Sustainable Transport or More Cars?
A spin on The Boulevard
Ten city regeneration projects for Swansea’s new administration.
Vetch Veg: Highline Urban Transformation in Swansea?
Snippets about Swansea City Centre
Mumbles Head Development Planning Application – Comments
Planning Application for Development at Mumbles Head Application Nr 2010/1451 Introduction. This building proposal is one of the most important landmark architectural developments to be presented to the city. Its internationally renowned location and its sensitive visual setting demand the utmost care in evaluating its acceptability to the community – a community that has a broad definition from local people to international visitors and sea-going admirers. A ‘first condition’ for approval. For the above reason, the primary condition of any planning approval should be an ongoing, highly visible and participative public consultation process for every stage of the design process right through to construction. There are far too many examples of important developments where the visual and functional contributions that buildings make to the city’s public domain have been sacrificed in the face of perceived or claimed ‘pragmatic’ obstacles. (To take just the pedestrian environment, examples include the architectural contributions to pedestrian streetscapes at Trawler Road in the Marina, Kings Road in SA1 and now the Swansea Point developments at Tawe Lock House, not to mention the comparable reference at the Osborne Flats in Rotherslade. Photographs can be provided to illustrate these locations.) Secondly, every precaution must be taken to…
Swansea City Centre Regeneration – A discussion paper
This paper is still in draft form Ben Reynolds and Gordon Gibson The real measure of successful regeneration is that people visibly love and use their city centres in lots of ways – for leisure, for business, for shopping, for living. Visitors and residents enjoy the rich diversity of city vitality, especially with quality spaces, places and heritage. Vibrant cities encourage and sustain footfall 365 days a year, 7 days a week, and for as many of the 24 daily hours as can be managed. Swansea has still not recovered from the blitz. Decades of regeneration schemes have offered retail-based solutions or grand highways schemes, none of them seemingly noticing what a wonderful place it is already. It certainly needs tweaking – some strategic town improvements, more people and families living in the city centre, greater and more strategic investment in culture, and improved public spaces, but get all of that right and business and developers will want to participate. It isn’t always about huge schemes, though if they are well planned and thought through they can have their place. We need a more holistic view of planning for the city centre, a more considered view of the type of…
Cheering on The Vetch
Swansea’s Vetch Field has stood as the centre-piece of a barren urban landscape ever since the last league goal was scored there in April 2005. The city’s football club left its city-centre site for a new home on the former industrial wastelands of the Lower Swansea Valley. What remains is decaying, untouched, uninspired, crying out for a dynamic and innovative regeneration initiative to bring vitality back to the Sandfields, and to the city centre. The stadium, sometime home to well over 30,000 spectators and many a historic football occasion, not to mention the odd pop concert, became the dominant component of Swansea’s inner-city Sandfields district. The Vetch, named after the wild flowering plant that inhabited the low-lying coastland before it was consumed by the industrial revolution and urban growth, still sits there in surroundings that relegated residential interests in favour of football crowd management that it could never really cope with. Sandfields was one of Swansea’s original rapid-growth inner suburbs, typical of the explosion of urban development that took place throughout Wales and the western world towards the end of the nineteenth century. Over the near 100 year life of the stadium, high un-neighbourly walls and gates went up, local…
The Tawe Bridges Extravaganza
(re SWEP Go-ahead to end bridges bottleneck Friday 22 October 2010 http://ow.ly/31mt6 ) It’s chaos! Multiple lanes, filters, traffic lights out of sync, queues, road-rage and ….errr…. have you ever tried walking or cycling in the vicinity of the Tawe Bridges in Swansea? Despite huge investment in new bridges, elaborate traffic management systems and upheaval of routes to St Thomas and the docks, they got it wrong, badly wrong. And those same players that got it wrong first time round have come back to tell us how it should be put right. The problem is, they always get it wrong. There can never be enough roads for cars. Build new roads and they soon fill up. Now this is bad enough outside of our cities on the M4 or M25 but when it comes to our city centre, we need to re-establish our priorities. Here’s just a sample of what has been done to us over the past 10 or 20 years. As many as eight traffic lanes, wider than the original M1, drive up past the new bus station in the middle of our city; a complex gyratory road system encircles the city centre with bizarre and dangerous traffic…
Swansea, Planning and ‘Sustainable City’
As Cardiff’s city centre regeneration visibly takes shape, for good or bad, Wales’ second city still hasn’t recovered from the war and slum clearance. Swansea’s latest city centre regeneration scheme is wobbling in the face of the recession. The exciting designers have gone and, behind closed doors, compromises and land-deals are afoot. The city’s record on regeneration is not good. After the dreadful damage of the Blitz and slum-clearance, city fathers (sic) adopted a new city plan focused on a Roundabout – a five-way junction for motor vehicles at ground level; a hole in the ground and tunnels for pedestrians underneath. The city centre road system connected with Fabian Way to become Swansea’s primary route to the east and England. [caption id="attachment_78" align="alignleft" width="258" caption="Swansea Centre Main Movement Routes 1938"][/caption] Back in the heady retail days of the 1970s, these seismic shifts in the hitherto ‘organic’ evolution of the city centre seemed to pay off. Shoppers crossed Princess Way, often in batches of hundreds, between Oxford Street, the David Evans department store, and the High Street. But they had to get the go-ahead from traffic lights to cross the new dual-carriageway that divided them. The pre-occupation of city planning was…
Cardiff
City Centre Regeneration: Homes, People, Shops and Malls.
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The Hayes, just opened, late autumn afternoon"][/caption] As an adopted Swansea native, I hate to say it but…… Visit Cardiff to see an example of good retail development doing the business for city centre regeneration. ‘St David’s 2’ opened a couple of weeks ago1 and, as you come out of the Royal Arcade opposite, there is evidence galore that ‘The Hayes’ will be a success. The street, with its variety of shop frontages, is already vibrant; and A large part of the development is city centre homes, with front door access onto the street. This section of the regeneration scheme is well founded: the street itself is on a long-standing footfall route – The Hayes is the city centre stretch of the historic linear connection between Cardiff Bay and Merthyr! It is part of the organic city form. And second, it is people that make shops work and people living there make for good business. On the other hand, cross the threshold and you enter a barely updated and typically characterless mall, as still much favoured by British developers despite the concept passing its sell-by date in the U.S. perhaps 20 years ago. Apart from the…
Urban Design Theory and Discussion
David Simon: City, The Wire and the End of Empire.
“Someone, somewhere, is going to start throwing bricks.” It’s not right or wrong, it’s just going to happen. That, Says David Simon, is how things change. There was consolation, in an epilogue to my long stay in the comfort zone that is New York, to hear a voice willing to publicly rail against the monster that U.S. capitalism seems happy to be revealing itself as. In the appropriate setting of a vacant lot, temporarily prettified at no small expense to house the first 10 week BMW Guggenheim Lab series on the urban condition, David Simon, of The Wire and Treme (and much more besides), tore into the bulwarks. He describes a sociopathic elite, willing to sacrifice a vast layer of society (15-20%, mostly black), prevent universal healthcare, collapse the education system for those unable to achieve Charter School places, blackmail the economy, brutalize the world, import it’s products from exploited workforces on the other side of the globe, pass laws so that corporations can, without restraint, fund their political lapdogs and so remove any vestiges of democracy that might represent the interests of common people – all this and more, as long as increasingly obscene amounts of money continue to…
City Centre Regeneration: Homes, People, Shops and Malls.
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The Hayes, just opened, late autumn afternoon"][/caption] As an adopted Swansea native, I hate to say it but…… Visit Cardiff to see an example of good retail development doing the business for city centre regeneration. ‘St David’s 2’ opened a couple of weeks ago1 and, as you come out of the Royal Arcade opposite, there is evidence galore that ‘The Hayes’ will be a success. The street, with its variety of shop frontages, is already vibrant; and A large part of the development is city centre homes, with front door access onto the street. This section of the regeneration scheme is well founded: the street itself is on a long-standing footfall route – The Hayes is the city centre stretch of the historic linear connection between Cardiff Bay and Merthyr! It is part of the organic city form. And second, it is people that make shops work and people living there make for good business. On the other hand, cross the threshold and you enter a barely updated and typically characterless mall, as still much favoured by British developers despite the concept passing its sell-by date in the U.S. perhaps 20 years ago. Apart from the…
Sustainable city: good for business
You can’t count the number of businesses within five minutes walk of my daughter’s home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. They’re upstairs, downstairs, in basements, back lanes, back rooms, even back gardens in the summer, in street front commerce, in shops and services. There are street vendors and the occasional hustler. Virtually everything you need from a tap washer to a manicure, from a quiet place to take your coffee to the public transport system; all this is just up the street. Commercial (and social) vitality breaks down only at the occasional park or where you might least expect it, at the huge high-rise ‘projects’ (what we Brits call social housing), where although the residential density gets higher, the range and vitality of other urban activity is weak. Most projects, all the way up to Harlem and beyond, were built with almost no doffing of the hat to the city around them. Projects are often angled to the street grid; entrances are tucked in remote corners. Yes there are playgrounds and lots of leftover greenspaces but this is barren city, shown up worse by the rich mixed-use city vitality just around the corner. There, can be found the ‘good town’ that…
Jane Jacobs and American Cities
David Simon: City, The Wire and the End of Empire.
“Someone, somewhere, is going to start throwing bricks.” It’s not right or wrong, it’s just going to happen. That, Says David Simon, is how things change. There was consolation, in an epilogue to my long stay in the comfort zone that is New York, to hear a voice willing to publicly rail against the monster that U.S. capitalism seems happy to be revealing itself as. In the appropriate setting of a vacant lot, temporarily prettified at no small expense to house the first 10 week BMW Guggenheim Lab series on the urban condition, David Simon, of The Wire and Treme (and much more besides), tore into the bulwarks. He describes a sociopathic elite, willing to sacrifice a vast layer of society (15-20%, mostly black), prevent universal healthcare, collapse the education system for those unable to achieve Charter School places, blackmail the economy, brutalize the world, import it’s products from exploited workforces on the other side of the globe, pass laws so that corporations can, without restraint, fund their political lapdogs and so remove any vestiges of democracy that might represent the interests of common people – all this and more, as long as increasingly obscene amounts of money continue to…
Jane Jacobs’ Village is alive and well.
Urban regeneration and gentrification 50 years on from the publication of ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’. Pain Quotidien is an up-market eatery far removed from the New York diners that served the manufacturing and shipworkers back in Jane Jacobs days in the West Village. It’s a worrying symbol of ‘gentrification’ for some Village conservationists. We walked over from the recently renovated Washington Square (pity they missed the toilets) on our way to see ‘Pain’ and it’s impact on Jane Jacobs’ neighbourhood outside 555 Hudson, her family home in the Village. Rest in Peace Jane, the West Village is still a joy to walk through these days. Streets are full of local people, lots of little specialist shops and activity – locksmiths, cafes and restaurants, many of ‘mom & pop’ character, albeit 21st century versions, old and new clothes shops, bric-a-brac, psychic crystal readings(!) and, as good an indicator as any, a small gathering of women sat chatting on the steps while their young children pottered out on the sidewalk of Perry Street – straight out of the pages of your book! Ok, this is quite different fare from the bustling and smokey mid-twentieth century years but it…
Residential Density: People, homes and numbers in bustling Manhattan.
Urban regeneration is, first and foremost, about numbers – of people and homes. Can we learn from the ‘big hitters’ like Manhattan? Stepping off the Third Avenue bus on the way back to my daughter’s home in New York, the streets provide most everything you might need: a supermarket on the corner, a pharmacy, bank, café, bread, deli, newsagents, post office, hardware, child-care, manicures, restaurants galore, a beer, a seat in the gardens. Manhattan’s Avenues carry a rich diversity of commercial and social activity. You spot various stores as you make your daily way around the neighbourhood, then test out and nurture your preferences. Rhian lives in an apartment on East 93rd St. This is four, five and six storey brownstone territory, built or converted to apartments, and typical New York. Further west, towards Central Park, dwellings are often still in single residence, seriously up-market. To the east, at the bottom of the street by the FDR Highway and the East River, is a social housing ‘project’ in five high-rise blocks, commonly labelled ‘high-density’. Her street in Yorkville is ‘good town’. In her seminal 1960s’ text The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs puts Yorkville alongside Greenwich…
People make ‘good town’
[This version of the earlier ‘Residential Density’ piece is edited for the Welsh journal Celyn.] People, not shops, make our urban centres work, says Gordon Gibson. Can Welsh town regeneration learn from the ‘big hitters’ like Manhattan? Stepping off the Third Avenue bus on the way back to my daughter’s home in New York, the streets provide most everything you might need: a supermarket on the corner, a pharmacy, bank, café, bread, deli, newsagents, post office, hardware, child-care, manicures, restaurants galore, a beer, a seat in the gardens. Manhattan’s Avenues carry a rich diversity of commercial and social activity. Rhian lives in an apartment on East 93rd St.; four, five and six storey brownstone territory, built or converted to apartments, and typical New York. Towards Central Park, dwellings are often still in single residence, seriously up-market. At the bottom of the street by the FDR Highway and the East River, is a social housing ‘project’ in five high-rise blocks, commonly labelled ‘high-density’. Rhian’s street in Yorkville, is ‘good town’. [caption id="attachment_105" align="alignleft" width="614" caption="Bustling Streets in the West Village at 7th Avenue"][/caption] The great urban commentator and campaigner, Jane Jacobs, put Yorkville alongside Greenwich Village amongst the most sought-after, vibrant,…
New York and cars. It’s loud, it’s busy, and it’s friendly (when you get in close).
New Yorkers (or is it Americans in our eyes?) are loud. Sitting having lunch at a streetside restaurant table, you will get every word of conversations on adjoining tables or of colleagues, neighbours or friends meeting on the street. It may be because everything is noisy in NewYork. Sheltering from the rain under the highway over the 96th St access to the East River walkway, with my sleeping grandson in the pushchair, I pass time by counting the timelapse between carhorn ‘honkers’, as they call it here (‘hooters’ has quite different connotations). Infrequently, there may be as much as half a minute between honks and it is just plain traffic noise, but the average is under 10 seconds. Some few drivers issue a relatively polite toot if an instant reaction to a green light has not been forthcoming or a small gap is left but, as often as not, it is an impatient blast that fills your ears. Only the tiniest of inroads are being made into the dominance of car culture in public space. This is the legacy of virtually all western post-war planning, identified here with Robert Moses, a 20th century Hausmann of Manhattan. Public space is something for the background, segregated and providing a…
Sustainable city: good for business
You can’t count the number of businesses within five minutes walk of my daughter’s home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. They’re upstairs, downstairs, in basements, back lanes, back rooms, even back gardens in the summer, in street front commerce, in shops and services. There are street vendors and the occasional hustler. Virtually everything you need from a tap washer to a manicure, from a quiet place to take your coffee to the public transport system; all this is just up the street. Commercial (and social) vitality breaks down only at the occasional park or where you might least expect it, at the huge high-rise ‘projects’ (what we Brits call social housing), where although the residential density gets higher, the range and vitality of other urban activity is weak. Most projects, all the way up to Harlem and beyond, were built with almost no doffing of the hat to the city around them. Projects are often angled to the street grid; entrances are tucked in remote corners. Yes there are playgrounds and lots of leftover greenspaces but this is barren city, shown up worse by the rich mixed-use city vitality just around the corner. There, can be found the ‘good town’ that…
For Jane Jacobs – an unpublished letter to the Guardian. And what was published.
Jane Jacobs scathing city critique of over fifty years ago still grates with many architects and planners. (Mother Courage, 12th September). Christopher Turner suggests that the vibrant, ‘old- fashioned vision of community’ that is Greenwich Village might be on the point of collapse. Nothing could be further from the truth, despite the recession. The point often missed is that Jacobs’ qualities of community are also good for business. Her principles of residential density, street blocks and socio-economic diversity are thoroughly vindicated not only in the Village but in the regenerating Meatpacking District, Tribeca, and Lower East Side not to mention most sub-districts of our fine European cities, including London. In areas of New York where 1960′s Highways still dominate, the Hudson Riverfront regeneration, the Highline Park, the pedestrianisation of Times Square, the valued public transport system and the increasing cycling culture, demonstrate real urban progress against both Taylor’s thesis and Robert Moses’ road system that, were it not for Jane Jacobs’ campaigning, so nearly ruined it all. end For and against Jane Jacobs Christopher Turner’s attack on Jane Jacobs is as snide as it is misguided (“Mother courage”, 12 September). Jacobs articulated a fundamental truth about what makes cities attractive. It…
Notes on Will Wiles, “Saint Jane”
Brief notes on Will Wiles, “Saint Jane” http://willwiles.blogspot.com/2010/08/saint-jane.html Sorry, it made me a bit angry. Most everyone in Planning and Urban Design pays homage to Jane Jacobs. Will Wiles, in his revealingly titled article, “Saint Jane”, is no exception. “Many of Jacobs’ ideas can and should be integrated into modernist planning” “Jacobs appealed to me because it chimed with what I saw in cities and what I liked about them” “Much of what she says of mixed activity on the street, still seems to me to be self evident.” “she was a lone voice in defence of … a community worth defending” “not an attack on modernism” Yet for some reason, far from apparent, Jacobs is the vehicle for a diatribe, a diatribe apparently against Jacobs but really against New Urbanism (“nurbanism”, as Wiles pejoratively labels it). Her thesis, says Wiles, promotes a “steady-state, gentrified, bo-ho theme park”. Wiles, terrified of being seen “in the company of the nurbanists”; generates pathetic swipes at poor Saint Jane, “haven’t read … (her) … microcosmic conclusions”, and repeatedly performs sleights of hand to shimmy from the Saint to the nurbanists’ ‘understanding of the city’. Where, exactly, does Jacobs get anywhere near much of…
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