Here and There

“A blog post once a month” she said. “That’s achievable” she said. Yet here we are, it’s April Fool’s Day, and there hasn’t been a blog post since February. This is not for a lack of ideas, more a lack of time. In fact it’s probably a deadly combination of too many ideas and too little time, resulting in a handful of hastily composed Twitter threads and….zero blog posts. Anyway, points should be awarded for not skipping March completely and waiting until mid-April to write anything else. This is a postponed March post, and I will write another for April. I will. I will. I’m also trying to be less fussy about planning the content/structure – it’s a blog post after all, not a book chapter.  For most of March Sarah Everard was at the forefront of my mind. What she symbolised I guess, rather than the woman herself, who I know so little about. I talked with my partner about our experience of being out in the streets, moving through spaces. For me this means always being on alert, always...

I’ve always had a soft spot for the work of Adam Curtis. His latest series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head , has caused me to think more deeply about a recent project; producing a National Model Design Code for the UK with MHCLG . In typical Curtis style the series seeks to tackle an ambitious grab-bag of themes, but what struck me was a section on the simplification of data required for humans to understand the complexity of the world.   Simplification of complexity for the purpose of understanding is the essence of what the National Model Design Code is seeking to do. Questions have been asked both about the validity of such an aim, and the ability of a codified process to create intangible outcomes like “beauty”.    Embracing Complexity   In around 300 BC Aristotle tried to define what it means to be virtuous. “Virtue” stands on the podium with “Beauty” in the Indefinable Concept Olympics and Aristotle understandably struggled. He said virtue means behaving in the “...

Ah 2020, we said, some time on new years eve, What a nice round number, how fun that ought to be. Imagining all the projects the next 12 months might hold,  The planning legislation, we hoped might soon unfold. The GMSF will be, no doubt, a strategic planning win, And the white paper, shaking things up, a new era could begin. A few more days of festive rest, then back to work said we, Tipsy, and optimistic about how the year might be. Things started out the way you’d think, dry January, new me, But then they slightly came unstuck, and suddenly you’d see - Talk of case numbers in the news, and graph lines surely rising… And… bumping elbows in the pub, I guess it was surprising, But we realised, slowly at first, then all at once, that everything would change - 2020, it transpired, was frightening and strange.  Like a Local Plan examination, the year rolled on and on, Some were furloughed, some lost work, our certainty was gone. We couldn’t see our families, we could see our frie...

I’ve seen a number of briefs coming out recently seeking an exploration of the impact of COVID -19 on town centers/high streets, along with guidance about what to do in the future. As my colleague David Rudlin opined it’s nigh on impossible to get good data or develop robust plans for the future when we are still very much in “the eye of the storm”. There’s a phrase that’s quoted in various forms and most commonly attributed to something that Plato may have heard Socrates possibly say at one point or another. The clearest articulation is something like: “Wisest is the person who knows they do not know” It’s difficult at the moment to take anyone who claims to know what will happen or that has the perfect solution very seriously. In respect of town centres, but more generally in relation to anything at this moment in time.  So, if you find yourself in a world of known unknowns, and you don’t want to just sit back and do nothing, what are you supposed to do?  There are a few dif...

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the resulting resurgence of interest in the Black Lives Matter movement, many of us have reflected on what more we could be doing to fight for an equal and fair society. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this. Everyone has different levels of influence, different spaces in which they can affect change and different resources (money, energy, time) to contribute. As individuals I think everyone at URBED is personally reflecting on what role they can play, but we are also examining what more we can do as a business. It shouldn’t be necessary to explain why representation in the built environment profession is important. We all live in this world, and the groups of people designing places should reflect the people living in them. As Jane Jacobs said: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody” It also makes sense for us commercially. Statistically sp...

Living with Beauty is the final report of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission; an independent body set up to “advise government on how to promote and increase the use of high-quality design for new build homes and neighbourhoods”. Personally, I thought “Living with Beauty” sounded like a semi-fictional memoir about sharing an apartment with a drag queen (named Beauty) in 1980’s New York. I don’t think this a view shared by many and is likely due to the speed with which I consumed the Netflix show “POSE” rather than any flaw in the Commission’s report titling. What’s good about it? Title notwithstanding, the report sets out many positive and diverse ideas about how to improve the design of new development in the UK. Interestingly a lot of the recommendations in the report are far more structural than they are aesthetic. So, it does talk about introducing design codes at both national and local level, but it also talks about stewardship, land value capture and a gre...

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government have been preoccupied of late with the philosophy of art. It is something of a departure from the broadly mathematical rhetoric that has dominated the media for the last few years; “we need to build 200,000 homes a year! No, 300,000 homes a year! Has anyone seen my calculator?!”. Recently, it has broadened its view beyond such prosaic matters to explore aesthetics; the study of beauty. The Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission is an independent body set up to advise Government on how to promote high quality design for new homes and neighbourhoods. Headed by on-again, off-again Chair Roger Scruton, the initial thinking was that objections to development would be greatly diminished if the buildings encroaching on the public sightline were aesthetically pleasing. This begs the question; how do we decide what is beautiful and what isn’t? When it comes to human beauty we have a pretty clear idea about what we like. C...