CONTENTS DIARY OF EVENTS - The Urban Design Group

NEWS AND EVENTS
Brian Richards 1928-2004
The death of Brian Richards last December
was not only a real loss to his family but
also to transportation research and to
the Urban Design Group, of which he had
been a longstanding member.
I first met Brian in 1965 at the
AA Leverhulme School of Planning in
Bloomsbury Square, where we were
fellow tutors. He had an encyclopaedic
knowledge of public transportation and
a ferret-like capacity for discovering and
then experiencing the latest innovation
in transport development.
This led him, over four decades, to
write four books on the subject: New
Movement in Cities (1966), Moving in
Cities (1976), Transport in Cities (1990)
and Future Transport in Cities (2001).
Recycled and Worn Out?
Do you keep recycling tired and rambling
urban design principles in design
guidance and design statements?
Try this guide to city design, courtesy
of the highly-regarded US Mayors’
Institute on City Design, which brings US
city mayors and architects together to
rethink the shape of their cities.
1. Design streets for people. Most cities
today still allow their streets to be
designed by traffic engineers who ignore
the real needs of pedestrians.
2. Overrule the specialists. The specialist
is the enemy of the city, which is by
definition a general enterprise.
3. Mix the uses. The first step should be
to ask what uses are missing. In many
6 | Urban Design | Spring 2005 | Issue 94
He was passionate in his hatred
of traffic and the way that society has
become so heavily dependent on cars.
He was very critical that traffic planning
dominates the way cities are now
designed so that it has, in effect, torn
many of our older cities apart.
He knew that through the proper
control of traffic and cars, combined
with a much more sophisticated public
transport system, the quality of life in
cities could be vastly improved, making
them better places to live and bring up
families. In the last sentence of his last
book he says ’only the political will is
needed to make this happen’.
Very fittingly, at his funeral the
younger members of his family joined
together to sing `the wheels of the bus
go round and round’.
His relatives are determined that
Brian’s contribution to transportation
will not be forgotten and are setting up
a special Transport Prize in his memory.
John Peverley
A Mosaic of Municipal Master Plans at MIPIM
MIPIM 2005 - Special Events - opening night cocktail party, sponsored by
Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. Photo: Missionning/MIPIM 2005
A visit to MIPIM, the property industry’s
annual conference in Cannes, France
(8-11 March) this year revealed the very
different approaches to development
and urbanism throughout Europe and
developing market areas. There are mixed
messages about where urban design
downtowns, the answer to that question
is housing.
4. Hide the parking lots. It only takes a
20-foot-thick crust of housing or offices
to block a huge lot from view.
5. Small is beautiful. Allowing
skyscrapers just causes a few lucky
sites to become overbuilt while their
neighbours all lay fallow under massive
speculation.
6. Save that building. Historic
preservation may be our best way to
respect our ancestors, but it is justified
on economic terms alone.
7. Build normal (affordable) housing.
Affordable housing is exactly the wrong
place to pioneer new design styles.
fits into the development world. Most
exhibition stands showed city-scale
ambitions to create new environments,
using maps, aerial photography, models
and imagery to conjure up what each
opportunity represents for investors
and occupiers. Some cities (such as the
Commune di Milano quoted in the title)
understand urbanism, and that it takes
more than a wacky building to make
a city. Major city exhibitors included
Moscow, Prague, Brno, Turin (see Urban
Design Issue 92, Autumn 2004), Warsaw,
and Verona, and showed city governments
coordinating linked projects and large
scale inward investments.
Other stands hosted notably by the
private sector – architects, developers
and their agents alike - were myopic,
insular or even naïve in their appreciation
of the urban environment, within which
BRIAN RICHARDS MEMORIAL FUND
If you would like to contribute, please
make your cheque payable to the Brian
Richards Memorial Fund and send it
to Shelly Porter at the Royal Bank of
Scotland, PO Box 3326, 49 Charing Cross,
Admiralty Arch, London SW1A 2BZ.
Experiment on the rich; they can always
move out.
8. Build green. Sustainable architecture
has finally hit the tipping point. Plant
more trees!
9. Question your codes. Conventional
zoning codes, made up of
incomprehensible statistics like floor
area ratios, ignore the differences
between pleasant and unbearable
urbanism.
10. Don’t forget beauty. Many of the
nation’s most beautiful buildings and
parks were built during periods of
unparalleled adversity.
Louise Thomas
they operate. Putting the predictable golf
or resort communities to one side, there
was a proliferation of anonymous angular
towers and geometric patterned housing
estates, with little evidence of the
context, character and humanity of the
places to be built, or how places will fit in
or join up. Poor CAD and Perspex models
do little for the urban design of places.
It takes a certain type of developer
to see the bigger picture in terms of what
they are building or investing in, and their
responsibility in forming another piece in
the urban, suburban or rural jigsaw puzzle.
While profit and turnover will remain their
primary goal, urban design has a long way
to go before it leads the property market’s
thinking. But when it does, it will deliver
much greater rewards.
Louise Thomas