33,000 Homes for Norwich - Michael Innes RIBA

JOINT CORE STRATEGY – ISSUES AND OPTIONS
We face a housing expansion target set by ‘Government’, that will change the face of Norwich, Broadland and South Norfolk – this is the phrase used in the document, and yet the date for public comment on this ‘Issues and Options’ document (8February) has passed almost unnoticed.

............ perhaps the issues are just too big and seem too remote?

The document assumes that the majority expansion would occur on sites in and around Norwich, (33,000 homes) and then, in reducing order of preference, in the market towns, villages and settlements and so on, until the total of 37,500 homes by 2026 was reached for the defined policy area.

Let us be clear about the scale of these proposed changes. In 2006 the population of Norwich city stood at 129,000. On the conservative estimate of an average of 2 persons per new house, 33,000 homes would represent a 51% increase in population: 3 persons per house would amount to a 76.7% increase, were they all to be accommodated within the boundary. Admittedly, the increase is for the greater Norwich area, but this comparison does give a some idea of scale. Does Norwich really suffer such a current labour shortage that we can confidently build for some 40,000+ jobs: the number required if these new housing communities to be socially and economically sustainable? Similarly, does it make sense to stretch existing, functional communities in terms of housing, schooling, transport and health infrastructure, or would it be better to focus new housing targets into new and coherent communities unto themselves?

There will likely be all the usual temptations to over stretch existing infrastructure. If the past is any precedent, this will be accompanied by the erosion of local character and scale - as well as of the green separations between built-up areas. Bear in mind that similar extremes of growth are to be accommodated in adjoining districts and over most of the South East.

Chanting the mantras of good principle and ticking the many boxes of virtue, as the document has requested, is no substitute for real vision and responsible investment. There is no indication as yet of what might be on offer on either count. At the level at which ‘environmental capacity’ has been reached for existing situations, proper and substantial new infrastructure becomes necessary: vision needs to kick in, and the proper new investment needs to be made.

................. applying first the logic of capitalising on existing investment, the relationship of Norwich to Gt. Yarmouth might be worth a closer look.

Gt. Yarmouth
A synergistic relationship with Gt. Yarmouth and an increased use of the Yare Valley would move some weight to the east, (including for the hospitals) and produce a better balance of the pressures around Norwich. This would partly reinforce some existing tendencies and could generate a useful modernised ‘take’ on old relationships by road, rail and water.

Gt. Yarmouth is chock-a-block with ‘brown land’ and is a distressed town. Rather than rely upon the extremely dubious benefits of a super-casino, something far more substantial by way of an urban development could be planned.

Gt. Yarmouth enjoys easy road, rail and river links to Norwich – the Yarmouth bus route is already the busiest of them all. The rail link is capable of substantially increased traffic at low cost and serves a string of small settlements all the way, including the small town of Acle. It could provide easy, speedy, road/rail links between settlements and to Norwich and Yarmouth.

Great Yarmouth is getting its outer harbour and thereby, a good link to Western Europe – and for small craft, (float-on/off) even on to Norwich?

.................or if this is not enough, an eco town (or two!) may be preferable to further sprawl

An eco town
Already happening for Cambridge as witness the recent application for an ‘eco-town’ called Northstowe, with 9,500 homes proposed, – this has come about as a consequence of using up most of the available opportunities to add sensibly, too much more, to existing settlements: such solutions for the necessary alleviation of number, may surely be preferable to sprawl? They give real scope for greater carbon reduction as well. Settlements like this can be designed economically as sustainable communities and they do come with a proper infrastructure. (Northstowe, for example, includes for 8 schools/education facilities, as well as providing scope for siting further employment within the bounds).

It would be imprudent to suggest a particular site without more study, but Coltishall has already been proposed as one possible site for an eco-town: where has this got? Is it quite incompatible with other ideas for the site, or can they perhaps be put together and made mutually supportive? The site is at least ‘brown land’ of a considerable extent.

Alternative sites that related well to railway as well as road would seem desirable: such alternatives might be sought in the vicinity of existing or revived ‘station stops’.

.......the 8th of February may have passed but it was not a deadline for being heard: just the formal start of a long conversation – so do join in!

Eastern Daily Press - Gabi Feingold RIBA

An introduction to architecture and the added value of good design

The Norfolk Association of Architects (NAA) is a group of professional representatives from all aspects of the construction industry. It is part of RIBA East which comprises an active network of 10 branches across the east of England. RIBA East is one of 11 English regions of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). It exists to advance local architecture by demonstrating architecture's benefit to society, and promoting excellence in the profession.

This is the first of a series of articles discussing our build environment, sustainability, good design and architectural services.

Architectural contribution and good design is too often considered an extravagance when considering the procurement of a construction project. Whether a large commercial scheme or the smallest of kitchen extensions, the added value of good design is often forgotten or ignored.

Architects are trained to understand your needs, wishes and sometimes even dreams. They can solve problems creatively when they are involved at the earliest planning stage. They can interpret a client's requirements into a coherent brief while developing creative solutions, maximising your investment and proposing ways to reduce costs while increasing long term value.

A RIBA Chartered Architect will provide you with much more than just the drawings for your new home or alteration. You will be fully involved in creating a totally tailored solution for your living needs. An architect has the experience to see your project safely through to completion, overseeing the design, the planning and building regulations, the builders and your budget. You can hire an architect to manage any or all parts of the design and construction process.

You are likely to be making a large financial and emotional commitment to your project, which makes standards and performance from others all the more important. Using a Chartered Architect provides you with extra safeguards to ensure that your designer acts with integrity and gives independent advice in support of your interests.

Only qualified architects registered with the Architects Registration Board (ARB) are entitled to call themselves “architects” in the UK and only registered architects who are members of RIBA and adhere to the RIBA Code of Professional Conduct can be called “Chartered Architects”.

To become a Chartered Practice, architect practices need to comply with strict criteria in an accreditation scheme that gives you, the client, a mark of quality. So by choosing a RIBA Chartered Practice you can expect a certain level of excellence in design and service.

Good advice has its price and the price of disregarding good design is far higher. Design fees will usually comprise a portion of the total construction cost but they pale into insignificance when measured against the added value of a well designed scheme to a successfully completed building.

A mug's game?

By some freak of timing (or maybe even serendipity?) I find myself to be a member of the Norfolk Association of Architects council. On the whole I regard this as a privilege, as an opportunity to serve my city in some small way. It is also an opportunity to socialise with architects from other practices. However, what surprises me is the NAA's lack of ability to persuade the majority of architects to have any involvement with the NAA at all. I don't feel particularly altruistic in this current commitment - quite frankly it feels like a vested interest in my own environment. Therefore by way of kicking things off with this new NAA blog, I invite you to write your comments in response to what is effectively a challenge! Where are you? What sort of bait would you like?
Philip Durban

Chris Heuvel - Aesthetics & Urbanism - Envisaging a new order of things for the urban century.

The UN Centre for Human Settlements has calculated that within the next thirty years two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in urban areas – twice as many people as will be living in rural areas. Whether we like it or not, we are entering the urban century.

So … it is time to stop pretending that we are simple country folk. And it is, above all, high time we stopped building our cities as if to disguise the fact that they are unnatural, in that they represent (no, they are) intrusions into the natural environment. It’s time we stopped thinking of our cities (and that means designing them as if they need to mimic natural systems) in terms of the way they function. Do away with the biological analogy. And do away with what we appropriately call ‘soft’ landscaping in the form of hanging baskets, roadside shrubbery, planted roundabouts, and – silliest of all – ‘urban farms’.

We need to face up to the economic and political truth: Herbert Girdadet, in his Schumacher Briefing publication ‘Creating Sustainable Cities’ has observed “London’s ecological footprint requires around 125 times its surface area to sustain it. If this is extrapolated for all the mega-cities that are around the world today and in the future, then it is easy to see we have serious problems… our present way of life in the developed countries is at the cost of others’ ability to develop. Our current model of development just doesn’t work.”

The thesis being offered here is thus rooted in concerns for sustainability – not in the sense of ‘greening’ the urban environment, but reflecting the need to contain it, to intensify development within its confines, in order to free up the surrounding hinterland in such a way as to balance its consumption patterns. In other words, at the same time as we urbanise our cities, ridding them of the ridiculous traces of our agricultural ancestry, we need to be ruralising the countryside, eliminating clusters or lines of suburban development, and providing the space we need in which to grow crops and fuel: we don’t need to extract any more minerals, and we certainly don’t need to use acres of land as landfill sites for our rubbish: all the materials we need have already been dug up, and now need only to be recovered and recycled.

Let’s consider the countryside a little further before we return to the main issue, the implications of the thesis in terms of the twenty-first century city’s visual appearance. There is absolutely nothing new in the observation that the countryside is not exactly the unspoilt product of all-natural forces. Even the earth’s wilderness areas, including the ice-caps and sea-beds, we are daily reminded, are showing increasing evidence of human intervention. This process is not just the product of industrialisation and pollution. It has been going on for as long as civilisation itself: in his major poem ‘Works and Days’ dating from around 700bc, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod presented the relationship between human life and the world of nature in terms of a tough agricultural routine, in which humans need continually to work in order to preserve some purchase in a world that, while not necessarily hostile to us, is not really made for us. And it was Hesiod’s model that was picked up by Virgil in Roman times, whose 4-volume didactic poem ‘Georgics’ (meaning “working the land”) presents human beings in a more profoundly estranged state – he goes disconcertingly deep in stripping away the usual equation of the agricultural with the ‘natural’ life.

We all know where the false vision came from, of course. It was Rousseau in his conception of ‘the noble savage’ – leading to the romantic movement’s depictions of people living in harmony with nature, culminating in the hippies’ notions of self-sufficient communes, The Good Life comedy series, and the present-day fantasy of carbon-trading and ISO 14001 systems as means of reversing the impact of humans upon the natural environment. Even the late Ernest Gellner, the philosopher and social anthropologist, author of ‘Words and Things’ (1958) – a great title for a book, seems to have held a view of ‘agrarian man’ as inhabitant of some kind of naturalised agricultural state, but he is at least clear in respect of the distinctive characteristics of ‘industrialised man’:

“Agrarian man can be compared with a natural species which can survive in the natural environment. Industrial man can be compared with an artificially produced or bred species which can no longer breathe effectively in the nature-given atmosphere, but can only function effectively and survive in a new, specially blended and artificially sustained air or medium.”

If we were to re-write Hesiod’s ‘Theogony’ today, we’d need to attribute the cosmic order of things, making life on earth possible, not to the gods but to our heating and ventilating engineers.

As we are endlessly reminded through TV programmes such as Ray Mears or Tribe, we urban-dwellers of the twenty-first century simply could not survive if suddenly relocated in an all-natural wilderness area, even if it were unaffected by global warming and pollution.

I’m not simply positing a modernist thesis in order to displace a romantic view. My concern is actually with the look of the city, its physical appearance. The picturesque remains our delight – it’s just that it is no longer concerned with gothic follies or classical remains in woody landscapes, but that we need to celebrate instead the ruins of warehouses and factories in amongst the built environment. We want to see the services exposed, to be visibly surrounded and cradled by the infrastructure systems that make urban life possible. There is a gothic element to this of course – or is it just a verbal association that we are talking of Gotham City as depicted in that great film Batman Returns? We are picking up, of course, from Fritz Lang’s vision of ‘Metropolis’ and from the Futurists’ aspirations, but not so much as manifestos or propaganda – just the reflection that, in retrospect, they were in fact right, their visions have become today’s reality. Their prophecies can no longer serve as templates for designers, they are simply rehearsals for the real environments which we now inhabit. They have given us the language, familiarised us with the visual effects we should expect – the parallax view in which more distant skyscrapers slide past slowly in comparison with those immediately in front, the dominant experience of the city from moving transport rather than from static power-points – in other words, Siegfried Gideon’s depiction of time-space continuum, fragmented, multi-layered …