Posts Tagged Public services policy
Prince Charles offers to take on key architectural planning role
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 3, 2010
Prince Charles's offer to take on architectural planning role means he could extend influence over UK's skyline
Prince Charles is poised to extend his influence over the skyline with an offer to arbitrate Britain's most significant planning applications, a role previously executed by a quango that had its funding axed in the comprehensive spending review.
The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, a charity of which he is president, is considering stepping into the breach left by the decision to withdraw funding from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, which leaves its design review role for new developments in serious doubt.
The move to offer the foundation's own design advice means the prince's favourite architects could soon be providing verdicts on plans for landmark developments, potentially altering how they are built. Cabe had steered the design of 3,000 plans including London's Olympic stadium and Shard skyscraper, as well as dozens of schools and the £1bn redevelopment of Liverpool's central shopping area. Cabe's influence has been such that local authority planners have heeded its advice seven times out of 10.
The possible move, announced by the foundation's chief executive, Hank Dittmar, has been met with dismay by leading modernist architects who fear Prince Charles may use the charity to further his preference for traditional styles of architecture and that the charity could not be held accountable for its advice. Others accepted the foundation could bring its expertise to town planning and supporters of traditional architecture said it could correct what some see as a modernist bias in the architectural establishment.
The foundation is not seeking public funding but is considering offering design reviews for a fee, using a panel of architects and other design professionals.
Paul Finch, chairman of Cabe, said the foundation's interest appeared "predatory" coming only a week after the axe fell on his funding, and as the quango's leadership prepares a bid to salvage its design review role in a slimmed down form.
Finch warned the foundation would not able to serve the wider public interest owing to its bias towards traditional forms of architecture and urban planning.
"Stylistic preferences will make it more difficult for certain building types to win planning approval," he said. "The public interest is better served by concentrating on the quality of a piece of architecture rather than style which can come down to superficial visual appearance. It comes down to whether their advice would be independent and disinterested and they obviously have a stylistic preference."
The prince's charity has increasingly pressed for greater influence over Britain's towns and cities. Under Labour it tried to persuade cabinet ministers to use Poundbury, the prince's mock Georgian village in Dorset, as a model for ecotowns; advised the Department of Health on the design of hospitals; and lobbied the Treasury, Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Department of Culture on design matters.
Dittmar says the foundation's design review panels would reflect a range of views on architectural style to fend off accusations that only traditional architecture would get the thumbs-up.
"To be credible, it would have to have democratic, independent judgment," he told Building Design magazine. "We would have to have a panel that was balanced and not exclusively traditional architects. We'd have to talk to our network and assess the market. It would need to pay for itself but we wouldn't be doing it to make money."
He told the magazine it will make a decision on whether to start bidding for design review work by Christmas.
Jim Eyre, a member of Cabe's current design review panel and the designer of the Stirling prize-winning Millennium Bridge in Gateshead, said the public and planners would struggle to feel that the foundation's advice was independent of the prince's own views.
"The prince has such a skewed and particular view of architecture it would colour their assessment of every scheme," he said.
Prince Charles enraged many architects last year when he complained directly to the Emir of Qatar about a design by the modernist architect Richard Rogers for the £3bn redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks. The Qatari development company scrapped the plan and appointed the foundation to advise on a more traditional approach instead. A high court judge described the intervention as "unexpected and unwelcome", while Rogers labelled it "totally unconstitutional".
This month Prince Charles published a book in which he attacked modernist architecture for "deliberately abandoning the grammar of harmony" which he believes "lies within us".
Letters: Kickstarting better housing design
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 11, 2010
Lynsey Hanley (Comment, 2 February) puzzles why Design for Homes has not joined in attacks on the Homes and Communities Agency's housebuilding rescue plans. She worries that the HCA awarded emergency funds to unbuilt schemes which scored badly in desktop reviews. These desktop reviews used a matrix called Building for Life, which I wrote in April 2002 so that housebuilding's many professions could have a common language for assessing how accessible, safe and welcoming a new-build development is. The matrix works well when visiting built schemes, but it can be very unreliable without a site visit supported by background knowledge. In 2008 Lynsey was one of several judges who honoured developments on the basis of Building for Life reviews. One of the "winners" is already reported in its local paper to be "a hub for antisocial behaviour a year after first residents moved in".
Building for Life is like a race meeting form card. It give you one person's calculation of the odds for success. But ultimately privileged knowledge of the track and the runners should guide your selection – which is how the HCA works with its local procurement teams. Design for Homes remains unconvinced that remote desktop reviews should be the overriding process for deciding how £1bn of public money should be wagered.
David Birkbeck
Chief executive, Design for Homes
• Your correspondents do not do justice to the Kickstart programme managed by the HCA (Letters, 5 February). While Building for Life assessments provide an important initial quality check, these are supplemented by our own local design teams. In fact we rejected 11 schemes outright on the basis of poor design quality. Kickstart is so far unlocking more than 10,000 much-needed new homes and maintaining capacity and safeguarding jobs in the housebuilding industry.
Bob Kerslake
The slums of tomorrow | Lynsey Hanley
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 2, 2010
In chasing its short-term targets for new housing, Labour is storing up a legacy of unfit homes
Channel 4, being on the cutting edge of all that's "real", has a predilection for making people live in surroundings not of their own choosing for the purpose of viewers' entertainment. It has just sent four MPs to live on council estates around Britain, with the results being broadcast, starting this week, under the boom-tish title Tower Block of Commons.
All that's needed to bring a nation's schadenfreude to a rolling boil is the footage of hapless Lib Dem Mark Oaten groaning, as he approaches his billet: "I'm hoping I'm not in a tower block. It is a bloody tower block." He goes on to describe his feelings about where he's spending a week in terms more suited to banishment during the cultural revolution. Fair enough, perhaps, given the project is intended in part as media rehabilitation for legislators.
The level of public esteem accorded to both tower blocks and politicians is, for the moment, about equal. They fester alongside charity muggers and Ryanair in what David Bowie, in the 1986 film Labyrinth, termed "the bog of eternal stench". So what would you say if you knew that the next generation of soon-to-be-loathed and unfit-for-purpose housing was being thrown up under the government's watch?
The Kickstart "housing delivery" programme, through which £400m of public money will be administered to stalled and truncated new housebuilding schemes by the Homes & Communities Agency, has been given a kicking in recent weeks by parties including the influential Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the government's adviser on building quality.
Under the first round of the programme, many schemes have been revealed as failing most of Cabe's Building for Life criteria. New developments are given ratings out of 20 according to the quality of design, surroundings, environmental credentials and likelihood of creating a sense of community. Some have scored as little as 1.5, with many others achieving 10 or less.
In effect, the government is pushing through inadequate housing schemes in order to meet its target of having built 3m new homes before 2020. Disenchanted professionals have taken to calling the programme "Building Slums for the Future" in a nod to the government's other patchy mass construction scheme, Building Schools for the Future.
Yet they're not getting the support they hoped for among other design champions. Even David Birkbeck, the chief executive of Design for Homes, an independent body, has called Kickstart "a Marshall Plan for the devastated housebuilding sector. You don't just give emergency aid to the best dressed. The HCA is right to withhold support from only the very worst".
Really? There's already plenty of appallingly unattractive and family-unfriendly new housing that's been completed during the recession without the aid of Kickstart. My favourite of these must be a high-rise orange space crumpet named The Old Bus Depot, squashed into the junction of two busy A-roads near the M6 at Lancaster. Solely comprising one- and two-bedroom flats, its balconies enjoy uninterrupted views of a PC World superstore and the bit where the A683 splits off from the A6.
Where's the commitment to usefulness, to durability and to delight, which design thinkers from Vitruvius onwards have advocated? John Healey is the latest in a long line of short-lived housing ministers for whom design and planning is just part of a new brief that has to be mastered, rather than a cause that needs pushing and defending at every turn.
Does he, like Richard Crossman in the last mass housing boom of the mid-1960s, want to push through acres of new housing that will look good for the books in the short term but fail miserably in terms of sustainability, and the wellbeing of residents? Or does he want to have a legacy so lasting that people remember your name and associate it – like Nye Bevan's – with the use of political power for democratising, rather than expedient, ends? We have long been used to talking about the health service in these kinds of epic terms. Now it's time for housing and planning to be treated with the same fundamental seriousness.
Good homes for all. That's all anyone needs to have in mind. Never mind making it "affordable" – we're the fourth richest country in the world, we can afford to build it, and subsidise it if need be. We could afford good housing in 1945; to say we can't now is like saying we can't afford to think of a future that isn't going to happen. It is. It just depends on what you want it to look like.
Architecture, Comment, Design, Housing, Politics, Public services policy, Society, The Guardian
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