Polypipe Civils & Green Urbanisations comments on The Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission’s final report
Wednesday 5th February 2020
It was with great anticipation that the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission’s final report was published on January 30th. The report, entitled Living with Beauty, which was led amongst others, by the recently departed Sir Roger Scruton. It perfectly encapsulates the new philosophy required to drive forward a pragmatic yet ambitious agenda to place beauty, community and democracy front and centre of the planning process.
It is clear from first reading that there is an attempt to reintroduce a strong moral framework, embedding a sense of what is right for a community within an innovative planning system that would be repurposed to enable citizens to refuse to accept the uninspiring, ugly, transport infrastructure focused developments, often proposed by those who believe their sole purpose is construction, not placemaking.
The report introduces eight principles required to achieve ‘beauty’ at the right density – Planning, Neighbourhoods, Regeneration, Nature, Stewardship, Education, Management and Communities. These must operate in tandem to realise successful schemes. It also makes clear that we need to reappraise our traditional attitudes to risk (2). Truer observations have rarely been articulated. Across many of the disciplines such as engineering and planning, green infrastructure and sustainable urban drainage interventions are often removed in favour of conventional yet unsightly solutions all in the name of business as usual and de-risking highways schemes. If done well, beauty and nature can be engineered into any scale of project.
The report presents the stark reality of what it terms the “scandal of left behind places” (3). If the last election has taught us nothing else, it is that vast swathes of this country feel marginalised and their ambitions and aspirations to live, work and play in safe, healthy and aesthetic environments are being ignored in favour of the false idol of continued economic growth and volume housebuilding at any cost. What good are more homes and more development if they are unhealthy, a threat to existing biodiversity, uninspiring, and most importantly, unaffordable? Green infrastructure and nature hold the key to revitalising these “left behind” places. The fastest way to inject feelings of productivity and cohesiveness into any community is to provide a visible statement of investment and care in the form of accessible amenity space. Beauty should have no price tag. It is also heartening to see that the report makes explicit reference to “happiness”. This nebulous, highly subjective term that we often shy away from co-opting into political argumentation is absolutely vital to the long-term prosperity of a post-Brexit Britain. We can all agree that beauty over pure utility, nature over concrete elicit the most primitive and fundamental of human responses – joy.
Beauty, according to the report, can be integrated at multiple scales from buildings to entire communities (10). At Polypipe we would certainly advocate the integration of nature and the beautiful in, on and around the building and create networks and connections of beauty to ensure every experience on a new development, brings its inhabitants into contact with our natural environment – an ambition that lies at the heart of Green Urbanisation. This in turn will promote another key feature of what the report advocates – “active stewardship” (11).
This can all be achieved at the local scale and the report’s emphasis on both changes to the NPPF and the use of local plans and design codes is critical (69). Another key innovation is the novel concept of digital feedback (120). A traffic light system whereby passers by can rate a building according to its aesthetic value. This could be extended to capture the public’s response to green infrastructure and SUDs interventions to strengthen the arguments for greater provision of green and blue roofs, urban trees etc. Indeed, the report advocates the planting of over two million street trees. The provision of urban trees lends itself to an additional plea the report makes for the centrality of “healthy streets” (104). At Polypipe we are constantly advocating a hybrid approach to street scene transformation using geocellular systems and intelligent planting to clean the air and manage water at source.
The report also focuses on one of the key barriers to implementation, the short termism of the current master planning process. So often long-term benefits are disincentivised through the existing planning and taxation processes. The report proposes several mechanisms by which developments , including those with permitted development rights can be transformed into places with stewardship and long term provision of beauty as standard.
The report utilises the word ‘resilient’ in the section on the future of our high streets ( 96). We at Polypipe are passionate about all scales of projects and understand well that solutions to treat and manage water, provide social spaces, to integrate nature into mixed use schemes will constitute the future of our high streets. Currently our high streets are becoming treeless monoliths, the same brands, not capturing the uniqueness of place that will encourage footfall and independents back into our town centres. We have to use beauty and landscape to reintroduce a sense of occasion into the day to day activities our high streets should be supporting.
Great detail regarding cleaning the air and the current barriers to integrating street trees into the public realm is provided (pp 105-111). Specific reference is made to the charges Councils make to accept a street tree and the issues of integrating trees with below ground infrastructure and utilities. Polypipe has developed specific solutions below ground to manage these difficult conflicts.
Value engineering is tackled head on (124). This process is a false friend to many developers who often invest more time and energy and certainly money trying to find innovative ways around providing landscape and beauty rather than working proactively to embrace new technologies and innovations that often cost less and can free up land for more units.
Conclusions – Moving to a virtuous circle of regenerative development. On p.132 the report provides a deceptively simple infographic to achieve this transformative revolution in the planning process and the realisation of beautiful, democratically delivered places. The inforgraphic has four key elements – Places NOT houses, Less Opposition to New Homes, Simple and Predictable Regulation and finally, Democracy Brought Forward To Plan Making.
Drawing upon our wealth of experience at Polypipe, working across the public and private sector divide we can analyse and provide solutions to enable those four constituent parts of that virtuous circle. Using solutions below and above ground to support green infrastructure and SUDs we can help developers create places not merely homes, we can work with communities to inject co-creative of landscapes into any project. Through high quality landscape, using unique solutions, we can remove staunch opposition to development.
by Charlotte Markey