Sustainable Bristol

City Design

Design challenges for the Bristol City region and inspiring urban design. How do we redesign and re-engineer our cities for successful and prosperous sustainable living?

Let’s move the Council to south Bristol

by Peter Madden

02 August 2011

How do we spread the growth, and share the benefits of city regeneration? Forum for the Future’s CEO, Peter Madden ponders this question in today’s Planet Bristol column in the Bristol Evening Post, and comes up with a radical suggestion :-

I’ve been thinking about what’s the best way to give a boost to South Bristol and help it improve economically. And I’ve come up with the answer: move the City Council there!

As you’ll know if you live or visit there, lots of parts of South Bristol aren’t in great shape. They are economically disadvantaged, with much higher unemployment than other areas. While other parts of the city are fairly successful economically – at least compared to other parts of England – neighbourhoods like Bedminster, Hengrove and Hartcliffe still lag behind.

Over the years, lots of regeneration money has been ploughed in. But this has not really changed the
fundamentals.

Some say a new ring road will solve the problems, however I’m not convinced. A new rapid bus route would certainly help in joining-up to the city centre. And there is lots of development around Hengrove Park, which is a cause for optimism. But maybe it’s time for a rethink?

One thing would really symbolise the Council’s commitment to tackling deprivation, spreading the growth and sharing the benefits of success: for it to move itself to South Bristol.

This would bring jobs into the area in a very direct sense. Bristol City Council employs around 18,000 people, and is one of the biggest employers in the South West. More of those staff would locate in South Bristol; and more people from the area would hopefully find jobs with the council.

There would the boost of all that lunchtime trade, the sandwiches, the pints of milk and loaves of bread. There would be the coffees in the morning and the beers after work.

Perhaps most importantly, a greater number of people would have first-hand experience of this part of
Bristol. It is all too easy to remain cocooned in Clifton and the city centre. Senior council folk would get a personal feel for the area and its problems – as would all the people that have to visit the Council to do business. I’m willing to bet that the streets would soon get spruced-up and the bus services would be rapidly improved.

What impact would this have on the council? There would certainly be some valuable central Bristol buildings to sell off, providing some much-needed cash. And if the move made sure that council staff were located together, it could even lead to a more efficient organisation.

Businesses do these kind of moves all the time. And other councils around the country have successfully
relocated into new premises. Where Bristol could really take a lead is to do such a move with the explicit intention of regenerating a whole  area and bringing it more fully into the life of the city.

The only question now is where in South Bristol should it go?

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Retrofitting cities to be more sustainable

by Laurence Copleston

11 February 2011

The task of retrofitting our cities is set to become an important part of managing our transition to a low carbon future.

Over half of the world’s population now live in and around cities, and this will arguably provide us with an opportunity for more efficient living. At present many of our urban areas are sprawling and inefficient, and short of tearing them down and starting anew, they present huge barriers to reducing our overall environmental impact.

So how can we improve the cities that we’ve already got? The answer lies in city scale urban retrofitting.

Engineers and urban planners have begun looking into new and innovative ways to retrofit our existing cities, in an attempt to improve their efficiency, reduce their environmental impact, and improve their quality of life for urban residents.

For many years we have focused our attention on improving our cities’ dysfunctional automobile and oil based infrastructures, but in light of an increasing depletion of global resources, we will need to move away from this urban model and encourage a design that is based upon densely populated city-hubs, transit corridors and clean renewable energy sources.

As well as building up hub areas, this implies rolling back urban sprawl elsewhere to create the new green infrastructure required.

One inspirational example of this model can be seen near the US city of Minneapolis. Here, a sprawling inner-city shopping centre earmarked for re-development was instead restored to its original state, a large wetland ecosystem. In time, the site became the centre-piece of a transportation orientated mixed-use development, which focused on improving the local economy, reducing car dependence through the integration of an efficient transit system, and encouraging environmental protection.

There are other examples of retrofit developments in Portland and Madrid. And, if you are wondering how innovative design could be utilised in Bristol, there is already a great example located within the heart of our city.

Today, Queen Square is an attractive pedestrianised urban green space used for events and festivals, but until only recently, it housed one of the city’s busiest dual carriageways, dramatically dividing the historical square in two.

During this period the square’s green space was inaccessible to the public and a large number of the surrounding office buildings became vacant. The square’s potential as a positive public space had been lost.

But with the closure of the dual carriageway in 1993, the square became the focus of an exciting proposal to reclaim the land and return the historic square to its former glory. The restoration has led to an environmental, economic and social revival of the surrounding area and has improved the access for pedestrians and cyclists within the city centre.

We can learn an important lesson from these examples. Although a road, or a shopping centre, may have dominated an area for many years; these structures do not need to stay in place forever. Through creative design, cities can be retrofitted to incorporate efficient design systems that will improve the way we live our lives, and help to reduce our collective impact on the global environment.

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Can Bristol Score a Green Goal?

by Peter Madden

04 January 2011

New Year is a time for reconciliation and thinking afresh, and one area where views in the city have got entrenched is around the new Bristol City football stadium. On one side are those who argue that the club deserves 21st-century facilities. On the other side are those who want to protect precious green belt from sprawl. But could an innovative stadium that make a positive environmental contribution provide a way forward asks Peter Madden the CEO of Forum for the Future in his New Year column for the Bristol Evening Post.

Progress on the stadium is blocked because the land in question has been designated as a village green. There is also valid opposition on wider environmental grounds. So, here is my question: if the new stadium could fulfil the major functions of a village green and be built in a way that enhances overall environmental quality, should it then be given support?

What characterises a village green? The dictionary definition says they are “used for grazing and sometimes for community events. Some may also have a pond, originally for watering stock. The green is traditionally at a central location and provides an open-air meeting place for the people of a village.”

So, what of this could a new stadium incorporate? Open green space – if not for grazing livestock, then at least for walking dogs, running and playing, or free events.

Could the stadium make a positive environmental contribution? Could it be carbon neutral, through generating its own clean energy? Could it enhance biodiversity, through areas protected for wildlife and a ‘green roof’ with plants growing on it? Could traffic problems be lessened by making tickets cheaper if people walk or use the park and ride?

There are educational possibilities, too. If it was a state-of-the-art environmental stadium, facilities could be used to engage City supporters and other Bristolians – as well as visiting fans – on green issues, further multiplying the positive impacts.

Other clubs are doing this. Ipswich Town went carbon neutral. And lowly Dartford FC built the UK’s first sustainable stadium from renewable timber with a grass roof and sunk two metres below ground level to reduce noise and light pollution.

So, why shouldn’t Bristol have the greenest major football stadium in the country, a beautiful building that shows what can be done, is useful to the local community as well as the fans, which provides the benefits of a village green and has a zero environmental footprint?

The purse-holders might worry about extra costs. Yet evidence shows that investments in energy efficiency and minimising waste have good paybacks. And long planning wrangles may prove even more costly.

Are the club up for meeting such ambitious environmental goals? If so, this might be one way forward.

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Rethinking Castle Park

by Fran Forman

05 May 2010

Architecture students at the University of the West of England (UWE) recently completed a year long exercise studying Castle Park in the centre of Bristol.

Today a much loved green space in the heart of the city, the area of course started life as Bristol’s medieval castle, before being rebuilt as additional town centre quay side merchants housing, and even in the 1970s used as a shopping centre car park.

The students looked at regeneration to ‘repair the edges’ of the space, with the reuse of fringe building designs that would improve community use of the area, protect and enhance the green space, and even improve links across the dual carriageway that dissects the City Centre from Old Market.

A key goal was to encourage more people to explore and visit the park by providing pathways into the park and structures that encouraged relaxation or social activities.  The students also worked closely with a professional landscape gardener to understand how their architectural plans could incorporate and protect green spaces within the park.

Posters of the student’s project work and conceptual plans were exhibited in Bristol’s Architecture Centre who also hosted a debate in February. The debate attracted a wide audience, including students, developers, community groups, architects, landscape gardeners and academics.

Practitioners and students also discussed whether the current Broadmead Shopping Centre car park could be replaced with a civic building that was entertainment focused, rather than primarily commercial, to further enhance the space.

Roger Mortimer explained a design option to widen roads, add a fine line of trees and then transform them into a shared surface, with no cars after 10am from Bristol Bridge to Wine Street.

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Learning to live in cities

by Peter Madden

17 April 2010

According to the UN, the world reached a historic tipping point in 2007: for the first time, we became a majority urban world. This trend is set to intensify. And by 2030, two thirds of our species will be city-dwellers.

The environmental implications of this are enormous, making some issues (public transport, waste minimisation and low-carbon housing) easier to deal with and others (total energy consumption, air pollution and overall quality of life) a great deal harder.

As mega-cities such as Mumbai, Sao Paulo and Shanghai grow we have no choice but to learn to live together in sustainable ways. This will mean providing a high quality of life for all urban residents. It will also mean reducing the impact that cities have on the wider world.

The impact of cities tends to extend beyond their population or geographical area, with urban areas having a disproportionate environmental impact on the rest of the world. London, for example, has an ecological footprint 293 times its geographical area (that’s a land-mass roughly twice the size of the UK!).

The world’s major cities will face a range of major challenges over the coming decades. All of our cities need secure supplies of water, energy and food to survive. Two years ago, with global agricultural shortages and commodity spikes, UK decision makers got very worried about food security. ‘MI5’, our security services, said we were potentially just ‘four meals from anarchy’. In southern Australia many areas face acute water shortages and water storage levels are on the front page of the newspaper in Melbourne every day. And whether you believe that oil will run out sooner or later, it is clear that our cities are very oil reliant, not just for transport in the cities themselves, but also for the agriculture and global supply chains on which they depend.

And overlaying – and intensifying – all of these pressures is climate change. Cities will have to deal with not only with the policy responses such as more expensive carbon, but also the physical impacts. Throughout human history we have we built our major settlements on rivers, estuaries and coasts. Sea level rise, storms and floods are just some of the impacts they will have to contend with. For cities like Sydney, one of the major impacts might be flood water backing up through the drainage system.

It is clear that the world has to learn to live together in cities in ways that work for people and the environment. We won’t survive without new thinking and more creative approaches. We will need completely new ways to live, work, produce and consume. That gives us, perhaps more than anything else, a challenge to innovate.
Forum for the Future has been working on innovation and sustainable cities for a number of years, helping city authorities, for example, innovate new low carbon services for their citizens.

We have found that there are particular issues when you are designing for cities. It is relatively easy to build new developments more sustainably, starting with a blank sheet of paper. Places such as Masdar – a new ‘sustainable city’ being constructed in desert outside Abu Dhabi in the desert– is being built from scratch using the newest technologies.

We will, of course, learn important lessons from such development. But a huge amount of what we have to do – particularly in the developed world – is to retrofit existing cities. We need to re-engineer cities that have been built up over hundreds of years. Often this will be through overlaying layers of digital information on the physical infrastructure to help a city function more efficiently.

Rather than designing individual products or services, for urban areas we need to design whole systems and rethink the infrastructure in fundamental ways. This goes beyond the technological innovations – such as electric cars or hydrogen buses – to social and institutional innovation – such as local food schemes or congestion charging.

And leadership is vital. Institutional politics often seem to get in the way in cities, partly because the governance structures often do not map well to the actual issues a city faces. It is, of course, preferable to have leadership and vision from the top but sometimes it can come from businesses or community groups, who help to develop a shared vision and a collective sense of where the city needs to go.

In many places, the city government itself is taking the lead. Stockholm, which was designated Europe’s first ‘Green Capital’ last year, is a great example of this. The City of Stockholm has a holistic vision, combining growth with sustainable development for the benefit of its 800,000 citizens. Some 95 % of the population live less than 300 metres from green areas. All trains and inner city buses run on renewable fuels. Green house gas emissions have been reduced by 25 % since 1990, and the city council has the ambitious target of becoming wholly independent of fossil fuels by 2050.

In Melbourne, I saw a smart, but simple, innovation by the City Council. On the wide streets, they’ve moved the row of parked cars out a few feet into the road. This creates a gap between the cars and the pavement. So, instead of cyclists being up against the traffic, they have their own safe space. This doesn’t require extra space, but makes cleverer use of the existing road.

In other cities, the innovation is more bottom up. The Transition Towns movement – which began in the UK, and now has some 275 communities, including in Australia – aims to raise awareness of sustainable living and build local resilience. Communities are encouraged to seek out methods for reducing energy usage as well as increasing their own self reliance. Another grassroots initiative is prolific sprouting of urban agriculture schemes in developed world cities. In Melbourne the city farm, which was previously a rubbish tip, is just minutes from the CBD in Brunswick, and people can learn how to grow vegetables. While ‘Cultivating Community’ is responsible for the management of 20 community gardens on public housing estates across the Victorian capital.

Elsewhere, it is businesses that are driving the innovation. IBM, for example, has launched its ‘Smarter Planet’ initiative, aimed at using information technology and outsourcing to solve the major problems facing cities, at the same time as driving new business for the company. Other major companies – such as Arup, Cisco, GE and Siemens, are also see huge potential win-wins through helping to make cities more sustainable.

In the UK, Forum For The Future has launched an ambitious 10-year programme to help make Bristol the most sustainable city-region in the UK, through tackling key sustainability challenges such as making our housing more energy efficient; helping organisations cut their carbon emissions; reducing dependency on private cars; encouraging local food; and raising awareness of sustainability.

We want to create a common understanding of what it means to be a sustainable city, deliver world-class projects in key areas, and share our experience. In Australia, the Victorian Eco Innovation Lab is taking a very similar ‘catalytic’ approach.

The future of the world is urban. Because of the rapid modernisation of countries such as China and India, we are seeing the largest rural-urban migration in history. How that urban development happens will lock-in behaviours for decades. We clearly have to find different ways to live. Cities are in many ways places of opportunity – hot-houses for economic, social and cultural innovation – so they are likely to be the places where we find these solutions. It is no exaggeration to say that the global battle for sustainability will be won or lost in our cities.

sources:
Masdar image: Fast Company.com

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