We\u2019re carving out new public realm, growing new communities, creating space, place, waste. I calm my inner Cassandra\u2019s bleatings about an imminent recession by reminding myself that this time we\u2019ve got oversight committees, stakeholder working groups and design managers, whatever they are.<\/p>\n
It smells like exactly the kind of \u2006\u2018trust me guys, I\u2019m wearing my moss-coloured blazer and arrived here on a Brompton\u2019 nimbyism that packs out commuter trains and squeezes another floor plate into the maximum envelope.<\/p>\n
Normally I\u2019m not terribly abreast of these developments before lift shafts start sprouting up, broadcasting their floor levels in alarmingly cheerful infographics. Such projects turn up in the Part 3 case studies I assess, and occasionally my commute confronts me with an efficiently channelled down-blast of wind from a 19-storey tower that I swear wasn\u2019t there yesterday. Luckily for me, you\u2019re never far from the sheltering embrace of a Pret a Manger.<\/p>\n
Yet this week, owing to unprecedented winter flu\/burn-out absenteeism, I found myself substituted into not one, not two, but three masterplan \u2018oversight\u2019 meetings, each for a \u2018one-of-a-kind\u2019 urban opportunism masterplan. We\u2019re in a large yet over-full meeting room. Just me, the client, their agent, their assistant and a rag-tag bunch of other design \u2018gents\u2019, struggling to get a PDF to open in full screen mode. Sigh.<\/p>\n
The landscape designer goes first, brave chap, and his painfully artistic watercolour sketches are immediately eviscerated. There\u2019s no authority, no spunk, no vision! Come on man, what are you, only appointed for Stage 2? Oh right, you actually are. Well, that\u2019s no excuse! We only get what we want out of the GLA if we sell the dream!<\/p>\n
The client\u2019s nasal tones whine on. People need to show some leadership for this new city quarter! We need \u2026 narrative!<\/p>\n
His beady eyes swivel round the room, looking for the next weakest member to latch onto. I\u2019ve found a pen on the floor that I really must pick up. Thing is, I\u2019m split. On the one hand, he\u2019s not wrong. If you\u2019re ripping up an entire city quarter, there needs to be a damned good reason. For me, it needs to be better than the existing, but also catalyse a better future city.<\/p>\n
But on the other hand, that\u2019s not quite what he\u2019s saying. He\u2019s preaching contextual relevance while jabbing at baby-fied diagrams of a rudimentary building mass, haloed by expressive radial lines that squeak as if the building is surprised by its own audacious scale. He\u2019s shouting about giving back to the city while his left hand gestures wildly at a plan with fat, wobbly arrows that denote where real, living people can and can\u2019t go, depending on how much they pay for their flat.<\/p>\n
He punctuates his soliloquy on community values by slapping each of the fluffy, evergreen, cartoon trees that hide a three storey-high plant room wall, blocking light out of the only \u2018public\u2019 use on site.<\/p>\n
This is not my circus, not my monkeys, so on one level I am watching this with the same horrified fascination that I watch any natural disaster unfold. But, as an urban dweller and a project outsider, I\u2019m aware that we really don\u2019t need more single-aspect, two-bed apartments stacked neatly on unlovable brownfield sites.<\/p>\n
Our cities are creaking at the edges, gasping to absorb the lessons of the pandemic and struggling to accommodate more sustainable, kind, humane ways of living. Yet these guys seem to have rebounded to beyond pre-pandemic cruelties, debating how to gate-off public pathways at night \u2018to keep them nice\u2019 and push blue badge parking to the perimeter because \u2018they don\u2019t belong here\u2019. What next, re-opening the mines?<\/p>\n
\u2018Come on guys, it\u2019s 2023, the year of big vision!\u2019 the client extols. He might be right. But as I sit in my corner I wonder: why are these people the only ones who get to dream?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We\u2019re carving out new public realm, growing new communities, creating space, place, waste. I calm my inner Cassandra\u2019s bleatings about an imminent recession by reminding myself that this time we\u2019ve got oversight committees, stakeholder working groups and design managers, whatever they are. It smells like exactly the kind of \u2006\u2018trust me guys, I\u2019m wearing my …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9844,"featured_media":684861,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"ep_exclude_from_search":false},"categories":[745],"tags":[1370,72352],"yoast_head":"\n