Designing London's Public Spaces

By Susannah Hagan

Those involved in the creation of public spaces think a great deal about the users of those spaces. Users think little, if at all, about those who create them. There are many: planners, developers, investors, contractors, special-interest groups, governments from local to national, and above all in this book, designers. The complex sets of relationships in which the designer is enmeshed remain largely unknown, as does the effect of those relationships on the public spaces they design. In "super-diverse" cities like London, a successful public realm, where people can be together in trust and tolerance, is essential. A city's commitment to design quality indicates a commitment to civic health. In the interests of such commitment, the book asks: What should public space "design intentions" be today?; Who is "the public" of public spaces?; What can/should designers do to protect the "publicness" of public spaces?; Was state financed public space mid-20th century of any higher quality than privately financed public space today?; How significant is the shift from commissioning architects to design public spaces mid-20th century to commissioning landscape architects and public realm architects today?; Does emptiness in public spaces have a value?; Does retail in public spaces narrow the range of people visiting them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Release date: Mar 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781848224179

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Introduction

Producers of public spaces think a great deal about the users of those spaces. Users think little, if at all, about the (other) producers. There are many: planners, developers, investors, contractors, special interest groups, government from local to national, and above all, as far as this book is concerned, designers. This multiplicity of actors goes a long way to explaining the user’s interest in use rather than production. The fiendishly complex sets of relationships in which the designer is enmeshed remain largely unknown, as does the effect of these relationships on the resulting public spaces.

For better or worse, people and relationships are much more crucial in producing successful public spaces in Britain than structures and protocols. The challenge now is to increase the number of competent, if not talented, producers involved, and spread best practice. It remains extraordinary that in a country with design talent as deep as it is wide, the built environment is as third rate as it is. This challenge is beginning to be answered at city and local authority levels by aiming squarely at increasing their own expertise and skill base. This is important because the production of the physical public realm – public circulation and public spaces – has been, and probably always will be, a predominantly public-private undertaking in this country, and the public partner should be at least equal, if not dominant, in that partnership.

When venturing into the subject of public space, one enters a vast discourse, of which physical public space is only one part. Over the past four decades in particular, there has been a growing anxiety, both in academia and in popular media, over the privatisation and/or commercialisation and/or securitisation of public space – digital as well as physical. In urban terms, there are narratives that for decades have been dominated, not by architectural commentators and historians, but by social and political scientists and geographers. These have produced seminal work united by an assumption that ‘public’ and ‘public space’ refer to certain political, social and spatial conditions that we once enjoyed but are now being eroded. This is held to be a loss of civil liberties, which include the ability to assert the citizen’s ‘right to the city’ (Henri Lefebvre), and a contestation with established power in the public arena, or in what the political theorist Chantal Mouffe calls ‘agonistic space’.¹

In response, this book looks beyond the abstraction of ‘public space’ to the richness and particularity of public spaces, in which the picture is neither so uniform nor so uniformly dark. In this context, the term ‘public spaces’ refers to intentionally designed, hard-paved, civic spaces, a subdivision of both ‘open space’ and the ‘public realm’. Open space can also include beaches, parks and public gardens, and indeed is often used to refer exclusively to green spaces. The public realm is an even larger category, embracing open space, public space and circulation space, as well as virtual space – the media, the web. Designers tend to refer to the physical public realm as ‘the public realm’, mentally excluding the virtual. It’s as well for the reader to remember this when these designers are quoted referring to ‘the public realm’. It’s physical public space they are discussing, together with public circulation (streets, pavements etc.).

* * *

What does the word ‘public’ actually mean to designers, and in fact, to the rest of us? Hannah Arendt’s definition in her book The Human Condition is useful:

… the word ‘public’ signifies the world itself, insofar as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place within it … It is related … to the human artefact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those that inhabit the man-made world together.²

The public, for Arendt, is the public realm, physical and virtual, and the public realm is ‘man-made’, and therefore closely connected to architecture and urban design.

Another important aspect of Arendt’s definition is the idea of ‘public’ being ‘common to us all’. This idea is central to most conceptions of the public and to debates about public space. But is ‘all’ really all? If not, then who is it? Who ‘co-constitutes’ public space? In ancient Greece, home of al fresco political debate, ‘all’ were property-owning men. In the post-war welfare state settlements of Europe, ‘all’, in the words of Aldo van Eyck, were ‘each man and all men’,³ which included women and children, at least as an afterthought. This was entirely in keeping with Enlightenment/modernist conceptions of universal suffrage, universal man, universal reason, and a universal architecture in cities arranged according to a universal order.

Within this dispensation, public spaces represent this universality, but how to do so without denying difference and individual identity? Arendt answers this by recognising difference within the same ‘common world’:

The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself … For though the common world is the common meeting ground of all, those who are present have different locations in it … Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position. This is the meaning of public life …⁴

Again, the public realm, ‘the common meeting ground’, is both virtual and physical. Physical public spaces enable a coming together of people as ‘the public’ while simultaneously maintaining their individual distinctiveness. It allows for different publics in the same spaces. In this way, the Enlightenment ideal of universality maintains continued relevance by, ideally, offering access to all, and individuality to all. The use of public space has always been conditional, and such conditions are set by public and private owners. The list of things one may not do in public parks is as voluminous as any dreamed up by private corporations for their plazas. Sometimes these conditions apply, not to everyone’s behaviour within a public space, but to access to the public space itself, i.e. it excludes, for example, women or racial minorities. The universality of the public, therefore, is not universally recognised, and yet the etymology of the word ‘public’ suggests that it should be. ‘Public’ is late Middle English, from the Latin ‘publicus’, a blend of ‘poplicus’ (of the people) and ‘pubes’ (adult).⁵ The meaning of ‘public’ includes:

concerning the people as a whole

open to or shared by all the people of an area or country

provided by the state rather than a private entity or individual.⁶

The word ‘people’ is Middle English. ‘People’ are the ‘citizens of a country, especially when considered in relation to those who govern them, those without special rank or position in society’.⁷ So public space is space for those without special rank, or less dismissively, for ‘the people as a whole’,⁸ for everyone. And ‘the people as a whole’ is the way most designers in the West still unreflectively define ‘public’. In common usage, therefore, the term ‘public space’ has much more to do with who uses it than who produces it. Production is covered only by who pays for it: ‘public’ means ‘provided by the state rather than a private entity or individual’ – far too simple a definition for today’s distributions of ownership and management.

Is there such a thing as ‘popular’ public space, as in ‘made by the people’, not simply ‘used by the people’? Yes, but it’s not often designed space, but rather space that’s appropriated, having been designed by someone else, or not designed at all, like a field. The ‘Occupy’ movement and its appropriation of a park on Wall Street in New York, or the ‘Umbrella’ movement in Hong Kong and its appropriation of roads through the business district, were ad hoc public spaces made by a public for protest. They are also made for everyday activities – markets, raves, events, etc. Designers cannot be part of creating these – one cannot design for the ad hoc – but they need to be aware, like all those who produce the built environment, that what they do produce needs to allow similar appropriation by citizens.

If one cannot have a public space without a public, equally one cannot have a public space without a space, designed or appropriated, and historically architects have been charged with designing them. To better understand the black box of production, this book examines the social and political contexts within which designers work, the effect of that context on their designs, the designer’s internal ‘idea world’, and the role of the designer in the success or failure of public spaces. If the gold standard of intentional public space is formal order that includes possibilities for the informal, then a distinction needs to be drawn between the subversive informal (e.g. protest) and the everyday informal (e.g. people-watching). Intentional public spaces are designed for the everyday informal: our comings and goings, meetings and greetings, playing and performing. It’s the kind of activity that doesn’t threaten the status quo. The subversive informal, on the other hand, sporadically and unexpectedly tears away the veil hiding the political and social order on which this everyday sits: the economic and social divisions under the cheery inclusivity of a successful public space. Designers address the everyday, and the ceremonial, as one cannot design for subversion, or only in the sense of suppressing it.

There are many kinds of built environments, many kinds of public spaces, and many kinds of cultural norms applied to them. There is, for example, a very large difference between a local public space and a national, or even global, one, between a neighbourhood square and a Trafalgar Square. A recognition of the particular when examining public space is therefore essential. Of the eight London case studies of designed civic space in this book, four were begun, if not finished, mid-twentieth century, and four were completed in the last decade. It can be predicted with confidence that not a single reader will agree completely with the choice of examples, and that others would have done as well. Nevertheless, this selection permitted as comprehensive a view as possible of the complexity of public spaces within the confines of this research. They cover public and private sector designers; public and private sector clients; a range of programmes (commercial, cultural, civic, retail); a range of scales, from intimate to infrastructural; spaces that were popular/unpopular immediately and spaces that were popular/unpopular later; designs with realised intentions and designs with thwarted intentions; innovative typologies and more traditional ones. They also provide some examples of interior as well as exterior public spaces; some that were inserted into existing fabric, and some that emerged from a bomb site:

POST-WAR

South Bank Arts Centre, Architects’ Department, London County Council: large space/public architect/public client (municipal)

Economist Plaza, Alison and Peter Smithson: small space/private architect/private client

Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre, Boissevain and Osmond: commercial space/private architect/public-private clients

British Library forecourt, Colin St John Wilson and Partners: medium spaces (interior and exterior)/private architect/public client (national)

CONTEMPORARY

Granary Square, King’s Cross Central, Allies and Morrison/Porphyrios Associates and Townshend Landscape Architects: large space/private architects/private client

Whitecity, Ian Ritchie Architects, and Westfield London, Westfield: large commercial spaces (interior and exterior)/private architects/private clients

Barking Town Square, Barking Central, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM) and muf: medium space/private architects/private clients

Connected Croydon/West Croydon Interchange public realm, Croydon Council/East architecture (lead): many spaces/private architects/public client (local authority)

Within these examples, there is a multiplicity of public-private relationships between designers, developers, planners, local authorities and citizens. The balance of power shifts with each project. This was as true post-war as it is now, and as will become evident, individuals and personal relationships, whatever the comprehensiveness of prescribed procedures, are inescapably central to design excellence.

I.1 Locations of seven of the eight London case studies; West Croydon Interchange is to the south, not shown on this map

The case studies also allow an assessment of the present through the lens of a particular past. Just how particular is not something generally appreciated. Far from being an increasingly distant and lamented norm, the social contract in place in post-war Britain – the interventionist welfare state – was an exception it took two cataclysmic World Wars to bring about in a rigidly stratified, imperialist nation profoundly resistant to change. In an architectural context, the power and privilege of the architect as an agent of the state in its re-formation of the built environment, was also an extraordinary exception. Contemporary architects’ bemoaning of a lost paradise of influence and centrality is pointless. The paradise emerged from a historically specific hell. Today, it is all about tactical alliances.

By focusing on a group of actors frequently ignored in discussion about public space, and by using a historical perspective, the book seeks to open up the current conversation beyond an exclusive focus on use. This enables a more comprehensive view of why things are the way they are in London and elsewhere in relation to the privatisation of public space, and what designers of public spaces can and cannot do about it. Questions are asked that are either not asked enough or not asked at all. For example:

What should public space ‘design intentions’ be today?

Who is ‘the public’ of public spaces?

What can/should designers do to protect the ‘publicness’ of public spaces?

Was state-financed public space mid-twentieth century of any higher quality than privately financed public space today?

How significant is the shift from commissioning architects to design public spaces mid-twentieth century to commissioning landscape architects and public realm architects today?

Does emptiness in public spaces have a value?

Does the commercialisation of public spaces narrow the range of people visiting them?

In the 1960s, Louis Kahn described the architect as ‘guardian of the public realm’.⁹ Today, with the retreat of the state, that role is much more important, but architects cannot possibly guard it alone. Today, they need to collaborate with others, all of whom should voice the ‘city scale aspirations’,¹⁰ not of those in power, but of ordinary citizens, unless those in power happen to be in step with the rest of us. Architects can achieve this by the way in which they translate the cultural complexities of public space into the tectonics of public spaces. Such translations do not guarantee success – the wrong design decisions can be made with the best of intentions – but when performed in collaboration, they can help designers chart a path between claiming too much agency or too little.

Finally, why London? Why not a range of cities, even an international range, to take in different cultural attitudes to the use of public space? Because this book isn’t primarily about use, but about production. The actors involved in producing public spaces in London, and the public spaces themselves, are so varied that there is a world of relevance in this one remarkable city.

1 The Importance of Design

The measure of a city’s greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.

John Ruskin¹

The term ‘public space’ isn’t very old. Post-war, one talked of the need in cities for ‘open space’, predominantly green, and ‘civic space’, predominantly hard-paved. ‘Public space’ as a term seems to have emerged more fully in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, with a new emphasis on its ability to attract investment, as well as its civic virtues. Civic public spaces are unavoidably declarative. The government of the day, at whatever level, is involved in creating or preserving room for them, and has a stake in what these spaces ‘say’, even if they are produced by the private sector (developers and their investors).

Public spaces also carry an emotional investment. The local public realm, whether streets or squares or parks, is an extension of our dwellings, where we can meet neighbours on more neutral ground and contain outsiders. Civic public spaces, on the other hand, are cosmopolitan in terms of scale and visitor, and although they can also serve as extensions of our domestic lives and carry our individual memories, they fulfil other functions too – public culture, commemoration, celebration and protest. These enactments can be ‘for’ certain groups more than others, but there is in the term ‘civic’ an implication (in democracies), that any citizen, from the city in question or elsewhere, can in some way participate.

Within the confines of this book, the public realm is taken to be physical, comprising public space and public circulation. Public space here is taken to be hard-paved and civic, because it was, and still is, the province of the architect (fig.1.1). There is of course also digital public space, and informal as well as formal public space. These variants are also found under the term ‘public realm’ but are not discussed here. Even if, however, one is confining a discussion of public space to a particular kind, there are further subdivisions. Matthew Carmona created a useful taxonomy of sub-categories such as ‘neglected space’, ‘twenty-four-hour space’, ‘exclusionary space’ and ‘parochial space’ (one type of user rather than all types).² These are internal as well as external, and one of the most noticeable changes in the past decade has been the evolution of ‘third space’, internal semi-public spaces, as in the circulation areas of the British Library and the National Theatre, where people who do not use the library (fig.1.2) or the theatre set themselves up for the day to work, use the Wi-Fi, and meet others free of charge.

1.1 Hard-paved civic space outside the Greater London Authority Building (left)

1.2 An informal class in the hall of the British Library

Public space can be formal, that is intentional and designed, or informal, an appropriation of some element of the public realm meant for one purpose and taken over by a public for another. This unplanned-for activity can be trivial, like a rave, or more subversive – a political demonstration or occupation of property, in which the design professions play no part, except perhaps as participants. Within formal spaces, therefore, the highest level of inclusion possible should be aimed for, because the social and physical health of a city is measured, among other things, by the condition and use of its public spaces. They are a barometer of the city’s success or failure in promoting a social environment open and stable enough to tolerate, if not embrace, difference.

Achieving this has much to do with the management of a public space, but also with its design. There is a host of ‘design guides’ produced by both central and local governments which present the design of public space as a spatial problem to be solved spatially, addressing questions of physical access, connectivity, scale, ornament, materials, etc. Certainly, such a meat-and-potatoes approach simplifies things, as with this definition of the urban square:

Square:

A formal public space no larger than a block and located at focal points of civic importance fronted by key buildings, usually hard paved and providing passive recreation.³

This may be sufficient to produce the artefacts themselves, and perhaps the design of public space is simply irrelevant to our current anxieties about the privatisation and commodification of public space, addressing instead the need for a pleasant microclimate and attractive physical features:

[B]eyond offering protection from sun, wind and rain, … the design of the public space needs to be anthropometrically and ergonomically sensitive … [P]hysical characteristics that can contribute to comfort in public spaces include sitting space … generous sidewalk width, trees, shade and shelter, a high degree of articulation with nooks, corners, small