Transcript: 20 questions you need to answer

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David Birkbeck:
You need somewhere for people to naturally bump into each other and introduce each other and say hi I'm your neighbour. If you just have houses on a cul-de-sac it doesn’t happen.

Wayne Hemingway:
Most of us want access to services, you know, it’s quite nice if you don’t have to get in your car and drive five or six miles to get a pint of milk or your local paper.

Dominic Church:
Well the bigger picture here is to think about whether development is taking place in the right location. So, it’s government policy to try and think about locating new homes near to existing facilities.

Yolanda Barnes:
The question of all the facilities and amenities starts to drive at the issue of place rather than just homogenous housing estates. I think as time goes on it will become a more and more important question because what it’s asking really is, is there a here here.

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Dominic Church:
So this point is really to think about what the needs of the local community really are, so you would want to understand what the demographic mix is. Do you have a lot of large families, do you have young people who might be looking for starter homes.

David Birkbeck:
It is a good opportunity to build small, medium, larger and very large units side by side by side, because of the fact that that gives you an alternative market, it gives you the opportunity that people can stay in the same place, it gives, you know, things like grandmas an opportunity to buy a flat next to their family and so on. You need to have a range in order to give people options.

Yolanda Barnes:
What we’ve done over the last decade or so is increasingly build only for what creates land value, what used to create land value, namely small apartments, sold off plan to build – to buy to let investors. This questions about mix actually addresses the issue of what people need and want in their housing, and starts to point towards a much greater variety of accommodation to meet need and demand.

David Birkbeck:
You know, what you don’t want is all families with essentially breadwinners going out to work all at the same time and everybody coming back at exactly the same time in the evening and you end up essentially with a door [?] machine. What you want is a social mix so that you’ve got people who are potentially living on their own and retired side by side with families so you’ve got 24 hour communities.

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David Birkbeck:
Mixing tenures [?] on site is never 100% popular with everybody, there’s always reservations about how it’s done. But what we know is that if you split them entirely, it’s always a disaster. If you stick all the social housing in one place it doesn’t survive, if you stick with the private sector stuff away from it, it damages the benefits of having a balance. So, we’ve put the two together and we try and muddle through. It’s not perfect, but it’s the most perfect solution we’ve got so far.

Dominic Church:
Within any given development you would want to be able to have market rate sale homes, but also homes which might be an intermediate form of ownership.

Yolanda Barnes:
The question of tenure is separate from the question of accommodation and so often people get the two intermingled. The needs of a family in terms of the size of accommodation and type of accommodation needed, is not always directly related to tenure. This is an issue that I think will come more and more to the fore as the private rented sector continues to expand as fewer people are able to afford deposits and so forth for owner occupation, and also forms of co-ownership and equity sharing start coming to the fore. We’re going to see a much greater variety of tenure, and a variety of tenure will give you a much more viable scheme because it broadens the market.

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Wayne Hemingway:
Well public transport clearly is something that’s important to a significant minority I would say at the moment, but I think that minority will become a majority.

Yolanda Barnes:
But I think it also links into the place issue and the sustainability of place that places that are built where there is existing infrastructure, transport nodes [?] are going to be more inherently sustainable to build than those that are stuck out in the middle of nowhere, quite apart from the fact that people with children, the elderly, people without access to cars, are going to need that sort of development.

David Birkbeck:
The benefit of having public transport is not because of the fact that people are desperate to go on the bus or the train every day, but it just gives them the option. And the alternative is, if you don’t give them any access to public transport and everybody has to drive absolutely everywhere and so you end up with far too many cars for your average new build development.

Wayne Hemingway:
It will be very stupid to build car dominated developments stuck in the middle of nowhere without public transport.

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Yolanda Barnes:
Environmental sustainability issues cover a wide range of features, and I think it’s interesting that some, for example, sustainable urban drainage systems can very much enhance and work together with the overall design of a place.

Wayne Hemingway:
Well, environmental impact of housing is significant and obviously it’s the duty of everybody to reduce their environmental impact.

Dominic Church:
This might be combined heat and power, it might be through creating sustainable open drainage systems, it might be through the use of flat roofs, green roofs, there might be a whole range of different features which you could include to offset the environmental impact.

Yolanda Barnes:
The issue about environmental sustainability is going to be there for a long time, this is something that future proofs the development.

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Wayne Hemingway:
Well, if we were all – wanted to be clones, then we wouldn’t all shop in different kind of shops, we wouldn’t, you know, we’d all go around in exactly the same trousers, or if you’re a woman, with exactly the same skirt, we’d all have the same haircuts unless you’re going bald, we’d all wear the same glasses, but we’re not like that. And it’s just the same with our housing.

David Birkbeck:
That question was chosen because there was a desire to try and get people to design schemes that was scheme specific, and obviously by asking that question, you could weed out a lot of examples that were standard house types where there had been no intention whatsoever to even re-elevate according to whether they’re in the north, west, east or south of England.

Dominic Church:
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel with every new housing development, so you might have relatively standard layout types within the home, you might even have standard house types which you use. But it’s important that you can use them flexibly so that you can respond appropriately to the needs of a given site.

Yolanda Barnes:
A scheme that fits in its local area, pays attention to local materials is more likely to be accepted by the local community, is more likely to stand the test of time.

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David Birkbeck:
When it comes to a new build development, one of the saddest things when you’re going to see anything say built in last 25 years, it’s often as flat as a pancake, there is no mature trees and for that first five to ten years, when you move into that scheme there’s a kind of nakedness to the site.

Wayne Hemingway:
When you’re landscape gardening you take into account the topography, so when you’re designing a housing development you’ve just got to do it, you know, you don’t just think, oh it’s flat, therefore we’ll plonk the same housing development that we did on that other bit of flat land.

David Birkbeck:
Down goes the road, the highways engineers, then in go the houses and at the end of it what you’ve got essentially is a series of hard surfaces and no softening of that. Now that question was about, you know, to what degree can we exploit what may already be there, what can we do with playing with the levels, what we can do with playing with the original trees that might be there.

Yolanda Barnes:
In commercial terms there’s great value in views, there’s great value in green space and open shared communal or private space, so there are sound commercial reasons for going down the landscaping route.

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David Birkbeck:
The question about character is devised so that – as a response to this anxiety about anywhere housing. We all know, and there’s been a lot written about it, that there was a move towards houses that actually were almost impossible to describe. The people that bought them would openly shrug their shoulders when asked what’s it look like, they’d say well it looks like all housing. And if you sort of said well, you know, give me more details, it was impossible.

Dominic Church:
If you think about places which are attractive, desirable locations which we all sort of liked to aspire to live in, many of those a very distinctive and I think that just shows the appeal that a distinctive sense the place has.

Yolanda Barnes:
The issue of character is a huge one, but I think paying attention, for example, to local materials increases the acceptability of a scheme, and also takes it away from this sort of cloned development, this idea that it could be anywhere.

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Wayne Hemingway:
Well, we’ve all probably been into a housing development to visit a friend or a relation and you can’t blooming well find your way around because it’s just like a maze with street names, the same street name goes off sideways, goes round a corner and numbering is all crazy and there’s no kind of signage to let you know, and there’s no distinct – you’re kind of looking outside the development to see if you can see a church steeple so you can orientate yourself. And that’s how our cities were built, they were built with steeples, they were built with towers so that we could orientate ourselves. So, we’ve got to start thinking about a housing development, about orientation.

Yolanda Barnes:
The legibility of a place has enormous impact on its appeal to residents, and its capacity to be long lived and loved over time as a space is claimed by inhabitants. So, I think the layout and legibility has a lot to do with it being a place that’s going to be lived in and loved.

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Dominic Church:
If you can create a network of streets which creates a very clear sequence of spaces which we can all easily recognise, it makes for a neighbourhood which is more workable as well because you have less spaces of potential conflict because people know what’s public, people know what’s private.

David Birkbeck:
It’s very simple, I mean, we all know the difference between a place where the architects have essentially designed, or the builder has essentially designed a series of buildings and the track that rounds round them follows the building line and where the highways engineer has designed the road and the buildings have been put round it, you know, one is very responsive to the pedestrian and the other appears to be laid out in such a way to keep everything away from the car.

Dominic Church:
So, if you look at historical forms of development, you’ll find that we’ve done this very well in the past. So, we’ve managed to create lots of networks of terraced houses, for example, which have very clear front spaces to them, it’s very clear where the back garden is, it’s very clear what the public and private spaces are.

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Wayne Hemingway:
We’ve been through a decade and a half, a couple of decades of traffic engineers, road engineers, overpowering designers, all about safety and kind of outmoded thinking, and just thinking that the car is a thing that we all cow down to.

David Birkbeck:
Yeah, I think the problem with highways has always been that there is a sort of desire for there to be a sort of black top area and then a pavement on either side, and that the carriageway should be say five and a half or six metres wide, and then there should be this sort of swishy [?] pavement to either side, and that the building should be set back so there should be a distance between them. Now that distance was often overwhelming for the relatively small properties that were set either side of that big sea of black top.

Wayne Hemingway:
And also it looks ugly, unless you’re a lover of roads and black tarmac, then why would you want a road to dominate your streetscape.

David Birkbeck:
In most of these developments you had to walk in a big U, you had to come out of your cul-de-sac, you had to walk round on the distributor road and you had to come back into the next cul-de-sac. And in fact you were walking say maybe 250 yards in order to get 50 yards.

Dominic Church:
So, an important principle just to think about the spaces and arrangement of the buildings first and then to think about how you are going to accommodate moving and park traffic within that.

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Yolanda Barnes:
It’s well documented and understood how car dependent developments actually are not sustainable going forward into the future.

David Birkbeck:
Black tops are like the sort of, you know, the black death of housing, 60% of all housing schemes are wrecked by it.

Wayne Hemingway:
The car parking just doesn’t have to dominate the street, it can blend in, it can go in with the landscape, it doesn’t have to be in a drive outside your house, it can go down a gable end, we can group it together, we can semi-hide it, there’s all sorts of things we can do.

David Birkbeck:
To what degree have we managed to balance the need for the car parking to be on the street where we get the active frontage and at the same time not be like the old on curtilage parking where essentially everything was dominated.

Dominic Church:
But to provide adequate car parking in a way where it doesn’t sort of completely take over and so that when you go to look at a development it’s not the car parking bit that you remember, it’s the great spaces and homes.

David Birkbeck:
The perfect building for life scheme would have a variety of solutions, it would have some on street parking, it might have some rear courts, it might have some garages, it might have some underground, but what it wouldn’t do is essentially put it all in a remote place or put it all on the curtilage of the path.

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Dominic Church:
Well, this is really focusing on the quality of the public realm; the streets outside our front door are the key spaces that everybody shares. We want to create spaces which encourage easy ways of getting around, and if we want to encourage people to walk, which is a healthy and sustainable way of getting around, it has to be easy but also pleasant to do so, otherwise people are not going to do it.

David Birkbeck:
Well, any new development that is going to be essentially hostile to pedestrians almost needs to be banned, you know, that would just be madness to promote that. It’s absolutely fundamental that we promote the freedom to walk your dog, to push the kids in a buggy, and you know, a lot of this development will be where people will actually walk around outdoors, where the kids will want to play outdoors with their bicycles, so we have to make that safe. And we’ve got to balance that sort of need to be outdoors, walking about, on your bicycle and so on, with the fact that we mustn’t ostracise the motorist because most of these homes are sold to people with cars, or to people – were rented to people with cars, and they will not accept a place that essentially makes them abandon their car or put their car somewhere remotely.

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Dominic Church:
I think if you look at our great historic built environments, is that you walk through seamlessly different parts of town from different historical periods, and yet they’re all seamlessly integrated with each other.

Wayne Hemingway:
It’s very easy to design and build a housing development that is a gated development in every respect apart from not having gates, and that can be by just having it as like an enclave which you can’t really get to and where nobody from the surrounding community walks through it. And that can lead to all sorts of problems, number one it can lead to jealousy, and that can lead to crime or anti-social behaviour.

David Birkbeck:
There’s a real tension between the people that live in a place and the people that move into a place into a new build. And what you have pre-building, pre-construction work is massive anxiety on the part of the existing community, who are these newcomers going to be, what will they take away from us, what will they ruin that we had.

Dominic Church:
If we want to encourage people to be able to get round on foot it has to be very easy and quick to do so. So you have to be able to get to places quickly and that means that you have to have short and direct routes.

Wayne Hemingway:
There’s so much proof that if you integrate communities together, existing and new, you’re more likely to end up with just a happier place to live and at the end of the day that’s what Building for Life is about, it’s about creating happier and more liveable places.

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Dominic Church:
I think if you want to encourage sustainable and healthy ways of getting around, we really need to think about more walking, more cycling and we really want to encourage people to use the public spaces that they share in a development because that also fosters a very strong sense of community. But if we want people to use these spaces and to feel comfortable walking and on their bikes, they have to feel safe.

David Birkbeck:
It’s not right of a developer to treat, you know, the safety of pedestrians as an afterthought, and that is the reason that question is asked.

Dominic Church:
I think we can achieve this by making sure that there’s good overlook onto public routes, that perhaps as you’re cooking a meal for your family you’re looking out onto footpaths passing by, you’ll see your neighbours and you’ll be able to see that, you know, they’re safe and you’ll be able to help them.

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Wayne Hemingway:
Public spaces is vital for so many reasons, you don’t want kids that sit inside and watch telly all day, and when you look at what actually kids want to do, sitting on a computer playing computer games, watching telly is way down the list. Most kids want to get outside, if you look at the Children’s Play Council and all of those things, there’s loads of statistics to prove that. We have driven them inside by not giving them great public space on housing developments, so you know, it’s adults that have done that.

David Birkbeck:
That particular question has never been more pertinent because the more density rises and the busier our developments get, the more pressure there is on the common parts, you know, those common parts might be apartment blocks, they might be the shared areas outside, but if there isn’t a strategy for de-risking those, those are the bits that will degenerate first and fast.

Wayne Hemingway:
In the past, you know, we’ve left – housing developments have left it to councils, councils have run out of money, playgrounds have gone into wrack and ruin, public spaces have cars driving across it, broken trees [?] which have never been replaced, and the whole thing ends up a bit of a mess.

David Birkbeck:
Now you need a management structure and you need a method essentially of managing all those common parts, and you need people on site on a big development on a regular basis.

Dominic Church:
We really have to think about how we’re going to sustain these places and manage them in the long term. There’s no point lavishing a lot of effort on the design of a new development and then turning your back on it and not really maintaining it properly. So, the long term maintenance of the public spaces and shared areas of new development is really important.

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Yolanda Barnes:
I think it’s very interesting that Building for Life is often mistaken for an architectural award, and actually there’s only one question about architecture. And I think it shows that it’s one factor that can be considered important, but it’s one twentieth of the whole. And we’ve got to get away from this idea that great architecture in a single building will make a place, build it and they will come. It’s not about that, it’s about the quality of the whole and considering the whole experience that people have.

David Birkbeck:
Architectural quality is in the performance of the interior space. Nobody lives on the outside of their home, they live inside it. And what they talk about, and what they feel and what their experience is what they get within the walls of their home.

Wayne Hemingway:
Design shouldn’t be an afterthought, it should be there right from the beginning and quality doesn’t mean style. Quality means thinking of places that are durable, that they’re adaptable, that you can use through all different stages of your life, you know, which don’t fall to pieces after five or six years and then you’re kind of going back to the guarantee. It’s about thinking about how people are going to use the space rather than just thinking well what can we fit on this piece of land most efficiently.

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Wayne Hemingway:
One of the reasons why Victorian, Edwardian housing remains very popular through all stages of life and for first time, second, third time buyers, all the way through, is because it’s adaptable, you know, and life, you know, all our lives change, we go from being cosseted within a family, to on our own, to married, to having kids, and then maybe back on your own.

Dominic Church:
In Britain we’ve got an ageing population amongst other things, so we’re all getting older, we’re living longer and ideally if our requirements change, so maybe we’re not so mobile anymore, for example, we can stay in the home that we’ve lived in for years and that we love.

David Birkbeck:
The longer you stay in any place the more you put your roots down, the more people you know. And essentially, you know, the more the place functions as a large community as opposed to a series of individual households. So, it’s the benefit of everybody living within a development that they all stay for the maximum length of time. If their homes make that more possible, and they’re not going to solve all the issues that people face, but if they make it more possible there’s a greater chance of more people putting down those deep roots.

Yolanda Barnes:
The future adaptability of spaces is absolutely key to ongoing sustainability of place.

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Dominic Church:
I think the idea here is to make sure that we’re really using the state of the art – really in terms of means of construction and materials and methods of construction. So, it’s really about what that can add to the quality of a new home. So, it’s not an end in itself, but if you can use off site manufacture, for example, and thereby create a saving either in terms of money or in terms of time, and you can reinvest that effort into other aspects of the design, that’s a very worthwhile thing to do.

Yolanda Barnes:
I think we have to look very carefully at this question as to whether it furthers the sustainability of a place and of buildings and allows for adaptation and greater environmental performance, for example.

David Birkbeck:
We live in a very technological world, but we’re looking for those in housing, not just cars or hi-fi’s, we’ve got them, we’ve got extract fans that will take the exhaust heat from a shower, give you back additional heat in your home, so you don’t have those high bills. We’ve got doors that will lock themselves; we’ve got entry phone systems that will make it securer for people to live in, you know, if those were in the houses that would qualify.

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Dominic Church:
Thousands of products out there and thousands of manufacturers across all different product areas and very few of them, I would think, would just be happy with saying have we reached a standard that we’re supposed to reach because at the end of the day if you do that you’re going to have somebody else who’s going to come along and do something better and outperform you and sell more than you, so it’s common sense to want to outperform the standards that are being set for you, they’re just there, they’re the bottom. The higher you go, the better your customer feels, the more you should sell and that means the more money you make.

Dominic Church:
This is a real opportunity to recognise where development goes the extra mile. If you have high density development then building to a higher level of sound insulation can be really important, because if you have large developments, high density, high child density, lots of noise, that’s going to make a real difference to the quality of life of everybody living there.

Yolanda Barnes:
I think this question will possibly become less critical as time goes on. In the late 20th century building regs have been minimal in terms of environmental performance; I think that’s going to change very substantially in the next decade or so. And so it will become increasingly difficult actually to outperform the bare minimum, I think it’s a case of regulation having caught up with Building for Life rather than the other way around.

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