AILA's landscape architecture occasional papers, articles and essays

Unlocking Connectivity

Mark Fuller FAILA

Presented at the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects Conference

3-6 April 2008 | Hyatt Hotel | Auckland NZ www.nzila.co.nz/shift

Mark Fuller FAILA (Australia) Principal, EDAW

>>> slide presentation

… “I’d like to thank my producer, the writers, my colleagues, my parents…”

We are all familiar with the endless lists of those who were essential to the Oscar winner’s success, so much so that you may recall Billy Crystal saying at the Oscar award ceremony after the last of the Lord of the Rings films: “its now official, there is now no-one left to thank in New Zealand”.

Bridging science and art, engineering and architecture, functionality and beauty, landscape architecture has always been a collaborative profession. The role of landscape architect is often that of a creative team player, connecting, integrating and collaborating to achieve outcomes that are often the most suitable compromise to complex problems.

This means there are a lot of people to thank, sure, but it also suggests that behind most projects is a complicated story of debate, of winning some arguments and losing others, and of ideas that, if you like, end up on the cutting room floor.

Most of the time landscape architects have been fighting these battles behind the scenes. We like to think of ourselves as the unsung heroes – successful if we won more than we lost, hoping we have built enough resilience in our work to accommodate the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

We sit in the audience, taking quiet pride in the final outcomes and letting someone else accept the Oscar.

But all that is about to change.

Landscape architects are increasingly being called upon to drive some of the complexities inherent in the “massive transformations” resulting from rapid urbanisation, which are the focus of this conference. Professor Peter Roberts (2008), Chair of the UK-based Academy for Sustainable Communities, states, “ there are so many things that landscape architects bring to the table that I see them being right at the core of the sustainable communities team, right through the process” .

He went on to say that he saw that the role included being at the start of the process, listening to the community, identifying value and making sense of place. He noted that people value the way the natural landscape has been treated and managed and the way the built environment has been created, and that landscape architects have a huge role to play in making sure the landscape elements of a community are factored in from the beginning of a project (Roberts, 2008).

This was echoed in the speech made last year by the Right Honourable Hilary Benn MP (2007) to the Landscape Institute Annual Conference on Climate Change, who said, “…you bring together the skills, knowledge and passion that we need for the 21st Century in the way that engineering shaped the 19th Century”.

So how are we as landscape architects responding?

Are we leading the shaping the 21st century?

Urban communities are facing unprecedented change. Rising fuel costs and traffic congestion, the increasing cost of green field sites for housing, change in demographics, and the competition for new industries and the creative class are just some of the drivers influencing political decisions and shaping these challenges.

In responding to these changes, we need to plan and re-fit our urban areas. Recent examples in Australia have shown that there is a major shift in the community’s understanding of the need for change and heightened expectations of quality outcomes for the public realm. A range of existing projects in Brisbane are demonstrating the value of such an approach.

Much has been said about the context of change that urban communities are facing and I do not propose to spend time detailing these. But I would like to emphasise three key areas.

Firstly, we are facing unprecedented demographic and social change. In the west, our population is of increasing age, and we are the longest living and the largest generation. 77% of the United State’s financial assets are controlled by this generation, and an increasing number (55% in recent surveys) expect to continue work rather than retire.

Families are changing too – those with children are now in the minority, and the strongest growth in South East Queensland is in one-person households. This means there are substantial socioeconomic changes coming on stream, in particular as baby boomers seek to realise assets (such as the family home in the suburbs), turn hobbies into home businesses, and redefine retirement.

Secondly, we have to learn to use our land better – Barcelona has a population of 2 million in an area of 100 square kilometres, while Brisbane only manages just over 1 million in an area over ten times the size. With decreasing affordability and housing densities, increasing sprawl and infrastructure costs, we are now struggling to identify both how to accommodate future growth and how we afford our existing suburbs.

In high growth areas such as South East Queensland, where there is the need to incorporate 575,000 new dwellings by 2026 to accommodate the projected population changes in the region – 40 to 50 percent of which will be urban infill – there is increasing talk and encouragement of managed development (Office of Urban Management, Queensland Government, 2006).

Master planned communities, urban renewal and strategic infrastructure investment enable an integrated and comprehensive alternative, with improved access to transportation, community facilities and employment opportunities. We can no longer afford the laissez faire approaches of the past and its urban sprawl based on unlimited land and resources.

Thirdly, climate change and the environmental impacts of our lifestyles are driving the need to change how we design our urban areas. High-density and low-rise, with pedestrian dominance, based on recycling waste and minimising energy, “eco-cities” are being planned which “put people and ecology joint first” (Pearce, 2006). Interestingly, these high-density and low-rise solutions are the very qualities of shantytowns.

As Fred Pearce (2006) writes, “from a purely ecological perspective, shanties and their inhabitants are a good example of the new, green urban metabolism. Despite their sanitary and security failings, they often have a social vibrancy and ecological systems that get lost in most planned urban environments”. So, we need to look again at the form of parks, streets and public spaces we are designing to achieve a much better balance of people and ecology.

These three drivers – changing social patterns, land use strategies and environmental conditions – represent insistent and urgent imperatives to which we must show leadership in responding.

In this, I believe we are supported by three key shifts:

A shift in attitude within the community;

A shift in procurement strategies; and

A shift in the value we give to the public realm.

The first of these – a shift in attitude – looks beyond the traditional resistance to change and recognises that there is a growing awareness within those communities affected of the need to take control of change.

In Brisbane and South East Queensland the combination of being the fastest growing metropolitan area in Australia and deferred political decisions on investment in key infrastructure, have seen a spate of projects retrofitting existing urban areas. A range of major roads, tunnels, bridges and busways – some of which are the largest infrastructure projects in Australian history – are being planned within urban communities that are also facing the parallel challenge of incorporating much higher densities than ever before. This is resulting in significant alteration to familiar urban areas, streets and parks as the city’s fabric transforms, and local communities are being asked to adapt unlike any time before.

Recent projects in Brisbane have demonstrated that in many cases the community now recognises that by adopting a comprehensive approach to the changes brought about by the delivery of these projects a range of possible wider benefits can be realised. By adopting an overall integrated urban renewal vision – rather than a fragmented, piecemeal approach – improvements in the public realm can be built in. New connections, new high-quality urban spaces, comprehensive environmental improvements and other community building activities can be delivered in tandem with the new built form typologies and major infrastructure necessary to accommodate increasing populations.

The need for a comprehensive approach is also supported by economic and market feasibility. Knight Frank’s Market Feasibility Study (2007), commissioned for a project in the Brisbane suburb of Lutwyche, stated that, “small piecemeal investment and minor redevelopment is unlikely to be successful at a broad scale”. In addition, University of Queensland’s Urban Housing Capacity Study (2007) sought ways to “catalyse amalgamations… [to] overcome the value of existing improvements”.

Project workshops and surveys in Brisbane have shown that one of the key factors in community acceptance of increasing densities is the quality of design. One such project at Lutwyche in Brisbane’s north identified key desirable themes as:

The creation of a vibrant, mixed use economy;

A range of public realm improvements;

That opportunities to reduce severance and create new legible movement systems should be exploited; and

That the development should have a strong sense of place, human scale, with consideration of safety and comfort.

Furthermore, we have found that the community accepts that the focus of increasing densities should be upon transport corridors, strategies that are clearly supported by climate change and energy considerations and, of course patronage, requirements.

Interestingly, the attractiveness of these denser transit developments turns out to be because of the quality of the environment that can be achieved through a comprehensive and integrated approach.

US studies have shown that the main factor that attracts people to live in transit-oriented communities is not their accessibility to public transport. People appear to be drawn to these communities primarily because of the quality of the urban environment and their liveability (Lund, 2006).

The best transit-oriented environments are designed as “people places”, with a wide range of complementary activities and that are extremely well connected. Having chosen to live in these attractive urban environments, the studies found that the residents were then at least a dozen, and in some cases as many as forty times, more likely to make use of transit as those living elsewhere.

The next shift is that of the increasing use and familiarity of innovative procurement strategies available to identify and deliver on shared objectives and long term goals.

Relationship contracts, Public Private Partnerships and alliancing provide opportunities for a wider debate and testing of briefs and budgets, and for bringing together the collective thinking of the public sector with the funds, the expertise and resource strengths of the private sector.

For landscape architects this represents a unique opportunity to translate an understanding of urban systems into propositions of value. The potential exists for open space and community building activities to be designed, costed and provide for future management, alongside the ‘hard’ infrastructure from the outset. Also, other opportunities which may arise, but which may not be directly provided for within the project scope, can be identified and articulated, acting as a catalyst for further enhancement.

Finally, we are seeing a shift in the recognition of the value of our public realm and open space. No longer are parks, open spaces and the shopping streets of urban villages the natural low-cost solution to the routing of infrastructure. There is now a growing acknowledgment, driven by many factors, including triple bottom line reporting of the economic social and environmental value of the ‘soft’ infrastructure of urban environments.

These pressures are forcing communities to address and recognise redundant uses, to understand the importance of inter-connections and linkages and seek opportunities to reconnect previously fragmented areas. They are also enabling a review of other environmental systems, such as addressing the water cycle and urban runoff in a comprehensive manner, redesigning to limit greenhouse gases, re-establish habitat and perhaps unlock new opportunities for food production and new community uses.

Changing identity needs creative control and the articulation of a vision for the right sort of spaces to allow a variety of experiences to evolve. From the intimate, individual and small- scale detail, through to an urban form that establishes new images, incorporates the future events and life of the city, encourages spontaneous interaction, reflects unique histories and natural stories, both natural and human-made.

Landscape architects working on these projects are engaged in “being right at the core of the sustainable communities team, right through the process” (Roberts, 2008). In doing so, the challenge is to realise the true value of the public realm and persuade others to do the same.

Before I finish, let me take you back to 1858. Charles Darwin was putting the finishing touches to his Origin of Species, which was published the following year. Rudolf Diesel, whose fuel invention transformed the shape of our cities, was born in Paris. Auckland had only been laid out 18 years earlier with the first wooden buildings along Queen Street.

But in New York, the vision of some early landscape architects, in particular Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, had persuaded the community that the future of their city called for a new park. Previously the largest park had been 10 acres. Imagine the city leaders’ astonishment when the landscape architects demanded 778 acres (and imagine the landscape architects’ astonishment when they said yes!)

Of course, today one can’t imagine New York without Central Park.

Olmstead and Vaux deserve a posthumous Oscar – it’s time we stepped into the limelight once again.

>>> slide presentation

References

Benn, H. 2007. Landscape Institute Annual Conference on Climate Change. Retrieved 28 February 2008, from http://www.liconferences.org/video/hilary_benn.html

Knight Frank. 2007. Market Feasibility Study. Commissioned by Brisbane City Council.

Lund, H. 2006. Reasons for Living in a Transit Oriented Development and Associated Transit Use. Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol 72, No 3.

Office of Urban Management, Queensland Government. 2006. South East Queensland (SEQ) Regional Plan, Part F: Regional policies 8. Retrieved 28 February 2008, from http://www.oum.qld.gov.au/?id=478

Pearce, F. 2006. Eco-cities special: Ecopolis now. New Scientist, issue 2556.

Roberts, Prof. P. 2008. Interview with Peter Roberts of the Academy of Sustainable Communities. Landscape, Elevated Thinking, journal of the Landscape Institute, UK, February 2008.

University of Queensland. 2007. Urban Housing Capacity Study. Commissioned by Brisbane City Council.

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