Issues raised by students and colleagues regarding ’suburban town centres’ – a discussion

Points made by students and others point to some genuine difficulties of concept and definition in the idea of ’successful suburban town centres’. We are, of course, aware of the lack of precision in the use of terms such as ’sustainability’, ‘diversity’ and (though it carries less baggage) ’success’; ’suburb’, by contrast, is a term where too much precision invites inaccuracy since the variety and history of the settlements that are called ’suburbs’ at various times is so complex. Naturally, the project acknowledges such issues and will address them.

Taking this into account, however, and even restricting the argument to settlements in the UK, some people are evidently uncomfortable with the idea that a suburb might constitute a ‘town centre’ (rather than a primarily residential area) while still remaining a ’suburb’. This is accompanied by a sense that suburbs are a strange subject to be approached in terms of their socio-economic diversity when they are so popularly regarded – with good reason – as being ‘all about’ the social-economic homogeneity (particularly of social class) associated with the traditional middle-class aspiration of ‘getting away’ from the social problems of the city. We need to take these objections seriously as it will affect our ability to explain our rearch agenda and disseminate its results (beyond its immediate audience) if we take as self-evident that suburbs are ‘town centres’ and potential generators of diversity and that these are desirable outcomes.

In working towards a resolution of these contrasting positions, it might be thought that the traditional idea of the sparse, residential, rural, socially homogenous suburb suggests a centrifugal image of the city within a strongly hierarchical region, whereas the idea of a ’suburban town centre’ suggests Stephen Marhsall’s (Marshall, S. (2006) ‘The Emerging Silicon Savannah, Built Environment 32.3, pp.267-280) image of the ’semi-urban’ settlement within a postindustrial ‘polycentric’ region. A contemporary Greater London suburb, I would argue, certainly needs to be approached in both ways. The relationship of a suburban centre to the major central place, as well as its position within a more variegated pattern of settlements both need to be considered in order to break down the unhelpful binary opposition of ‘urban’ and ’suburban’ – we might talk about the ‘urban’ in the ’suburban’ and vice-versa. The way this research project is framed, I think, tends to privilege those places which are ‘centres’ against what many people may understand intuitively as being ’suburbs’. This is partially because we are less concerned with residential ’sprawl’, so much as with how the sustainability (in the sense of durability) of suburban centres may have a role to play in minimising the numerous socio-economic and ecological difficulties of low density housing. What this project promises to bring, I would suggest, to the consideration of the academic-political clichés of ’sustainability’ and ‘diversity’ (we prefer ’success’) is a fundamental acknowledgement that people like living in suburbs and much of the way of life that goes with suburban living. In other words, we are not trying to ‘reinvent’ the English suburb, so much as identify what constitutes a successful suburb on its own terms – and what can be done through policy and design to maximise this potential so that people might like living in them even more.

I think the approach we have to take is pragmatic (as most people must be in choosing where to live). Since we can’t all choose to live exactly where we want (for example, in the town centre or on a country estate), we have to rub along somewhere inbetween, with people who we wouldn’t necessarily choose to spend time with socially. Moreover, as Marshall points out (after Ebenezer Howard) the location of suburbs between the town and the country is a unique selling point that people aspire to. My point is that maybe suburban ’social diversity’ could be regarded as more a question of ‘matter-of-fact’, day-to-day routine, rather than as the ‘celebration of difference’ that is gushed about in literature on self-evidently ‘urban’ settings. Suburbs should not be compared to the cosmopolitanism of the city centre but rather in terms of a de facto diversity of peoples who, despite being (arguably) more homogenous than the population at large, still include a wide enough demographic to cause all sorts of social disatisfaction between them if the local town centre is run down – and these will tend to increase over time.

Similarly, ‘economic diversity’ in a suburban setting might be understood as reflecting the ability of the regional urban system as a whole to sustain economic growth through maximising flexibility; accommodating companies and individuals who find it useful to be located in particular areas for a range of different reasons (this is the polycentric model). Without the potential for economic diversity in suburban town centres, the potential for regional growth overall would, one would think, be seriously undermined. See also the New Horizons work on polycentric development and suburban office space conducted at UCL for the ODPM (as was) in 2003-2004.

In investigating the relationship between architecture and ’success’ – we have to be careful to position our work relatively to regional and national indicators. Suburbs, as relatively minor town centres with relatively less socio-economic autonomy compared to the large urban centres are, in some respects, relatively more easily ‘explained away’ by macro-factors which are not affected by local morphology. On the other hand, we would not argue that the centrality of the West End of London means that its morphology is unimportant in understanding how the city centre generates opportunities for economic transactions and social interactions (the two often being combined in that example). The mediation of regional socio-economic trends in different suburban town centres over time will provide strong indications as to how those centres are performing relatively and we need to be sensitive to this. In researching the differentiation between such centres a whole range of local factors, including morphology, will be important in understand their relative success or lack of success over time.

Fringe Belts and Space Syntax – a point of similarity

Research concerned with urban ‘fringe belts’ – particularly associated with the Urban Morphology Research Group at Birmingham University – and the space syntax approach to urban systems pioneered by Hillier and Hanson are, in many respects, very different. The former grew out of the Conzenian tradition of town plan analysis and has a strong historical-geographical emphasis, while the latter analyses spatial configurations using a method based on graph theory. (P.J. Larkham (2006) ‘The Study of Urban Form in Great Britain’, Urban Morphology, 10.2, p130 has something to say about this).

A reading of the article by Whitehand and Morton (2003) ‘Fringe belts and the recycling of urban land: an academic concept and planning practice’ , Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 30, pp.829-839, suggests what these two approaches share: namely a concern to identify the global properties of urban structure through an examination of urban space itself rather than through areal or administrative sub-units. Whereas fringe belt research emphasises patterns of historical development, plot size and land-use, space syntax research emphasises emergent spatial configurations, linearity and natural movement. Since the fringe belt development cycles is essentiallya suburban phenomenon it would be worth us considering how clearly it is identified through syntax analysis (the Daltons’ work on the ’spatial signture of sprawl’ might be a good starting point). Similarly, a consideration of fringe belts of Greater London could help lead space syntax methods to a richer analysis of the spatial stucturing of suburban areas. Space syntax, of course, aspires to a elucidate the generic properties of urban structure, whereas the fringe belt research is more geographically particular (with much research focused on the UK). This need not be a difficulty for the SSTC project however, which is concerned with morphological and socio-historical development of suburban town centres in Greater London.

CASA WP91: measuring the success of suburban centres over time

CASA working paper (no.91) by Mark Thurstain-Goodwin and Yi Gong (Feb 2004) is concerned with linking retail data on London town centres from the 1971 census distribution to the CASA/ODPM (as was) town centres data. The paper first addresses the problems of making contrasting datasets comparable and then gives the ‘ten best performing’ and ‘ten worst performing’ centres over three decades according to three criteria. These are: convenience retail employment, comparison retail employment and retail floorspace.

The following centres appear twice in the top ten: Wood Green, Wandsworth, Uxbridge, Wallington & Orpington.

The following centres appear three times in the top ten: Camden & Bexleyheath.

Of these Uxbridge, Wallington, Orpington & Bexleyheath all occur in the ‘doughnut’ area between the inner circular roads and the M25 that we are primarily concerned with.

There are many socio-economic reasons why these suburbs should have been ‘on the rise’ between 1971-2000 but it would be interesting to look at their morphological properties – which could be contrasted with examples of failing centres.

The 1971 adjusted data is available on a CD-ROM. Census Distribution raw data exists for 1950, 1957, 1961, 1966 and 1971.

The edge of London in H.G Wells

More thoughts about defining the edge of suburbs (or the impossibility of doing so) -

In ‘When the Sleeper Wakes’, H.G Wells writes about how London used to have a graduated passage between town and country. See full text here, following is the quote from page 170 of the version I have: “That gradual passage of town into country through an extensive sponge of suburbs, which was so characteristic a feature of the great cities of the nineteenth century, existed no longer, Nothing remained of it but a waste of ruins here, variegated and dense with thickets of the heterogeneous growths that had once adorned the gardens of the belt, interspersed among levelled brown patches of sown ground, and verdant stretches of winter greens. The latter even spread among the vestiges of houses. but for the most part the reefs and skerries of ruins, the wreckage of suburban villas, stood among their streets and roads, queer islands amidst the levelled expanses of green and brown, abandoned indeed by the inhabitants years since, but too substantial, it seemed, to be cleared out of the way of the wholesale horticultural mechanisms of the time”

“Welcome to ‘Superbia’” (more news on suburbs)

Dear all, note the following comments made by Jon Rouse, and others “A government boss signalled the end of the urban renaissance this week with a landmark speech attacking the ‘urban cognoscenti’ and lauding the suburbs as the natural home of the British.”

http://www.europaconcorsi.com/db/rec/inbox.php?id=13589

The (lack of) quality of the debate is breathtaking.

Mark Thurstain-Goodwin lecture

Mark Thurstain Goodwin gave a presentation with a retrospective flavour, looking back over ten years of work at CASA. His subject was ‘After 10 years of Town Centres research, are we any closer to the Promised Land?’ His answer was ‘not much’, giving as the main reasons the ‘farce’ of gaining easy access to government statistics from the point of view of affordability and an absence of co-operation. The Ordnance Survey also came in for some heavy criticism owing to the high costs they charge.

Despite these concerns however, MTG believed that the possibilities for GIS going forward were improving owing firstly to the ‘revolutionary effect’ of Google maps – in getting people (i.e. businesses) thinking spatially and secondly, to the arrival of new sources of data owing to New Labour’s liking for indicators. He sees GIS as an increasingly web-based technology.

The bulk of his talk was a review of material concerning CASA’s contribution to the The Department for Communities and Local Government’s Town Centres Statistics project already available in the CASA paper ‘Data surfaces for a new policy geography’.

MTG made several proposals particularly relevant to the SSTC project:

1. That town centre economic diversity is a good indicator of success

2. That economic diversity is a town centre attribute that is insufficiently understood and needs further research

3. That integration of a diversity of data, especially regarding pollution etc., are increasingly possible and an important to assessing the sustainability of town centres over time

From a space syntax point of view – the absence of any detailed discussion of the morphology of town-centres, particularly how ‘centeredness’ is predicated (to a degree) on the generation of natural movement owing to local grid condition, was an obvious omission.

This emphasises how nice it would be if we could integrate syntactical data into a study of Suburban Town Centres that is concerned not only with BOUNDARIES but also with CONFIGURATION.

Trevor Phillips and segregation

The Trevor Phillips stuff will work beautifully as justification for my Leverhulme application!

Second, yes he is being negative about high density without understanding or describing well what he means. The implication seems to be that high density leads to polarisation as opposed to mixing of communities. It’s intersting that the narrative of the article seems to be describing the sort of casual encounters – like the argument set out in Hillier and Hanson’s 1987 ‘The Architecture of Community’ (I’ve put a copy on BSCW if you’re interested).

To answer Ozlem’s comment, I think that the Trevor Phillips article is too imprecise for us to say it discusses scales and types of densities but it is certainly thought provoking!

(Note: original post 8/11/6)

SSTC blog starts (again) here!

The Successful Suburban Town Centres (SSTC) blog is relaunched here, incorporating the ‘SSTC’ acronym in the URL. Initially, the blog is intended to circulate news and ideas between the members of the project team.