More than buildings: Growing biodiversity and happiness in communities
By Kevin McCloud
First published in Once in a Lifetime: City-building after Disaster in Christchurch. Freerange Press. 2014. [here for details and purchase]
Kevin has visited Christchurch twice since the earthquakes and helped instigate and judge the Breathe (Residential Demonstration Project) competition to design one of the city blocks. Here he writes about the contribution that imagination brings to placemaking and how his experiences in growing his own development company have led him to believe that Christchurch should take a radical step and regrow as a ground-up collaboration between community and designers.
In 2007 I started a housing business, Happiness Architecture and Beauty (HAB). HAB was founded in a fervour of interest in how our built environment can alter our wellbeing, a fervour that grew in the twenty-first century following a welter of studies by modern sociologists [1] and in the wake of the New Urbanist movement in America.
HAB remains a group of dedicated and innovative thinkers. Early on we found succour in works like Building Happiness, a collection of essays edited by Jane Wernick [2] and in Alain de Botton’s Architecture and Happiness. We found inspiration in Bioregional’s groundbreaking BedZED One Planet Living housing scheme; we looked back to the empowering self-build projects of Walter Segal and pioneering housing schemes of the twentieth century.
But we are not philosophers or teachers. We are developers, enablers and placemakers. Seven years on we are growing the business to construct 1000 homes a year according to a set of principles that we have matured across our early housing schemes in the UK. Those principles include working to context, social inclusion, community engagement, the importance of self-build and custom-build in the housing mix, blind tenure (where it’s not possible to distinguish between homes in ownership and those in rent), social sustainability and biodiversity. All are civilised means of building by any standard but they are often overlooked or paid lip-service in the brutal world of construction and development.
So we build and we improve the biodiversity of sites as we build. [3] Our architecture (in collaboration with fine, dynamic practices) delivers a positive experience that lifts the spirits, and helps our residents to flourish; our homes look like they belong where they are and they are built in a contemporary language that reflects the spirit of a place. In this we have been much influenced by the idea of local distinctiveness, championed by the charity Common Ground.
To achieve this, we deliberately create design teams around places, choosing to work with one particular architectural practice in just one town in order to develop a stylistic language for that one community. Another town will merit collaboration with another practice. On large sites we work with more than one practice to bring diversity. And we ask our architects to explore the narrative of a place and make a contribution to that through their building. We look for, and reinforce at every opportunity, stories and links that will give our developments character and resonance. From the choices of construction materials and the colours of render and paintwork to the naming of streets and the imaginative design of public spaces and allotments, we construct new narratives that add a chapter to the history of a place. This is meticulous work and it requires the involvement of existing communities and much research. But it pays off, every time.
I foster a quiet hope that as Christchurch is rebuilt, its new narratives are carefully woven. I hope it is not constructed as a clone city or rebuilt to the same blunt model, around a central business district, as every other international city has for the last one hundred years. It could instead be a community city, designed around the vitality that people bring to a place when they are allowed and encouraged to flourish. Melbourne demonstrates what happens when you relax planning laws and allow people to repopulate a city centre: it springs alive. Christchurch can go much further. It has the opportunity to reinvent itself: as a series of villages or new neighbourhoods that could be self-sufficient in food and energy; as a super-sustainable and resilient city prototype perhaps; as a place that takes biodiversity, landscape and Maori design principles to its very heart. It might look and feel different to every other city on the planet.
The architecture of Christchurch could be different to anywhere else. It should be. The planning of the city could and should break down some of the rigid grid forms of the old ground plan. Communities should be encouraged and facilitated to rebuild, self-build and reinhabit the city centre (it is, after all, the job of civil servants, designers and planners to facilitate community). And there is an important, less defined contribution to be made from another quarter. We should also place great store by the design of spaces in between buildings. Jeremy Till has written that ‘buildings do not produce “aesthetic” space but are settings for social space . . . . Architecture’s offering lies here exactly — in its contribution to the formation of social relations.’4 At HAB, we share with our collaborator, the great landscape architect Luke Engleback (who writes elsewhere in this book), the belief that without a properly designed public realm, a housing scheme is meaningless. You can create beautiful buildings but the results will turn to ugliness if you don’t provide people with the means to interact and form relationships with each other, inside and outside; you can build the highest spec eco-homes but they will not function properly until residents of a scheme learn to become interdependent and to help each other. This is social sustainability: the creation of a durable, resilient community — the mark of which is the magic social glue that is formed between people.
This glue can never be manufactured by architects or builders but we can light the fire and lay out the ingredients for it in the same way we set out the infrastructure and public realm design for a scheme: in visibly expressed water courses from roofs and gutters in which children can play; in the underground crating of water that can be hand-pumped to water gardens and wash cars; in the provision of electric bike and car clubs to reduce car ownership (and save residents money for that matter); in the way that fallen tree trunks, a hedge or a dry stone wall can be at once a play facility, an amenity, a boundary and a haven of biodiversity. Overlapping, ambiguity and the evolution of ideas are crucial to this, in order that residents can imprint their own imaginative narratives on places and features. So, a small rectangle of tarmac and some chalk (for hopscotch or any number of games) become as important as a tightly designed and highly functional recycling facility.
True social sustainability cannot occur unless you encourage people to collectively reduce their environmental footprint by sharing. And through all our work, that basic principle runs like a golden thread. We like to see food grown and shared so we put in Luke’s edible hedgerows and fruity streets. The ambiguous car park is also an orchard. The allotments are shared. The boundaries to private gardens (these boundaries are themselves fruiting bushes which residents are encouraged to negotiate over) lead to a shared garden where a shared trampoline, sandpit and shed sit. And a community land trust might run it all. In the UK we are building schemes of 50, 100 and 200 homes that embody these ideas and move towards the One Planet Living ideals of low-carbon, low-resource but high-happiness living. Wouldn’t it be extraordinary to see Christchurch grow into the template of what the twenty-first century city should be? Super-sustainable, diverse, contextual, shared and unique?
I’ve seen what might be possible. Our work is just properly starting in the UK. The results are nevertheless promising, sometimes loosely defined, often fuzzy and certainly creative. The places we’ve built are forays into a new way of making places and already they pulse with a loose and shifting vitality. But it is not the unison hymn of architectural order and planning control we can hear. It is the quiet humming of a community growing: the Song of the Magic Glue.
Foot notes:
- Such as Zygmunt Bauman in Society Under Siege (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
- J. Wernick, ed., Building Happiness (London: Black Dog Press / RIBA Building Futures, 2008).
- See Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch’s “The Urban Jungle” in J. Normand’s Living for the City (London: Policy Exchange, 2006).
- Jeremy Till, “A Happy Age (before the days of architects),” in Building Happiness (London: Black Dog Press / RIBA Building Futures, 2008); For further reference see also Fritz Haeg, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn (Metropolis, 2008); www.habhousing.co.uk; www.bioregional.co.uk; and www.commonground.org.uk.
