The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Ladies and gentleman, I am so pleased to be able to join the Minister of the Environment and this distinguished group here today to help launch the New Zealand Urban Design Protocol.

Urban design is vital to the health of our peoples and our planet. The trend toward urbanization is a global one, and with New Zealand being one of the world�s most urbanized nations, you have appropriately taken a leadership role in both environmental quality and urban design. For urbanism and Nature are truly two sides of the same coin.

Proper urban design understands the importance of Nature, and preserves the edge between city and country. The fact that New Zealand has joined up environment and urbanism in one government ministry is a good sign, and I can only commend you for it.

The diversity of the group gathered here today to sign your Urban Design protocol is remarkable. You have brought together all of the sectors involved in development, as well as all of the professions.

That diversity demonstrates that New Zealanders know what it will take to reform the unsustainable development patterns that have swept the globe in the past fifty years. For the built environment is too important to leave to any one profession. If I may say so must pursue urbanism and architecture as an interdisciplinary process, and above all we must put the human being at the centre of the design process. After all, that is only good manners or courtesy when you think about it �doing to others as you would have them do to you��

In the more than twenty years since I wrote my book Vision of Britain, in which I called for a sea change in the way we make buildings, towns and cities � and places, as the Minister has so rightly stressed � I have been gratified many times over by the positive reactions of many people.

It seems to me that residents of our cities, towns and villages instinctively understand that we need to learn again how to make walk-able, livable, well-mannered � dare I say beautiful, places. They also want to live in mixed-use � not zoned � communities, where one doesn�t have to use two litres of petrol to get one litre of milk!

In my quest to address the challenge of making our cities and towns livable once again, and on a human scale, I have used three main strategies: teaching by example, articulating key principles of architecture and urbanism and supporting the development of tools and techniques in practice.

First, I sought to create an example of a mixed use, mixed income, pedestrian-orientated community that reflected local character and local tradition. In Poundbury, an urban extension to the town of Dorchester in the South of England, my main aim was simply to provide a place that might improve the quality of life of the people who would eventually live there; would enhance the landscape in a sympathetic way and not be imposed upon it insensitively and would reflect the local identity and vernacular characteristics of Dorset.

The obvious starting point was to analyze the successful places and buildings that people have enjoyed living in for centuries, and to draw out the lessons of why they were still so popular today � so popular that you may have noticed how many architects, planners and other professionals live in them! Then I wanted to know how these lessons could be developed to make them better suited to contemporary needs.

Now that over 1000 people live there, I rather hope Poundbury has proved the point that it is in fact possible to break the conventional mould of zoned development and create a mixed-use community. But it is only one example of the range of diversity that can be achieved.

Incidentally, the Guinness Housing Trust, which is providing the affordable housing that now comprises thirty percent of the dwellings, tells us that Poundbury is their most successful and trouble-free site. Why? Because of a far higher satisfaction level than anywhere else � and this is due to an integrated, mixed approach to housing and work places. The affordable housing at Poundbury is indistinguishable from that sold on the open market. Interestingly 15 years ago I held a diner party for volume house builders, in order to persuade them of the value of mixed-use developments. Although they said it was a nice idea, they said it would not work in the real world. So I thought I would see if I could demonstrate this myself.

Today, there is a worldwide groundswell of new interest in this kind of compact, mixed-use, walk-able settlement as a means of addressing the complex challenges of the future. The demand to visit Poundbury and use it as a teaching laboratory is now so great that my Foundation For the Built Environment has had to station staff in the town. If you emphasis quality, although it may cost more initially, it produces greater value in the long term. Nowadays all too often we tend to think in a short term way � quick fixes which are not sustainable.

The second tool I have used to champion the reclaiming of the craft of town-building was to define it properly. In my book A Vision of Britain, I articulated ten principles for creating a sense of place, and I am gratified to see that they are reflected in the �Seven C�s� outlined in the New Zealand Protocol. These principles embody the timeless solutions to the intricate needs of human beings in the built environment and, above all, demonstrate the ultimate value of placing the pedestrian, and not the car, at the centre of the design process to create more livable, human communities. They are the principles which enable architecture � as the most public of art forms � to address the public realm in a well-mannered way and to enhance our humanity rather than to treat us as another piece of inanimate machinery or technology.

I would like to highlight a few of your principles, and illustrate their importance and continuing vitality.

Your first �C� is context, which means that buildings, streets and public spaces must be viewed as part of a whole. Too often they are not and buildings, in particular, are seen as individual objects, and as appropriate places for the imposition of an architect�s individual ego.

Your second �C� is Character, which is intended to reflect the history, culture and built heritage of New Zealand and its unique communities. This is vitally important, for we have found that each region has its own building traditions, its own materials and its own adaptation to climate and setting.

Resisting the global trend toward standardization, and exploring ways to marry local craft traditions with production building techniques is a challenge that can and must be met if we hope to produce thriving communities again. I know that your own Maori cultural tradition is ancient and deeply rooted, and that building in New Zealand can make wide use of local materials.

There is much that can be drawn on in an �organic� way and which can provide inspiration for the creation of places of character and local identity. To me, it is a tragedy that wherever you go in the world today you are confronted by the same dreary homogenization of our surroundings. What will there be soon to tell us which country we are in? Why can�t we balance globalization with localization? It�s the same with food � after all, in so many ways we are what we eat and we are what we are surrounded by�

In A Vision of Britain, I emphasized the notion of permeability, which you have defined as �Connections�. The best way to ensure a vibrant, walkable community is to build an interconnected street network.

The concept of mixed use and mixed income is also important. For many years we built housing estates where everything was separated, and then wondered why modern life seemed so fragmented and alienating. Our towns and cities should provide a diverse mix of housing suited for all ages and incomes, and should offer the opportunity to walk, shop and learn within walking distance of one�s home.

I note that one of your design principles is Creativity, and I just want to sound a note of caution here. As important as creativity is in all aspects of life, I simply do not see why it should be used as an excuse to sacrifice literally thousands of years of continuity with tradition in the process. In this regard, the desperate obsession with being �modern� seems rather old-fashioned � after all Modernism is only a style. But why can�t we be obsessed with being, above all, �human?� That way, I believe, lies true modernity since the process of life itself involves a subtle balance between the past and the future. Most of us need roots and a sense of belonging in order to feel some degree of security and meaning. Our built environment best enshrines that psychological need in a physical form. And in a world dependent on technology, surely we need a contrast in our surroundings that reflects our innate humanity and not just a continuity of the DVD player or the lap-top computer?

There is plenty of scope, then, for the creative mind in applying the principles of traditional urbanism to contemporary human needs. Creativity is important, but it is not a trump card.

The third way that I have sought to work in the field of design is to ask my Foundation for the Built Environment to develop tools and techniques for putting people at the centre of the design process, and to teach them through practice.

We have resurrected techniques from the Anglo-American building tradition that we share, including the architectural pattern book, the charrettes and design-coding, and used them to teach the languages of architecture and urbanism all over again. I am pleased to be able to report that, although much remains to be done, we are making a difference: even the government has adopted many of these techniques as part of its Sustainable Communities Agenda!

We are now beginning to see new communities designed according to these timeless principles being planned and built, on brown field sites, as extensions to towns and in inner city locations as infill and regeneration. My Foundation has also developed a partnership with our National Health Service to ensure that design principles of beauty and harmony are incorporated into the healthcare environment. Research is now showing that sensitive and sympathetic design can have a positive impact on people�s health � particularly if the patient is placed more centrally in the design process than merely the technology.

The adoption of a national protocol for urbanism places New Zealand at the forefront of best practice globally. Implementing this protocol successfully will require strong collaboration from both the public and the private sectors, not to mention the need to create much more flexibility within the conventional approach to planning and road engineering in order to allow the implementation of the kinds of principles we have been discussing. At present, most of the current attitudes and regulations can only produce standard, rather soulless housing estates or suburbs. But the representation here today leads me to believe that New Zealand will meet these challenges.

If I may, I would also like to congratulate you on naming 2005 as the Year of the Built Environment, and on devoting so much national attention to these critical issues.

Urging a swift response to the bombing of the Houses of Parliament after the Second World War, Sir Winston Churchill said, �We shape our buildings and afterward they shape us.�

We are finding out through research that Churchill was quite right, and that traditional urbanism can promote human health, improve social cohesion and help to shape a more � I hardly dare use such an over-worked word! � sustainable future.

Instead of seeing every building as an opportunity to make an ever more imaginative iconic �statement�, I believe we must see each piece of the built environment as part of a living language, connected to a living tradition and leading to a local �dialect� that enhances a sense of belonging in a world that is rapidly in danger of �pasteurizing� the true meaning of our place in Nature and ending up with �genetically modified� surroundings that are never in harmony with our fundamental instincts. Rather, we must come to regard the characteristics of traditional architecture as not merely unfashionable political statements, to be thrown out with yesterday�s rubbish � but, rather, as organically adapting creations over the passage of time, helping us to generate and regenerate places that relate to our essential humanity and thus are truly contemporary.

After all, you only need to think for a moment of the places most of you want to live, or perhaps visit on your holidays in far-flung countries, to see a little of what I mean.

   

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