Re*Move

The debacle of Denmark Hill station

A few years ago I met the legendary designer John Maeda. "As social media links people and ideas together in unprecedented new ways, and as design tools become accessible to many", I asked him, "are we about to benefit from a world with a thousand times as many active designers?" "Great question!" he replied.

It's fair to say that very little design or engineering talent has been applied to my local station Denmark Hill since Queen Victoria was alive. I use this place a lot. It's the primary mass-transit feed to Kings College Hospital, one of London's most important hospitals, which is five minutes walk away. It's used for 3.1 million passenger journeys each year. So the equivalent of about a twentieth of the entire British population stumble through this little inner London railway station each year.

And stumble they must. Despite a refurbishment in the 1980s, it's been woefully inadequate for as long as most people can remember. All four rail platforms must be reached by steep wooden steps, all of which are in poor condition. Water pours through the roof during rain, directly onto these steps and all passengers are filtered through a narrow inner and outer doorway, via a 19th century booking hall. At peak times during the morning and evening, exacerbated by timetabling that means many of the half hourly train services arrive within minutes of each other, this Victorian grouping of steps gets badly overcrowded. Many of the users of the station are visiting hospital, so the demographic skew of passengers is towards the elderly or the physically impaired.

I wonder what the Victorian engineers who built the place would think about the reconstruction project that started to affect public access to the station this week.

Work is underway to provide much better access to the station - on paper the plans look great, or at least the reporting of them (plans are not easy to find online, nor made available at the station - if you find them let me know).

A lesson in poor design

Work has begun but the implementation hasn't been thought through. I'm particularly surprised by the lack of attention paid to access - the service experience for users - during the transition phase. It can only confuse passengers who use the station (many are occasional visitors, exacerbating this) and it provides even worse accessibility during the construction work, which seems expected to last about a year.

- On Wednesday the existing station access bridges and staircases, which have always channeled passengers through the booking hall, were closed. Now passengers use a temporary scaffolding-based bridge and network of staircases that is if anything more overcrowded than the old (deeply inadequate) arrangement.

- Passengers exit onto a side access road, Windsor Walk. However, this new entrance is very poorly signposted.

- Inexcusably, no Oyster card readers are installed at the new entrance, or on the platforms. London's Oyster card system requires all rail users to "touch in" and "touch out" on arrival and departure, and not doing so will lead to a daily cap fine being imposed of about £5 extra. Last night, in the warren-like confusion of the new exits, I completely forgot to touch out and had to call Oyster today to get my fine reversed. I am absolutely sure I'm not alone here.

- Now users are expected to walk right around the station into the old booking hall, to touch in or out after each journey, far from the new temporary entrance and exit. This imposition seems absolutely at odds with the project's goal, which is, a year from now, to provide dramatically improved accessibility.

- Communication about the changes is poor or non-existent. There are some basic posters but no detailed project plan is available online. Nor are progress updates being posted. I'm working with organisations who do far better updates building toilet blocks in Africa. There's a Wikipedia entry about the station and that would be a great place to link to formal plans and timelines. The lack of status updates reduces my confidence that the project is well-led. Or even led at all. I think the original Victorian designers would be amazed that with the advances in technology, we can't do better.

Some years ago I dipped once before into the planning of Camberwell's local infrastructure. A grim, vicious public meeting about the Camberwell Grove railway bridge (beautifully captured in all its misery by the Guardian's Peter Preston) left me disillusioned by the limited ambitions of those who are employed to improve London's public infrastructure.

As 21st century designers, we can do much better. Designing and redesigning stations is about more than just engineering work. Clearly, little thought has been applied to the interim needs and experience of the unique demographic that uses this station. There's an army of kids out there without jobs, and many have been trained in media, design and communication. With the right support, they could run rings around these efforts. Maybe, it's time we got them involved.

More about Mark Charmer here.

'70s Fords in Camberwell

Just to prove that in Britain we're living right now through a remake of 1978-83, my walk to work through Camberwell and Peckham featured a couple of proper British '70s Fords today - a 1979 Escort MkII estate and a slightly older Cortina MkIII.

Cars are a really powerful way to date a photograph - or instil the identity of an era in a photo - because the mix of them usually changes much more quickly than the built environment around them. As a child of '71, these Fords are the tin I grew up surrounded by.

I'm fascinated by ways we might see the market for "classic cars" go more mainstream over the next decade. New technologies make it easier to manufacture (or remanufacture) short run products, the web makes it easier to market and source components or share expertise on repairs and fixes. And it's become easier to share a car like this amongst a devoted fan club, all of whom publish the car's interaction with the world, share responsibility for looking after it, and reinforce its place in their lives with tools like Facebook, Twitter and whatever comes next.

In contrast I chatted with Joe Simpson a few weeks ago about the desire in most modern car companies to design cars to specifically target customer categories, nailed down to the last detail. He's seeing a lot of this at the moment, even in the booming Asian markets. This is a folly - society defines the image and role that cars play in their lifetime and there is a limit to how clever designers and marketeers should get. The Golf GTI was a hobby project by German VW engineers, that went on to become an icon of the 1980s yuppie era in Europe. The Volkswagen camper van was never conceived to service America's alternative scene - the surf and hippie scenes took the vehicle and made it their own.

I suggested to Joe that modern car companies should design great vehicles that do a good job and let the customers, and the era they live in, define how they fit in and what they eventually come to mean. Those of us designing digital products right now would never dream of assuming we know exactly how users will take and use what we create - in fact, our success will be defined by how users pick up our products and make them their own.

Kenny (my dad) said recently that he felt that music was losing its connection with time - "new" music is less of a mass experience that crosses generations (listen to a typical '70s or '80s hit and ask if anything equivalent ever crosses multiple generations now) - so instead we slice and dice the past in new, multiple ways. After all, we have access to a massive back catalogue.

Why might the same not happen with cars? One thing's for sure - a proper fashion shoot featuring one of these motors would right now trump something featuring a brand new car design. New is no longer about actually being new - it's more complicated than that.

Posted by Mark Charmer on Tuesday 1 May 2011.

On cathedrals, new and old

A friend was telling me this week how he felt that so little of our environment today seems to be have been constructed with an intention of permanence, or even a sense of what a permanent thing should be.

I read Stefan Zweig's description this morning of a journey he took from Paris in 1924, seeking respite from this city "that now explodes into a thousand flying sparks". He makes the hour and a half's journey to Chartres, to see its cathedral.

He is moved by its scale and purpose. I thought what he said was really interesting, and relevant:

"For this church had room for an entire generation and that is its heroic lesson, eternally big enough for all earthly aspirations, eternally able to exceed all possibilities and now forever a symbol of infinity. They simply wished to immortalise their faith, those who raised this cathedral in the heart of this flat country, forging in stone to preserve their pious will beyond their own time.

For never again will such works arise in our epoch, which measures time in a different way and lives at an altogether different pace: man will build no more cathedrals.

Our plans demand accomplishment at speed, our rhythm of life becomes ever more frantic, and there is no single work that lasts beyond a generation and none even that reaches beyond a single life. We who thanks to a spark are capable of communicating with another continent in a second, we no longer know how to articulate our being across the slowness of stones, the infinitude of years.

Our miracles are manageable and intellectual, our dreams more compact. Now the soul takes leave of the huge rising form of something that has become alien to it, like the Pyramids or the Parthenon; we have lost our capacity for the eternal, which the world itself has gained, and our capacity to incarnate the spirit of a whole people or the genius of a time in a single work. So then, it's over: men will build no more cathedrals."

But then Zweig travels back towards Paris:

"And yet, as the return train made its way through the darkening evening landscape, before the sign itself, the presentiment of Paris loomed: the giant city, a glowing cupola atop a reddish vault on the horizon, rising up into an invisible sky...

Indestructable, this glowing dome of light reigns above the seething nocturnal city, this union of countless electrical energies and the ferverently pulsing lives of millions forms the most impressive cathedral of our epoch... Radiant with celestial light and raised on high in the listening night, this new cathedral of Paris would perhaps have appeared to the builders of yesterday just as splendid, as mighty and divine as the works they left seem now to our eyes.

Epochs have used different signs to engrave their face on the landscape of the earth, and nothing is more wonderful than in the space of an hour to read, to understand and to love (as much as they may seem strangers to each other) one sign and the other expressing their will to live."

As I said, Zweig wrote this in 1924. Posted by Mark Charmer. Sunday 6 March 2011.

iPad - The best things come to those who wait

Two weeks ago a man called Mark Nitzberg did a lovely thing - he sent me an iPad from California. Mark's a board member at the Akvo Foundation, where I spend much of my time right now. He wants to know what I think about it - how it changes the way we use computers, whether it's any good, and whether you can read a book all day on it. So I've been giving it a whirl. I'll write more about the actual device, and what the big deal is over the coming days. But the thing is, I can't really describe the iPad to you until I do a bit of a recap - a few snippets of my perspective on the evolution of personal computers. So here goes.

In 1993, I got a job at Apple Computer. It wasn't in Cupertino, or even (as you might expect as a Brit) in Stockley Park, near Heathrow. It was in Warsaw, Poland.

Set on Jana Sobieskiego, a particularly bleak stretch of road out in the Warsaw suburb of Mokotóv, Apple Poland HQ was above a hat factory (filled with scary old ladies), and an Amway franchise (filled with scary Americans).

I was there for about a year, and learned a lot. Apple, "in between Jobs", so to speak, was struggling. Although its state of limbo was one of those things that I only really understood with hindsight. I was surrounded by technology. I shared an office with two guys. Marcin and I would throw paper at eachother all day while doing "marketing". Andrjez, a wonderful kindly man, would sit at a Mac Quadra 950, carefully designing Polish fonts to be used in Mac System 7. Because his computer had a 33MHz Motorola 68040 processor, it was actually categorised as a super-computer, requiring a special import license into this fragile new democracy, just four years beyond the collapse of communism.

I had a Powerbook 170. With an active matrix black and white screen, it was the absolute business - a dark grey wonder that was full of original ideas. It had the keyboard set back close to the screen, and a "track ball" - a dead-ringer for a pool ball - set on a ledge at the front of the computer. It had folders dotted around the desktop, and I could write wherever I was because it was genuinely portable, with little feet that twisted around at the back. I could connect it via "Appletalk" to other computers. I think we even had staff electronic mail running.

It's difficult now to describe just how dull most computers were back in the early '90s - after an '80s childhood of BBCs and Spectrums, Killer Gorilla and Donkey Kong, the personal computer future had fizzled into a way to run a digitized version of the 1970s office. I could type my own memos, print things off myself, decide where to save things and what to call them. I could even now take my computer with me to other places and use it there as well. While I was there, I could make things bold - or even italic. I could do all the things people could do in the 1970s, without needing support staff.

One day what looked like a pizza box arrived with a monitor on top, that had speakers. It was a Mac Centris 660AV, the first computer to be imported into Poland, as far as we knew, that could show video snippets and play music clips. It had a fancy innovation called a DSP, which stood for Digital Signal Processor. That meant it actually had another computer processor inside, which handled most of the video and sound. The clips were pretty tiny on screen - and the sound was okay but we all had CDs, which seemed much more useful, because they connected quickly to your hifi. So most people would say, "well what can you do with that?" And to be honest none of us had a good answer. It also had something called "GeoPort", which meant you could use a modem, so the computer could connect through telephone lines. But we didn't really use that.

One of the guys was also toting an Apple Quicktake 100 digital camera. Most people couldn't understand the point of that, either. I think it cost about $400 (to put this in context my Polish salary then was $200 per month, and that was above average). It could hold 8 photographs at 640x480 resolution. Which you couldn't do much with. Even bleak early '90s Mokotóv was blossoming with colourful Fuji and Kodak and Agfa signs above shops, where you could take your film camera and get prints developed, sometimes while you waited. So people would say, "Why would you want a digital camera when a film camera is really cheap and more useful?"

In early 1994, I was given an Apple Newton Messagepad. It was tiny - well actually it wasn't. It was an alien size - quite long and bulky. But it just had a screen - and no keyboard. Well actually, it had a stylus, a plastic thing that you knew you'd lose. And you would attempt to write on the screen and watch it convert each character into words. I took it out to a dinner with American and Irish friends that night and passed it around the table. Everyone thought it was fun, but noone could really make it work properly. And by the time it got back around to me, the batteries were dead. It was a digital notepad, for which there was no need.

Late that year I went back to London and worked for Apple, then Compaq, then Dell then HP, later in the '90s.

Apple and all the others spent a long time playing around with technologies that weren't yet really ready. But all this stuff is ready now. When I first got hold of an iPad two weeks ago, it felt like an alien size, but as an iPhone user it's all so familiar to use. But it is really different to any other computer.

The point of the iPad is that people can actually watch and read material off the internet. They can do it for ten hours. They can do it without sitting poised like a typist. That first Apple Powerbook 170 I had was bold enough to put a trackball at the front of the portable computer, and let the keyboard sit behind it. Apple's now been bold enough, and clever enough, to remove the keyboard altogether. A year ago this would have been premature. But now the internet is easy to use by just clicking around most of the time.

Microsoft's tablet computers, sold half-heartedly by PC makers, were insufficiently developed and timed too early. In computers, as in most things, timing is everything. Apple's timing is impeccable.

People who say the iPad isn't any good are the people that think the world is worse now than it was in 1955, or 1965, or '75, '85, '95 or 2005.

It isn't. It's a better world. The iPad is great - a product absolutely in tune with its time, not too far ahead or in any way behind. And it'll make the next ten years much more interesting. Just watch – or read, or follow.

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau.

Photo: the Sign / Movement Design Bureau kit museum in Bermondsey includes a Powerbook 160, a close relative of that PB170 I mentioned earlier. London, 5 May 2010.

The trouble with eight-point plans

As a fair-weather cyclist - the kind that wonders why everyone else is in such a rush - I'm really at a loss with London's "coordinated" attempts to sort itself out as a great cycling city. Here's the latest campaign, to tackle theft:

LCC's eight-point campaign plan:

1. Creation of a police anti-theft squad A dedicated police team must tackle cycle theft, engaging in pro-active ‘stings’ to find persistent offenders and gangs.

2. Tougher action against selling stolen on websites Websites need tough rules on ID, and sellers must be made to provide real photos and frame numbers.

3. Code of practice for bike shops Bike shops must make proper checks on seller ID and bike provenance. A new code of practice will enable those that sign up to it to demonstrate their good standards.

4. Tougher action against street markets Well-known locations for selling stolen bikes such as Brick Lane market must be policed much more aggressively.

5. A central repository for recovered bikes A central location where people could recover stolen bikes would make it easier to unite owners with the large number of bikes that are recovered.

6. Regular stakeholder meetings Cyclists, police and politicians must meet regularly to ensure that cycle theft is given sufficiently high priority.

7. Increasing secure parking provision Thousands more secure cycle parking spaces need to be built for homes, estates, shops, educational institutions, workplaces and transport hubs.

8. Better education for cyclists Cyclists must be given sensible information to help them protect their bikes, such as registering the frame number online, buying insurance, and using strong locks. They also need tips on avoiding buying stolen bikes.

Why is secure parking for bikes item number 7? An eight-point plan is useless, unless it's set in order of priority. And right now secure infrastructure is item 7. First will come police squads, dealing with cyber crime, canvassing shops with codes of conduct, chasing market holders, building a database, meetings. Unless of course, this list isn't prioritised.

In the Netherlands the reality is that cycle theft is rampant, but most people ride cheap bikes and are used to it, albeit irritated. London's bike boom is a consumer boom as much as it's about getting around - people buying smart bikes and worrying about where to put them. There isn't really any good storage - in Dutch cities there are manned parking stations, there are safe places to park at work and there's plenty of places to hook your bike outside where you need to be. It's not perfect, but it's probably (quite seriously) a five million times better situation than we have in London.

The list, indeed the London Cycling Campaign site, smacks of lots of time spent in brainstorms, or on "advocacy", and no role to play in building infrastructure. The absolutely most important thing that matters if London is to be a great city to cycle in is that infrastructure is reprioritised towards bikes. Most crucially bikes must take priority over pedestrians and cars (which is basically the way it works in Holland - get out of my way, I'm on a bike).

Almost all the lessons we need are close by, in countries like Holland and Denmark. Indeed a study two weeks ago argued that Dutch children were the happiest in Europe - it's not measured, but I have no doubt that a contributing factor is that most cycle to school. Or ride to school with their parents.

Trying to define this stuff ourselves, how London should work as a cycling city, as some kind of exercise in original thought, is a bit like making your own nails to build a fence. Or building your own web browser to display web pages.

We need to gather the best practice lessons fast but step forward, onwards. We don't have the right infrastructure - pathways and storage - and if we're going to build it quickly, when there's no money around, we need to be smart. The London Cycling Campaign website could be about infrastructure and every decision should be visible. Every junction, pavement, post, ramp. Where are improvements planned? What do people want? Which companies are helping co-fund secure storage (in, for example, each office lobby)? Which council budgets, and which taxpayers, are paying for what? Instead we have people trying to change behaviour. In what sounds to me like meetings that will have intangible outcomes. Seven, in fact.

Related reading: If Lincoln Cathedral is architecture, what is a bicycle shed (by Joe Simpson) A lesson in business from the French (by Mark Charmer)

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau, a think tank.

Post consumerism? A crisis in design, a crisis of ethics: a time for change

I just got married. Hence have been away for a while, and why the lack of posts. It's not unknown for such activities to cause people to reassess their priorities, and begin to question stuff they previously took for granted. So, this could just be me. Yet I sense something is in the air. Something feels different...

Take the election in the uk right now. The media-spun forgone conclusion we began the campaign with has been thrown open by a number of things, including a TV debate which shook-up the status quo. Every day, social media channels are exposing the bias and vested interests of traditional publications and big business. The entire event feel not only more open, but exciting, and 'different this time'. As Gordon Brown discovered yesterday, you are never 'off record' anymore. And in all of this, among the optimists such as your author, there's a sense that we - the people - can make a difference. Our say somehow feels like it 'matters more' this time.

Then take the auto show in Beijing last week. The western auto companies unveiled products that whispered of a sense of relief. The crisis is over, and now China's growing auto market will allow them to simply continue as they were, thanks very much. Ford, at least, showed a city car. Yet I haven't found many people who are impressed with Mercedes' vulgar - and dubiously dubbed - 'shooting brake concept'. Or anyone who actually needs, or cares about the BMW Gran Coupe concept. And while many were still busy laughing at Chinese 'copies' of western models, those who stood back saw a set of Chinese car designs that had a level of genuine credibility that was unthinkable just two years ago. Some even noticed the Chinese Government initiatives, and the impacts they are having on development of Chinese electric cars, which could have some interesting consequences for the old guard. Better Place gained a foothold in the world's largest country - despite being increasingly poo-pooed by some in the developed world, but Chinese firms are developing similar charging infrastructure plans of their own...

There's a sense that the more switched on people are looking, scrutinising, and questioning the status quo more than ever before. It's apparent in design and design criticism as much as anywhere else. Ultimately, the very role of the designer is being questioned. While this may be somewhat frightening, it at least means we may be moving to the next stage of the debate, beyond dubious tick-box, shiny apple-green sustainability. Rather than become all preachy, the main point of this piece therefore, is to draw your attention to a series of important articles and events reflective of this new, deeper line of questioning. If you're a designer, or design student, I'd argue they're required reading...

The underlying contention they all make, is that many designers are - far from making things in the world better - complicit in simply encouraging people to consume at an ever growing rate - messing up peoples' heads, and screwing the planet in the process. So what role for the designer?

Core 77's Allan Chochinov perhaps framed this most eloquently some time ago, in his 1000 word manifesto for sustainability in design. Now a couple of years old, it nonetheless still resonates and provides a useful starting point. More recently, Munich professor Peter Naumann's "Restarting car design" looks set to become a seminal piece, and is one all students of transport design need to read. Judging by the shock-waves it has generated, and the response to it from those I've spoken to in the auto, design and education sectors, he has hit the nail on the head. Because increasingly, it isn't just industry that's in the firing line, but design education institutions that are being questioned. For its part, the Royal College of Art is currently hosting the "Vehicle Design Sessions". There have been two so far, and both have touched on the areas I'm discussing. As Drew Smith's write-up chronicles, the panelists at the first - sustainability focused - debate, were unanimous in their view that vehicle design students should now look outside of the established industry if they were truly intent on using their design skills to have real impact in the world. Perhaps not what you'd expect from an event held at one of the world's leading vehicle design courses.

For those students of design interested in more than just the design of the next sports car, all of this raises a dilemma. How do you balance the necessity to find employment and money, without simply tramping up a well-trodden path, or falling into big-industry - pandering to whims and being emasculated from affecting meaningful change?

I doubt many will find that quandary any simpler after reading Carl Acampado's piece, but it's a necessary read nonetheless. Entitled  "The product designer's dilemma", it is bound to strike a chord with many of its readers. Acampado touches on the conflicts that the average designer - and indeed typical consumer - today faces in balancing personal desires, ambition and personal success, with the best way not to fuck up the planet. It's an impassioned piece, and just like your author here, Acampado has no real silver bullet solution to many of these problems. Yet his "dog for life/do it with love" message resonates loudly, and without wanting to sound all soppy, could be an interesting mantra to apply both as a consumer and in whatever area of design you practice. Please read the piece to see for yourself what I mean, if you haven't already. It echoes the voice of many of those I have mentioned above, and contrasts starkly with the PR-spun froth that consumers are (hopefully) growing increasingly sick off, yet which nonethelesss still dominates media 'opinion' that we are bombarded with every day. Stuff that I might add, is now the domain of much online green media, not just the likes of auto.

A final point. "Drive less. Save more" proclaims the title of the most recent email to land in my inbox, which is from the Energy Saving Trust - a UK Government sustainability body. In terms of missing the point completely, yet perfectly representing a very particular 'old way' of thinking that I'm taking issue with, I can't help thinking that it sums things up rather neatly. New approaches are needed. Thoughts on a postcard please... or alternately in the comments box below.

Image credit: "Consumption reflected" - Zohar Manor-Abel on flickr

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 29th April 2009. Full disclosure: Joseph Simpson is a visiting lecturer in Vehicle Design at The Royal College of Art. The thoughts expressed here are his own, and in no way necessarily reflect the views of the Vehicle Design Department or the wider College.

The Citroen SM is 40

The title says it all really. This masterpiece of automotive design and technorama was introduced exactly 40 years ago today at the Geneva auto show, and it's been making the world a slightly better place to be ever since... with brown SM detail pic to warm the cockles of Drew Smith, Ben Kraal, Davey Johnson, Mr Charmer, and all those other #browncar #LHMluv(er's) hearts.

Images - hyperspace and seat850 on flickr, under creative commons license

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 11th March 2010

Moonlighting on Downsideupdesign... Geneva auto show Podcast #1

Still not had your fill of this year's Geneva auto show? Well then why not head over to Drew Smith's downsideupdesign blog, where you'll find me guesting on their first podcast, in which Drew and myself disect the design and strategy behind Geneva's most important production debuts (and at times, that disection perhaps comes closer to vivisection...don't say we didn't warn you!)

Click on the screen grab below to head through to downsideup's site, or here to go direct to the video on blip.tv

With thanks to Drew for conducting the podcast, and putting in all the edit time...Check back soon if you'd like to see us rake over some hot coals in the form of Geneva's concept cars.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 11th March 2010

Geneva auto show 2010 - some things you might have missed...

By now, you'll no doubt have read all about the cars and concepts that you were interested in at last week's Geneva auto show. But if you've still apetite to digest and cogitate, Drew Smith - of the Downsideupdesign blog - and myself are producing a two part podcast with pics to cover all of the major production debuts and concepts, which you'll be able to see/hear in the next few days. For now though, you might be interested in some of the details, elements and irreverant bits and bats that I noticed in the Palexpo last week. So without further ado...

Citroen reimagined the ReVolt from Frankfurt as a racer for the road in the form of the SurVolt (above). Only Citroen could get away with painting it gloss blue, matte grey, pink and orange. But they did. Note these graphics - they were quite fun, a play on PCBs - used to signify the electric drivetrain.

Meanwhile over at Mercedes (above), they'd got wood... (sorry, couldn't resist). The use of wood laminates in this interior was fantastic - it vied with the Pegueot (see below) for concept interior of the show, and previews an altogether more 'light of touch' future Mercedes interior design language...

Peugeot marked its return to form with the SR1 (although special note to the glorious bike also on the stand) - which previews the brand's altogether more acceptable new face (thank god the rictus grin's gone). But it was the interior that really stood out in this car...great work Julien et al:

Speaking of gorgeous things, here's a shot of the superb little Pininfarina Alfa Duettotanta that makes me go a little bit weak at the knees...

Poundbury - an essay in how not to design a new town

Poundbury is Prince Charles' 'exemplar' urban environment, built on the edge of Dorset's county town, Dorchester - in the UK. It is held up in some planning and design circles as a template for how we should design future towns, and in other circles it is ridiculed. As some of our contacts have been discussing it online in the last few days, I thought it would be appropriate to publish my perspective, in the form of a re-worked extract from my 2008 Royal College of Art Thesis - "The future of the car in the city". The short essay follows:

Above: Pounbury streetscape - as seen from the green

Introduction

“It resembled an ancient relative to whom one was very close as a child, but who lacked any understanding of the adult whom circumstances had in the interim formed, whether for better or worse.”

Alain De Botton’s withering description of Poundbury village – a recent extension to the town of Dorchester in Dorset, is typical of those made by both mainstream and architectural media following the opening of Prince Charles’s ‘model’ town.

For many it is purely the architectural form that proves to be Poundbury’s undoing, but the most interesting aspect of this place – and what makes it a worthwhile study, is its urban design principles and attitude towards the car - both in terms of the theories and ideologies its designers used, and in the physical manifestation of the place itself.

Background and history

Poundbury exists today primarily thanks to HRH Prince Charles – the Duchy of Cornwall. His views on architecture, and how in turn the architecture profession has received this, can be read elsewhere. What specifically interested me was that Poundbury’s “…entire masterplan was based upon placing the pedestrian, and not the car, at the centre of the design.” To understand the relevance of Poundbury when considering the relationship between urban environments and the car, it is necessary though, not to focus on Poundbury’s visionary Prince Charles, but Leon Krier – Charles’s masterplanner, and New Urbanist.

Krier’s book – ‘Architecture: choice or fate?’ – sets out the principles that form the basis of New Urbanist theory which he employs at Poundbury. Not a fan of large, modern, metropolitan cities – he argues that they develop in problematic ways – nor Suburban sprawl, Krier instead suggests a model of ‘the city within the city’. These are smaller urban villages, situated close to one another, yet that don’t physically connect. The intention is to “re-establish a precise dialectic between city and countryside.”

Poundbury embodies these ideals, situated approximately two kilometers from the heart of Dorchester town centre. In between the two is a less dense, greener, urban ‘strip’. The place is split into four quarters, being built in phases (currently only phases one and two have been completed). Each quarter comprises it’s own mini-centre - a square intended as a focal point, for people, rather than cars.

Above: Pounbury schematic layout in relation to Dorchester, as I see it

Experience

Yet visiting Poundbury and observing how people actually live there, reveals deep flaws in Krier and Charles’ model. Poundbury feels like a village that has not yet been through the industrial revolution – yet (paradoxically) it feels dominated by the car. The central squares are not ‘people’ places - they are car parks. The streets around them are deserted of both people and vehicles. Ultimately, you discover the cars have been shoved out of the way, into back alley muses containing nothing but garages, eating up acres of space. The result is that both streets and courtyards are devoid of life and feel soulless.

Walking through Poundbury is analogous to Jim Carey’s chatacter in the Truman show. Life feels somewhat fake. In part, this is unsurprising - The Truman show was based on and filmed in Seaside, Florida which was designed by the ‘fathers’ of New Urbanism – Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and a place which Krier speaks about enthusiastically in his book.

Ultimately, despite being planned as “…a high-density urban quarter of Dorchester which gives priority to people, rather than cars, and where commercial buildings are mixed with residential areas, shops and leisure facilities to create a walkable community”, Poundbury’s fails in three key areas, expanded upon below:

• Services

Richard Rogers argues that for a place to be truly ‘walkable’ one needs the ability to work, live, play, (by inference meet people, eat, shop, entertain and be entertained) within the same (1 mile or so?) area. Although Poundbury was developed as a mixed-use community, as one might expect, many of the people who live there do not work here, and vice-versa. Likewise, the keystone services and amenities taken for granted in cities and towns - the supermarket, cafes, bars, a cinema, restaurants, educational and academic institutions, gyms, theatres, a take-away, a library or bookshop – simply do not exist in Poundbury. Poundbury has a high end hi-fi store, three wedding and bridal shops, and a ‘Budgens’ mini-mart shop masquerading as “Poundbury Village Stores”. Bluntly, being denied the amenities modern people and modern life require, strangulates Poundbury.

• Accessibility

If the designers had truly wanted the residents of Poundbury to use their cars less, then would it not have been more pertinent to explore and create better links, pathways and services between two of the places which Poundbury residents might most frequently be predicted to need access – Dorchester and the nearby Tesco’s supermarket? The supermarket sits only 1.4 km away as the crow flies (fig.26), but there is no path, no route for pedestrians, or other vehicles - so almost everyone drives there, as the supermarket is just around the ring road. Dorchester itself is 1.6 km from Poundbury’s central square. These distances (around 1 mile), equate to around 20 minutes walking time - too great a distance and time to prevent time-pressed people from using their cars. Alternatives options to jumping in the car are needed, and they are notable by their absence.

Above: an annotated aerial view of Poundbury with key landmarks and POIs in Dorchester marked

• Parking and streetscape

This area is the one Poundbury comes closest to getting right. However, some short-sighted ideas, and odd implementation, create issues. Krier is right for suggesting, “The speed of vehicles should be controlled not by signs and technical gadgets (humps, traffic islands, crash barriers, traffic lights, etc.) but by civic and urban character of streets that is created by their geometric configuration, their profile, paving, planting, lighting, street furniture, and architecture.”

Yet somewhere between drawing board and physicality, things have gone wrong. Poundbury does feature narrow, winding streets with ‘dropped kerbs’ that seem to discourage cars drivers from traveling particularly quickly. At the same time however, its lack of real hierarchy and distinction in building types – and the apparent desire to completely remove street signage, or implement any technology – means that the place does, to use his words about certain other places “demonstrate [its] unique capacity to disorientate, confuse…” Poundbury isn’t readable; it isn’t legible to an outsider.

Parking is worse still. The overarching desire to maintain ‘order’ – for everything, including the car – and to be neat and tidy, seems to have created issues when it comes to dealing with where to put stationary vehicles, and how much space they are allowed. Vast parking mews at the rear of houses tends to keep vehicles off the main road, but the benefit of this is questionable. The garage mews take up enormous space in the areas behind houses, occupying huge tracts of land that in ‘real’ cities simply isn’t there. Squares and courtyards have no focus, no life, and where there is some focus like a shop, simply become car parks.

 Above: one of the many garage mews, which take up acerages of space in Poundbury

If the intention was to put pedestrians (or even cyclists and other small vehicles) first, Poundbury might have looked at employing the incredibly successful ‘Woonerf’ system seen in Holland – which limit the space for cars on residential streets – and makes the street-spaces vibrant, safe environments in which children can - and do - play. Might it not have been better to move the cars out to two, maybe three main ‘areas’ on the edge of the development? But then this would raise the prospect of creating multi-story car parks, which Krier criticizes for little good reason, but at great length, in what he has written.

Conclusion

Poundbury is an interesting example of an attempt to build a new development in the early twenty-first century. Objectively, its failure is not down to the plain-to-see distaste for modern, nee modernist architecture which its facades embody, and for which it is most commonly criticised. Instead it is the failure to provide any vision or any excitement, about how the future of urban environments might be, and how people and vehicles might move around and share space, that disappoints most. Worryingly, for a place that is intended as a counterpoint to sprawl and overcoming car dependency, Poundbury provides little in the way of a blueprint for how things could be done.

It is also a lesson in why not to look at mobility as only being about cars, and why a creeping agenda of discouraging or limiting movement and mobility could be dangerous. Should others try to ape Poundbury’s developers, they too risk becoming preoccupied with trying to create well meaning solutions that don’t take into account the needs and desires of modern lives. One hope that if future developments try to counteract the car and its impact, they don’t forget about other forms of private mobility, which can complement or repurpose traditional cars. Sadly, for all the anti-car bluster, there is not a hint of a cycle lane, a bike park, a PRT system, a car-share scheme or a Segway to be found here.

An opportunity has been missed here, because of a refusal to embrace and experiment with new ideas, technologies, and products. This place could, and should have been an exemplar or a test bed in how we might live and move in the future. Instead, what best encapsulates the failures of Poundbury is this: its inhabitants appear condemned to a life on Dorchester’s ringroad, traveling to a big-box Tesco’s store, built on a greenfield site, in a car that weighs twenty times their weight, and typically has three empty seats.

One can only hope that those tasked with helping shape future towns and cities - both in the UK and abroad - who are now bussed to this place to ‘learn’ from it as some kind of example, recognise its failures and don’t condemn the inhabitants of their future towns to the same fate.

Published by Joseph Simpson on 17th February 2010

Some notes and information on this piece:

This piece is an adaptation from part of Joseph Simpson's Thesis "The future of the car in the city" - Royal College of Art, June 2008. A full set of references for this piece are available on request, but are not included here in our usual hyperlink fashion as they mainly refer to offline sources.

The piece is not creative commons licensed in the way our usual pieces are, as it is sibject to some copy right from The Royal College of Art. Please contact me if you would like to use or reference it so that I can grant permission. A copy of the original piece in pdf format is available on request.

Joseph Simpson visited Poundbury in October 2007