Chapter 7
Serving society
In 2008, Martha Schwartz took part in a Channel 4 TV programme called ‘Big Town Plan’, presented by architect Kevin McCloud, in which designers were invited to make improvements to spaces in Castleford, a former mining town in the north of England. Schwartz was invited to design a ‘village green’ for New Fryston, a community on the outskirts of the town. She did not see eye-to-eye with local residents, but her scheme was built anyway. According to an article published later in Horticulture Week, the locals nicknamed the sculpture which the American placed in the centre of the green ‘Martha’s Finger’, reflecting their feelings about her way of working. Phil Heaton, another landscape architect involved in the programme, told the magazine, ‘Martha Schwartz is a wonderful designer but a bit of a prima donna … Designers need to listen before trying to impose ideas and that is where Martha Schwartz went wrong.’ On the other hand ‘design by committee’ is something which makes most landscape practitioners nervous, associating the phrase with bad decisions and uneasy compromises. The landscape auteur’s clarity of vision will be watered down by those who can’t or won’t see it. Those on the artistic wing of the discipline probably feel this more keenly than others, but there is also a strong counter argument which says that landscape design that ignores users’ wishes is bad design.
Landscape, power, and democracy
The architecture critic Rowan Moore has written that ‘Architecture is intimate with power. It requires authority, money and ownership. To build is to exert power, over materials, building workers, land, neighbours and future inhabitants.’ I fear that this is true, even though we might look for examples of the power of the collective, barn-raisings in rural America, for example. A similar statement could be made about landscape architecture, at least if we are considering the canonical designs that are found in history books. These show that it took surplus wealth to create parks and gardens, and for most of the time this was in royal or privileged hands. This did not necessarily make life easier for landscape designers, but the issues were different. When André Le Nôtre laid out the vast gardens of Versailles for Louis XIV, he had to contend with court rivalries, the changeable ideas of an absolute king and a degree of interference from royal mistresses, but on the whole he knew who his client was and what would please him. He did not have to worry much about anyone else. Designed landscapes, such as the gardens of Versailles, were expressions of mastery and control. English landscape parks of the 18th century certainly looked very different, but they were about the display of wealth and power too. Power came through control of the land, and wealth was needed to employ the labourers and horses required for necessary damming of rivers and recontouring of the ground. These parks were often created for men who talked much about British liberty, but it was their own freedom from arbitrary royal power that concerned them. They were not generally on the side of the common man. Infamously, when Joseph Damer, who later became the Earl of Dorchester, employed ‘Capability’ Brown to work on his estate at Milton Abbas, he asked him to relocate the villagers who were his neighbours to a new settlement built half a mile from his great house. One stubborn inhabitant would not go, so Damer ordered Brown to flood him out. For most of history, the only listening landscape designers had to do was to their paymasters.
The democratization of landscape architecture began with the 19th-century movement for public parks. Now the client was a public client, generally a council of elected representatives, and the parks’ users were the citizenry in all their complex diversity. Part of the brief was to provide a park which would appeal to all classes, and behind this often lay the paternalistic hope that such social mixing would reduce tensions within society. The revolutionary zeal of early Modernism took things further, placing a social mission at the heart of the design enterprise. The German Bauhaus (1919–33) was founded around ideals of socialist design and production. The utopian idea that a rational, functional architecture, pre-fabricated and mass produced, could improve living conditions for all was adopted in many countries, not least in Britain, where Nye Bevan, the 1945 Labour government’s first Housing Minister, declared that nothing was to be too good for the working man. Politicians and planners put their faith in high rise blocks of flats but the dream soon soured, and many British tower blocks met the same fate as the Pruitt-Igoe flats mentioned in Chapter 3. There were, however, some significant successes, such as Ralph Erskine’s Byker Wall in Newcastle (1969–81), which achieved a sense of place through attention to orientation and topography. Landscape architects were involved in the design and planting of the communal spaces in the low rise development sheltered by the Wall, and notably the design team consulted with the residents of the terraced houses in the old Byker who would become the tenants of the new social housing.
Modernist housing did not have to be high rise; two British architects, Eric Lyons and Geoffrey Townshend, teamed up with landscape architect Ivor Cunningham (1928–2007) to form Span Developments Ltd, a company which built Modern suburban homes in Kent, Surrey, and East Sussex, re-animating the ideals of the garden city movement and incorporating large communal gardens to the front of the properties. Both the Span housing and the Byker estate have a northern European sensibility and it is easy to draw parallels with housing projects in Scandinavia, such as the Søndersgårdparken development at Bagsværd in Denmark (the architects were Hoff and Windinge; the landscape architect, Akserl Andersen, 1943–50), where rows of low rise housing are grouped around a large community green flanked by tall poplar trees. In all of these schemes there was a conscious attempt, on the part of the designers, to foster sociability through the design of open space.
Empathy
If a landscape architect is going to serve people—and it is difficult to think of a project that does not involve this to some degree—then a capacity for empathy is required, and this involves a kind of imagination, the ability to place oneself in the shoes of another, no matter how different that person might be in terms of life experience, and physical and psychological characteristics. Since it takes a prolonged period in higher education to qualify and since the profession is comfortably middle class, there may already be little overlap between the life-worlds of the designers and those of many of the people they design for. It is not the case, however, that the great majority of landscape architects are men. The website of the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects, for example, observes that while (building) architecture and landscape architecture both start out with an even balance of genders at university, only 18 per cent of registered architects are women, whereas the corresponding figure for landscape architecture is 42 per cent. A recently published American book, Women in Landscape Architecture: Essays on History and Practice, edited by Louise A. Mozingo and Linda L. Jew, observes that the realm of landscape provided women with an alternative to domesticity, and that it has always been more receptive to female practitioners than has been architecture, engineering, or science. If there is a specifically gendered way of experiencing the landscape, then the presence of so many female practitioners ought to ensure that it is represented in design practice and that women’s concerns are an influence upon the places that are created. A positive example might be the attention given to matters of safety and fear of crime in public parks, where placing tall, dense planting adjacent to footpaths is usually avoided, lighting levels are carefully considered, and alternative routes are included to provide egress in an emergency.
Empathy is a good thing, but perhaps it has its limits. At one of the landscape architecture schools where I have been an examiner, it was customary to set aside some time each year for able-bodied students to become wheel-chairs users for a few hours, to understand how they coped with various surfaces, changes of level and ramps around the campus. Similarly, sighted students were asked to wear blindfolds and use canes. Recently there has been a flood of designs for sensory gardens, supposedly with the visually impaired in mind, but the sense of sight and the communication of ideas through drawings have been so central to the landscape enterprise that I have not, in 30 years of practice and teaching, encountered a visually impaired student or practitioner. Considering such forms of difference helps one to understand the limitations of empathy. It is easy to give people, not what they want, but what you think they want, or need, or ought to want. Most designers make this mistake at some time. I remember designing a very elaborate play-fort out of logs for an open space near a council estate in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. It looked terrific on the drawings, and indeed when it was built, but its curtain walls provided the ideal concealment for teenagers sniffing glue and the whole thing had to be dismantled. My fault was that I had not asked anybody what they wanted. I was the archetypal outsider who misread the situation I had been sent into. If I had lived in one of the neighbouring streets, I might have known that my timber castle was a bad idea.
The unhappy fate of my play-fort illustrates one of the strongest arguments for designing not just with people in mind but actually with people—in other words, in a collaborative or participatory way. Talking to people is a way to access local knowledge—of the twilight habits of disaffected teenagers, for example—which perhaps cannot be obtained by other means. It is better still if you can involve the community, including its estranged and marginalized elements, in the design process, so that when the park is laid out or the climbing frame set into position, the community sees it as its own, not as some random imposition from a distant authority. The skills required for this sort of work, which include listening, suggesting, explaining, negotiating, brokering, arbitrating, and a whole lot more, are seldom taught in the design studio. Also, working patiently with people can take a very long time because it is an iterative process, involving lots of meetings, lots of feedback, and lots of changes to the drawings. For designers who have been trained in the studio system to produce final designs by a given deadline, it can be hard to shift to a more patient, incremental progression. Yet unless this effort is made, much design, particularly in disadvantaged inner-city districts suffering high levels of delinquency, the time and money spent on new facilities can be wasted. Although it is possible to beef up specifications in an attempt to make items like park benches or play equipment more resistant to vandalism, this defensive approach has its limitations. It is far better to encourage local groups to take pride in their surroundings, because a sense of ownership can lead to forms of self-policing within communities. How best, then, to create that pride of ownership?
Participation
Back in 1969, an American planner called Sherry Arnstein published a paper entitled ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’ which became a classic text. She noted that there were degrees of participation which could be arranged like the rungs of a ladder. At the bottom was ‘manipulation’ which was really a parody of participation where officials would pay lip-service to local democracy by inviting a few well-chosen community representatives to join committees. It was the officials who ‘educated’ and persuaded the citizens, not the other way around. Only slightly better was ‘informing’, where the authorities had the decency to tell people about plans that could affect them, but again the flow of information was one way. Informing is certainly a necessary first step towards participation, but unless there are mechanisms for responding to feedback, it is no more than that. ‘Consultation’ involved soliciting citizens’ opinions through such devices as attitude surveys, neighbourhood meetings, and public hearings. Arnstein cautioned that this could often be a sham, mere window-dressing, unless combined with more active modes of participation. Towards the top of the ladder were ‘partnership’, involving genuine sharing of power between officials and community representatives on policy boards and planning committees, and ‘delegated power’ where negotiations between citizens and public officials resulted in ‘citizens achieving dominant decision-making authority over a particular plan or program.’ Arnstein placed ‘citizen control’ on the very top rung, which ceded full authority for management and decision making to community insiders. Where public money is involved, those in power generally see full citizen control as too risky, and they may have a point. It is reasonable to ask whether the community has the skills and capacities required to control budgets and manage complicated operations on site. It is more usual, therefore, to find participation occurring as some form of partnership between local government and community groups, and this model is often successful.
Methods
Much has been written about community participation in planning and design, and there are literally hundreds of different approaches and methods. Many have been devised in response to the perceived failings of traditional methods such as questionnaire surveys and public meetings, which do not involve and empower citizens. They range from techniques for discovering what people want, such as briefing workshops, future search events, and guided visualization, to methods which harness local creativity, such as art workshops, model-making, and parish mapping, through to events and activities which engage citizens in the design and decision-making process itself. Corresponding to the top rung of Arstein’s ladder we have local development trusts, which are non-profit organizations, set up, owned, and led by a community to pursue social, environmental, and economic regeneration, usually working in conjunction with other private, public, or voluntary organizations. Perhaps more relevant to landscape architecture are a cluster of methods which bring together members of communities (insiders) with designers and others with specialist knowledge and skills, such as ecologists and engineers.
Charrettes and task forces. The term ‘charrette’ derives from the French term for a cart or a chariot. In the 19th century, architecture students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris would work furiously up to a deadline, upon which a cart would be pushed through their studios and they had to throw their designs into it for review by their teachers. The idea of intensely working against a deadline to solve a problem or produce a plan is captured in contemporary usage, which also suggests the idea of a focused team effort. Charrettes are short-term events, usually held over a few days, in which the participating professionals listen to the local stakeholders (not just residents, but other interested parties, such as politicians, sponsors, local business people, etc.), try to develop a collective vision for the place and then draw like crazy to meet the deadline. A task force or design assistance team is similar, in that it consists of outside practitioners brought into an area to work with the stakeholders to solve a problem, perhaps in response to some calamity like the closure of a major factory, a tornado strike, or a serious flood. At the heart of the process will be a multidisciplinary team of six to ten professionals who will work with the community for four or five intense, productive days. Some university landscape architecture programmes run charrette-like activities with local groups, often in conjunction with a studio design project, the products of which are made available to the community after the final review.
Workshops, Design Games, Planning for Real®. There are strong resemblances between all of these participatory methods. What distinguishes this group from the last is the emphasis placed upon people producing their own solutions rather than just contributing to solutions ultimately produced by outside experts. They generally involve some form of initial mapping or visualization stage. So in Planning for Real® (PFR), a process devised and trademarked some 30 years ago by Dr Tony Gibson, who was then part of Nottingham University’s Education for Neighbourhood Change Unit, local people build a table-top model of their neighbourhood, which is then used in pre-advertised sessions held at various locations in the community, such as libraries or church halls. Participants place suggestion cards on the model showing the sorts of changes or additions they would like to see, such as a new park or play area, tree planting, better parking, or local shops. The cards can then be sorted and prioritized to produce an action plan for the community, to be followed up by working groups. Design games are similar. One version sometimes used for the planning of parks involves local people placing scaled cardboard shapes, representing facilities such as football pitches or tennis courts, or models of play equipment and park furniture, onto a plan of the park. These items have all been previously priced, so the participants can get a sense of what might be possible for a certain budget and can discuss and hopefully agree their own priorities.
I will close this chapter with two examples where participatory methods of planning and design have been used (see Boxes 1 and 2).
Box 1 The Ian Potter Foundation Children’s Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, Australia. Landscape architect, Andrew Laidlaw, completed 2004
A rusty metal gate featuring the shapes of old gardening implements invites children into this most magical of play gardens which was funded by the foundation created by Australian businessman and philanthropist Sir Ian Potter. The principal designer was Andrew Laidlaw, whose portfolio of work includes both renovation projects in botanic gardens and garden play spaces for schools. The garden, which won the 2005 Victoria Tourism Award for Best New Tourism Development, includes a long, curving, living tunnel, a snaking water rill, a secret ruin, and a rocky gorge surrounded by snow gums (Eucalyptus pauciflora) and tussock grasses (Figure 8). It was developed by a multi-disciplinary team which included expertise in visitor programmes, education, horticulture, and art, but it also involved working with children from two primary schools, one from the inner-city and one from a rural bush environment. The design team visited the schools to gather ideas for the garden from the children. On a subsequent occasion the designers presented the children with a concept plan which showed them some of the main elements, such as spirals, tunnels, and grassy mounds, then the children were invited to draw the features which they wanted the most. The children were also brought to the Botanic Garden and encouraged to interact playfully with the plants. An artist worked with them, creating artworks in free play. Through such activities, the designers learnt that the children’s play was active and energetic, and that they enjoyed places where there was a sense of spatial enclosure. A review of the methods used observed that the interactive activities in the Gardens were much more helpful to the designers than the interviews with the children at their schools at the concept stage. The project is exemplary in the way it sought to develop the garden with children, rather than just for them, and for its adoption of active, creative, and enjoyable methods that would appeal to the children as creator-users of the space. Though this garden was made in the high profile setting of a major botanic garden, the same philosophy can be applied to the improvement of school grounds or the creation of community parks and play areas.
8. The Ian Potter Foundation Children’s Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, Australia (completed 2004)
The charity Groundwork is the largest single employer of landscape architects in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1982, Groundwork is an organization which mobilizes local people and resources to improve the prospects of struggling communities, using the local environment as the focus for action. The idea took root in places suffering from the decline of traditional industries such as coal, steel, and quarrying, where communities had not only lost their main sources of employment, but also had to contend with the ravaged landscapes which industry had left behind. Although good design was always an objective, the initiative was also about resolving social tensions, improving people’s life chances through training, education, and work experience, attracting investment, and stimulating the local economy. The organization also helps people to think about the ways in which they can take local action to counter global environmental problems. Landscape architects work alongside community development officers, youth workers, and project officers, engaging patiently and enthusiastically with individuals and community groups to harness creativity and bring about beneficial change. Groundwork is now a federation of around 30 local non-profit trusts, which between them deliver thousands of projects every year. It almost seems invidious to select any one project or even region, but to give some sense of Groundwork’s activities we can consider Groundwork Leeds, which in a single year helped young people to redesign and renovate a skate-park, worked with a local residents’ association to manage an overgrown woodland for public access, redesigned a dilapidated playground as an informal playground incorporating natural elements, and renovated Victoria Gardens, a prominent open space in the city centre, with input from the children of Little London Primary School. Many Groundwork projects are small scale and not many make the pages of glossy design magazines, but that is hardly their aim. It is the cumulative impact over three decades of Groundwork’s many projects upon people’s lives that ought to be considered. The approach has been so successful that it has inspired the creation of sister organizations in the USA and in Japan.