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The Garden,
Communal Spaces and Greenspace |
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Original
texts on Social Aspects |
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Unallocated open space Continued from previous page - CLICK HERE TO GO BACK On all housing schemes, but particularly those for the lower income groups, the designer is often working within very limited budgets. This accentuates the difficult problem of deciding how money should be spent on the external environment and too often results in little or nothing being left to spend on the detailed design of those areas, once the houses themselves have been built. However, to see the outdoor spaces as the leftovers - areas to be dealt with after the important part, that is the house unit, has been built - is to misunderstand how people react to their home environment. It is an attitude which will simply result in a repetition of all the mistakes made in the design of housing areas this century. The 'doorstep' There is an area which can be identified in relation to each house which is part private, part communal. On higher density low-rise estates it is important as a meeting area; a bridge between what is perceived as private garden space and public circulation space; the place where neighbours stand to talk; the place in which the young children play; the place the teenagers gather. It is a difficult place to identify and will be different in each form of layout. It is important to try to understand where this meeting between private and public takes place. If it is successfully identified and detailed to give some feeling of seclusion, it can help people through the problems of meeting their neighbours and, therefore, through the problem of settling into a new environment. If it works as a social space it can play a major part in helping that elusive community spirit to develop, that sense of belonging which ultimately decides whether a residential area works or not for individuals. Walls or railings which are robust enough to sit on can help this 'place' to be used to the full, as they give a reason to loiter there, particularly if located in sunny, sheltered corners. |
Shared surfaces/"Woonerf" A summary of the development of the idea of 'shared surfaces' (that is a space used by both cars and pedestrians but within which the pedestrian has priority) and a critique, using examples from new towns, on the way in which the design solutions have succeeded, is given in the Department of the Environment Design Bulletin 32. That publication also gives a wealth of information on the types of surface, turning circles, width of roadways and methods of dealing with parking. Clare Cooper Marcus (1986) also deals in detail with this increasingly popular solution to traffic problems. See also Carmen Hass Klau (1990) on Traffic Calming. The Dutch have developed the idea of 'shared surfaces' to the extent that almost all their housing since the late 1970s has been built around courtyards. The term used is 'woonerf' and the Dutch Government implemented special laws to ensure that pedestrians have priority and that cars can only park on certain designated areas within the woonerf. Germany now has similar laws, as does Denmark, but in Britain the legal framework still lags behind people's concern to produce a safer environment for pedestrians in residential areas. Britain has the lowest car accident rate for drivers and passengers in Europe, but one of the highest pedestrian accident and death rate, with the worst statistics being inside residential areas. A radical approach is needed and in October 1990 the British Government took the first steps towards this by allowing local authorities to impose a 20 mph limit in certain areas. But this limited concession is nowhere near enough - legislation is needed so that local authorities can actively encourage woonerf-like schemes with complete pedestrian priority, with speed limits well below 20mph. All surveys show that residents want to be able to park their cars as near to their homes as possible and preferably within the garden. It may seem preferable to the designer to hide cars in large car parks, but these and large garages are perceived as unsafe by residents. The shared spaces or woonerfs are mainly communal spaces. Children will frequently play there, everybody living around the space will have to pass through it and car owners will leave their cars there. However, when used for cars, it is essentially a hard surface space. In the most successful schemes, as identified in the research carried out at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University), (Architects' Journal, 25th June, 1983), the shared space is normally well planted. The vegetation acts as a foil to the hard surfaces and gives visual privacy to houses facing each other across the space. A characteristic of this type of space is that once the vegetation has become established, maintenance costs are relatively low. |
Communal spaces - public open spaces Mistakes in the way that the non private space is allocated and treated are now understood to have long term social as well as financial repercussions. To minimise maintenance costs for the community it is advisable to ensure that as much land as possible within any estate is within gardens. There can be no standardised design of the private spaces which become the gardens; the designer needs to provide a solution which makes the best possible use of land on that particular site, rather than be guided by any "standards of provision". On the whole people accept that gardens are their responsibility and, provided that their territory is obviously identifiable, they are more likely to take good care of it. If it is not perceived by the residents as being obviously their garden, then litter and rubbish can be allowed to accumulate by residents, with all the long term repercussions outlined above. This type of public or communal open space in housing areas has almost always proved to be a problem unless the local authority is properly organised to maintain it, and few can now afford to do that for all open spaces under the changed rules governing local authority expenditure. Planning authorities throughout the 1970s and 1980s demanded that developers provided open space in new housing areas. This formed part of their open space strategies and met the requirement for a certain number of square metres of open land for each group of a 1,000 people. The result of applying these standards with no thought to the long term costs of maintenance is a litter of pieces of grass in and adjacent to housing areas, which are for the most part unused and unusable. Large grassed open spaces are rarely appropriate within new housing areas unless they are designed as part of a theme, such as housing set around 'greens' and special measures are taken under management agreements, at the time of building, to charge those overlooking the 'green ' for its maintenance. Small well planted communal spaces consisting of several visual subdivisions frequently work better than large areas of grass. The residents are more likely to perceive them as attractive and use them more readily (see references quoted in Beer, 1990, chapters 7 and 8). In the British climate grass is an ideal surface for playing and in the summer for sitting on, but if it is to be fully used other than as a football field by young children, it needs a setting. The setting is best provided by fencing, or shrub beds, areas of structure planting, or walls or buildings. Where grass is used, it should only be used in fairly substantial patches, so that maintenance costs are controlled. The small spaces left over after planning and usually grassed should be designed out of housing schemes, since they greatly add to maintenance costs in the long run, even if they are the cheap solution in the first place and, when not looked after, add an air of unkemptness to a housing area. Open spaces are an invaluable part of all housing areas: they can act as focal points for children and adults and within higher density housing can add that sense of spaciousness which surveys have shown that people value greatly in their residential settings. However, unless maintenance can be ensured in advance, preferably through a management agreement which stipulates that the people benefiting from the space are directly in control of its maintenance, then it is perhaps preferable only to provide small areas which can be easily managed and are easily accessible from all housing. Security in communal spaces The question of people's security must be considered by the designer who has to develop a solution to the provision of open land in and around housing areas, a solution which will provide visually attractive spaces and yet allow for informal surveillance from surrounding houses. When designing communal spaces in housing areas, it needs to be borne in mind that people will move through the space as well as congregate there for activities. Such places normally work best if they can be perceived as a 'special place', somewhere that the user arrives at and thus something special within the housing environment. Merely to grass over the areas between buildings and beside the pedestrian system and to call them communal spaces is not design and misses an opportunity to create a special sense of place within the housing area. The designer should be aware of where the special 'place' begins and the footpath circulation system ends; this awareness helps in deciding how the design should develop - how a special setting can be designed. |