Next to the aforementioned design rules, context is king. It is all well and good to be able to design a great place, but for that to be achievable and successful it will need to be designed in light of the local context, market conditions and potential of the place. These same design rules apply to low density and high density design solutions, so any design needs to be tweaked such that the design solution is achievable and reflects local context. The same nature and scale of development won’t be appropriate or deliverable in London, York and Grimsby.
This is all quite dull but important, so watch here if you like first for a summary:
So before working on any scheme for any place, we must undertake some background research to understand the context we are working in and that falls into a number of different areas:
Hierarchy of centres
To start with we must first think of the overall place’s potential and place within the wider hierarchy of settlements, towns and cities. Some places are just more important than others, some less so. The importance of any place will have a significant limiting factor on its potential, unless the place in the hierarchy can be changed.
Even within a town or city there will be a hierarchy of centres within it. In the small town, the high street will usually be at the core. As towns grew other centres often arose. In the pre-war town these were usually small to serve neighbourhoods that emerged around the town, or strip centres running parallel to what were once tram lines.
In the post war era many towns grew substantially, such that they spread out at a significantly lower density and higher rate to the pre-war city. Therefore, new centres arose, with some competing directly with the town centre. Shopping centres and retail parks are the most obvious examples. In the pre-car town centre however, its high street and the mixed use zone that surrounded it was not just the focus of retail, it was usually the core of the town’s economy, where people, lived, worked, traded, bought food or goods and produced goods.
When a supermarket or retail park opened on a large site out of the centre it effectively set up another competing centre. A centre specifically designed to ensure all spending occurred within the site. As office parks appeared on the greenfields around the town they again set up another centre drawing the office space from the town centre and the mixed use zone around it. As industry was separated from mills and factories around the town centre and moved to industrial estates on the periphery, this again created new centres where working people were concentrated with spending power outside of their workspace three times a day. All these new centres compete with the core to a degree or pull footfall from it, since those uses were once often focused in or around the town centre.
Separation of uses and decentralisation of urban centres means that many towns now have a complex hierarchy of competing centres with different centres fulfilling different purposes. Most high streets have transitioned from being the core of a mixed-use district into a strip of shop fronts almost wholly focused on selling consumer goods or cafes- entirely optional activities. Once town centres were the focus of the necessary activity of purchasing the week's groceries, now this activity has moved to the supermarkets.
So if you are designing a centre, you need to understand its current status and potential. If you are designing a new or regenerated place that requires an appropriately-scaled centre, you need to measure the level of need and demand in the place and proximity to other centres to understand the scale of what is deliverable.
Not asleep yet? Time to move to section 17.
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