Context 167 - March 2021

48 C O N T E X T 1 6 7 : M A R C H 2 0 2 1 Notes from the chair From micro to macro: conservation and urban design When describing the work of a conservation professional to students, I often illustrate the range of responsibilities by telling them that on one day they might be advising on a mortar mix to be used in repointing a listed building in the morning and assessing the impact of a tall building on a conservation area in the afternoon. Both are important aspects of our profession, but they require different knowledge and skills. Yet unless we take on a quite specialised role in heritage, we need to be competent at both scales of operation. Indeed, it is difficult for me to imagine how a heritage professional could do their job without a knowledge of architecture and urban design. During the last year and a half two potentially important urban design documents have been issued by government in England: the National Design Guide and Living with beauty .While there was some public discussion about these at the time of publication, the debate was rather curtailed by the pandemic and publication of the planning white paper. Both these documents are a mixture of accepted good practice and radical approaches. I will put these into context by giving an account of some earlier important urban design publications which have influenced my approach to placemaking. It is very much a personal view and by no means a comprehensive survey. As a young town planner, my first inspiration was Gordon Cullen’s The Concise Townscape , which described in simple and visual terms what made our towns and cities interesting places to be in. Another was Jane Jacob’s (see page 54) The Death and Life of Great American Cities ; a great polemic against top-down and large-scale city planning. These were both published in 1961, the year after The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch, which led the way in defining some of the key concepts of urban design, such as paths, nodes, edges and landmarks. All of these involved understanding and learning from existing places and inevitably the good examples were from traditional or historic towns and cities. When did this all coalesce into something we call urban design? A key moment was the founding of the Urban Design Group in 1978, but my awakening to the practical application of urban design was in Responsive Environments (1985), by lecturers running the MSc urban design course at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University).We now had a form of guidance that told us not only what was good and bad, but also how we might go about creating better places and adapting existing ones. Its chapter headings comprised many of the terms we commonly use and take for granted today, such as permeability, variety, legibility, robustness, visual appropriateness, richness and personalisation. There were many other seminal texts, such as Jan Gehl’s Life Between Buildings and Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space . In common with many ground- breaking publications, it was some time before the theories and recommendations of Responsive Environments were reflected in national guidance. My next key document is By Design , published by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) in 2000. Its sister publication, Building in Context (in partnership with English Heritage) was published the following year, and both display a similar approach to the discipline. By Design sets out the following eight aspects of development form: urban structure, urban grain, landscape, density and mix, height, Kevin Lynch’s elements of the image of a city