Places from Spaces: The ‘What If' Experiment
Release date: 5 June 2009
Public spaces set for future regeneration in three of the South East’s biggest cities will feature a one-week only design experiment this summer in the Places from Spaces (PfS) Project. The City Councils of Brighton and Hove, Portsmouth and Southampton have been working with their local universities to help test design ideas which may influence long term solutions for each site.
The idea is the brainchild of the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) which recognises that quality public spaces are a powerful means to attract sustainable inward investment to a city and can improve the quality of life for the local community. Many cities in the South East have public spaces which could be a real feature if they could be revitalised. Local authorities or developers often propose long term visions for town centres or civic spaces which make promises without knowing how to test the vision and turn it into a reality.
SEEDA’s Urban Renaissance Manager, Miranda Pearce, says: “Places from Spaces” is showing decision makers in the public sector how to test and challenge such visions, to inspire their authors and to enable a more informed critique of those visions. One tool that the programme uses is the promotion of temporary transformations to answer the question ‘what if’?”
Valley Gardens in Brighton, Queens Park in Southampton and The Hard in Portsmouth will be the locations and the temporary transformations will take place in each City, two in June and the third in July.
The programme is being run for SEEDA by the Solent Centre for Architecture and Design (SCA+D), with support from the Kent Architecture Centre, and in partnership with Brighton, Portsmouth and Southampton Universities.
The main objectives include encouraging design knowledge transfer and showing the value of creative urban design, in turn enabling local authorities to explore innovative creative thinking and evaluate the possibilities for more radical schemes ahead of long term investment decisions.
For the universities, the project gives students a practical project to work on, giving them experience of working in a real world environment with the kind of constraints they might face, helping to ready them for professional employment.
Following a targeted training programme for senior Councillors and officers in each of the cities, a ‘client brief’ was developed for each site and this brief set the practical challenge for the students. The training enabled the local authority team to assume the role of expert critic and, finally, as judge to the student proposals.
“The project is showing some really positive outcomes,” says Phil Smith, SCA+D’s Project Manager. “It gives local authorities the opportunity to consider and test some exciting ideas for the development of spaces earmarked for future investment, while the universities get the chance to demonstrate their design capability and the students obtain practical project experience.”
For more information, please contact Ruth de Mierre on 01444 453399 (mobile: 07870 267344) or visit our website: http://www.solentcentre.org.uk/placesfromspaces
PLACES FROM SPACES - THE STUDY SCHEMES:
Queens Park, Southampton (1 – 5 June)
Project Leader: Paul Bulkeley, Visiting Lecturer, University of Southampton
Queens Park in Southampton had its high point in the heyday of Southampton’s Port when it was a magnet for people passing through the town to join a ship and for businesses serving the local economy. But the area round the park has changed, meaning that use of the park has changed radically; it is now primarily used as a through route for commuters and, in general, merely as a conduit rather than a space to be enjoyed, as it is also blighted by noise from road traffic. The City Council would like to see the park regenerated and become a better link between different parts of the City.
The PfS experiment will review how the local community might be attracted to make better use of the park. There are two parts to the exercise; students have borrowed around fifty chairs from the local IKEA store, which park users will be encouraged to take to different parts of the park - to understand how they might use the space if there were to be some permanent features there. This will be effected through a unique sound experiment conducted by the University’s Sound Engineering department. There will be ‘sound zones’ in different parts of the park which will reproduce - for example football games, a water feature, a café, street theatre, birdsong and children’s playground. Users will be able to take a chair to where they feel the sound is most conducive to what they feel they would want to use the park for.
Students will be recording the way in which people use the park so that they can then recommend a framework for the planned redevelopment of the park.
The ‘Forest’ of Lower Valley Gardens, Brighton (5 – 11 June)
Project Leader: Ian McKay, Visiting Lecturer, University of Brighton
Year 4 Architecture Students entered a competition to propose a temporary transformation of Valley Gardens, an underused public space between the one-way gyratory roads taking the main thoroughfare into and out of Brighton. The Gardens have existed since 1810 going through several transformations since. In the early 20th century, Brighton's then Superintendent of Parks and Gardens, Captain Maclaren, had a vision of open ‘valley vistas’ throughout the town, and Valley Gardens was seen as ornamental rather than recreational gardens, with complex horticultural bedding systems to be admired from passing cars and trams.. Back then, though, the gardens were planted more densely with trees and the areas of bedding were much larger than now.
Today, locals think of it as somewhere to be crossed to get to the other side - it's not a place. So the Council set the brief for the students, which included making a memorable space to be the heart of the City, welcoming visitors and encouraging the community use all year round,
Council members and officers judged the entries and the winner was Lucy Palmer who created the ‘Forest’ of Valley Gardens where 700 trees in pots will be used to set out nature trails and environments. Six different species of tree enable a landscape to be designed varying in height and density, bringing back a park full of greenery in an otherwise heavily urban environment. The trees will also compliment the mature elm trees which survived the elm beetle infestation of the 1980s and 90s – one of only two collections in the country. After PfS, the trees will be planted in another Brighton Park to give the City a sustainable legacy from Places from Spaces.
The scheme has also enabled Year 5 students to prepare concept designs for other possible permanent transformations of the Gardens which will be put on display while the temporary transformation is in place.
Portsmouth: Hard Times: 20 – 24th July 2009
Project Leader: Catherine Teeling, Senior Architecture Lecturer, University of Portsmouth
University of Portsmouth students will temporarily transform ‘The Hard’, a major transport interchange in the City, by erecting beach huts and marking out three routes - to the city centre, the historic dockyard and the waterfront. The students will create dramas to animate the routes and spaces, as well as using lighting, texture and a ‘memory bank’ for collecting local reminiscence.
Called ‘Hard Times’, the project is the brainchild of Architecture and Design students, as part of a scheme to generate design ideas for neglected areas of Portsmouth. The ideas will feed into the City Council’s master plan for regeneration of this area.
The Hard, which today brings together several methods of travel for local and national connections by rail, sea, coach and bus, was created in the 1700’s by locals dumping clay into the water at low tide and rolling the clay until it was hard.
The Hard is visually and physically disconnected from the rest of the city and the waterfront. Visitors arriving in the city are faced with an impenetrable urban landscape. The students have come up with innovative and intelligent designs to improve the interchange. The use of beach huts as markers and identifiable points of attraction along the defined routes will seek responsive community action and feedback, while spontaneous artistic and creative activities covering the themes of drama, sound, light, installation and memory of place will raise awareness of the possibilities for future regeneration inspired by heritage and local memory.
The Hard is currently undergoing a master planning process by Portsmouth City Council and the PfS programme seeks to support and augment this work.
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