Fresh thinking on place planning

The last couple of months for me have been particularly intense in terms of project milestones and also out-of-work events offering plenty of opportunity for CPD in placemaking, one of the wider fields I consult for. I found I was able to distil my learnings into a checklist; to keep to hand, especially if you're stuck for inspiration on a placemaking bid or feel, as a developer, you're going too fast and suspect you're missing a trick or two in your plans. Basically the past months, I learnt that you'll shift paradigms and create more enduring spaces (probably make more money too) if you:

1—Think like a child

Fig. If you're stuck for inspiration on how to develop a piece of land, remind yourself of your best childhood memory and you'll be seeing new potential for a place simply by seeing it with fresh eyes. Incidentally, if you're part of the overwhelming majority, your best childhood memory is likely to be something you did outdoors... Photo from mischaphoto.com

-- in particular, the child that you were! (Dinah Bornat on this panel, Festival of Place 2019).

There's good reasons why looking at the world from a child's perspective is both important and interesting. For one, it brings another angle to inclusivity (hence vibrancy and social resilience). Dinah Bornat's advice is on doing so by reminiscing your own childhood experiences, which enables you to empathise more effectively with children in general. You're unburdened by your adulthood and the expectation you should be protective of children. The exercise itself helps you see familiar things anew; it's amazing to find yourself paying attention again to things that had become invisible simply because you have grown so accustomed to them! The best thing about this is we've all been children at some point in our lives, so rather excitingly, this Proustian moment is within reach. [1]

2—Think like a human

Fig: This map putting forward all the green and blue spaces of London is fab; get a copy online and start exploring. Incidentally do you remember the first time you learnt to draw a map? Photo from London National Park City

-- in particular, as being part of the natural ecosystem of this planet (originally via this placemaking panel discussion last year, touching on London National Park City)

As London National Park City launched officially this year, I found the associated conversations around it interesting, because they look to draw people together around a rather simple premise; an acknowledgement that even within the large, complex forms of human habitat that cities are, the contact to nature is essential for our well-being and we should value and facilitate it. [2]

City-living is in fact still fairly disruptive for humans: 55% of the human population may be urban, but cities have existed for only 6-8,000 years compared to the 200,000 years that humans have been around. This means, in evolutionary terms, cities are recent and explains how our sensitivity to nature remains so deep-seated, rooting people to place in ways that are primal.

The benefits of a considered approach to planning with nature in mind is long-term but it can also be immediate. From prior bid writing (and winning!) experience, geography and landscape give a set of solid first principles to eke out what really makes a place unique, and, even if it's about what it can emulate, potential. Because they can be so primordial to the experience of place, the context provided by local natural elements will span generations. This portal to a place's collective history is a powerful thing and the downside of it is that, used the wrong way and to its extreme, it's prime material for manipulation and division.

By giving fundamental cues to understanding a foreign land or an unfamiliar place, it endows the imaginative and discerning outsider with solid insider perspective and also helps them formulate considered bids that are also surprisingly well-tailored.

3—Think like an islander

Fig. Size matters: streets of Port Louis, Mauritius, offer a perfect example of human scale, whose role in social contact and cohesion would deserve to be studied. Streets are not so big, so ideal for pedestrians and the interaction possible at this pace of movement, yet not as small as those of medieval European towns, so practical enough (think access for deliveries and other logistics, like emergency services, by four-wheeled vehicles). We might be in the process of losing it all due to hasty planning and “over-efficient” design. Photo (c) Sapna Nundloll.

-- in particular as a Mauritian. Conversations with fellow placemakers typically touch on identity, so this is as much professional as personal. Bear with me a moment while I wax lyrical about the island where I am from and to which I am still very much attached.

Mauritius is often used as a case study on successful interracial living; but it was not a given we would be good at this. The population today is the result of three major immigration waves under French then British rule from Europe, Africa, and Asia. The islander trait of artfully balancing between fitting in and standing out had to be mastered within a couple of generations,keeping things together, on a tight territory and restricted resources, within a highly diverse context was a matter of survival. 

The will to thrive was at least partly shaped by the country's branding (post-independence) as a destination at the confluence of the world, and indeed it's an element of Mauritian identity we take great pride in. Even if it caused many to leave at the time, here was no doubt general buy-in into the excitement of becoming fully in control of our fate, through the process of independence in 1968; those of my age with parents who were high schoolers just around that time, will know of the overarching hope and sense of pride around the opportunity.

This vision of hope, diversity, and ambition buoyed morale for those who stayed on the island, but looking back on my experience growing up there, and more recently working on Porlwi, a major event in the streets of the capital city Port Louis, makes me think we were helped by space. There's the size of towns: you can walk the span of my hometown of Quatre Bornes in half an hour (quite like Pontevedra, Spain), which is ideal for pedestrian movement and human interaction. The streets are not so big, yet not as small as those of medieval European towns, so can accommodate four-wheeled vehicles. Neighbourhoods are highly mixed. A somewhat loose planning approach across the island had its benefits. Port-Louis as a prime centre of activity was congested for a long time, but gathering a third of total commuters (around 13% of the total national workforce) from other districts five days a week for work until as recently as 2011 meant a concentration of daily shared experiences across ethnic group and class. Such sharing is repeated, and mundane, but doesn't transformative power of contact lie precisely in the banality of it?

This sweet spot in terms of size and configuration (which would really deserve to be studied more carefully) facilitates serendipitous exchanges and perhaps made it possible for Mauritians to live together. These human-scaled towns and villages fostered a common identity. This may change, as driven by the inflow of foreign loans, we feel compelled to build hastily, and fall into the other extreme in terms of planning: "over-designing" for efficiency (in the case of the tram/ Metro Express, moving volumes of people fast) without any form of public consultation.

The social fabric is already changing—with increased opportunity for private education, the delocalisation of administrative and work hubs (not necessarily bad), gated new builds (not great). Losing scale in this context is likely to amplify the dynamics of segregation and put at risk a rather unique identity and our social resilience.

Stressing distinctions between groups of people (the "us" versus "them", also in the immigration models presented in this well-known discussion), may be appealing, but it is overly simplistic and misses a fundamental aspect of human interaction: the transformative value of human contact. We may not realise it, but the latter lies at the root of a seemingly effortless, pluricultural identity we Mauritians derive so much pride from. 

So thinking like an islander still holds its place on my checklist for the following reasons. Mauritians have valuable anecdotes on communal living; the expat community of those who grew up in the country and are now living abroad, are able to compare experiences of places from various countries. And—as a friend who grew up in Quatre Bornes but lives in Port Louis since her marriage reminded me—locals too in fact have stories to share. Those who move across the island, for work or other personal reasons, and experience various degrees of diversity from one neighbourhood to another, will have a comparative angle to share. There's definitely a lot of knowledge, and the Mauritian Government and its planners would do well to seek those insights.

That's it for now, have a great day! [4]

Links

[1] I'm hoping to follow on a post covering exclusively this year's edition of the Festival of Place, which I was able to attend thanks to the Sign Design Society. If you really can't wait, have a look at this year's program for names to watch and ideas on placemaking, and at the Pineapples award shortlist and winners for new places to check out. Regarding children and the city, you may also like to follow Tim Gill on LinkedIn.

[2] You might recall me gushing about London National Park City a year ago here. It's inspiring to read how the idea started gathering some momentum back in 2014 and how Dan Raven-Ellison, the leading force behind the movement, views it, quite prosaically, as "a branding exercise in which businesses, public services and individuals all think differently about the way they interact with the urban nature around them." I also love Zunaira Malik's thoughts on the matter: "What if environmentalism wasn't a word but a value that lived within us. Wasn't a sticky label to wear. [...] What if eco habits were not called 'eco' and instead a normal way of life?"

By the way, if you live in London, or are visiting, get one of these beautiful maps and start exploring.

[3] In case you missed it, Projet de Société, a citizen engagement platform, hosted a panel on the island's identity and strategic positioning in the Indian Ocean and in the world ("Maurice, la Région et le Monde"). If you were unable to catch the debate live, it's online here. It's interesting to see the progression of this bold idea from the early 2000s, which made it to national TV, that Mauritius' key aspiration should be that of bridging Africa and Asia.

[4] Ack! Really not my kind of thing, horror stories, but it's always nice to share something fun, particularly musical. Babani Soundsystems' "Bolomm Sounga" ("boogeyman" is the best translation from creole) is at the confluence of musical streams. Indo-oceanic percussions form the backbone to a Bollywood bhootiya-styled melody, the mix capturing Mauritian identity more aptly than words. ... And because music is often a rather good mirror for culture, perhaps you will hear, in these percussions typical of Southern Indian Ocean islands, African rhythms percolating through a West European sound filter...