From Bristol 24-7 www.bristol247.com
Bristol Mayor George Ferguson has said the city has to avoid the “disaster” of the Harbourside redevelopment when it comes to planning its future.
He told an audience at the Arnolfini this week that the partnership between the city council and developers Crest Nicholson became “too cosy”.
And he added that the partnership, which transformed the Harbourside area with new homes over the last decade, “fooled themselves into thinking they were right”.
The lack of a ‘community feel’ to the development, in which there are few retail spaces for residents to use and congregate around, was a development result which should not happen again.
Mr Ferguson was speaking at an event organised by the Architecture Centre, which brought together leading international urban planners.
It came at the end of two days of discussions as to how the Redcliffe area of the city could be transformed into a potential Barcelona-style boulevard running from Temple Meads station to the Harbourside.
World-renowned architect Jan Gehl, David Mackay, who helped transform Barcelona in the run-up to the 1992 Olympic Games, and award-winning ethical developer Chris Brown from Igloo were joined by Melissa Mean, convener of the Redcliffe Neighbourhood Development Forum.
Ms Mean said the area between the station and the Floating Habour was “10 to 12 wasted acres covered in Tarmac” and outlined ideas which showed how the strip could be transformed with new housing and public squares.
Mr Ferguson, an architect and property developer, added that visitors to the city had to get a first impression that lasted for the right reason and called on designers to stop being “obsessed by the architecture of funny shapes” and instead concentrate on the people who would use the city’s spaces and buildings.
But he reserved special pleas to avoid the “disaster” of the Harbourside development.
“We have to avoid the single developer approach,” he said, referring to the Crest-led scheme, which he opposed at the time. “The intended partnership between business and the local authority looked promising. But what it produced was the wrong result.
“Because it was a strong partnership, they fooled themselves into thinking that they were right – the partnership became too cosy. They didn’t listen to the creative people, and just listened to the money people… the agents not the doers. We must never fall into that mistake again.”
A packed audience heard from architect and author Mr Gehl, who the mayor said was an inspiration. The Danish architect described how he had spent most of career “unlearning what I had been taught in the 1960s about city design”.
He went on to describe how architects had been arrogant and considered themselves and their buildings more important than the people who lived in and around them.
Mr Gehl reserved particular scorn for traffic engineers in the UK, who he described as having “more power than the Queen”, before outlining a vision for “lively, attractive, safe, sustainable and healthy cities fit for the 21st century”.
Below: Artist’s impression of how Redcliffe Way could look
