Farewell to a
man
of ideas
Leading article
Kenneth Roy
The legacy of Sir Iain Noble
Donald’s cone
A new Glasgow landmark
My brother Kenny
Biography
Lorn Macintyre
The national institution they buried with his mobile phone
Life of George
My intimate examination
The night I nearly drowned
The sea
Mike MacKenzie
Saving the coastguard service
Alan Fisher
A new future for the Middle East?
Bob Smith
The new kid
A man without enemies
Person of the Week
Sir Alec Cairncross
Profile by Barbara Millar
Lazy read
The Richard Wild series
The Midgie
Now we know where the money comes from
Islay’s pics
Monifieth, Angus
West end, Glasgow
North Berwick, East Lothian
Glasgow Central Station
Drumpellier Park, Lanarkshire
Photographs by
Islay McLeod
Environment
A new civic direction?
Andrew Guest
More than 40 years after its founding the Scottish Civic Trust is reaching out to the civic movement in Scotland (which it helped in part to spawn) to seek ‘fresh impetus and new direction’. John Pelan, the SCT’s director since April, says this is needed by both the trust itself and the civic movement, so that both can continue to make a positive contribution to Scotland’s built environment in times that have changed much since 1967.
What better way to start this journey than with a national conference, not held since – well, no delegate can quite remember – to which the SCT invited all 110 affiliated local civic groups in Scotland, plus representatives of other national bodies, the built environment professions and government agencies. With a stellar line up of speakers, the audience were treated to a blizzard of views on the built environment that encompassed those of the professor, the politician, the technocrat, the bureaucrat, the activist, the owner, the developer, the civil servant, delivered from the differing angles of policy, practice and poetry.
In 1967, Scotland’s cultural and political landscape was a very different terrain, smaller in some ways, larger in others. Founded by no less a person than the secretary of state for Scotland himself (Lord Muirshiel), and enjoying then the ready support of the great and the good, in its first 40 years the SCT chalked up some significant achievements. These include a major role in the conservation of then neglected highlights now taken for granted such as Edinburgh’s New Town and Strathclyde’s New Lanark, the creation of the first conservation areas in Scotland, and the reuse rather than abandonment of a vast number of important buildings and structures.
In his modest telling of this story, former director John Gerrard said that much of this happened ‘because a few influential people got together’. Much of the work of the local civic groups that have come into being since 1967 still happens because a few people get together (such bodies are almost exclusively created and run by volunteers) but in the more crowded landscape of today’s Scotland how does a body like the Scottish Civic Trust again become an influential force at a national level, and can it recruit to this task the powerful potential of a civic movement that is mainly active at a local level?
Another legacy of the work of conservation bodies like the Scottish Civic Trust is the creation of a climate where both the quality of the built environment generally and the treatment of the architecture of previous generations receives on the whole far better attention than it did in 1967. Government’s greater involvement in the built environment can also be seen as part of this same legacy.
Forty years ago the government had no architecture and place division’, nor executive agencies architecture and design Scotland and Historic Scotland. Nor was there a government based in Edinburgh let alone one with a nationalist administration. Moreover this same government (through Historic Scotland) has for some time now provided funding for some of the work of conservation and civic bodies such as the Scottish Civic Trust and the Architectural Heritage Society for Scotland.
For its first 10 years the SCT raised all its own cash. But government in Scotland is more focused than ever on economic objectives, and more hands on into the bargain, and government agencies follow a more corporatist agenda, are divesting themselves of increasing amounts of their own specialist expertise, and are also less willing to fund independent and potentially critical voices; this new landscape has become an uncomfortable one for individuals and organisations keen to continue promoting a sensitivity to their particular field, an open forum for debate, and a broad ‘civic’ approach to the challenges of creating a high quality built environment.
In amongst the presentation of exemplary regeneration schemes and perfectly formed policies this conference threw out some starting-points worth holding onto while charting a new course for the civic or built environment movement in Scotland. The programming of three practising architects surely underlined the fact that the civic movement needs to become less associated with conservation or a mission to ‘protect the past’ and more ready to grapple with the much more difficult and thorny issue of raising the quality of what we build today.
If this is the case, there may be a critical relationship to be made between a civic movement and Architecture and Design Scotland, the government’s ‘champion for good architecture, design and planning in the built environment’; this is even more so now that A+DS has swallowed up The Lighthouse, the only other body in Scotland that was championing architecture and design on a semi-independent basis.
The civic movement has to improve its communication – communication between national and local, of which the conference itself was a start, and communication amongst national bodies that share the same agenda, as well as the long hard task of joint working and building alliances. The SCT’s web presence is already lively and fresh, and it needs to build on this to engage a wider spectrum of Scotland’s population than the over 50’s white person who is usually involved in civic society activity. Scotland’s close cultural landscape has in places become suffocating, particularly with a more interventionist government, and there is a desperate need for open, un-polarised debate about the built environment, again particularly since the demise of The Lighthouse. If the past 40 years have been a success in better conservation of the built environment, perhaps the challenge for the next 40 years is the better making of the built environment. The Scottish Civic Trust could be at the forefront of this direction, particularly if it can bring with it body of people involved in ‘civic’ work at a local level.
If ‘getting a few influential people together’ is no longer a viable route to making change, a new direction will require a hard-headed focus on how to have influence and how to make change, delivered by a civic movement prepared to become more politically active. Trevor Davies, himself not long out of the political stocks as chair of Edinburgh’s planning committee, spelled out the opportunities for local groups to do this and some of the tactics they could use.
Andy Myles, the parliamentary officer of the Scottish Environment Link, illustrated how environmental bodies on the green side worked together to build influence at a national level. Myles’ forthright lecture on the importance of ‘civil society’ and the possibilities, nay the necessity, of voluntary bodies acting together to lobby and inform government, to affect policy, to shape legislation and to monitor its practice, provided the biggest octane boost of the day and should provide much for the civic sector of the built environment to chew on.
There are significant differences between championing marine biodiversity (to take one example) and championing good quality mixed use development for city centres (to take another example) but the ability of the (green) environmental movement to adopt common cause, to articulate this collectively and to attract the significant attention of both politicians and public must have some implications for the (brown?) movement of the built environment. Historic Scotland is certainly not going to fund a parliamentary officer for the civic movement, but the movement needs to work out how it can employ such a beast.
The SCT and its local affiliated groups are uniquely positioned to provide this kind of engagement at the level of local and national government. Such engagement is likely to be much more fruitful than the kind currently being promoted by government as a key ingredient in successful ‘place-making’. ‘Community engagement’ in planning and architecture has long been a talisman for civic-minded planners and architects, and is now formally part of planning policy, but the more the government talks about it (see the new planning advisory note 3/2010), the more it becomes a process that seems to exhaust rather than inspire, which may improve neither the end result, nor the public’s relationship to the whole design process.
The perils of this practice were amply illustrated by Eugene Mullan’s presentation on Smith Scott Mullan’s master-planning work for Stranraer Waterfront, ‘It’s Good to Talk: Is Anyone Listening?’ Although architects say that modern techniques of consultation have become ‘very sophisticated’ there remains the nagging feeling that they are not really talking to the people that they need to talk to, that they still don’t quite know how this relates to the design process, and that the more people are ‘consulted’ the more disenfranchised they become.
There remains also the reality that the whole process is mediated by the architects themselves, whereas what we should be looking for is a more direct way for the non-professional to become engaged in a broader process of shaping where they live. Is even this too much to ask of a previously un-engaged community member? Local civic societies could pursue a long-term policy of broad community engagement before any one specific issue comes onto the development table.
If the civic movement is to find a new direction for a more forward-looking and more proactive journey, if it is to strengthen both locally and nationally and bring both of these dimensions together, it needs to define what it means by ‘civic’ and to set out a common vision for its values. The conference provided a glimpse of three concepts that provide starting-points for this. First, the concept of public interest – an important value to define, when so much is increasingly valued in terms of private interest, whether that of individuals, or individual bodies like companies or councils or even government administrations.
Trevor Davies showed how the public interest – for example of a good public square – could enhance the private interest – for instance of those whose businesses bordered it. Secondly – the common good, a concept or a framework of values that would bring together both public interest and private interest. Perhaps next year’s conference could tease out these concepts.
The third concept though is more immediate. As the site for architecture, urban design, people’s immediate environment for activity and their routes to other places, as well as the location for commerce, David Page made a typically impassioned and articulate case for the street, and by implication for ‘Street-making’ as a much more focused, inclusive and holistic activity than ‘Place-making’. Independent, local, informed, views on civic matters are important and need to be heard more than ever. Could we meet first in the street?
Andrew Guest writes on art, culture and the built environment
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