Hana Loftus: architecture, regeneration, planning, resilience, design | Podcast

Hana Loftus is a co-founder of HAT Projects.  HAT are award winning  architects, planners and enablers for the built environment.  Projects include: London’s Science Museum Smith Centre, transformation of Trinity Works (a disused church), Ely Museum, Jerwood gallery and Jaywick Sands’ Sunspot. As well as practising planning and design, she writes on the subject and plays a great fiddle and violin.  

Architecture: Building Answers for Systemic Problems & Rethinking Urban Planning

The overall podcast discussion is around the challenges and opportunities in architecture and urban planning. The topics range from finding systemic housing solutions for poverty-stricken communities in Alabama, exploring the importance of practical real-world experiences for architecture students, 

"I think as a young architect, firstly learning how a building is actually put together; nailing bits of wood together, wiring a house, plumbing a house, pouring foundations, all of that practical stuff is critical... And anybody can do that. Anybody can get tools and learn how to build something."

and discussing the Sunspot project that addresses affordable business units in Jaywick Sands, a poor area of east England. Hana talks about the lifespan and adaptability of buildings. She highlights the critical aspect of maintaining quality in construction and the risks in cost-cutting, referencing the Grenfell tragedy.

We discuss the political challenges of the Green Belt policy, proposing a 'finger model' for development, and the importance of exploring rural domains. Hana emphasises acquiring practical experience and making a concrete impact in the world.

Transcript and summary bullet points below.

• Building Houses and Rural Studio Experience

• Understanding the Realities of Rural Alabama

• The Impact of Building with Your Own Hands

• Working with the Community: The Story of Miss Phillips

• The Importance of the Front Porch in Southern Homes

• Reflections on Building Experience

• Transition from Alabama to East of England: Jaywick Sands

• Understanding the History and Challenges of Jaywick Sands

• The Regeneration Strategy for Jaywick Sands

• The Complexities of Place-Based Regeneration

• The Role of Consultation in Community Development

• The Sunspot Project: A Case Study in Localised Economic Stimulation

• Reflections on the Success of the Sunspot Project

• The Balance Between Planning and Unplanning in Community Development. The role of beauty.

• Nationwide Economic and Climate Perspective

• Local Agency and Development Opposition, Challenges in the Planning System

• Inequality and Climate Resilience 

• Design Codes and Pattern Books: A Debate

• The Aesthetics of Development and Cultural Relevance

• The Lifespan of Buildings: 

• The Future of Building Design and Sustainability

• The Role of Transport in Sustainable Planning

• The Impact of Construction Industry Structure

• Rethinking Greenbelt Policy for Sustainable Development

• Current and Future Projects: A Glimpse

• Life Advice: Making a Mark in the World

Podcast wherever you get podcasts or links below. Video above or on YouTube. Transcript follows below.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

• All links:  https://pod.link/1562738506

Hana Loftus and Ben Yeoh Transcript

(Only lightly edited with AI assistance, there may be errors)

Ben

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Hana Loftus. Hana is a co-founder of HAT Projects. They are award-winning architects, planners, and enablers for the built environment. Projects include the London Science Museum Smith Centre, a transformation of Trinity Works at disused church, Ely Museum, Jerwood Gallery, and Jaywick Sands. As well as practicing planning and design, she's a writer on the subject and plays a great fiddle and violin. Hana, welcome.

Hana

Thank you so much, Ben. So nice to be here.

Ben (00:33):

Let's start with building houses. You spent some time in Alabama at the Rural Studio where they try and build houses for $20,000 or so, and you helped build a house. Tell me what that was like and what you learned?

Hana (00:00:48):

Well, the Rural Studio is a really unique program, and for people who might not know anything about it, it's an outreach program of the University of Auburn, which is one of the state universities in Alabama. It was founded by an extraordinary man called Sam Mockbee, nearly 30 years ago-- It'll be their 30th anniversary coming up this year. Because he felt the architecture students weren't having enough exposure to real life problems and real life communities. That they were too stuck in their studios in the world of theory and not really learning how to build things, nor in fact how to work with real people who needed buildings built for them. Alabama obviously has some of the most poverty stricken communities in the whole of the United States, and he had grown up just in the other side of the Mississippi/Alabama border in very similar situations and been working in those communities.

So he thought, "I'm going to just take a bunch of students out there and make them build things; make them actually build practical, helpful projects in the community as a way of educating them very differently." So it's a really extraordinary program, and it has been going since then. Samuel sadly died about 10 years after he founded Rural Studio, but it's actually been continued funnily enough that the director for the last many years now is actually an Englishman, a Yorkshireman named Andrew Freear. It is a really extraordinary program. Over the years, the Rural Studio has built dozens and dozens of buildings; many houses, but also some public buildings, library, fire station, park projects, lots and lots of different things in the community. The project, when I went to study there as what's known as an outreach fellow, we were tasked with trying to crack open really a systemic housing problem-- a problem of kind of failure in the housing system in the United States, which has many failures.

I think when you try and understand the context of this going to these small, very rural communities in West Alabama, it's like nothing else. To my mind when I went there, it was such a surprise even though I'd had friends who'd been there and heard obviously a lot about it to find in the richest country in the world. These communities that are living essentially in shacks and shanties; no running water sometimes, no sewage system functioning a lot of the time, in trailer homes that are often second or third hand; terrible, terrible housing conditions. And whilst in theory there is funding available to construct new affordable homes and practice the way that that funding worked, negated any practical solutions because it was essentially a low cost home ownership grant that you could get.

But if you are on the very minimum social security payments that families might be getting-- so in the States at the time, that was a disability payment of around $500 a month. The maximum loan you could get would be $20,000, and nobody would bill you a house for $20,000. So there was this problem. So my group of outreach fellows were the first fellows to be tasked with trying to crack this and say, "Well, actually as architects, as designers from a multitude of different backgrounds-- actually, the Outreach Fellows is this kind of multidisciplinary unit at the time-- Could we think more creatively about how to solve this? Our house was the first in an ongoing series. What's so fantastic about the Rural Studio is they can iterate because they've been in the same community for such a long time.

They have now iterated the $20,000 house for the last 15 years or so to learn every year the lessons of the last ones. Now, it has grown into a much bigger initiative known as the Front Porch Initiative, which is actually rolling out partnership programs that are building these very, very low cost homes across not just parts of West Alabama, but other parts of the Southern United States as well. In terms of what you learn from doing that, I think as a young architect, firstly learning how a building is actually put together; nailing bits of wood together, wiring a house, plumbing a house, pouring foundations, all of that practical stuff is critical. And I think that Samuel Mockbee, when he founded the Rural Studio thought about the disconnect in architecture education, I think sadly is still very, very true today.

Most students that come out of architectural education are often actually scared of the process of building. They find it kind of terrifying. They find it mysterious. They don't understand how a building can get put together. They feel that it's somehow beyond them. And actually, the process of building with your own physical hands in mud, in the sun, in all different weather conditions is really demystifying. You realize that a building is just a series of things that are put together in different ways. And anybody can do that. Anybody can get tools and learn how to build something. So whether that's small or big, I think that's a really important lesson.

But the second piece is obviously working in a community like those communities in West Alabama, to see how you actually communicate and work and collaborate with people from a very different background from oneself with a very different life story, with a very different set of priorities and principles. And how do you not only just design with them, but work with them as human beings. The client for our house was an extraordinary lady called Ms. Phillips. She was in her late eighties when we were trying to build this house for her. She lived in a house where the joists of the floor were so rotten. You would walk on them and you'd have to take care to not kind of fall through the floor. She was diabetic-- she had type two diabetes brought on by the kind of diet in West Alabama. She was descended from obviously an enslaved family and then a sharecropping family in that part of the world. She grew collard greens in her backyard. She loved gardening, but she lived in what can only be described as a really precarious level of poverty. But she was amazing. She would sing songs and she would kind of make some food for us sometimes.

You learn how to both be really humble in those situations. Not to step in thinking you know the answers. And also, how to see beyond someone's current situation to kind of imagine what a future might look like that is a little bit more sustainable, a bit less precarious without destroying what is sort of fundamentally important. The reason the Front Porch Initiative is called the Front Porch Initiative now at the Rural Studio, is this cultural importance of the front porch in southern homes. The front porch is where everything happens. You really cannot have a home without a porch. In fact, you might almost be better with the porch and none of the rest of the house sometimes because it is so important to have that space in the heat and the humidity. So there's a climate element, but also socially. So the house that we built for Ms. Phillips, the house itself was pretty tiny. The porch was nearly as big as the house-- the screen porch-- because actually, that extends the living area and gives that continuity in terms of how the kind of culture of family life, the culture of those communities work.

Ben (00:08:52):

What was your favorite part of building, or maybe what was perhaps most misunderstood that you came to realize, "Ooh, when you put this together, this happens?" Or you could also reflect on what was your least favorite part of building, maybe when it was raining on you. But yeah, what was your favorite part of building?

Hana (00:09:10):

I love learning how to do wiring and plumbing, actually, because I gave up science subjects relatively early after GCSE. I felt that that was something that I was never really going to understand. Actually, now I can do the wiring and the plumbing in our house, and I feel confident with all of that which to me, that was good. I'd done carpentry before because I'd worked in theater and I'd built sets. So carpentry was a sort of relatively familiar skill set and sort of allied trades to that. But I think for me, it was great to actually learn how to wire and plumb a home and that stuff. Again, it's not mysterious. It's just gravity and basic physics and being rigorous and systematic in your work and you will get there in the end.

Ben (00:09:59):

Yeah, very in demand. So I'm going to jump from Alabama, to the East of England to Jaywick Sands, because I've observed your work over the decades and I see there's a lot of interlinks. Jaywick Sands is also a relatively poor place. There's a lot to do with working in the community and what they really want. Would you maybe describe what you learned from working on Jaywick Sands and where the project stands now?

Hana (00:10:23):

Yeah, I think it's a really pertinent analogy. I remember actually saying to Andrew Freear, the director of the Rural Studio a number of years ago, probably the place that is closest to West Alabama in the UK is Jaywick. So again, for those who might not know anything about the history of Jaywick Sands, I think it's really interesting to give a little background. A hundred years ago, this community that is now over 3000 people on the Essex coast, there wasn't a single home there, there was nothing. It was just a salt marsh. But something happened in the late twenties and early thirties in the UK, in parts of Southern England, which was called the Plotlands Movement. And what this was, was at the time, there was an agricultural depression. Developers started to buy marginal agricultural land and divide it up into tiny plots and sell those tiny plots off mostly to working class or lower middle class Londoners as holiday plots where you could then build a little chalet, a heart, bring a railway carriage or something if you wanted. And in way, have your weekend escape out of the crowded city, out of what were quite often difficult conditions in the city, but enabled by the fact we now had railways. We had omni buses and things that could take you out of the city quite quickly.

You could have a little kind of slice of the English countryside to yourself because there were no real planning rules at the time in the way that we have them now. Jaywick Sands was one of those plotlands communities that was founded at that time by a developer called Frank Stedman, a land speculator, who was a sort of funny mixture of a socialist utopian and a kind of speculative investor. It grew quite quickly. Tiny, tiny plots, really glorified beach huts. You could buy a kind of prefabricated one or one out of a catalog of little patterns that he had or you could build your own. It was a fantastic holiday resort in the thirties; wonderful pictures of people enjoying themselves, splashing around on the beach, having this amazing time.

But after the Second World War, when many of those Londoners had been bombed out of their homes in East London, many of them started to think, "Well, why can't I just stay on my plot full time? Actually, I've got this little piece of land. I've got the basics of a small house there. Maybe I'm just going to stay here. Seaside is nice, have happy memories of it." So what was intended to be a holiday community without any permanent residence started to have a permanent full-time population but with no infrastructure. So Steadman had always struggled to try and get the council to make kind of water connections and sewage connections through the water boards and so forth at the time-- continued to struggle. So you've got this community growing up-- Again, very like those West Alabama communities in some senses with very, very little basic infrastructure, but people wanting to be there and starting to assert their rights as well to say, "Well, we are living here. We should be having services. We should be having our rubbish collected. We should be having water and sewage and electricity."

But really for most of the next decades, the story is one of a struggle between the local councils who really didn't want anybody to be permanently living there, and the freeholders and the residents themselves who wanted to be there. The councils really-- to simplify-- took the view that if they did not provide all of those services, people would not be there. But that eventually had proved to be an unsustainable situation and gradually over the years, some services were introduced. So it's a community with this really extraordinary story of resilience and this kind of self-made DIY ethos. It looks very unlike anywhere really in the rest of the country. There were other plotlands communities around the place. So Laindon Hills near Basildon, which was pretty much demolished when they built Basildon New Town. Down at Shoreham-by-Sea there are still some remaining plotlands-- Canvey Island, a few other places at the Thames Valley as well.

But most of them have been translated over time to what I would call a fairly normal suburbia for England. Jaywick still has a completely different pattern, a completely different look as a place. Still, very much the bones of those original tiny timber frame chalets very, very tightly plotted, much more like you would see in the states in some sort of shotgun house communities in places like Houston. Little gable fronted houses onto the street, tiny, tiny backyards very, very, very tightly packed, and everyone different. They've all been customized and adapted by their occupants over time.

So it doesn't have the sense of that kind of if you like regular housing estate with this sort of uniformity that we might expect in other places. It's got this very ad hoc nature. The residents are fiercely proud of their community and they are very, very fond of its character. But the reality is that unfortunately, Jaywick is mostly in the news for having the worst deprivation statistics for the whole of the United Kingdom, which goes across all of the indices of multiple deprivation, health, employment, access to services-- education outcomes, et cetera. So it's a community with some really big challenges. And coupled to that, it was built on a salt marsh and it's in the tidal floodplain. In the 1953 floods, 37 people were killed there. And with climate change, obviously the flood risk is increasing all the time. Now, again, even though the flood defenses were improved after 1953, but they're starting to reach the end of their lifespan again and there need to be some improvements. Sorry, that's a long piece of background, but I think it's important to kind of situate both socially and historically as well as environmentally the place.

Our practice were commissioned by Tendring District Council as the council of the area back in 2018 to try and look at a regeneration strategy for Jaywick Sands to address the housing quality issues. Because whilst some of the homeowners look after their homes really well and are very house proud, the reality is there's a lot of homes that have become part of portfolios of private rented accommodation in very, very bad condition. That in terms of housing policy and how our world works in this country at the moment, I mean, I think it's a huge, huge scandal that we have essentially allowed the outsourcing of affordable housing provision into the hands of private landlords who are being paid by the state through the benefits system.

But the consequence in a community like Jaywick is if you have parts of that community, some streets where we'll have 50, 60% private rented accommodation that has a really serious impact in terms of blight on the wider community and serious social impacts because there's no sort of support. So they wanted to look at housing quality, they wanted to look at the issue around flood defenses, and in the longer term, what is the strategy here? We did some initial research in late 2018, 2019; some initial engagement and consultation with members of the local community there. Pandemic then came along, bit of a pause during the pandemic. Although actually, one-- if you like-- sub-project of this wider strategy got picked up through stimulus funding from the pandemic. That's a building that we have now designed and built and opened earlier this year which is called Sunspot, which is 24 affordable business units there as part of the kind of economic approach.

Anyway, after the pandemic, late 21, early 22, we started back on the kind of regeneration strategy. And now, we're actually at the moment in consultation on what we think that looks like. We did a further consultation last year on some options and scenarios. This year we've kind of gone back with what we think and with the council the kind of best strategy might be. And it's really complex. It's a fascinating and complex place because-- I won't go into all the details of the strategy. Everyone can read it online. But it's a place where the issues around climate change and deprivation really intersect in a way that kind of amplifies and multiplies their effects. 

A community that had that level of climate change threat, flood risk but was more wealthy, frankly, one wouldn't worry so much about because the people who would be living there would have the resources to be able to firstly know and understand those risks. And secondly, if the bad thing happened, the financial resources as well as their own personal capacity to probably be able to cope a lot better. But when you're talking about a community which is firstly very aging now-- So the demographic skews very old although there are patches of families with very young children, so it's kind of quite a divided demographic. Secondly, has very poor health. So mobility, people with oxygen cylinders, people with diabetes-- very serious health problems in a lot of parts of community. And very low cash resources. A lot of retired people who have sold up their house in East London bought a little homey house in Jaywick Sands based off the back of their happy childhood memories of seaside holidays there and are living off the difference. They're eking out that difference in the kind of cash value of a house in London for half a million quid, and a house in Jaywick Sands for 60 to a hundred thousand.

So they've got very little resources to fall back on if a bad thing happens. This question about, "What is the duty of care of the state? What is the duty of care of us to our fellow citizens in a time of climate crisis, in a situation where people do not have those resources?" We are seeing that with the cops obviously globally in terms of small nations and so forth being threatened and saying, "Hey, there is a responsibility, but we have that right here in our own country. We have this really, really pressing question about what is the responsibility. Is it sustainable for communities to even exist in these locations? If so, what should they look like? What should they feel like? How would they be best defended against the floods and against the tidal flood risk? How is that equitably dealt with when we've got such disparities and resources across the country? How do we find a system that is fair here?" Because there are parts of Central London that are as bad a flood risk as Jaywick Sands. But the real estate there is worth billions. The owners of those parts of land and the councils and so forth are very different. How do we find some way of calibrating that? If I'm frank, I don't think at a national level we have that sorted out at all.

Ben (00:22:29):

That's really fascinating on the policy level. So perhaps we can dwell on that. And maybe you want to comment about the actual little business unit project as well because there are so many things within that. So some of what we hear in other places where you've got rural communities, I guess is as often the very naive urbanite view, which was expressed by the councilors is, "Surely they should move. Not sustainable, climate risk, why should we give them a hospital for 200 people when that or schools and services and all of that." So I'd be interested in what the responses and the kind of things that you talk about which have been in this discussion. And I guess the second one then going one level down from that is this sense of the balance on consultation that some people think, "Oh, we're doing too many consultations of the wrong sort."

Then if it's something that government doesn't like to hear, they don't follow them anyway. And if it's something that they like to hear, it feels like it was a setup. On the other hand, often a centralized or even a regionalized area or government zone doesn't really know what a local populace wants which is the whole point of consultation. Then you have this higher level-- I guess it's kind of the paternalistic versus not as does a centralized force ever really know, "Should it do it, should it just let that," which is, I guess this on the extremes between completely planned to versus unplanned and everything in the middle. It seems like Jaywick is at the center of a lot of those debates. So I'd be interesting in any reflections that you have about whether we should be abandoning communities or not, and even how you do that. And then that level down about do consultations really work or how do you get them to work-- would probably be the better question. And then maybe how you then through an economic lens seems to be one bit, which at least there's some agreement from some sides is possibly a way to work through this.

Hana (00:24:35):

Well, to address that sort of question about should we be "abandoning communities," there have been some tentative moves towards what's known as managed retreat. The world of risk management and climate change is full of these wonderful euphemisms. But managed retreat essentially says, "We won't no longer maintain the flood defenses in a particular area." I grew up in the coastal floodplain-- Actually, my parents' house is in the coastal floodplain, and my father has lived there since 1947 and lived through the 1953 flood. So this was all quite sort of familiar territory to me on a personal level. Fairbourne in Wales is actually the kind of first community of homes where a decision was announced a few years ago to say the defenses would no longer be maintained and essentially that community was going to have to look to be decommissioned, which of course, the residents there were furious about.

I think there's an interesting question because this country has so far sort of said, "We won't compensate people." Sort of what they're saying is, "We'll give you warning, we'll give you kind of 20 years warning that we're no longer going to maintain your defenses. It's up to you in that time to make your own move. We're not going to give you a relocation package. We're not going to actually financially support that" which is unlike many other countries. So other countries are providing relocation packages, whether it's looking at some of the Nordic countries, whether it's looking at parts of the states even actually. They are looking at supporting people to move.

I kind of think that we have to have a bit more of a national debate about that because I think the reality of these communities, as I said, is that you can have great disparities of wealth. Where I grew up is near the Suffolk Coast, and there are communities on coasts there which have some houses in the floodplain and they're owned by very, very wealthy people. Sure, I don't think we should be subsidizing them to have to relocate. They could relatively easily fund their own support. But when you're talking about communities in these much more deprived places, the reality is that people don't have that money and people therefore won't move. So Fairbourne, from what I've heard recently, in a strange way, the property prices have actually gone up there which is very unusual and the sort of relocation decommissioning program seems to have gone quite quiet.

We need to have a national debate about this. And I think this leads to your second question around consultation. These are really hard, big, tough questions for which there are no answers that are going to make everybody happy. It is not possible to somehow make some magic consensus where everybody is going to go, "Oh, you know what? We've just found this magic bullet for this. What a brilliant idea. God, you've cracked it. Here's a perfect solution to making it fair and affordable and all the rest of it."

Ben (00:28:11):

We've discovered a magic floating islands where we can live.

Hana (00:28:13):

Yes, there are no easy solutions. So this takes leadership, but it does also take that consultation and engagement with people. There's an intergenerational aspect here. When we do consultation in Jaywick, some people are saying, "Well, frankly, I'm going to be dead. This is not my problem." That's a totally fair point for them to make. They just want to live the rest of their however many years happily and in their community with their friends with the sea view that they love. What comes after that is not their problem. At the same time as obviously there are generations to come not only in that community-- children and the younger people, but also nationally, the generations that we're going to have to pay for and look after and take care or take the actions that are needed. And how do we make that fair?

My personal view is that I don't think that there is too much consultation. I think in many cases there is too little, but I think the kind of consultation we do is very, very flawed. So we do a lot of work around community engagement, consultation, participation-- call it what you wish. I'm kind of constantly trying to shift the emphasis of that away from the sort of stereotype of, "Have your say." To me, that's a phrase I ban from our office. Never advertise a consultation with, "Have your say," because really what you're just saying is come and spout off and shoot your mouth off about what you do and don't like, and we'll just listen to it and do absolutely nothing about it. That's not the point.

For me, the point of talking to people-- and I think we've got to call this what it is. It's just talking to people. Talking to people, normal people in the street could be your neighbors, could be your friends. It is a research tool and I think we should be taking much more from the social sciences and less from the way that policy makers have often approached consultation as part of a sort of systematic process towards getting a policy agreed. We need to look at it as research. We need to look at it as insight. Understanding those very human factors that are at play, understanding how people understand their own environments, their own situations in life and being able to take that research away, analyze it quite methodically and use it to inform better decision making. 

So it's understanding that those people are the experts in their own condition and the job of ourselves as "experts, policy makers, planners," whatever you might say. Our job is to try and untangle what they tell us about their lives and their environments, and understand where the interventions can be most effective in that based on what that research is telling us. Then there's a secondary job, which is about education and capacity building. We have communities-- particularly low income communities, who the kind of failures of our education system over the last decades really fall heavily on. Their ability to understand the very complex nature of these risks-- and risk is hard for anyone to understand. We are notoriously bad as humans understanding and quantifying risk. When you are trying to talk to people about a 0.5% AEP probability of a tidal flood risk happening, that just means nothing to anybody.

We need to be able to take the time to sit with people and explain that to them in simple terms, step by step. Allow them to absorb that, allow them to cogitate on it, allow them to come back with more questions and say, "They don't understand it, or can you go through that again? Or what does that really mean? I've been thinking about what you said and this bit doesn't make sense." That can't really be achieved in a six or eight week consultation period which is this kind of process that typically has gone through. That is a much more embedded process of saying, "Well, actually, how do we allow people to make good decisions about their own lives?" So I do think that we need a bit of a rethink on this. Of course, as a role for if you like the sort of statutory consultation where you go out to your statutory consultation bodies-- Natural England, or the Environment Agency or whoever, they're professionals. They know how to respond to things within a six or eight week period and write you a very lengthy response. And you can go through it point by point.

But when you're talking to communities, it's just a bit of a crazy system. So we try to advocate with our clients for a rather different approach. As always, they're local authorities and they have to abide by certain rules. So we have mixed success with that and I think we try to carry that through. But having worked in Jaywick for nearly five years now, I think what is interesting is that at least I feel like our team has started to grow some of those relationships in a different way. It's slow, slow steps gaining trust, not being seen too much as the sort of consultants from outside who just come in to try and tell people what to do, even though we're quite local in the sense of our office is very locally based. So yeah, it has been a really interesting process and a lot of lessons for wider policy making, I think.

Ben (00:34:08):

How did you arrive at the structure that you arrived at? And I have so many other thoughts as kind of like, I'm thinking why do we not really have a Rural Studios here in England or the UK and all of these other types of things. But maybe we can see it through the lens of the actual building that you came up with and why it is how it is, and the process you got to.

Hana (00:34:31):

Yeah. So the building that my practice completed-- and I think what's fun about our practice is that we do operate across these scales. So we kind of work on these strategic projects and planning projects as well as on individual buildings and spaces. The building that we completed is 24 affordable business units for affordable rent plus a covered market, plus some public open space; community garden, bus stops, and practical things like that. It came out of the fact that when we started to talk to people in Jaywick about their issues, whilst the council was saying the focus is on flood risk and all these sort of big, naughty, wicked problems, the thing that people were saying to us in the community was jobs and services. "There are no jobs here and it's impossible to get to any work." It's a relatively isolated community. Clacton-on-Sea which is just up the road is not so far, but Clacton is also very deprived; not many jobs there. The next nearest economic center, to get there you would need to take a bus which would wind its way through villages for an hour and a half each way, and actually wouldn't ever get you to work on time and couldn't get you home. So there's this really big problem.

And by the way, around half of the households in the most deprived bits of Jaywick Sands do not have access to a car or van. So you've got a community who are totally dependent on foot, public transport, or bicycle. So people were saying, "They're no jobs here. They're also saying there's no services here." There's no kind of basic-- lack of shops to buy things in-- food, as well as in a way the things that make you feel good about your life-- hairdressers, things like that. Very little in the way of local economy. So we sort of thought, "Well, actually this is something that something can be done about more short term." We were talking to the councilors, our client about this and saying, "Maybe you should consider looking at this economic question a bit further because don't these two things go together? As in if you have more local services, there's also more jobs in the community that can also employ people." And actually, this question about how do you make an economy in these sorts of places that is kind of for the community and by the community, that keeps that spend local. It's not about trying to attract some sort of big external investor who's going to open a factory or something. But all of that money kind of disappears into the wider world. It's, "Can we look at a more localized way of simulating the economy?" 

So happily they were interested in that idea and commissioned us to do a little bit more research and market testing to see whether that was feasible. We did that market testing in a rather different way than you would normally do it, because normally if you ask someone to do a market study on making new business space or workspace somewhere, they'll bring up a bunch of estate agents and say, "How many people have you got on your books looking for an office or an industrial unit or whatever in area X?" Well, obviously nobody was going to be on the books looking for a workspace unit in Jaywick Sands because it wasn't a sort of established employment location. Didn't already have a kind of pool of businesses that people just not thinking about whether they wanted to locate there.

So we did two things. Firstly, we looked at the wider data across the area. So there was a quantitative aspect and we found that there was a shortage in the wider area which was actually in the council's own economic studies. A shortage of startup and grow on sort of small units for obvious reasons; not very viable commercially for developers of commercial space to provide that kind of space. So actually, there was a lack. So then we sort of said, "Well, that means that there's a hidden economy of people who are needing space but are not finding it. And in the meantime, they're working from home or they're working out of kind of garage, or they're working out of a sort of rather ad hoc, renting an old stable on a farm somewhere or whatever it might be, or looking to Colchester and other further afield places."

So we sort of thought, "Well, if we can go and talk to some of those tenants and we can establish whether they would see it as a barrier to come and actually locate their business in Jaywick Sands." So we went out and actually just talked to a lot of businesses. What we found was no, it was absolutely not seen as a barrier for them to come and locate in Jaywick. They weren't put off by the unfortunate stereotyped bad reputation of the community and the press. They were mostly local people, that didn't really bother them. Really, they just needed space. It was affordable, suitable-- obviously for their needs, and accessible, which if you are a business with, it's actually got fairly good road access or public transport access.

So we managed to demonstrate that we felt there was a sufficient pipeline of businesses who would be interested and take up space, and particularly at two ends. One being small retail. So this point about actually, there's few shops and services there, but you've got this beach as well, and you've got this opportunity to really trade in the summer off of visitors. And secondly, at the kind of smaller workshop through to the small end of light industrial type scale. So kind of small type manufacturing type businesses and things like that.

Ben (00:40:28):

And how many have been taken up? Is it all full already? Do people pree these?

Hana (00:40:33):

Yeah, it's full. I think they may have one or two units left, but it's full. It opened in late September and it's doing really well. I think the other bit is the market. So the market's really important both as a way of providing additional retail for the community. So being able to have food stalls and things like that. But also it's a stepping stone towards startup business. It's the cheapest way you can try out a new business idea is to rent a market store for 10 pounds or whatever a pitch, and have a go at your idea. It brings a community together as well in a way that's social. So yeah, it's exciting to see it really be busy now and bustling and a huge diverse array of businesses working out the building.

But also the building, I think from a design perspective, it's really important that it's a visible symbol of change in the community. We aren't just interested in making space for space's sake, but it's also got to say something. Buildings, spaces, environments - they have meaning-- they carry meaning, and the value and the quality of those spaces says something about how valued that community is. I think too often we are-- particularly in the public sector, I'm afraid to say at this time-- unwilling to have higher ambitions and aspirations for the sheer beauty and quality of spaces that we make for people. It's not really a cost question in my view. It's not more expensive. It's just about actually how do you procure, what kind of procurement do you have of your teams that are working on these projects, and how much do you really care about the communities that you're building them for? Don't look down on them. Don't give them sort of the dumb answer just because they might be poor or more deprived communities. Give them something that is bright and bold and exciting and is something that people can take some joy out of in their everyday life.

Ben (00:42:38):

And what do you find beautiful about the building? I've heard people note the colors-- the color palette. And also the space and the quality of materials, which actually to your point, aren't super special. You're not talking about imported granite or anything like that. But what made you think this building is of quality or of beauty?

Hana (00:43:01):

Yeah, I think it is a very economic building. It's built in a way that the technology of it is really just the technology of a normal kind of light industrial shed. But there is so much you can do with shape, firstly; just sort of subtle changes to the way that the shape of the building is designed. The fact that when you see it from the beach it has this kind of zigzag profile rather than just seeing a kind of long, monolithic, eaves profile like a sort of typical shed building might have. And color is really important. On a gray, rainy, February day, a community even on the beautiful beach that there is there right in front of the building can feel quite grim. So it was really important that the building never felt grim; that it always felt joyful, uplifting, and generous.

Color is part of that form. Also, there's things like the canopy; the canopy that shades and shelters space around the building. That's practical. It prevents the south facing units overheating in the summertime. But it's also about saying actually, it's dry. The building is kind of bigger than it would otherwise be. Things like the bus shelter which no one had really thought of, but we kind of said, "Well, there's no bus stop here, and the bus stop just down the road is literally a pole and there's not even a pavement to stand on." So we moved the bus stop and we made a bus shelter with a bench, and shade, and shelter, which sounds extremely simple, but actually makes a huge difference in a community where most of the bus stops have no bench and no shelter.

The work was put to try and say, "Well, without it costing more money, without it being impractical, using materials that are extremely robust, using profiled metal and things like that, that are typical for modern seaside buildings-- like buildings that are built on the piers or buildings that are built in seafront arcades and amusements, the similar language to that." This is not about parachuting in a design language that is alien to the place, but it's got to feel joyful and people have got to feel proud of it in the community. Something that they can actually say, "You can't miss that building. You can look out for it. It's a landmark."

Ben (00:45:43):

Does it have a nickname yet?

Hana (00:45:44):

It's called Sunspot, which is great because actually, that's the name of the old amusement arcade that used to be on the site which was pulled down when the holiday economy started to tank. So it sort of also revived that name and the kind of hopefulness of that name, which is really sweet.

Ben (00:46:03):

That sounds like just such a brilliant example of place-based regeneration done right. I guess there has been a lot of debate around it because quite a lot of place-based regeneration hasn't worked so well, and this tension between people and place. I thought for a moment, "I might go up a level in thinking about policy or some of the ideas behind that." Although reflecting on this, it seems that it's just getting a lot of detail and right on the local level. But that does seem to be one of these arguments about place and people. And I guess at this very high level in thinking about globally, there are these people who believe places or cities or towns should generally be driven by jobs; maybe put in some transport and service infrastructure, but essentially let it be unplanned or limited planning. And I guess particularly you see this in some of the non-Western countries. That's essentially how they develop.

Some of those develop really well and some of those develop into slums. So you can kind of have arguments on both sides. Or you go to the other extreme when you think, "Okay, can I completely plan this place or city?" And maybe sitting around that you have this idea of charter cities, like maybe we can just completely plan something from scratch. And actually, you have some examples of planned places which work quite well, and some examples of planned places which don't work well at all. So there's probably no real consensus on it. But I guess given that policy and maybe either reflecting globally on cities or in the UK, do you think you lean more to elements of planning or more elements of un-planning or jobs, or how do you meld the best of both of those sets of ideas?

Hana (00:47:46):

So yeah, I'm a planner as well as a designer, and I think there's a really important role for planning. But I think you touch on a really critical point, which is actually human behavior is not a plannable thing. People are going to do things that confound the expectations of economists and planners who like everything to be extremely orderly. But people just don't behave like that. And people also want to feel that they have freedom and they have choice. One of the things that's so important in Jaywick Sands and why people love it so much is-- coming back to this point-- that every house looks different. They love the fact that it's their own identity; it's stamped on their own physical environment. One of the things that they said to us through the consultation when we talked about kind of new design guidance and coding for Jaywick Sands is, "It's really important that we don't lose this sense that every house is different. You can't make them all look the same."

People do want to feel that they have agency and have capacity to make choices. So whilst I think the economic planning-- and I think strategic spatial planning is really important. It's something that we have completely lost in the UK, I'm afraid over the last 15 years. We used to have regional spatial plans and strategies. We no longer have them. So it's a very, very disjointed approach to planning that we have and I think that does urgently need to be addressed. We cannot look at this country from an economic or a climate perspective and not look nationwide. We're not that big of a country. We really do need to be looking across the whole country and having a joined up economic and spatial strategy.

But I also strongly believe that we need more ability at the local level for people to feel that they do have some agency. That's a really difficult one because the reality is that the person who moves into a new build house on a new build housing estate, practically the day they move in, they become opposed to any more development in their local area. That is a known fact that just happens. They've been the beneficiary of housing development. But as soon as they're in that house, they want to be the last house that was ever built in the area and never see anything change again. So trying to find a way to say there are some tough messages here that actually, "You know what? Maybe you can't be that selfish always. You're going to need to see change." But also, there's a quid pro quo there that actually you might have more ability to change your own house, to be able to extend or adapt your own building.

People get so frustrated when they see their own back extension or not being able to do simple things get held up in the planning system at the same time as it appears that major housing developments-- thousands of homes get sort of waved through. I know behind the scenes those are not waved through. Those big schemes go through a tortuous and very time consuming and very rigorous process, not always with the right outcomes, but they do go through a process. However, to the person on the local level who doesn't see any of that, they see a system that is not working for them. They see a system where they can't add a conservatory or change the color of their front door sometimes in some cases, or put solar panels on their roof or whatever it might be. We've got to look at what the quid pro quo is in the planning.

But to come to your wider point, to the wider scale of unplanned development and some development and so forth, it's really problematic. Obviously, I think we are very far in this country from going down that route. But globally, when we're talking about inequality and we're talking about resilience to climate as well, you look at some of those very precarious slum communities and they do tend to also cluster to the parts of the land, whether it's favelas in Rio that are on the very steep mountain sides, very vulnerable to things like lands slips and landslides and heavy rain, through to development in India and places in flood plains along rivers. The poorest people often end up in the most physically vulnerable places. So I think there is a real obligation on city authorities and regional authorities to be more strategic about that, to take more of a grip on it, and to actually help provide for citizens in a way that isn't going to endanger them.

Ben (00:52:39):

One last thought on policy before turning to perhaps another project or two. So there has been a little bit of talk around design codes or use of pattern books, which actually, I think it was a conversation we had either on email or X Twitter or something like that about the fact that they've gone back in time. I think that Dutch had quite a few of these in the 16 or 17 hundreds as a kind of way forward. Critics might say you get these very identical, no identity, but perhaps also poorer quality poor materials particularly on the edge of towns and suburbs where you're going, "This is not housing which makes anyone filled with joy." On the other hand, proponents are talking about-- I guess they say gentle densification in urban areas where you've got stuck in this planning or can you do extensions or things like that. I picked up that it seems that some architects seem to be a little bit tentative or not particularly involving themselves in the pattern or patterning decision or this debate, which perhaps surprised me, but I'm not particularly hooked into the system. So maybe there is more debate. But do you think design codes or pattern books are one way of some sort of compromise unlock on here and do you think that's an interesting policy idea?

Hana (00:54:01):

Yeah, so we work on some design codes, and I guess that shows that we do think that there's some value in them. I think we've gotten into a kind of rather curious situation at the minute with regards to the aesthetics of development, the style of development with some odd politics, if I'm perfectly honest. I think around what's seen as kind of good, "attractive," "beautiful," "development," stemming from things like Building Better Building Beautiful Commission, which was chaired by Roger Scruton until he died and things like that, which are seen by many as quite backward looking, sort of everything needs to look like a Georgian or a Victorian street or terrace. And not maybe acknowledging some of the ways that culturally we need to be building for today and for today's communities.

Obviously, the Georgian and the Victorian and the Edwardian stock that we have is in many ways wonderful and in many ways synonymous with England. But I think when you cast a look at the economic systems that they derived out of and the social systems that they derived out of also, and question what are the lessons that we take from them from today and what are the lessons that maybe are not relevant. It's an area that I think we are treading carefully around at the minute because I think that there's a real, real value to having more of a pattern book approach. But I think it's got to be much more genuinely based on how is the functionality of these buildings working on a number of levels, not just a technical functionality.

So building regulations and so forth obviously should be taken for granted. But things like climate-- so overheating is a huge, huge problem. We must be designing and if we are having new pattern books, they must be including things like external shading for south and west facing windows. Really basic stuff, but really important. And other climate adaptation measures actually as much as mitigation because the reality is we are in a very different world. And secondly, that I think this focus on aesthetics needs to focus on the different communities that we have now. There's a question around the meaning that's attached. I suppose this is where sometimes I'm a little bit surprised because the kind of gentle density proponents-- and I think it's a well-chosen phrase because you can't really disagree with it. We all want to see that.

But when I see the buildings of Whitehall be held up as kind of an example of how everything should be built now and why don't we build new office buildings like the Foreign  and Commonwealth Office was built in the early 20th century. I think one also has to say, "What are those buildings really--? What are the meanings that they're embodying for a more diverse society with very different backgrounds and cultures?" They're quite problematic buildings. They are loaded with meaning around imperialism, around their references back to ancient Greece and Rome, of course, through their kind of neoclassicism. There's a lot going on there. And I think it behooves us to unpick a little bit more around this question of style that's not just, "Isn't it pretty? Isn't it attractive to the eyes" of whoever it is who's making that statement? I think beauty comes in many forms. I think we could be a little bit more generous in finding beauty in different forms. But also I think we absolutely need to push back on the lowest common denominator meanness of design that one sees from a lot of the commercial development sector.

Ben (00:58:32):

Yeah. That's really nuanced. So obviously there has been ongoing debates on form and function and this unspoken-- well sometimes spoken as we know humans give meaning to any big endeavors, building places, art, all of this, spaces porch, all the way back to what seems like simple structures and the like. That's before you consider that buildings designed 17, 18 hundreds or even 50 years ago, are not designed for technology, sustainability, climate, all of the things of today. I've been in some of those Whitehall-- in fact, I've even worked in things like Corbusier buildings and the like which are just very poorly considered in terms of heating and all of that because it wasn't a challenge of the time, it wasn't of their consideration.

Hana (00:59:22):

Or it wasn't even a priority. Sometimes those buildings function badly from the outset.

Ben (00:59:27):

They did.

Hana (00:59:29):

I think what is wonderful about us as humans is that we are really able to adapt things. And I think we shouldn't be demolishing all of these buildings-- their embodied carbon, their structures. But actually, the ability to adapt them over time, adapt them to be quite radical about how we adapt and change them, and then learn from that as well. This is where I think we can afford to relax a little bit more. To say, "Well, actually, the most important thing is that we kind of build well, as in the structures that aren't going to be needing to be pulled down in 20 or 30 years’ time. The buildings that actually can endure and have that ability to change and adapt as we learn, as our technology changes." We are working on all sorts of ages of buildings at the moment and that kind of robustness to be able to say, "Well, yeah, it can take a bit of a bashing and it take a bit of a change" I think it's really important.

Ben (01:00:28):

Yeah. And that begs the question of how long should a building or structure last? Because if you do carbon analysis and you're assuming the building is going to last a hundred, 200, we have buildings which are 500, arguably a thousand years old. It's a very different calculation to 10, 20, 30, 40. Perhaps that's one to consider about the age of buildings and that in public space. But maybe you could do it through the lens of just choosing another project that you'd like to talk about. Could be one of yours, could be something else, but obviously you've done a lot of this public space as sort of museum and gallery work which I guess we would assume is going to last a long time as well as some private space work. You could also comment on other projects or things that you see in the world. But yeah, any other project you'd like to pick on and maybe picking up on the themes of how long building should last for-- I guess we've done aesthetics a little bit and sustainability a little bit. So any project you like.

Hana (01:01:30):

Yeah, I think that time dimension is something that we're really interested in and that spans across all of the kind of planning projects as well, where we're talking about 20, 30 plus year strategies. I mean, a hundred years is what we're planning for in terms of flood defenses in Jaywick Sands. Who knows what the world is going to look like in a hundred years and what kind of homes, but the flood defenses need to look at that time horizon. We do work with quite a lot of existing buildings. For some reason we've worked on quite a few town halls actually, which came from the late Victorian period, kind of great municipal flowering of all of these big municipal structures that were built for a very particular point in time as a very particular expression of civic pride. Fast forward another 120 years, and the way our civic bureaucracies work is really different. So a lot of those structures have fallen into new uses or into no use at all, and a lot of the time we're charged at bringing them back into use. I think they are fascinating. So we've worked on a number of them. We worked a little bit on Shoreditch Town Hall a very long time ago, early days of its conversion into kind of arts and cultural use. We've worked on Redbridge Town Hall which is in Ilford town centre, and that also was working with Space Studios to make artists workspace and gallery space there.

We are currently working on Lowestoft town hall up on the East coast in Suffolk which is a quite a major project to bring this civic building back into use. This question of robustness and what you keep and what you have to adapt is really pertinent to them because ultimately it's the kind of basic structure as well as the external materials of wall and to a degree roof, that matter. If those are starting to fall apart, you've got a really big problem. So long as those kind of basic elements remain in fairly good shape, it's an onion. You can replace other layers in and around that. It's quite easy to replace a roof covering and renew that over time; much easier actually than replacing walling to a lot of degrees. Part of that is also about the aesthetics. You can replace wiring, obviously plumbing, floors, wall finishes. You can make partitions or take partitions out that are non-structural. You can kind of rethink a lot of things around the building, but still, there's something of that physical essence of it that is remaining. And I think that continuity is really important for communities as well, that these buildings are landmarks within your mental map of your community. You want to have that continuity at the same time as, "Look what you could explore, this kind of very different way of using that building into the future."

We do talk a lot about the age of buildings. We've worked on some buildings much, much older. So back to 13th, 14th century bones of a building. They're these remarkably enduring things. And I think it's wonderful to observe the completely unpredictable ways that these buildings have been used. Someone who built a church in-- I mean, we're doing some public realm around a church that was built in 938 or something. A Saxon Church Tower which then was much adapted in the medieval period. They couldn't possibly imagine the environment that this now sits in, the kind of world that that sits in. But it sits there as this kind of artifact. It's like a sort of sentinel observing this really long time scale of change. I think that's kind of remarkable and wonderful, and I would love us to take and to be able to persuade our clients to take more of that approach to new buildings that are built now.

We often talk about trying to create the heritage of tomorrow or the next generation; the buildings that are going to be those much loved, really enduring buildings that do stand the test of time. I wrote a piece recently that was sort of talking about this a little bit and noting that a little bit like children, when a building is first finished, actually it's the start of its life. The completion of the physical building is the beginning of its life as a thing in the world. And like a newborn baby, everyone kind of goes, "It's so beautiful and it's so great and cute." Looking and can't get enough of the pictures of it, and it's all shiny and perfect. Then they do tend to go through a period which is like the sort of awkward teenage years where everything just seems to go wrong. They're starting to look a bit shabby. Things are starting to age. Even wiring and plumbing and all those sorts of things don't have a very long lifespan. They do need to be renewed on a relatively quick timescale.

Maybe the original owners or clients for the building have moved on and you've got new management who maybe don't really understand it so well, or don't love it so much, or are stretched on their budgets and they can't afford to maintain it that well. There's a common misperception that new buildings don't need any maintenance. They still need a lot of maintenance. You need to invest in your maintenance from day one. So they go through this sort of awkward period. And then also their aesthetics tend to go out of date. So people start to not find them that attractive. This is a danger point because at that point people can go, "Let's pull it down. It's just too expensive to maintain. It's not working, kind of ugly." We've seen this with Victorian buildings.

The great campaign to pull down loads of Victorian buildings in the kind of mid-20th century, seen as overly ornamented and too gawdy and too this and too that. "God, we just don't need them. They're just so out of date." Now, we see it with brutalist 1960s and 1970s buildings. People saying, "Oh God, they're just big lumps of concrete. Let's pull them down." But if you get beyond that, actually people start to love them again. They start to have this kind of different life again. So I would almost like to see a rule that you couldn't pull down a building, that you were forced to look after it, that you had to look after it for at least a hundred years and see what happens over that span of three or four generations. What new things come out of that? There are some wonderful examples of buildings that have been completely reimagined. I mean, you could go to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, which is an amazing art center and this kind of old grand palace; very radical. You could go the other extreme and look at-- There's a car park in mid Wales which has been transformed in an art center and a market. It's a very ordinary concrete car park structure. There's so many amazing examples. I think we need to be a little bit less quick to judge on the successful failure of a building before it had time to grow up into its adulthood.

Ben (01:09:01):

That's a really insightful way of thinking about buildings which I hadn't really come across. And it reflects on a couple of things around this idea that buildings can also have a part of humanities or art in them. They are still, in some cases, a kind of vector for ideas that has meaning. And actually, there are so many parts of humanities which are no longer so much vectors for ideas because of the way that things have gone. Arguably, even economists are now dealing in the micro of business, whereas a hundred to 200 years ago, they were dealing with socialism, capitalism, what systems that they were vectors for ideas which broadly speaking, they are no longer. And I think about this in terms of theater, because plays, still are, although again, perhaps fewer, but they are vectors for ideas as well about how maybe we should aspire to be on a big scale or little scale.

Actually, they sometimes go through a similar lifecycle. Sometimes the beginning, the really good ones are great and then you don't hear about them again. And then maybe they reemerge with a lot of arts practice. which is perhaps a good segue to your very early life where you did have some theater practice actually, both in helping design theater buildings, but also as a theater and opera director. You worked a little bit with Peter Brook who was one of my most famed theater and opera directors, but also found and I guess light touch rejuvenated a theater space in France, Gare du Nord, which you worked in and which I've seen work in.

So I guess this is a multi-part thought question, which you can handle which was why did you lean into architecture and design when you could have lent into theater? So the roots of your own thing. And what did you learn perhaps from Peter Brook, or that theater or that space, or your work within design? I kind of think when I reflect on looking at your wider work that because you've been so sensitive to humanities-- I think your music playing is great. You've done theater work and things. There's something about your places and your design, which reflects this humanities. Yes, you've done the consultation and that. But actually, you have got an eye or an ear out for not to channel Marie Kondo too much, but the kind of a spark of joy, something other, something to aspire to, which are what humanities and arts have as a question. So anyway, bringing it down theater, Peter Brook, design, why architecture?

Hana (01:11:52):

Oh, gosh, great question. And maybe if I was to speak to my 20-year-old self from today's perspective, I might tell them to just stick with the theater. The thing with architecture, the built environment or the environment more generally is it's kind of inescapable for everybody. Theater and the arts by and large, the audience makes a choice to go and engage with that. But actually, you walk down the street or you drive around the city or the countryside, wherever you might be. Whether or not you want to be affected by the environment, you are affected by the environment. And I think that felt to me really important that one was trying to influence that process to the best possible degree. I think it was a really interesting time and maybe we're going to come full circle with this in a bit because it was kind of early 2000s when I graduated and I was sort of working in the various different things and as you say, in the theater and thinking about what to do.

We'd come out of obviously a period of quite difficult time and there was a huge amount of energy going into regeneration and urban development; a lot of ideas, as you say, a lot of really big ideas about what that might look like. It was a time of people like Richard Rogers writing ‘Towards an urban renaissance’ and advising government at the highest level. I don't think we've ever had an architect since him have that actual influence in government saying, "This is a picture of how our society and our cities could look really different." So it was a sort of interesting time to be moving into the built environment. But I think what I've taken from theater and from working with Peter, which was a huge privilege and an amazing thing to be able to do, was this idea that it's the human activity that is the center. The kind of job of the person shaping the environment is to make the conditions for that human activity to be as meaningful and as joyful and as fulfilling as it could be.

That way that as when you put a play on the stage, the focus is the actors. The focus shouldn't be the set or the lighting. If the set and the lighting is wrong, you notice it. If you go to a play and you are noticing too much about the set and the lighting, it's probably a problem. If it forms the perfect setting for the human drama, that's when it's really working. You almost don't remark on it because it's just working so brilliantly. Peter took that to an extreme where he had barely any sets for anything; a prop here or a bench or a curtain or something, but almost nothing. He was really paring back to the idea that you just needed a space and a group of people watching.

I think there's something about that to say, "Well, actually, what is the least one can do?" It's not about putting your own ego on the stage as an architect or as a designer or as a placemaker. It's what is the least you can do and what is the most strategic and clever way you can do those things that they have the greatest impact. Just subtle placement of elements and space or subtle sequence of spaces that can be made. Then what are the moments where you do need drama, surprise, joy. Those are the things when you turn a corner in a building or down a street and you see something that you weren't expecting and it makes you kind of amazed or surprised or maybe shocked as well. It's important sometimes. 

These are sort of human emotions that are really important. The built environment can only not just be about things that you could have love. And coming back to our earlier point, not everybody loves the same thing. Some people will find a building or a space amazing, and other people will absolutely hate it. Doesn't mean either of them are right. But I do think it's important that we try and actually engage with those emotions and create some response a little bit from people. We're not trying to make everything kind of gray mush just because it's a path of least resistance, but actually, sometimes you need to do something that is really surprising,

Ben (01:16:27):

That seems to be a call to arms to designers, planners and architects everywhere. Great. So I have a short section on underrated, overrated, and then wrap up. So if that's good for you. So you could pass, you could just quick overrated, underrated, some semi-random things here. So overrated or underrated, concrete.

Hana (01:16:50):

That's an interesting one. So I actually think that concrete currently, at least if you talk to those who are sort of talking about embodied and energy and so forth, is actually underrated. There's this great push to get rid of concrete out of buildings which is entirely understandable for many, many reasons. However, done right, it is an extremely durable building material to this point of longevity. You can look at the past and you can look at all these Roman buildings built with concrete thousands of years ago. I think we need to be much more discriminating about where we use it. But used selectively, carefully, smartly, it is a hugely important material. I think that we just have to be clever about where we choose to use it. There's a huge wastage of concrete, for instance, I mean, road construction. Let's forget about buildings. Road construction is the single biggest use of concrete. The amount of concrete that goes into our infrastructure is hideous and I think we should do something about that. But in buildings, I think it's actually quite an important material to use still.

Ben (01:18:04):

Yeah. And I think, as we said, if you take a two or 300 year view, not as bad. I've been announced to a couple of sites. There's one outside Copenhagen, whereas at Brownfield they managed to use a process of recycling the concrete and the studies for that showed it was pretty good in terms of carbon. Okay. Second one, heat pumps.

Hana (01:18:25):

Oh, heat pumps, definitely underrated. Heat pumps are great. Heat pumps should be everywhere. We should be making this really easy.

Ben (01:18:35):

And planning means it's kind of not easy sometimes.

Hana (01:18:38):

I think it's a little bit of a misconception actually.

Ben (01:18:42):

Is it just heritage areas?

Hana (01:18:43):

Yeah. And not even that. This is an area where I think codes should be used because I think we just need much clearer rules.

Ben (01:18:49):

Yeah. And you should be able to pattern code.

Hana (01:18:51):

Yeah. Really simple, really clear rules. Can be quite challenging actually with the retrofit of historic buildings because they need air and they need to be out in the open. They can't be hidden in a basement boiler room like an old boiler. But they are good. I think the other thing that is good about them is essentially they are a kind of plug and play system. So what I mean by that is this technology is going to continue to change and evolve and maybe in 20 years, everyone would be like, "Heat pumps, what was everybody thinking back in 2020s? What a daft idea. We've now got whatever-- some next generation." But actually, they still work off-- broadly speaking, pipe work and so forth that you could cut that heat pump off and put something else in and make it work. So I think that they are an important one. Making space for them in development, making enough space and making it easy to actually change that technology later down the line is really important.

Ben (01:19:53):

But the infrastructure of heat pumps or say heating networks and the likes could well last for a very long time. The physics of it aren't going to change because it's built on a fundamental physics principle.

Hana (01:20:06):

Yeah. They heat water and water runs in pipes and that's pretty straightforward.

Ben (01:20:12):

And that's likely to remain.

Hana (01:20:13):

And the fact that they're electrically driven and we obviously are decarbonizing our electricity grid pretty successfully so that kind of all works.

Ben (01:20:22):

Sure. Underrated, overrated, self building?

Hana (01:20:27):

Well, a little bit of a mixture actually of underrated and overrated. I think it is hard for people to build a home themselves. And when we say self building in this country-- and this obviously doesn't apply to Africa or parts of the subcontinent that are seeing shanty towns and things. That's a totally different thing. But if we're talking about-- broadly speaking-- developed economies. When we talk about self building, we're not actually talking about building one's own self with one's owns arms. One's talking about employing a small contractor, a small builder to build a house that you have gone and gotten planning for that has been drawn by somebody. You are paying for a small scale construction industry to take place on your plot. I'd love to see more of it, but we have a big skills gap. 

I think we are not confronting the skills gap here in terms of the technical knowledge and skills within the construction industry. Actually, it's bad at all scales. It's bad at the big company scale as well if you go onto job sites and see what people are doing. But if we're trying to build energy efficient buildings and we're trying to build durable buildings that are going to last and not need to be pulled down or have terrible failures in the future, we need to have a far better sense of training and system and value really for construction trades as things. We slightly do need to get back to the idea of a master mason and people who were the most valued members of society at the time because it's difficult to build well. You need to care, you need to have an understanding of physics, you need to have an understanding of technology, and you need to have pride in your work. The conditions in a lot of job sites aren't that at the small or the big scale. So I'd like to see more self building, I'd like to see our system set up better for that. But I don't want to see it if what it really means is poor quality construction, poor quality design coming through.

Ben (01:22:44):

And is that an education and training challenge or like you say, a value in society challenge. Arguably, we have a similar issue with teachers and nurses. Or is it a money problem as in, "We're not paying them enough in the value." I guess all of that is a little bit interlinked. But would you put equal weight on all three or do you weight one of them a little bit more as a priority to try and invest in?

Hana (01:23:11):

Two things I think are a problem. Firstly, I think there's an issue around the structure of the construction industry, the economic way it works, which is essentially a system of subcontracting and subcontracting down to the individual. So if you are a very large construction firm building however many hundred homes, you are essentially just a layer of managers. You then subcontract the brick work, or the concrete, or the timber, or the plaster boarding, or the electrics or whatever. Let's just take one of those as an example. You're brick laying so you'll employ a brick laying subcontractor and you'll say to them, "Please do all of brick work for these 300 homes." They actually then end up subcontracting that again and again and again down to the individual so that actually that individual brick layer who's on the site will be a self-employed brick layer. They're not within a structure that is valuing or sustaining or helping them grow their skills. It is a system that rewards, "Get it done as quickly as possible, get my day rate--" which is actually there are good day rates in the industry. I don't think the problem is necessarily money. "Get my day rate and go off and never be seen again." Then if there's a problem with it down the line, it's like everyone has sort of vaporized into thin air.

Ben (01:24:44):

Yeah. And the risk doesn't sit at the proper level, if it sits anywhere because it's essentially being atomized away in legal contracts which is fine on paper, but doesn't address the practicalities of, "Do these people know how to build whatever they're building? Are they aware of the right materials and design to use regardless of what's told to them from above?" Because they can look and go, "Well, this isn't the right sort of material. This is going to be flammable. I don't kind of care what something said. It's just not right because I know this." Yeah, I think that's a very good point.

Hana (01:25:15):

So I think it's a really big problem. And when you get to the individual workmen on the site, they're not bad people. They're not necessarily even that ignorant, but they're being incentivized all the time to cut corners. We haven't mentioned Grenfell, which we should really because that is absolutely-- That's laid bare in that project and that terrible tragedy. It's really disappointing for me as an architect to walk onto a job site, to inspect work on site and talk to operatives and see things being done wrong and be told, "Well we were just told to get on and do it like that because we needed to get off site and get it done in this amount of time." There's just no custodianship of quality. With some honorable exceptions, very little custodianship of quality in the process.

Ben (01:26:10):

Yeah. And we don't seem to have learned-- Actually, I did a recent podcast with Lucy Easthope, who's a disaster planner specialist, and that's a similar theme coming through from that. We're currently recording in a studio which is in the shadow of Grenfell, so it's definitely something on the mind. And that's it. You've got the causal problem, fire and cladding. But actually, those are the surface elements of the structure and system whether you want to think about how we do social housing and things that we touched upon, or the nature of contracting and subcontracting and risk and how it's all thought about which could do with a real strong rethink. 

Okay. Last one on the overrated, underrated and the wrap up would be green belt land.

Hana (01:27:00):

Well, I'm not sure how you can either overrate or underrate it. I suppose the land itself is just land. The concept of the green belt, I suppose is maybe what you mean as a planning construct.

Ben (01:27:09):

Yes, I guess as a planning construct. So I guess to unpack it a little bit, people seem to think there is actually good parts of the green belt and bad parts of the green belt. And because of the construct of the green belt, we can't at the moment develop anything on what probably geographers and planners and people would say, "Oh, these are bad bits." And then because of the politics of the matter, it's very log jammed. But people accept that there are good bits and bad bits. So that's why it's kind of interesting to see whether net it's an underrated or overrated concept or neutral.

Hana (01:27:45):

Overrated, I'm afraid. I'm not a big fan of green belt policy. I understand politically why it arose, but it's like so many parts of our system-- politics and this applies in many different fields and subject areas. Sometimes something that was kind of put in for short term pragmatic political reasons to try and get a bigger picture question pass through ends up being so enduring. One can think of, for instance, the decision to allow GP practices to continue to be essentially self-contained businesses. It was sort of seen as just really necessary at the time to get the NHS over that hurdle. But boy has it created problems for us. And I think likewise, the green belt was seen as a sort of necessary adjunct to other forms of planning that were coming out in the post-war period to allow people to feel like, "Oh, this is just not going to be uncontrolled sprawl."

But it has really provided a problem for us ever since. I'm a strong proponent that we need to be transport led with our planning in terms of where we plan for additional development. From a sustainability perspective, it is really imperative that we stop having to use our cars so much. Electric cars are not the answer here. EVs are great, of course. They are part of the decarbonization process, but it is completely unsustainable and insane, frankly, how much land and resource we give over to road infrastructure and how much time as well. So I am a strong proponent that we need to look at planning along transport corridors. What that means in practice is more of a finger model of development than a kind of donut ring form of development.

I would like to see more of a green finger approach than a green belt approach which says, "Let's protect and enhance the green spaces that sit between these transport corridors. How do we make them work best for not just agriculture, but also for nature and biodiversity, and also for people to enjoy? Let's refocus our strategic planning along those transport corridors rail mainly and rapid bus and tram and so forth so that we can intensify those communities as huge amount of wasted space. I did my dissertation for my architecture part two, a billion and one years ago on exactly this, looking at a rural rail line and the tiny amount of land that was actually available for the development around it because of all of the various restrictions and how completely mad that was, which still 20 years on or more, this hasn't being addressed

Ben (01:30:43):

Very clear. Great. So would you like to comment on any current projects or future projects that you've got in the works, either in terms of writing projects or design and planning projects?

Hana (01:30:54):

Well, we've got lots of really fun projects in the studio at the moment. Mentioned this kind of project up in Lowestoft Town Hall taking up a lot of our time at the moment, but really interesting and hopefully quite impactful. Also, more sort of policy space projects and things like that as well. We're really interested in rural questions. So London and the big cities, loads of great architects and thinkers and people sort of constantly pouring over them. The rural space is relatively unexamined so I think we feel that there's a need for more thought and interesting approaches to be looked at in the rural domain. On a more sort of personal level, a few projects sort of developing. One little project that I don't know where it's going to go in the new year, but I'm actually going to be doing a little bit of recording work with someone who runs an amazing apple farm near us.

He knows more about that land and that climate than really anybody I've ever met intimately. And I think it might be a really interesting lens to talk about climate change as well. I'm very interested in these kind of long-term futures and how we go and look beyond the sort of immediate short-term generation that we live in. I guess a tree and an orchard is a kind of good vector for that in terms of those wider processes of renewal and change. So yeah, looking forward to talking with him and recording him and hopefully doing something with that in the future.

Ben (01:32:43):

That sounds really exciting. And would you like to end on any life advice or thoughts that you have either about someone wanting to have a career in design and architecture, or someone wanting to make their mark in the world in terms of sustainability or arts or just anything you've observed. We haven't touched upon actually, your music which is also something which you perform really highly at. So any life advice or thoughts.

Hana (01:33:15):

I mean, I always hesitate to give too much life advice because it always just sounds like an old person being kind of patronizing to young people to a degree. You and I, I think we were actually very lucky in the generation that we grew up in, in terms of the way that the world opened up for us more than generations before, and in many degrees, more than the generation that's coming up behind us. So I do feel that we were very, very lucky to be able to broaden our perspectives; still have a pretty good education at low cost or no cost. 

I would say the thing I think is really important is to actually do things in the real world. Do projects that get your hands dirty, practical things, and probably not just things that exist online. Maybe they could be online, but I would tend towards saying make something. Like run a market stall or make some furniture and try and sell it. Or try and design some clothes and see how that process works, or take a disused space in your community. You walk past a derelict lot and you think that could be amazing community garden or something. Try and make something practical happen in the world because what you learn from that is firstly, you can actually make things happen. You don't need to be scared of it. Really, it just takes someone with some persistence and energy to make things happen and then it can happen. 

But also, you learn an awful lot about the nature of bureaucracies and about the barriers that exist systemically as well as about how to talk to communities, how to work and collaborate with other sorts of people. I think getting out from behind the screen and into that space where you're having to negotiate and work with often frustrating things, but also with real people, learn to communicate, not be shy, just get out there I think is really important. I would definitely encourage anyone certainly coming up into my field, but I think more generally, it's wonderfully liberating to find out how much you can actually make happen if you just sort of dare and go out there and aren't afraid to break things and get a bit messy and dirty in the process.

Ben (01:35:49):

That sounds like excellent advice. Be a builder, be a maker. So on that note, Hana, thank you very much.

Hana (01:35:54):

Thank you Ben. Lovely to be here.

Launch of the Developer, architecture and placemaking site

“The biggest risks are the ones we never talk about… If development, design and government doesn’t join forces, unite as a powerful lobby and face the challenges ahead, we may stumble into a future in which the real value of everything we’ve built is nothing, writes Christine Murray…

The architectural press is a tidy place to be an editor. For the past 10 years, I visited buildings in the hazy afterglow of construction, between practical completion and handover. The projects were rich in artistic intention and unsullied by human inhabitation. Walking around with the architect, there was an air of celebration, because the difficult birth of the building was over.

Writing about these projects, I was often troubled by the fact that I didn’t know yet whether the building actually worked. That nagging feeling was formative in what would become The Developer – the need to look at places as they develop, from concept to decades after completion, and take the long view. With regards to successful city-making, everything about the journey counts, especially what’s there before you begin.

Plunging into the waters of place over the past few months, I’ve enjoyed meeting developers on muddy sites and hearing how on these plots of land will grow orchards of offices and homes. The scale of urban redevelopment in the UK is staggering.

Just as interesting as the stories developers have told me, however, is what they’ve failed to say.

Unmentionables in conversation often reveal our fears and their silence speaks of risks to UK investment. Brexit has been the most avoided topic. This week, at Mipim, there is magical thinking in action that if Brexit isn’t mentioned, it won’t scare investment away. The only person to bring it up was the French taxi driver.

This week, at Mipim, there is magical thinking in action that if Brexit isn’t mentioned, it won’t scare investment away. The only person to bring it up was the French taxi driver

There are other spectres scary enough to make crashing out of the EU (almost) a distraction. They also remain off the agenda…..

…Even those with major projects fronted on UK waterways don’t explain how their buildings will cope with the expected 60-fold increase in flooding. The number of floods in the UK has already doubled since 2004. The Thames Barrier will fail within 40 years – what then?

No longer a distant threat, the risk of frequent heat waves, water shortages and floods now falls within the investment timelines of major UK redevelopments completing in 10 to 30 years.

By 2030, we are expected to pass the 1.5ºC marker, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If that seems a small or even a welcome degree of warming on an unseasonably warm, winter morning, let David Wallace-Wells’ new book, The Uninhabitable Earth, scare you. In it, he describes how seven million people are already dying of air pollution globally in “an annual Holocaust”.

No longer a distant threat, the risk of frequent heat waves, water shortages and floods now falls within the investment timelines of major UK redevelopments completing in 10 to 30 years

As the Earth warms, the risks grow: in a 2º warmer world, 150 million more people would die. Wallace-Wells writes: “Numbers that large can be hard to grasp, but 150 million is the equivalent of 25 Holocausts… It is more than twice the greatest death toll of any kind – World War II.” Within 20 years, there will be 200 million climate refugees fleeing and in search of a new home, according to the UN.

The difficulty with carbon emissions, as explained by Wallace-Wells, is that we can no longer afford to do one or two token eco-things per development as an offset – we need to do everything at once and at speed: less waste, no concrete, fewer diesel vehicles, smarter estate management, more wildlife and biodiversity, and more innovation. But in return, we get the chance to future-proof investments.

“The risk of not engaging with these debates is obsolescence or worse – the loss of the real social, cultural and financial value of our places”

In the face of immense challenge might creep an inkling of futility, but we have the power to change how and what we build.

True visionaries see opportunity in every risk, while the peril of not engaging with these debates is obsolescence or worse – the loss of the real social, cultural and financial value of our places.

In our first edition of The Developer, we come at the topic of risk from many angles – from risky procurement to the anodyne public spaces created by the risk-averse.

On the whole, placemaking has always been a risky business, volatile in the short term but resilient in the long term, with high-stakes winners and losers.

“It’s the developer who takes the bulk of the risk, if they’ve acquired the land and have conditional funding arrangements, long stop-dates and need residential units to be sold before profit can be recovered,” says Theresa Mohammed, construction litigation partner at law firm Trowers & Hamlins.

But developers are not afraid of risk, perhaps because this is a well-heeled industry – CEOs with affluent roots take more risks than those from poorer backgrounds, according to a 2014 study published in the Academy of Management Journal.

True collaboration is a refreshing concept, because the time for finger-pointing is over. As makers of place, we must take great strides and big risks together

Fear of risk might explain why nimbys dig their heels in so deep – communities have a lot at stake, too. From residents decanted from social housing to small businesses ousted from their market stalls, embracing change can be a leap of faith too far. And are we worthy of their trust?

Tackling the risks of our time will increasingly require sharing them. In an era of finger-pointing and what Paul Berg, partner at insurer Griffiths & Armour, calls “back covering”, sharing risk is a challenge in an industry where an “integrated, collaborative environment is the exception, not the rule”.

Berg says: “Where it exists, it invariably requires an insurance solution that recognises that among the team delivering the project, there is no blame, no litigation, no fault, so that between team members, there is no finger-pointing.”

This industry has a handle on charm, bluster and glib retorts, but in the age of social media activism and hyper-accountability, more thoughtful responses are now required

True collaboration is a refreshing concept, because the time for finger-pointing is over. As makers of place, we must take great strides and big risks together. This will require a search for common ground and shared goals among the whole design, development and management team, including planners, architects, contractors, politicians, investors, engineers, policy workers, developers, asset managers and end users – especially the marginalised ones.

My ambition for The Developer is to bring the whole industry together to break down barriers between our siloed professions, first at the Festival of Place on 9 July. At our events, there will be frank discussion about the future of cities and no ‘unmentionables’.

The Developer exists to unpick the key ingredients to successful placemaking and promote evidence-based findings to help us mitigate risks.

This industry has a handle on charm, bluster and glib retorts, but in the age of social media activism and hyper-accountability, more thoughtful responses are now required.

Launching The Developer is a risk, too. But I believe we need more thoughtful reporting on the user experience of our cities. The Developer is an experimental space where we can grapple with the most difficult questions as an industry and work out inspiring solutions together.”

Check out the site and the full article here.