Review - Design and Landscape for People: New Approaches to Renewal

BOOK
By Robert Holden

Design and Landscape for People: New Approaches to Renewal.
By Clare Cumberlidge and Lucy Musgrave.
Thames and Hudson, 2007. 224pp. £29.95

This is a really interesting pictorial survey of projects worldwide since 1990 dealing with urban and rural regeneration. Written by public art curator Clare Cumberlidge and former director of the Architecture Foundation Lucy Musgrave – who now run the art and public realm consultancy General Public Agency – this is a take on contemporary community action and renewal.

At first glance, the book seems to be a series of snapshots, not an analysis; but the projects are grouped by theme – utility, citizenship, rural, identity and urban – which the introductory essays do explore to some extent.

In the ‘utility’ section, for instance, Cumberlidge and Musgrave note that the creation of water supply or transport networks can result in new structures which cut across urban forms, paying little thought to what’s already there. So they argue for the reuse of infrastructure and for interventions that are sensitive to local needs.

Their examples include the playpumps installed in numerous villages in South Africa. Powered by children playing on roundabouts, the pumps raise groundwater – as much as 1,400l an hour – into big overhead tanks, adorned with AIDS prevention messages and the advertising which pays for the programme. The pumps also help to combat disease: the threat of cholera in open water supplies.

Zagreb, Croatia: site of a two-year project by Platforma showcasing the potential of the city’s empty buildings

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A European inclusion comes from Stanica, Slovakia, where an old railway station has been converted into a community meeting place, with studios, exhibitions and a café, while it still continues to function as a station. The point is to build upon what’s there.

The edible schoolyard at Martin Luther King Jr School in Berkeley, California, where the classes grow their own food, is one of the authors’ examples of citizenship promotion, as is the Hotel Neustadt in Halle-Neustadt, Germany, where teenagers converted an abandoned system-built apartment block into a 92-bedroom hotel, related to and serving an arts festival. In both these cases the authors argue for long-term engagement and participation, with programmes that enable ‘active citizenship’.

But the book can be rather hard going. The language is frenzied and fatiguing, using metaphors and clichés that mask meaning rather than illuminate. The authors also seem to suggest that the 1990s invented cross-disciplinary working and community action. Try telling that to the squatters of 1960s Amsterdam, or to members of any rural commune or urban allotments.

I suspect that the real invention of the 1990s was that arts consultants began to realise the possibilities of community action consultancy. And it is a pity that the rhetoric and hyperbole of the writing should cloud the really useful messages contained in the selected projects. So treat this as a valuable source book, with a collection of good photographs – but don’t expect an easy read.

Robert Holden is a landscape architect in London