Preface

From the heady days of West Coast artists like Robert Smithson and Robert Irwin and indeed our own Artist Placement Group there has been a consistent thread in public art practice of artists working within non-arts organisations to influence outputs in the arena of the public. Contemporary examples include Peter McCaughey’s role within the giant Glasgow Housing Association and San façon’s imminent departure to spend 18 months within the Utilities and Environmental Protection department of the City of Calgary.
As an artist, it is always fascinating to learn about the philosophy and methods that others apply in their approach to the environment that we all share. Sustrans is a rare example of an ‘early adopter’ – an advocate for and provider of sustainable transport they quickly identified how artists could bring added value to the routes that they were creating. In the first instance these collaborations tended to take the form of artists ‘decorating’ routes with markers and benches etc. In recent times Sustrans have been working with more socially-engaged arts practice (eg Neville Gabie, Mathew Pinsky) and seeing the value of diverse collaborative working in looking at the larger social and cultural impact of travelling through public space.
Mark Chalmers’ article provides a fascinating insight into the way another creative professional thinks about and works in public space. Having a real-time reportage of the foundations being laid for artist Nicola Atkinson’s collaboration with Sustrans and Katrine Crescent (Kirkcaldy) will be invaluable for later critical reflection around the overall project.

(Matt Baker is a public artist – he is currently the commissioned artist with Sustrans for the new english Coast-Coast cycle route ‘Way of the Roses’ and working with the community of Govan Riverside on a response to the new Riverside Museum on the opposite bank of the Clyde in Glasgow)

Top

A collaborative Project by Sustrans and Fife Council

Over the past few decades, there have been many proposals to humanise streets and turn their focus back to people. Developments planned during the 1960’s, such as the Templehall area of Kirkcaldy, learned much from Scotland’s New Towns – from the so-called “Radburn” layout of their roads and courts, to the design of individual houses. Even though a street like Katrine Crescent, which is the focus of our project, is connected to a network of footpaths and cycle routes, the perception is that too much emphasis was placed on the car. That in itself may create problems with speeding or parking, but more fundamental is the way in which the public realm ceases to play a social role once it becomes a carriageway or car park.

Katrine Crescent is the site of a pilot project which aims to re-design a street to meet the aspirations of its residents. These range from enhancing the area’s road safety and amenity, to practical concerns such as fixing broken fences and improving streetlighting. Having previously designed social housing arranged in “Homezones” – where the street and pavement become a shared surface on which cars travel more slowly than on a conventional street – I was keen to explore Homezone principles in an existing neighbourhood, without the disruption and cost of wholesale reconstruction. The biggest difference is, perhaps, that whereas in a newbuild scheme, a social landlord is your client: in this case, the process is community-led.

This community design model has a good track record, since Sustrans has completed several schemes in England and Wales where the residents led the process, with designers involved throughout to facilitate the re-design. The scheme in Kirkcaldy, where Sustrans are working with Fife Council, sits in parallel to a Town-wide Walking and Cycling Initiative – which gives some clue as to the “active travel” aspects of the project. Sustrans, as a transportation charity, is keen to enhance the opportunities which people have to walk, cycle and use public transport – offering alternatives to the car. A sister scheme in Elgin aims to achieve the same ends in a different context. From the outset, we engaged with a broad cross-section of residents, to the extent that Katrine Crescent effectively chose itself for the pilot project. Initially, we distributed 450 postcards to houses in Templehall: householders were asked to respond to a simple questionnaire on the reverse, and after a follow-up visit to the houses, we found that almost a quarter of residents in Katrine Crescent had responded.

After launching the project with an event on the street – a chance to plant spring bulbs and have an informal chat about the issues people were concerned about – a questionnaire was compiled to seek their views in depth. During spring and early summer, a series of structured design workshops took place in a nearby church hall. Everyone was invited to attend and a conversation began, where a discussion of the problems on Katrine Crescent naturally developed into a series of ideas and suggestions, which evolved into a design scheme. Once the proposals emerged, they were set down in sketch form – the drawings were deliberately kept loose to allow folk to feel able to influence them – and that scheme is currently being costed, ahead of an anticipated September start on site.

In my own mind, the project’s broadest design aim is to apply the principles of the urbanist Jan Gehl to smaller-scale parts of the public realm, rather than grand civic spaces. Street Design hopes to foster activity and encourage casual interaction between neighbours, by making the spaces between buildings more conducive to people. In this case, it may be as simple as creating chicanes and speed tables to discourage through-traffic, then overlaying a series of pedestrian routes onto the exisiting “desire lines” which run across Katrine Crescent. By providing dropped kerbs and crossings at grade, the routes become more accessible to the elderly, young mothers with buggies, and children on bikes or scooters. In return for a modest investment in infrastructure, you can reinforce the feeling that a street is there for people, rather than motorists or traffic engineers.

Similarly, dozens of school pupils travel along and across the street each day, so we worked with a class at both Fair Isle Primary and Torbain Primary Schools to explore the pupils’ experience of the area, and their aspirations for it. The artist Nicola Atkinson has also been involved in recent weeks, helping to stimulate discussion and encourage the children to consider how their ideal street might work. Once construction begins, we anticipate that the children will remain involved, with their drawings being translated into decorative patterns to identify the routes they use.

In contrast to a full-blown Homezone approach, which requires wholesale re-construction of roads and landscaping, Street Design is more pragmatic and allows us to concentrate our effort where the community feel it would be deployed most effectively. On Katrine Crescent, that means a series of “hard” features at intervals along the length of the street, including new gateways, traffic chicanes, and opening up a dark and unwelcoming stairwell. Equally important are the softer aspects of the scheme, with planters and raised shrub beds to offer colour and texture, where at present the spaces between buildings consist of threadbare grass, broken concrete slabs, and weed-infested cobbles.

The Street Design process is ongoing, with a view to construction beginning in September 2011. By November, the community hope to have a re-designed street, less than a year after the project began. Despite this short programme – relative to conventional public realm works – the scheme will have a long lifespan, and each feature is designed with low maintenance in mind. That means the planters will be built from large sleepers of green oak, which will weather naturally; the speed table will be constructed using large precast units, for robustness; and the raised beds will be dressed with bark mulch to ensure they remain tidy and weed-free.

Hand-in-glove with the physical aspects of Street Design are its social benefits. A community-led ethos runs through the scheme, and while Fife Council will adopt the completed works, a fledgling Residents’ Association will take ownership of the scheme in a broader sense, and help to look after it. That should make for a stable, three-cornered arrangement with the residents on Katrine Crescent, Fie Council and Sustrans all working in partnership. Our close association with the local schools will hopefully foster an interest in and respect for the landscaping, and we also anticipate working closely with the Council’s Community Payback team, so that young offenders will help us to build some of the features. We feel that the flexibility to do all this comes from Sustrans’ nature as neither a public sector body, nor a profit-making company, but a charity with a strong environmental and social purpose.

We hope that these aspects, taken together, will not only help to humanise the street but also turn its focus back to the people who live on it.

Top