In the first decade of the new millennium, cities will acquire a greater importance than ever before in accommodating the world’s population. In the developed world, demographic changes – more elderly people, more divorces, more singles and a corresponding decline in the average family unit size – will create increasing demand for residential accommodation near transportation and information centres.
In the developing world, new cities are being created at an unprecedented rate to house growing populations and to cope with the drift of people from the countryside. China, for example, is at present building over 300 cities the size of Bristol. Typically rural/urban population ratios will be reversed, from 80:20 to 20:80, as people move from the land to work in sprawling new industrial centres. The effect of these changes will be to put huge pressure on existing towns and cities in developing countries as well as on agricultural land.
The vital issues that need to be determined are the correct level of urban density, the appropriate mix of uses, the relative level of public/private transport, and the acceptable amount and quality of public space, all related to local cultural patterns.
Given this pressure on land, there is an increasing need to be economical with its use. In the past, this has meant that public space has been squeezed to make room for land development or roads. There is an increasing understanding, however, that the health of a city depends as much on its civic realm as on the quality of its housing, offices, roads and transport systems.
Since there is insufficient space for all the functions of a city to be catered for discretely, new arrangements will have to be made. These include:
– mixing uses within quarters of the city and also within buildings in order to make more intense use of land and built developments and to reduce the need for transportation;
– restricting the space taken up by private cars and encouraging a mixture of elements in the public transportation system, including trains, trams, buses, coaches and taxis, as well as shared cars;
– enhancing the spaces between buildings, wasting as little as possible in order to create pedestrian-friendly streets, squares and parks with layered and overlapping uses.
Effectively, these arrangements mean that cities will become denser and will be used more intensively.
We need to find ways to share spaces; for example, between apparently conflicting uses such as private restaurants and public thoroughfares or cycle and pedestrian routes. We need to use space during the day and at night to accommodate alternative uses, such as commuter/business activities during the day and leisure and entertainment at night. Finally, we need to ensure that the spaces we provide are flexible and can accommodate seasonal, weekly or daily fluctuations in existing uses, or absolute changes of use as social and economic patterns alter.
We need to develop much more sophisticated systems to facilitate this more complex, dense and flexible use of private/public space. This includes the infrastructure of services underground, the ground treatment itself and, equally important, the services and equipment we provide above ground.
In the UK, as in many other countries, the above-ground streetscape is nominally controlled by local municipalities. In practice, the streets are a free-for-all, with various utility companies and the transport authorities vying for space to install their apparatus. It is not uncommon to see a narrow pavement cluttered with traffic signs, phone boxes, bus stops, advertising hoardings, lamp posts, parking meters, etc.
These elements are frequently placed in locations suitable for the specific function, but showing little regard for other pieces of street furniture or the street environment as a whole. They are often of different design, colour and style, and where illuminated, they may be differently lit. The result is visual and physical chaos, heightened by the fact that redundant items of street furniture are in many cases not removed.
Geo is a newly developed, co-ordinated street-furniture system that aims to provide a coherent, elegant, minimal way of servicing public space in the city. It has been developed on the following assumptions:
– the public realm is precious and should not be cluttered with street furniture;
– street furniture should primarily serve the needs of people rather than cars or utility companies;
– conditions change, and street furniture should be capable of adaptation to new situations.
Soon to be launched on the market, the Geo system includes most common elements of street furniture, from lighting to public telephones, from bollards to benches – all based on the principle of minimizing street clutter by utilizing single posts about which as many items as possible can be clustered. The furniture is designed to be neat, robust and minimal, and above all to age gracefully.
The system is foreseen for use in towns and cities anywhere. It can be expanded to embrace new requirements and in particular emerging technologies in information and electronics. Its essential features are as follows.
– It is a complete system that comprises the whole range of urban furniture, including lighting, lamp posts, bins, bollards, bus stops, benches, railings, shelters, signs, advertising and art.
– It is designed with a coherent set of shapes, colours, materials and details. As with the most successful ironmongery systems, all elements can be mixed and matched to provide the appropriate combination. The system deals with visual clutter by linking different elements into a family. The clear relationship between the lighting column and the litter bin, for example, or the seat and the signpost, may be contrasted with the confusion of styles seen on most streets today.
– It is a post-based system designed to reduce street clutter. In conventional situations, each item of street furniture and equipment is likely to have its own separate post and substructure connection. This is costly, wasteful of space and visually confusing. Geo posts are provided with capacious stainless-steel bases, which can accommodate several electrical and telecom connections. The posts themselves can be in mild steel or stainless steel and are stiff enough to carry a variety of street equipment, including regulatory and directional signs, traffic lights, telephone housings, bins, banners, play and display machines, etc.
– The posts function analogously to lighting tracks, allowing additional equipment to be added and obsolete items to be removed without necessarily requiring streets to be excavated for new underground connections. In this context, the stainless-steel base cabinet is essential in providing adequate capacity for electrical and telecom connections.
– The materials and details used in the system are designed to be simple and elegant, timeless and unobtrusive, so as to remain in the urban background and not become dated. Stainless steel is used at the base of each column partly to protect against corrosion, but also to provide quality where it can be most readily appreciated. The posts consist of painted mild steel for economic reasons, but also to allow a choice of colours. Stainless-steel posts are a further option. Lamp housings are made of aluminium extrusions and castings to provide durable and elegant forms that can accommodate most lamp lighting sources.
Although the family of elements is already extremely large, more items are planned. Bespoke elements will also be created for individual projects and, where relevant, incorporated into the standard range. The elements can be divided into three main categories.
– Signs and information: local information signs consist of stainless-steel finger posts with the actual sign elements formed by aluminium extrusions. The fingers can be easily added or removed and rotated to point in any desired direction. Alternatively, the same finger signs can be added to lamp posts to provide street names or directions. Finger signs with LED information matrices are under development and will be interchangeable with printed signs.
Traffic signs and traffic lights are also available in the system range. The former consist of aluminium cases with translucent sign faces that can be illuminated internally. Traffic lights have attractive cylindrical aluminium casings that house LED luminaires. Again, all traffic signs can be clipped to system (lamp) posts and integrated with other elements.
The public telephone “box” consists of a curved glass housing that can also be clipped to a post. Up to three phones can be clustered around a single post, with adequate space for all telecom services for existing and future video-phone technology.
All the signs can, of course, be used for advertising as well, but we anticipate that local authorities will wish to explore the opportunities that exist for public art. The system therefore includes large, internally illuminated fabric banners 6 m high and 1.5 m in diameter. These can accommodate up to three images around their circumference. The art presented at high level in this way could be subsidized by sponsorship and by advertising displayed on low-level (electronic) signs.
– Lighting: there are currently three basic types of street-light fittings in the system. Two have direct lighting sources; one is an indirect fitting. The aim is to create a quality of light far superior to that provided by standard road lighting. It will be designed for people rather than just for cars and will ensure glare control and provide good illumination levels and colour rendition. The two types with direct sources share similar features, although their shapes differ. One is a circular fitting available in various diameters; the other is an aerofoil-shaped fitting manufactured in different lengths. The types with direct lighting sources are made of aluminium castings, extrusions and plates. The lamp glasses are curved and toughened. Direct luminaires can be mounted on system posts that range in height from 4 to 11 m, depending on the lamp sizes. The indirect luminaire is an angled aluminium reflector illuminated from beneath by a metal halide uplighter. This fitting is designed primarily for pedestrian areas and most effectively fitted to a 4–6 m post.
All fittings and posts can be equipped with the latest systems for monitoring and control to ensure energy savings and uninterrupted service. The posts can also be fitted with supplementary power supplies and mounting points for additional light fittings for Christmas or other temporary festive occasions or for architectural feature lighting to prominent public buildings.
– Street furniture: numerous items of street furniture have been designed for this system. They range from a simple tubular mild-steel bollard capped with a distinctive stainless-steel cylindrical boss to more complex benches. The latter are available in various shapes – circular and linear, with and without back rests. The circular benches can be attached to system posts. Others are free-standing or can be fixed to bus shelters.
The benches are made of stainless-steel rods set out in a curved ergonomic profile. The rods can be infilled for greater comfort either with plastic extrusions or with timber sections. Benches of this kind are particularly appropriate in indoor or supervised locations.
There are many other items of furniture too numerous to describe here. All of them have similar lines and utilize a common family of materials and details.
Furniture has already been manufactured ahead of the launch for London’s Millennium Dome site and for Canary Wharf, and orders have recently been received for entire quarters of two other cities in England.
Our project for the South Bank Employers’ Group in London attempted to create a more coherent environment in a street filled with discordant furniture. This important route, serving some of London’s major arts and office buildings, had been largely given over to car traffic, with busy four- and six-lane roadways and narrow pavements. We reduced the road width and calmed the situation, at the same time substantially widening the pavements. We also designed furniture and signs to enhance the street space.
Most radically, we provided a series of six- metre-high internally illuminated banners, which are cantilevered from javelin-shaped lamp posts. These banners were based on individual artwork obtained by means of a national open competition that attracted more than 3,000 entries.
The project was considered a success in the way it transformed the street environment from a through-traffic run into a pedestrian-friendly route filled with art that is related to the area’s cultural identity and that also serves to illuminate the pavements dramatically at night.
