Scaping Capital

2 1 Design and planning methods

2.1 Design and planning methods
Contents list

Design results from methods of working. A sculpture of welded steel differs from one chipped from granite or modelled with clay. Rodin was a modeller, Brancusi
a carver, Picasso a constructor. Look at their work: different methods produce different results. A modern planned town is not like an organic town. A
garden that is made by using a drawing to fix every detail before starting work will differ, markedly, from one that is made by choosing the plants and
stones one at a time, year after year. Means influence ends.

Clean hands design

Dirty hands design

Rough hands and smooth hands can both produce good design. The rough-hands method is practised in workshops and out of doors. It is the craftsmans way,
the peasants way, the ancient way. The smooth-hands method is to sit in an office working at measured drawings for implementation by others at remote
sites. This is the modern way: the way of the engineer, the architect, the town planner and the landscape architect. Both methods have their strengths.
In medieval times, the rough-hands method was universal. Today, it is the other way about. The change took place as part of a broad cultural trend, with
the rise of modernism a significant factor. Planners can learn from designers.

2.2 Pre-modern design methods
Contents list

Cart wheels

Apprenticeship is a system of great antiquity. The Code of Hammurabi, a Babylonian king, required skilled craftsmen to teach the young. Books were not available,
and technical knowledge was of great value. Those who possessed knowledge wished to keep it to themselves. In ancient Rome, most craftsmen were slaves.
This was an effective means of retaining the ownership of knowledge. In the Middle Ages, craft guilds emerged in Western Europe, controlled by independent
master craftsmen. Articles of apprenticeship bound trainees to their masters, often for seven years, to work for little or no pay. Some masons went on
to become designers. This was the only way to become an "architect. The knowledge gained in apprenticeship was practical, not theoretical. In the great
cathedrals, full-size drawings and large sets of dividers were used to set out masonry. Shapes and forms developed gradually in the minds of master craftsmen.
Small-scale drawings came into use at a later date.

Under the master and apprentice system, design decisions were taken on traditionalist grounds. Things were done in special ways because they had always
been done in such ways. "If twere right for Old Bill, twill be right for me. Changes came about very gradually, if at all. John Christopher Jones, who
published an extensive study of Design methods (Jones, 1980), was greatly impressed by this aspect of craft evolution, and especially by George Sturts
book on The Wheelwrights Shop. He quotes Sturts account of the waggon-builders approach to what we call design:

The truth is, farm-waggons had been adapted, through ages, so very closely to their own environment that, to understanding eyes, they really looked almost
like living organisms. They were so exact. Just as a biologist may see, in any limpet, signs of the rocky shore, the smashing breakers, so the provincial
wheelwright could hardly help reading, from the waggon-lines, tales of haymaking and upland fields, of hilly roads and lonely woods and noble horses, and
so on... Was it to suit the horses or the ruts, the loading or the turning, that the front wheels had to have a diameter of about four feet?

...

I never met a man who professed any other than an empirical acquaintance with the waggon-builders lore. My own case was typical. I knew that the hind-wheels
had to be five feet two inches high and the fore-wheels four feet two; that the "sides must be cut from the best four-inch heart of oak, and so on. This
sort of thing I knew, and in vast detail in course of time; but I seldom knew why. And that is how most other men knew. (Sturt, 1923)

Most design was done in this way, in most countries in most historical periods. It was used for carts, buildings, ships, cars, towns, gardens and every
other thing. Admiration for the products of traditional design methods continues to grow.

Fig 2.2 Evolutionary craft design - from George Sturt

2.3 Modern design methods
Contents list

The master and apprentice system declined in the later stages of the Industrial Revolution. Machines caused a separation between skilled designers and unskilled
workers. Craftsmen continued to make machines, but their hands became smoother as their need for theoretical knowledge increased. James Watt, the inventor
of several steam engines, studied at university. Though he could, in his own words, "work as well most journeymen, he was refused admission to a trade
guild. Eventually, the universities themselves introduced technical training, leading to masters degrees. When governments began to subsidize this type
of education, the master and apprentice system declined further. So did the contribution of rough hands to design.

The modern approach, of design with smooth hands, has grown by degrees. It began in ancient times and resumed its advance with the Renaissance.
Vitruvius
wrote that the architect should be "skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry (Vitruvius, 1914 edn). Since the translation of Euclids Elements into
Latin, in 1482, the activity of making new places and products has become steadily re-entangled with the process of drawing. To de-sign is to make signs,
originally on paper, increasingly on computer screens. To plan is to make a projection on a flat surface. The early advantages of design-by-drawing were
both technical and aesthetic. In shipbuilding, technical considerations were dominant. Drawings made possible calculations relating to structure and function
(Figure 2.3). Orders could be sent to the forests, and tradesmen could proceed with the simultaneous fabrication of separate parts. In architecture, the
early benefit was mainly aesthetic. But, as construction became more sophisticated, drawings were also required for structural calculations.

Smooth-handed designers use more abstract reason, and more self-importance, than their rough-handed counterparts. To represent a place or a thing on paper,
abstract thought is required. "Abstract, as a verb, means to draw out. The draughtsmans tools - geometry and arithmetic - are rational procedures, useful
for drawing out. Book learning necessitates the use of reason. The whole procedure is one of simplification and of concentration on fundamental elements.
In societies that believed reason to be the grand avenue to human progress, it was natural that rational design should supplant craft evolution. Town plans
and building plans came to be founded on survey drawings.

During the nineteenth century, the technical and aesthetic reasons for producing drawings grew apart, as did the architectural and engineering professions.
The architect became a gentleman-artist, reliant on experienced craftsmen and engineers to make buildings stand up and resist the elements. In the twentieth
century, architects sought to gain control of the whole building process through their drawing skill. So much knowledge was available in books that it
became feasible to produce drawings and specifications for every aspect of the building process. When waggon building was replaced by car building, a similar
change afflicted vehicle production. Men in smart suits subjugated men in boiler suits.

During the early years of automobile manufacture, vehicles continued to be designed and built by craft methods. Components were machined, one at a time.
Each part was honed to slightly different dimensions and often embodied minor design improvements. It was a very expensive way of making cars. With his
Model T, Henry Ford applied the techniques of mass production to automobiles. Each part was standardized. A gauging system was introduced. Parts were made
in standard sizes to be attached in the simplest possible ways. Assemblers were given specialized tools and made to adopt a single task. Henry the First
became king of the whole process. All design decisions were taken before the production line was started. Workers became operatives, not craftsmen (Figure
2.4). Uneducated immigrants to the New World could learn the job in a day. Each had responsibility for one tiny step in the production process and for
an endlessly repeated operation, as satirized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Fordist production methods created the modern world. Not since the invention
of gunpowder had smooth hands won such dominion over rough hands. Bronze defeated the peasant; the longbow defeated the knight; gunpowder defeated the
castle; Fordism defeated the worker, temporarily.

Fordist mass production

2.4 Fordist mass production - in a UK Ford factory

2.4 Post-Fordist design
Contents list

By 1980, the Ford Motor Company itself was losing huge sums of money and market share, especially to Japanese competitors. Selected Ford managers were sent
to Japan with sharp pencils and notebooks. They bought a stake in Mazda and discovered that the Fordist system of mass production, named after their founder,
had been overtaken by a new system, which came to be known as lean production. Compared with mass production, it required 40% less effort and resulted
in products of superior quality. The Ford Motor Company adopted as many lean production principles as it could. Since then, people have been talking about
post-Fordism in the same breath as postmodernism. Reflecting on how the company changed between 1980 and 1990, Fords director of strategy observed that:

We had to stop designing cars we liked and start designing cars the customers liked. The Japanese had teamwork. We had macho designers who found it difficult
to sublimate their own ideas to the new realities. (Sunday Times, 1994)

The design teams brought rough and smooth hands together.

Between 1960 and 1980, Japans share of world automobile production rose from 3% to 30%. Initially, Western companies attributed the growth to low wages
and hard work. No doubt these factors played their part but, eventually, it became apparent that the main factor was their new approach to planning, design
and manufacture. Lean production is lean in the use of energy, time and materials. Parts are delivered Just-in-Time, instead of being stockpiled. Manufacturing
faults are identified at once and the cause is traced. Operational faults are reported to the factory and the cause is traced. Production workers, salesmen
and consumers all participate in the ongoing task of product improvement and design. Thought, by everyone involved, takes the place of waste.

The MIT study of car manufacture, on which the above account is based, also looked at the design and planning process (Womack, 1990). The following differences
were found between the two systems.

Design for mass production:
The design team starts small and expands (as staff are brought in to solve problems).
Design team membership varies from week to week.
Master plans are completed before component designs.
Component manufacturers work to drawings and specifications issued by the design team.
Planners and designers lack production line experience.
Customer feedback comes from market research studies.
The team leader is a powerless coordinator, seeking the agreement of all parties.

Design for lean production:
The design team starts large and contracts (as problems are solved).
The design team is dedicated and tightly knit.
Master plans are developed in parallel with component designs.
Component manufacturers are full members of the design team.
All planners and designers have experience on the production line.
Customer feedback comes from car salesmen and car users.
The team leader is a powerful boss, seeking the agreement of all parties.

Lean design and planning are more knowledge-intensive, less hierarchical and less demarcated. Everyones experience and judgement is brought into the planning
and design process. This includes customers, garage workers, production workers with experience of decision-making and decision-makers with experience
on the production line. Despite the profusion of knowledge in books, lack of knowledge is the greatest drawback to the smooth-hands approach. You can learn
much about the behaviour of steel, timber, brick and stone from books, but there is a great deal more that can be learned only by touching and using materials.
You can also learn much about indoor and outdoor space in books, but there is a great deal more that can be learned only by knowing and using real places.
Edwin Lutyens ability to make good gardens was limited by his lack of interest in using gardens. First-hand knowledge comes from living in a place, driving
a car or making a car.

In a lean production company, the MIT team asked to meet one of the directors, at the Honda plant in Ohio. "He was unavailable, we were told: he had just
joined the company and was busy assembling cars (Womack, 1990). In a mass production company, the MIT investigators found an engineer who had spent his
whole career designing doorlocks without ever learning how to make a doorlock. Even knowing how to make doorlocks was the job of another engineer - not
a craftsman. The large initial size of the lean design team signifies the assembly of knowledge, both practical and theoretical. The small initial size
of the mass production design team signifies the focus on abstract knowledge.

The leadership role is crucial. In lean planning and design:

The shusa is simply the boss, the leader of the team whose job it is to design and engineer a new product and get it fully into production. In the best
Japanese companies the position of shusa carries great power and is, perhaps, the most coveted in the company. True, employees may seek the position as
a stepping-stone to the top. However, for those who truly love to make things, the job brings extraordinary satisfaction. In fact, its the best position
in the modern world from which to orchestrate all the skills needed to make a wonderfully complex manufactured product, such as the automobile, come into
being. One might even say that the shusa is the new supercraftsman, directing a process that now requires far too many skills for any one person to master...
in an era when the skills involved are not so much technical as social and organizational. (Womack, 1990)

Lean design has similarities to the way in which medieval cathedrals were made. A powerful master-craftsman controlled the whole project, while specialists
had power to decide upon and regulate their own work. This is one of the things that
Ruskin
and
Morris
admired about medieval architecture. They hated industrialization, but as factories become more automated, the whole production process may become more
like cathedral building. When the ultimate black-box factory is built, the lights will be switched off, the machinery switched on and the plant left to
churn out products so long as they are wanted.

Ford bought a stake in Mazda

2.5 Fordism and the built environment
Contents list

Current design and planning practice in the built environment professions retains a disastrous similarity to Fordist production arrangements. The knowledge
employed is abstract knowledge, gained in colleges. Professionals are "advisers, not managers. The public are "consultees, not planners. The design process
begins with a big idea, traditionally scribbled on the back of an envelope. It is then passed down the design team, with more and more junior people checking
the final details. At the "coalface, on construction sites, workers are treated as indifferent automatons. They must obey written specifications, drawings
and regulations, often drafted by people without practical experience of doing the job. Management contracting, and design-and-build, are bringing about
changes, but component designers and clients still have little prospect of becoming involved.

Nor do users of places and buildings have anything but a marginal role in the design process, even if they are the owners, which is never the case for bridges,
public parks, mass housing, or speculative office developments. As with design for mass production, design teams for built environment projects tend to
start small and expand. Once formulated, the plans are submitted to municipal authorities, modified and agreed. When such plans are implemented, they often
run into stiff opposition. "Why werent we consulted? everyone wants to know. The technically correct reply, that "You elected the people who hired the
people who took the decisions, gives little comfort. It is Fordist autocracy. Henry took all the decisions himself. Lean design thrusts as many decisions
as possible onto the shoulders of the workforce and the users. It deconstructs the Fordist hierarchy. It is knowledge-intensive instead of resource-intensive.

Back-of-envelope design

The back of an enveolpe was the classic place to start a 20th century design project

2.6 Knowledge-intensive planning
Contents list

Planners have responded to the public outcry against road building and other plans with offers of "public participation in planning. The idea is excellent.
The practice is usually deficient. At worst, planners give an impression of treating the public according to the disdainful motto: "They say. What do they
say? Let them say. At best, planners have shown skill in drawing fresh ideas from the public and putting them to work. Public participation can operate
in several ways: advisory committees, written comment, public debate and design workshops. Each has value. Each can be criticized.

Advisory committees can work in parallel with public committees, as in Germany and Holland. Authorities generally have subsidiary committees, of elected
members, dealing with planning, parks, housing etc. Each is paralleled with an advisory committee. It is a good way of expanding the knowledge base for
decision making. The difficulty lies in choosing the advisors. If they are professionally qualified in the subject, they will be an interest group. If
they are volunteers, they will be unrepresentative. If they are elected, they will come under the sway of political parties. Normally, they will lack knowledge,
and the decision-making process can become very lengthy.

Written comments can be invited on draft plans. A leaflet can be circulated or an exhibition mounted. The public can be invited to write letters and complete
questionnaires. Sometimes, they receive written answers. Letters produce a good opportunity for individuals to let off steam but, generally, do not lead
to constructive improvements. Too often, the minorities oppose one another. This leaves planners with the satisfying delusion that they have "conducted
the orchestra and reached a balanced compromise.

Public debate can take place after the planners have given an account of their proposals. This allows people who are happier talking than writing to make
a contribution, but the results are similar to exercises in written consultation. It too often seems that planners listen to what is said, as a formality,
and then do what they intended in the first place. This is not necessarily the planners intention, but it is the impression received by the public.

Design workshops can be enjoyable and productive (Figure 2.5). Public meetings are held. The planners come with open minds, large-scale models, white paper
and fat pens. Members of the public put forward ideas, which are drawn on paper and then countered with other ideas. Such sessions can be very creative
yet unrealistic. With idealism in the air, it is too easy to ignore economic realities and entrenched interests.

So what should be done? Use all the methods? Reject all the methods? Devise new methods? Each solution is workable, provided it brings together those with
both rough and smooth hands: clients, owners, builders, component-makers, designers, planners and maintenance workers. For architecture, Hassan Fathy wrote
of re-establishing "the Trinity:

Client, architect; and craftsman, each in his province, must make decisions, and if any one of them abdicates his responsibility, the design will suffer
and the role of architecture in the cultural growth and development of the whole people will be diminished. (Fathy, 1973)

But for the environment, who is "the client? This is a central problem. For a private house, the client is the building owner. For speculative housing,
shops and offices, the client is hydra-headed: financiers, insurance companies, property managers and, at the far end of a long list, those who merely
spend their lives using the places. For transport schemes, too, there are many clients with divergent interests. When cycling, I want a vastly better provision
of segregated cycle tracks. When driving, I can be heard muttering "Bloody cyclists. When walking, I feel threatened by cyclists on footpaths, and hostile
to smug car drivers in comfortable seats pumping noxious fumes into my face. So what happens during public participation in planning? I am torn in three
directions and have little to contribute.

2.5 A community planning exercise

2.7 Designing a resort in Hawaii
Contents list

A resort development can be used to illustrate Fordist and knowledge-intensive approaches to planning and design (Landscape Institute, 1990). The Hyatt
Waikoloa is a typical American resort development, in Hawaii. It cost $350 million and has 1200 rooms. The project was designed in California. The Hawaii
coastline was reshaped. Different transport systems were made to offer "ways to your room via monorail, grand canal boats, coronation carriages pulled
by Clydesdale horses, or a moving sidewalk which offers the visitor a trip through Polynesian history. It was a Fordist project.
Hyatt Waikoloa
went bust in 1993.

Also in Hawaii, a Japanese company was planning to develop a post-Fordist resort. Two years were spent on community participation before design work began.
A further year was spent preparing and modifying design concepts. In consequence of this effort, the resort was planned to revitalize a depressed economy,
to support local agriculture, to build affordable new housing, to improve local healthcare facilities, to improve public access to the environment, to
conserve the local heritage, to establish forest preserves, to develop local industry. The resort itself was developed as a series of small buildings in
a style that was inspired by "the traditional regional style of Kohale characterized by courtyards, verandas, open rooms with gracious overhangs. I have
not been to Hawaii, but I know which resort I would book into.

Effective public participation depends upon recognizing that there are many clients and many problems. Instead of a plan, we need many plans. This is the
planning equivalent of lean production. Each specialist planning team should be for a component system. Each should have a shusa, charged with integrating
all the financial, technical and aesthetic considerations. Assuredly, such plans will reflect the diverse economic and social character of different buildings,
resorts, towns and regions.

When specialist plans have been prepared, it would be possible to go back to work on general plans. But what areas of land should they cover? Places are
not automobiles. Specialist interests have their own geographies (Figure 2.6). Few coincide with municipal boundaries, and few are represented within municipal
committee structures. To cater for my personal transport needs, there needs to be a pedestrian plan, drawn up by pedestrians, a cycling plan, drawn up
by cyclists, and a road plan, drawn up by drivers. Divergent interests cannot be fully resolved, but compromises are possible, if and when the component
plans exist. Should there be only one plan, it will excessively favour one group, usually the group with the big bucks. Instead of an agreed city plan,
societies require sets of "landscape plans, each produced for a special region from a special perspective.

Fig 2.6 (below) Specialist interests have their own geographies – and they do not co-incide with municipal boundaries

Hawaii beach

Hawaii beach

2.8 Planning Londons river landscape
Contents list

The Effra, one of Londons lost rivers joins the River Thames at this point.

2.7 The River Thames has lots its small boats, traders, animals and ferries - through planning.

Canalettos painting of boats on the Thames at Greenwich (excerpt)

Take the case of Londons rivers. Neither town planners nor river engineers have sufficient knowledge, sufficient power or sufficient wisdom to produce
the necessary plans. Most rivers have therefore been culverted, channelized and degraded into open sewers by those with the big budgets (Figure 7). Watercourses
now need massive reclamation programmes, to bring them back to the dignity of rivers. Some work is being done on making them into nature reserves, which
is not enough. River planning requires cooperation between many bureaucracies and voluntary bodies. Britains National Rivers Authority cannot do its job
without the help of community groups and planners. A time must come when Bartons heart-rending book, The Lost Rivers of London (Barton, 1962) will be
followed by its necessary sequel: How we won the rivers back. The River Thames must be rejuvenated. As in days of yore, and Canaletto, it should be crowded
with animals, small boats, traders, floating restaurants, flowerships and ferries (Figure 2.7). There should be beaches and habitats on the banks. This
requires multi-purpose planning and non-statutory planning, extending well beyond the margins of the river. The Pool of London, once the greatest port
in the world, now almost dead, should be declared a waterpark and nature reserve. Open spaces need not be dry.

Specialist planning and design teams can be led by artists, planners, businessmen, architects, poets, landscape architects, politicians and surveyors. Alternative
planning and design methods should be employed, according to circumstances. Extensive community, private and voluntary planning should take place, not
mere "public participation in planning. Wise plans, which may conflict, will be required: some for rivers, some for greenspace, some for pedestrians,
some for boroughs, some for groups of boroughs, some for street corners, some for London, some for the Dover to Bristol Edge City, some for the Calais-Folkestone
Economic Zone, some for the areas around suburban stations in Washington DC. Planning competitions and exhibitions should be held, with prizes. Assistance
from professional planners will be required. All the plans should be stored in geographical information systems.

Countries are unlikely to get plans of the necessary imaginative quality from downtrodden bureaucracies, even if their staffs contain brilliant and committed
people, as they undoubtedly do. The fatal disease, which Parkinson named Injelititis, overwhelms forward planning departments. The inventor of Parkinsons
Law named the disease and proposed a cure:

No portion of the old and diseased foundation can be regarded as free from infection. No staff, no equipment, no tradition must be removed from the original
site. Strict quarantine should be followed by complete disinfection. Infected personnel should be dispatched with a warm testimonial to such rival institutions
as are regarded with particular hostility. All equipment and files should be destroyed without hesitation. As for the buildings, the best plan is to insure
them heavily and then set them alight. Only when the site is a blackened ruin can we feel certain that the germs of the disease are dead. (Northcote Parkinson,
1959)

He exaggerated, no doubt. But it is only by drastic means that the regeneration of "town and "country planning will be accomplished. Far-sighted and imaginative
plans require a shusa. This was Abercrombies role in the 1943-44 London plans (London County Council, 1943, 1944). His plan had excellent qualities but
fell short through aiming at comprehensiveness.

Planners have felt themselves to be under attack since "one way, one truth modernism became questioned. My hope is that by producing varied plans that
are better, more useful, more client-oriented, and more knowledge-intensive, it will be possible to raise the popularity of planning and, incidentally,
to improve employment prospects for planners. As car firms throughout the world adopt the principles of lean planning and lean production, they are producing
better products at lower prices with happier staff. Planners and designers need to follow these paths.

Modernist planning