Placemaking_P68-69_ESP:Placemaking_P68-69
7/2/08
17:09
Page 68
our places: collaboration
DIY URBANISM
The idea of supporting communities of self-builders is gaining ground in the UK, says Juliana O’Rourke
Speaking at the launch of the Urban Buzz ‘enabled self build’
initiative, Design for Homes’ David Birkbeck graphically
outlined the challenges facing self-builders in the UK. ‘I’d
rather be f****d up the arse with barbed wire’ than go
through another seven years of that, he said, referring to his
own self build experience. Yet self build on a community
scale has great potential for successful stakeholder
engagement. ‘This approach to housing delivery begins with
the establishment of a credible pattern book. It progresses
by bringing a Government agency or landowner into the
equation, and by ringfencing land on which the project can
take shape,’ says Birkbeck.
New communities are at the top of the UK’s social,
economic and political agendas. Architects, urban designers,
regeneration agencies, developers and housebuilders are all
busily developing schemes that will create large volumes of
houses. Creating communities, however, is a different matter.
There are tried and tested methods for building houses in
volume, said Professor Colin Davies, also speaking at the
Urban Buzz event. Unlike much of North America, Asia and
the rest of Europe, few people in the UK design and build
their own homes. In England, ‘self-build’ is usually a long haul
option, with affordable land scarce, planning consent tricky
and architects expensive. In the UK, volume housebuilders
buy up greenfield or brownfield land, design and build homes
–with or without amenities and appropriate infrastructure –
and sell them for a profit. Increasingly, they offer a selection
of home ‘types’ for the buyer to choose from; creating the
illusion of design choice for the homeowner. This choice is
minimal, says Davies.
Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, one group of people
– potentially quite a large group of people – wants to take a
fresh look at how homes are delivered in volume, complete
with sustainable infrastructure and support for those
68
involved. These people are interested in ‘enabled selfprocurement’ or self-build, but within a scheme that
supports the community in planning consent, infrastructure
planning, design, supply and build of their chosen home.
Meeting targets
To meet the housing and carbon reduction targets set by
Government, there is no way that a majority of homes can
be unique, site specific creations. Volume home provision
requires set types that can be creatively adapted to their
location and use, says Davies.
There is no need to re-invent house design in order to
deliver innovation, he adds. In the 19th century, the USA
pioneered the modern approach to pattern book with the
Sears Roebuck homes, plus other assorted town buildings,
all available to order from a catalogue. These homes were
inexpensive and popular due to the standardisation of
building technology and materials that were used across
North America. In most countries, with the exception of
England, homes are built in using this timber-framed method.
In the USA today, websites such as www.e-plans.com offer
tens of thousands of free house plans.
Davies’ point is that architects in the UK need to begin
delivering their house patterns in a similar manner. Spatial
design is cheap, he says. Building professionals can still make
their money from value-added services such as delivering
working drawings and customisation.
Alex Ely of Mae architects, another speaker at the launch,
said that for many countries around the world including
Germany, Holland and Sweden, self-procurement is already
delivering large scale, economically viable communities that
are both environmentally and socially sustainable.
More than 55 per cent of housing in Germany is created
using self-build or ESP techniques, he says; 45 per cent in
France, and as little as 10-12 per cent in the UK. However,
the self build sector in the UK has turnover of £4bn,
demonstrating robust beginnings on which to build. Selfprocured housing could quickly become more popular, and
established, in the UK.
The November 2007 Calcutt Review of housebuilding in
the UK advocated the use of approaches such as ESP if
targets are to be met and quality maintained. Ely pointed out
that such ‘pattern book’ design and building approaches have
delivered quality and density in the past, up to the
specification of PPS3, for example across the London estates
of the 1700s.
Ely also pointed out that in the English Partnerships
Design for Manufacture initiative, which aimed to create a
sustainable home for £60,000, the homes delivered offered
an average of 76 sq m living space for the £60,000. Other
‘pattern book’ homes, for example the German Hebel Haus,
deliver 108.34 sq m, with three bedrooms, for £47,800.
The barriers
The main barrier to self builders is access to land. David
Birkbeck suggests that, in the near future, a major
government agency such as English Partnerships will move to
back these kind of development schemes.
The Urban Buzz-funded ESP-sim project aims to work
with regional and government agencies to source and
ringfence land on which to pilot its ‘enabled development’ –
‘pattern book/design codes’ approach. There is no intention
to swamp planners with thousands of individual planning
applications: the aim is to move towards increasing certainty
for local authorities through the use of a combination of
pattern books and design codes in ESP projects.
Placemaking_P68-69_ESP:Placemaking_P68-69
7/2/08
17:09
Page 69
our places: collaboration
1
DESIGN CODES + PATTERN BOOKS = ENABLED SELF BUILD
2
4
An ESP (Enabled Self Procurement) project funded by Urban Buzz aims to develop new
ways of delivering volume home-building projects. It kicked off with a competition for
‘pattern book’ housing designs, and will end with the online provision of free ‘design, plan
and build’ software that will incorporate house designs, design coding and infrastructure
planning into one free to access portal. The plan is that the portal, designed by a team led
by Michael Kohn at Slider Studio, along with design codes and the pattern books, will be
used in the creation of an actual large volume self procurement community, possibly
developed in the south-east of England.
Kohn summaries his approach as a ‘move away from speculative development towards
an ESP development model that focuses much on the design and infrastructure input from
future residents, leading to effective community engagement’.
In this development model, the future residents do not need to know how to get planning
permission, comply with building regulations, how to order building materials or how to lay
bricks. ESP is an ‘enabled’ system where these things have all been co-ordinated by a project
managing developer, and the path to a new home in a sustainable community is made easy.
THE ESP-SIM PROJECT: AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
3
5
1-2: Borneo Sporenburg, West 8
High density Borneo Sporenburg was built in a disused dock area on the outskirts of Amsterdam. An innovation in West 8’s
masterplan was the provision of ‘free parcels’– land plots up for grabs in a lottery. The winners worked with an architect
selected from a list drawn up by West 8 to create their own house, within guidelines set by the masterplan. The resulting
visual vitality and expression of personal commitment to the area is one of the most successful aspects of the development
3-4: Tutti Frutti, New Islington
At New Islington’s Tutti Frutti street, 26 canal-side building plots were offered to self builders wishing to enter their design for
a home in a competition. Twenty model entries were received, and the ‘winners’ have ‘won’ the right to purchase the plot of
land and build on it. Says Nick Johnson, deputy chief executive, Urban Splash: developers of New Islington: ‘We know there’s
tons of people itching to design and build their own homes but finding the right plot can be the most frustrating part of the
process…’
5: This Craftsman house, minus the added second storey, was originally ordered in 1911 from a Sears catalogue for US$1,106,
or US$2,800 including labour
Many urban designers fear that as volume housebuilders rush to come up with new CSH
fitting housing types, good infrastructure planning will be sidelined. But if we have learned
anything from our experiences in creating new towns, suburbs and urban extensions, says
Kohn, it is that creating the overall masterplan, delivering infrastructure and encouraging
buy-in to long-term community management is what makes, or breaks, a place. Quality
architecture and construction adds value, but our urban designers, planners, local
government officials, highways engineers and ecologists are the real powerbrokers of
quality and sustainability in the longer term.
The ESP-sim project is defining a viable model of enabled self procured housing for the
UK and illustrating this using two key tools:
a blog that is engaging stakeholders and decision makers in the planning and regeneration
sectors and leading to the creation of an online ‘process map’ which will help current
policy makers, regeneration experts and interested professionals understand how ESP
can work for them
multi-user online software that will simulate the consumer experience of entering an
enabled self procured project. This software, called Youcanplan, offers future residents a
choice of plots within a community, and a range of pre-approved house design choices to
design their own customised house
ESP is explained in detail on the project's
website at www.esp-sim.org
69