Re-set the Suburbs Next Generation Placemaking

Our cities are under pressure - more people, more young, more elderly and many more demands for homes, jobs, education and health provision. We want and need the best cities possible. We want neighbourhoods and communities that are great places to live in, that allow for quality, successful and healthy lifestyles. But urban areas have grown rapidly, been heavily influenced by ever expanding networks of roads, home to work lifestyles, residential sprawl and office and retail parks that have hollowed out our traditional centres and communities. These just don’t match our needs. So today it is the outer zones, the periphery and city rim, that offer a great opportunity to re-energise, re-imagine and to re-set the suburb. Technology is releasing us from old habits. The real need to be in a place to work, meet and shop is changing from a physical and functional requirement to an experiential one. Whilst we can shop on-line for everything and could work, be educated and entertained from home, we still have a desire and need to move and meet face to face and to be in stimulating places with others. Our future lives and choices are increasingly experientially led. Large amounts of data about us, our movements and choices, is collected and analysed through our interaction on social media and tracking of mobile devices. Add this to latest research and we get a much richer insight into the psychology of place. This research is informing our approach to the form, function and feel of environments for work, learning, health, leisure and retail. The tech and analytics allows us to be more precise and bespoke in our understanding and this enables a much more nuanced planning and design approach. Forward thinking city planners and developers are using this data and the trends they articulate to look and re-analyse our cities. Accepted advantages of transit orientated development (that have been applied to city

James Rayner Director “In a rapidly urbanising key cities, not nations becomes key. In this context, masterplanning has great potential to positively shape the future”

centres and major transit hubs) are now increasingly being considered for suburbs and city-edge towns, especially those that are or will be connected by rail and mass transit. In these places, transit orientated development thinking and place-making excellence is offering an opportunity to create a new generation of transit orientated communities (TOCs). Such transit orientated communities offer a real opportunity to provide highly liveable places, meeting the needs of our increasingly connected society, as well as more homes and attractive lifestyle environments. That is, if you can get the jigsaw of pieces properly aligned and matched up. We see an opportunity to create a renaissance in our suburbs (whether new or retro-fitted) to evolve them into much more liveable and desirable destinations in their own right. The suburbs need to max out “their” away from citycentre lifestyle advantages so that they are not a destination alternative but a first choice place to be. At the heart of this surburban renaissance are reimagined urban townships and transit hubs, hubs that are superconnected to their surroundings by a high quality public walkable realm. The transit station – whether it is bus, rail or AV – has to be reinvented into a landmark civic heart which blends with the adjacent streets and places. It needs to be mixed use with a denser and high quality built form offering home, work, cultural and civic use - a complete community offer that supports and accommodates a new “experiential” retail format that embraces the new realities of “click & brick” and “try, buy, collect”.

We need to reinvent the out of town centre supermarket and traditional box retail offer. Forget the drive to the major food market or community centre and look towards carefully crafted destination retail, mixed use and a highly walkable attractive, place focussed hub that acts as catalyst for other complimentary development such as residential. The future is only part in the digital ether dominated in recent years by the behemoth e-tailers or the out of town shopping mall, but is evolving into something more familiar and more sophisticated – our next generation retail is beyond the mall in the traditional sense, it is destination, it is our information rich environment and it also a place – welcome back to the high street. Even in the latest iterations of the more traditional out of town retail developments, we are seeing the creation of destinations led by leisure and lifestyle as much as retail but wrapped up in a design approach aligned to creating highly liveable urban communities as opposed to shopping centres. It is a streetscene that is more familiar, with a crafted urban scale, density, pattern, connectivity and an experience which the internet alone cannot provide. Human need, desire for tactility, physicality and sense of place is seamlessly blended There is an urban renaissance unfolding which has the potential to transform how we live. Whether it is destination retail, station hubs or creating new communities, we must rethink our development patterns and put authentic human experience and a focus on liveability and place-making at the heart of our approach.

© Broadway Malyan

Bandar Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The Bandar Malaysia project for 1MDB is a new 196Ha settlement in Kuala Lumpur that was identified in the City Plan as a major growth and transit node within the Malaysian capital. Like many global cities, Kuala Lumpur has major challenges related to accommodating a growing population, modernising city infrastructure and delivering long-term sustainability and prosperity. Broadway Malyan was commissioned to develop a major strategic masterplan for the site that responded to the local context while also assisting a key city objective of creating a higher income economy.

The comprehensive strategy for a new city quarter has at its heart a proposed Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) line with a direct link to the city’s financial quarter and a high speed connection between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur as well as a centrepiece ‘Think Park’, an iconic new park for the city that connects the key districts of Bandar Malaysia. With sustainability at the heart of the project, the proposals include community facility rich walkable neighbourhoods, multi-model ‘complete streets’ that accommodate all modes of transport in well-designed boulevards, shaded pedestrian and cycle corridors connecting communities, green roofs for insulation against the heat and onsite renewable energy.

The plan was driven by a number of key city drivers which included increasing the mix of uses to increase the service industry to 65 per cent of GDP, driving domestic consumption through the provision of affordable housing and job creation, creating a balanced economy for sustainable growth and urbanisation through the creative and informed re-use and densification of prime strategic sites such as Bandar Malaysia.



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East Village Masterplan, Calgary, Canada

On winning an international design competition, Broadway Malyan was commissioned to masterplan a 50Ha riverside downtown site at East Village to accommodate 11,500 new residents with a mix of complimentary retail, employment and cultural uses as well as renewed community and civic uses. Broadway Malyan’s masterplan sought to reverse 25 years of neglect and to transform East Village into a lifestyle waterfront destination. This required re-planning the threadbare context of open car parks interspersed with homeless shelters, seniors’ apartments and disused buildings into a vibrant and habitable connected community. Our urban designers focussed on the potential of the waterfront open spaces, historic former warehouse buildings, accessible amenities and frequent transit services and proposed a European-style mid-rise high density urban



model with active frontages and branded as a clear and cool alternative to a traditional Calgary district. Building on its heritage assets, arts activities and accessible/ sociable location near the city core and as a gateway cluster seen on the approach to the airport, East Village was conceived as a contemporary cluster of cultural riverside activities to experience the best city living on offer. Five years and CA$400m investment later, the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation has created a successful new community that is anticipated will raise CA$800m in tax levies over the next 15 years with East Village now regarded as one of Canada’s most successful regeneration masterplans, winning international awards for its sustainable features and transferable solutions.

© Broadway Malyan

Chester Station Gateway, Chester, UK

This public realm scheme was commissioned by Cheshire West and Chester Council as part of the first phase of the Chester Central Business Quarter, a major development initiative to comprehensively address the north east part of the city with the creation of a new vibrant and distinctive commercial quarter. The scheme’s immediate context is the Grade 2* listed Chester Central Station adjacent to a brownfield postindustrial landscape with the focus of the project to improve visual and physical connectivity, incorporating the existing historic built form into a new city park. A major driver was to support sustainable transit through high quality and considered public realm adjacent to the mainline station and facilitating a model shift while a key challenge was to deliver a flexible space that could act as

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a gateway conveying workers to the new business quarter while also providing a greened place of calm within the city environment. The historic and improved Coach Shed sits at the heart of the scheme and provides cover to a semi-enclosed garden space with a green wall and south-facing seating, offering a refuge of tranquillity but also a covered event space that generates revenue for the local authority. The public realm scheme also helps delineate a new route between the station and the city centre by opening up the Grand Union Canal, bringing a new urban purpose to the Grade 2 listed Shot Tower and providing a coherent vision between the station and Broadway Malyan’s award-winning Waitrose development.