Space craft

Bryant Park typifies the attributes that make a successful space: it is easily accessible from significant buildings and transport hubs, and is a comfortable environment, providing ample seating areas under shade and in the sun to encourage people to linger in all seasons. It is also representative of the kind of funding models that have emerged as public-sector cuts have deepened and awareness of the business benefits of public space has increased.

“Because the park is privately managed by a not-for-profit organisation, a cooperating business improvement district and a neighbouring property owner, it enjoys a much larger budget than it would under city management,” says urban development expert Graham Coutts FRICS, international director of strategic consulting, Asia-Pacific, at JLL. “This reflects the value that the surrounding owners perceive in its amenity and underscores the value that well-managed spaces can create.”

Over the past 10-15 years, more enlightened developers and investors – particularly those with a long-term vision – recognise that value is not simply achieved through maximising the amount of saleable or leasable floor space. Success lies in creating destinations that people want to visit, linger in and return to. At Tokyo Midtown, for example, Mitsui Fudosan developed 6m ft2 (557,000m2) of offices, hotels, residential, retail and leisure among plazas and gardens. Home also to the Suntory Museum of Art, it is one of the city’s most popular destinations.

New York City’s High Line is considered a touchstone in public space projects. Before its inception as a park in the sky, most New Yorkers – including then-mayor Rudy Giuliani – wanted the old elevated railway to be torn down. It is now the city’s second most-popular tourist attraction and has generated more than $2bn of private investment.

These spaces confer significant value on their surroundings. Landlords are now telling David Bannister MRICS, director at London-based agent Nash Bond, that what makes the building is what is on the ground, because that is what attracts occupiers and enables them to charge higher rents. “Getting the feeling right at the building’s entrance has become significantly more important,” he says. “A tenant looking for 10,000 ft2 [930m2] is unlikely to take a place that has no vibrancy on the ground floor, as that would not meet the requirements of its staff.”

The accusation that is often levelled at developers is that they only invest in the public realm if they have to. But Guy Bransby MRICS, lead director of planning and development at JLL in London, explains that, in his experience, that accusation is unfair. Clients are now voluntarily spending more money and time on public-realm schemes. 

“Most of our clients are employing public realm, landscape or public art consultants from the outset of a scheme. And it’s not just about hard or soft landscaping any more – the ground floor is becoming another part of the building,” explains Bransby. Developers understand that it drives the economic performance of the asset, either through increased sales, rental values or greater room occupancy in the case of hotels, he suggests. And even if there is limited public access, it can also add an amenity value – space can also be enjoyed if you have a view of it.

It also gives buildings an identity, Bransby adds. “In London, people know that the ‘Cheesegrater’ [the Leadenhall Building] has three storeys of open space at its base and that they can go to a sky garden at the ‘Walkie-Talkie’ [20 Fenchurch Street]. Developers realise that the quality of the space reflects on them.”

Landowners are also investing in public spaces in order to improve the quality of their central London holdings. Since 2002, the Crown Estate has invested £25m in public realm improvements as part of its Regent Street Vision. It has also paid attention to the connecting spaces, commissioning transformational projects such as Atkins’ award-winning diagonal crossing at Oxford Circus – a design inspired by Tokyo’s famously efficient Shibuya crossing.

Making the spaces that connect, such as streets and pavements, more people friendly, generates more activity in those spaces that collect: squares, parks, even shopping malls. How these fit together is very important, says Gordon Brown FRICS, principal at Chicago-based Space Analytics. “If you look at Renaissance[-era] Florence, you’ll see that the buildings come right up to the property lines and there’s a lot of space for people. It’s this direct connection between private space of a certain kind and public space of a certain dimension that makes things work.”

Our love affair with the car, says Brown, changed this dynamic from smaller units that were interconnected to large units that were less accessible on foot. For many cities, particularly in the US, the result has been more than 50 years of constrained pedestrian movement and a separate public and private space. “That separation has led to diminished public space. Now we ascribe value to it, but the physical mechanics no longer enable the kind of activities that we want.”

Projects such as the Oxford Circus crossing are part of correcting these physical mechanics. As the idea of the liveable, walkable city has come to the fore, attitudes to planning have changed, often resulting in safer public spaces with reduced traffic connections. As the number of people walking goes up, commerce typically responds. One example that captures this is outdoor seating provided by cafes. A 1980 study by Copenhagen-based Gehl Architects (case studies, previous page) discovered that there were fewer than 230 seats outside cafes in the Danish capital. Today there are 5,000. From two kerbside cafes in 1983, Melbourne has become one of the cafe capitals of the world, as a result of people-first urban policies that have increased daytime footfall by 40%.

When landscape designer Burns & Nice reviewed the original brief for the redesign of London’s Leicester Square, it decided to focus on the square itself. The practice’s winning design expanded that to respond to the nine connecting side streets. Four paths now radiate out from a central fountain and gardens, neatly scooping up pedestrians from Chinatown to the north and carrying them south to Trafalgar Square and vice versa. Each of the side streets has also been redesigned to achieve consistency and uniformity as a city block. 

“People never used to walk through the square, now they’re choosing to cross the gardens to get to Piccadilly. It’s changed pedestrian movement and that affects people’s memory of the city,” says Burns & Nice founding director Marie Burns. 

Since it reopened in 2012, Leicester Square has attracted inward investment of £500m and 500 new workplaces, claims Burns & Nice. That is just one measure of its success; designing for the public realm is about balancing competing interests. As Burns says, the challenge is to create a comfortable space that can not only accommodate increased footfall and a better retail experience, but also community expression and events, so that it becomes a destination in itself, rather than simply a means of getting from A to B. 

“Flexibility within the public realm is the important thing. Part of the success of Leicester Square is choice. People can rendezvous there – they don’t have to be a consumer or feel that they need to have a purpose to go there,” she says. Consider the 200m-long curvilinear white granite “ribbon” that provides informal seating along the square’s gardens. It is available at any time of the day – or night, when it is lit from underneath, giving the impression of floating on air.