Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 17 - Part 2: The Built Environment and opportunities to boost wellbeing
64 Plays2 years ago
In part 2 of episode 2 with Ian Boyd from Arc Consulting, we're discussing the Built Environment and Wellbeing.
How do we make buildings and outside spaces better for the people who live and work there?
Changes to the design and build process can make spaces more appealing, improve mental health and create engaged communities.
Ian Boyd has worked in environmental conservation, ecological management and public engagement roles for over 30 years. He founded the Island 2000 Trust, the conservation charity Gift to Nature and inaugurated the Newport Rivers Group and Island Rivers.
He has worked for national and local charities, public sector and in private practice at locations across England and Wales and has managed coastal and freshwater reserves in Suffolk and Kent, upland rivers in Cumbria and lowland rivers on the Isle of Wight.
Ian is extremely passionate about what he does and has some great insights across the three parts of this episode.
In part 2, looking at Wellbeing in the Built Environment we discuss:
🏡 Designing habitats for humans with consideration for quality of life.
🏞️ Designing public spaces for mental health benefits.
⛰️ How outdoor spaces can be more interesting and engaging than generic flat areas
🏗️ Building in unfinished spaces for community involvement.
🏃♂️ Creating spaces based on how they'll be used and look when they're lived in
Recommended
Transcript
Failing at Creating Human Habitats
00:00:00
Speaker
Yeah, one of the other aspects I want to look at was buildings and well-being. And he talks about it nicely there, sort of to bring us into it. One of the points he made in the Future Build video I watched was we're really bad at building habitats of humans. What did you mean by that? I was really interested in terms of what are we getting wrong, and then how does the design process help to, or how can it help to improve that? So, yeah, I absolutely believe that.
00:00:29
Speaker
And I do think every built environment is a habitat for humans, because we are humans, and they're the places where we live and work, and that's habitat. And we should be thinking about it that way, and we should be considering what it means to the people, the human beings who are going to occupy their spaces. But development doesn't. So work with a development team and an architect, however brilliant and enlightened they are, it's extremely vanishingly rare for them to think about what it will mean to live or work in that space.
00:00:58
Speaker
At the other end of that, very often in actual fact, they're an encumbrance. So actually the perfection of the building, the building would be much better if no one ever lived in it, because it would be perfect and pristine. And there's that floating about out there. Oh God, people are just going to mess all this up. I can't be dealing with that. I'm going to build it so it's perfect and beautiful and highly functioning. And it's perfected in terms of its BIM,
00:01:26
Speaker
kind of technology and all of this stuff is gonna work brilliantly. And I'm gonna put a load of people in it and they're just gonna mess it all up because they won't understand any of it. So I'm not gonna think about that. And that's where it goes wrong. So volume house building, it's fast and it's inevitably of course it's a business. But the people in it are entirely secondary. They have no say in the quality of the building that's gonna go up and the developer usually has long gone by the time they move. And not always if it's a phased development, then they still be
00:01:56
Speaker
eventually, you know, they're kind of on their own, really.
Flaws in Traditional Design Approaches
00:01:59
Speaker
So traditionally, I would say, and I would certainly be able to provide examples, the design of the places where we live and work has no interest at all in the quality of life of the people who are inhabiting it. Now, it may have to meet minimum standards in terms of the individual unit, the space available to people, the building control rules that we need to
00:02:24
Speaker
Think about the air quality, the ventilation, and so on, of course, absolutely bitty. In terms of the design of a community of people, either in terms of work or residential, it's extremely rare to see design that has thought about the common spaces. So I'm going to step out of my home. Let's think about the gardens for a start. So everyone's in their own tiny private spaces, and the gardens are often too big, and they can't manage them, and that becomes a frustration.
00:02:54
Speaker
And because the gardens are so big, the public realm is tiny. So shrinking the garden space is maximizing the public realm. For example, we've just done on a project with the housing. Brilliant. Because it means people can manage their space, but they know they can walk out the front door into this colossal park that has given them for free.
Private vs. Public Space Prioritization
00:03:10
Speaker
and get the best of both worlds. So we're really far too interested in tiny little private domains, boxing them and fencing them in so that everyone is hermetically sealed in. We meet when we step outside the front door and we say hello and then we go on our way. But the public realm given to us is rubbish. It's almost always awful. And that's because it's the leftover bits that weren't developed.
00:03:32
Speaker
So there's a whole bunch of rubble and God knows what rolled into it for the start, which makes it quite hard sometimes to landscape it. But that aside, it's not always an issue actually, because we're interested in carbon benefits and doing that kind of stuff. It's not designed to make spaces where you and I might actually have a chance, where I can go for a walk with my dog and I know it's going to be a place where I can sit.
00:03:54
Speaker
And there's a bunch of kids who want to go out and ride their bikes, but just around the corner, they can do that. And I barely noticed them. And I know they're there, and that's fine, but we're not trying to fight over the same space. The designs usually leave an entirely tokenistic, ill thought through, and entirely disposable public realm. It's always flat. It's always green. It's always got the lowest cost planting, which is the least interesting stuff in it. And we churn this stuff out every day, and it makes people ill.
00:04:24
Speaker
because we're fighting over the little bit we've got, which is awful and has no purpose and has no meaning and has no value. And so I want my kids to kick a football on it, but you don't. You don't want that at all. You want to sit there and read your newspaper. But that's all we've got, what we're going to do. So this is what we're doing all the time. And what happens is that the consequences, and they are severe. It sounds trivial, but it's not. How many developments are there? Almost all of the big ones I can think of.
00:04:52
Speaker
generate issues once people move in around ASB, around arguments, sometimes flashpoints that lead to murder.
Design's Impact on Social Behavior
00:05:00
Speaker
That's rare. Now, can you draw that back to design? I think you probably can, to be honest. I'm not sure I'll be able to make that stand up in court. But we are not thinking this through. We are not making places that are treating the outside space as the common room, the common room that all of us share.
00:05:19
Speaker
that is deliberately designed to provide that multiplicity of functions that gives me respite. I've got a crap day, awful. I'm in the house, it's doing my head in, I'm just going to step outside and go for a walk. And it saves me from trauma that day. And I might jump into someone in a way that I can say hello, I just don't want to talk. But actually, do you know what? I've had an awful day and there's a bench there. There's a bench every hundred meters. I know I can sit down and have a
00:05:45
Speaker
Simple stuff. Tons of work done on it. People like Jan Gallop have been talking this stuff for years. We know what to do. It's exactly the same as our previous conversation, Matt. We know what to do. This is not a mystery. We have got to work it out. We know how to design places that keep people healthy. Why aren't we doing it? Why are we not doing it? And one of the reasons is that people do not have the same level of compliance demand through the planning system as Wild Yacht.
00:06:13
Speaker
Mm hmm. Okay. Is it? Yeah, it's interesting, because I think I was sat there, whilst you were saying that thinking of two different scenarios in my head, that very style environment that you mentioned, which is
00:06:24
Speaker
You just don't see anyone around. And it's one of the problems I suppose from a mental health perspective at the moment is it's very easy never to smile and say hi to someone. You know, you order stuff from your house. You don't have to leave home. You go to the checkout at the supermarket. It's self scan. So you can never speak to someone all day. And then the other extreme in my head was the times where you might go camping and you're in a sort of maybe in a field, for example, camp, you know, one of those communal fields and there's a, they put a fire pit in the middle and everyone, you don't know anyone there, but everyone communes around the
00:06:54
Speaker
around the fire and you have that social element that you lack in, as you say, in those more sterile environments. And it makes a huge difference with social beings, I think. I suppose what are the opportunities then there with those developments, whether it's commercial space, residential space, to what are the easy changes that can be made on them to make them more engaging, more wildlife-friendly, more socially interactive?
00:07:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's all about places to dwell and multifunctionality. So older cohorts need something different to a bunch of teens. Young moms need something different to a bunch of professionals who just want to have a wonder with their laptop or checking their phones. They are all valued members of the community. They all deserve to be thought about in the way that a place is designed.
00:07:55
Speaker
You can't just churn out a flat green square and presume that that will provide any of those because it absolutely won't provide any of those things. So we are going straight from design to maintenance in that case. We feel that the tokenistic demand to provide some open green space flat is good because I can run a mower over it as small as possible please. And I'll put some pointless landscaping around it and off I go and I've gone and I've done that.
00:08:21
Speaker
And that's awful. In fact, it's worse than awful because what it ends up doing is creating problems that are then the business of underfunded public services to deal with. So I'm bumping those issues that I could have designed out, but I didn't straight onto the NHS, straight onto the public health team that my local council have got no money, got no time. But it's actually awful. It's terrible. So what do we need
Innovative and Engaging Design Elements
00:08:43
Speaker
to do? We need to provide places to sit benches. Let's not go to the catalog and choose yet another
00:08:49
Speaker
same looking metal park bench, making sure, of course, that it's got enough knobbles and notches on it that no one can actually sleep on it. So instead of going for horrible, generic, bland, meaningless, boring, and hostile furniture. My God, we do that all the time. Let's go for interesting. Get a big log, plane the top off. Cost almost nothing. It's bomb-proof and fire-proof, and it's brilliant. Because if a kid's on a BMX bike, they'll be on it in a flash.
00:09:19
Speaker
do enough of them, and he or she will be over there, but I can still sit on that one over there. And I can see them, and we can see me, we know we're in the same place, but now I'm in my chat with you over here, no problem. We're sharing the same place, we're enjoying ourselves, we're getting what we need out of that space. And if you haven't got much room, you can still do this by creating interesting topography. This is a problem with flatness. We've got a flat earth problem in design and development. Why do we do it? It's complete, because it's easy to maintain.
00:09:48
Speaker
There is no excuse for boring point. Football pitch, of course, obviously not. Okay. And we're going to kick a ball about very, very, very important. Good. Let's have that. But where we can, let's make a lumpy, undulating, interesting topography that is full of variety and curiosity that has dry bits and wet. From a wildlife one of you, brilliant. And if you combine, at this point, you can combine human health, your carbon budget and your biodiversity gains in one simple project.
00:10:17
Speaker
because you don't cart off for 50, 60, 70,000 quid. You retain that material on site and you build an interesting landfill. You get all the inert stuff from your demolition job and you include that within it. You have a subterranean environment that's full of holes and voids. Now, of course, you need to think about this carefully. You need to build it safely so that you don't, after the first rainfall, have all the concrete pointing through. Yes, obviously, but we can do that. We know how to do
Biodiversity and Well-Being Integration
00:10:44
Speaker
that.
00:10:44
Speaker
but you create a space that has subterranean spaces that all fill up with slow worms. Meanwhile, on the top, there are little kids running about like crazy, because it feels like a fort. Round the corner, I designed integral benches, because I've designed this landform. I haven't even had to buy a bench, because I've built it into the landform I've made. And suddenly, this space, whatever it might be, 20, 30 square meters, is full of life, because there are different ages doing different things, and there is wildlife, and there is variety, and the landscape.
00:11:15
Speaker
The maintenance of it is potentially slightly more difficult and complicated because it's not flat. But honestly, of course we can deal with that. Obviously, of course we can. And what about dogs and not being able to see dog mess and that, you know, well, we'll deal with that. We'll find a solution to that. Let's not make these these imaginary hurdles that are real issues in life, but they are not hurdles. Let's not make them stop us doing something brilliant, which is cheap.
00:11:41
Speaker
and incredibly valuable in terms of your ESG returns, for example, because you have used that space so efficiently. You've ticked off all those things in this tiny space and we created an environment that is just better for people in wildlife than it was before. Instead of flattening it off, spending a fortune cutting off in terms of money, in terms of carbon budget, in terms of remaining wildlife and utility, you've made it the worst possible space you could, just so you can hand it over to a man code in an easy fashion. It's mad, absolutely mad.
00:12:11
Speaker
So heterogeneity, variety of landform, places to sit. Imagine outdoor rooms for different cohorts of people and build that into your thinking. And you can do it in tiny spaces and you can do it in big spaces.
00:12:25
Speaker
I can see the benefit of that just from even a quick smile sometimes. If you walk past someone, you're having a bad day, as you mentioned, even though you don't want to smile, you have to do that smile just to be polite. And it does give you a boost. And you might have a quick hello, and then it turns into a conversation. But it changes your mindset. Then you go back into the house, and you feel that much better. And it's such a small, simple thing, both in terms of
00:12:50
Speaker
changing the design of something, but also the interaction from, as you say, then a longer term problem that then has to get funded through, you know, mental health care or whatever, whatever else it might be. So it's amazing how the chain effect that you mentioned around these things. Exactly. I mean, that's it, Matt, really, if you decide, if you start thinking about this, and also it's not finished when it's built.
00:13:11
Speaker
by doing it in that way, by not fully prescribing it. You know how development works. You create a D, usually as a condition, a detailed landscaping plan that nails down precisely the size of the plants, not just the number. I mean, I've written these things and, you know, but actually, you know, the office is going to die and, you know, it's going to change for the better or worse. So we should be building places that are not fully prescribed. Now, of course, we've got to get through the planning system. Yes, understood.
Adapting Spaces to Community Needs
00:13:38
Speaker
we should be thinking of places that are gonna develop with their community. So leaving spaces unfinished so that in the process of them being inhabited, we can figure out collectively, whether that's through a neighborhood society or a housing association, or the ownership of that is through an interesting manco version or a variety, different forms of management are required. If there's any innovation required,
00:14:05
Speaker
It's actually in that, not in the design of habitats. So as I said, you can buy them off the shelf. You can do a lot more if you're interested in the way that you create textured patterns and so on that are both ornament and designed for people, but also habitable by very simple plants, encouraging mosses and lichens back into the built environment or world of interesting stuff to be done. But the real innovation is how am I going to construct the contract model for my development such that it allows sufficient room for this to evolve
00:14:33
Speaker
become more interesting and respond to the demands of the people who live there in a positive way so that it isn't just made ludicrously neat. Why? From the outset, at which point everyone, some people will moan that it's no longer neat. Well, then we're already doomed at that point. So let's create it in an unfinished way to start with and work our way on from there.
00:14:55
Speaker
These are techniques we should be building into the way we think. And also that's agency. You do that on an industrial park. It means every tenant has a stake in how that space that they like and they want to become better. And they can actually have a conversation. Well, what are we going to do? We're going to club together and do something interesting with that bit that hasn't finished yet. It doesn't mean it is going to happen, but it can be facilitated. This can be part of the way that sites are managed collectively.
00:15:23
Speaker
and it gives us a chance to talk to one another about something we both think is interesting on our doorstep.
00:15:29
Speaker
With that agency perspective, do you then see the people working or living in those environments take more care of the environment they're in? Because for an example, I can think of, this is going back to housing, I suppose, but housing development near us, and there's a few, but they were nice, fresh, I suppose is the word, not rather nice, but when you walk through initially when it's built, but very quickly,
00:15:55
Speaker
It starts to look a bit rundown. There's just cars parked everywhere. The landscaping is not really well looked after. Does that change when you have these environments where you put these sort of mounds in and the different benches and stuff like that? Because people have more care about being in the environment. They're interested in being in that space and therefore they look after it or? Yeah, it's a good question. I think it can. So one of the, of course, one of the tricks is that by not
00:16:21
Speaker
designing it from the outset so that it straight lines flat surfaces, perfect flowerbeds and everything as neat, perfect as it possibly can be, which can only decline. It can't get any better. It can, we're back to the purity of the design versus a lived environment. They're not the same thing. If you create a pure design and you build it and then you put people in it, they will mess it up. It's just, that is how it's, because we are, that's how things work. That's inevitable. And yet that then generates the arguments
00:16:52
Speaker
complaints and the letters. So let's not even start in that place. Let's have some formal space. But there's only one component of the way that we design it. Parking is another really interesting example. How we're going to arrange parking so that we don't end up with everyone parking on the pavement because there's no longer any space. Because the garage next door has actually got so many cars that they're parking in your road now. We all know how this happened. Some of it is insoluble. It will happen. So let's just say it's going to happen.
00:17:18
Speaker
and think about how we can mitigate or soften some of those inevitable lived experiences of being a human being in
Balancing Formal and Informal Spaces
00:17:25
Speaker
a place. That's messy, complicated, and it's entirely contingent. It's not pure, not like design.
00:17:31
Speaker
So let's think about it in that way. And let's create spaces that have an element of formality that is clearly intentional. I've made this space and the maintenance contract around it is saying, well, a two meter strip around this is always going to be moved. Don't worry about that. So you'll be able to see your way into it. It's not going to creep over the pavement and trip you up or get in the way of you buggy. But actually within that, it's going to be a chaotic kind of mess of a thing with all sorts of curious features in it.
00:17:57
Speaker
but enough benches and paths through that you'll be able to safely get to it. It's not going to be an impenetrable wilderness. But we start in a place that has enough designed quality to it that I feel comfortable. I don't feel alienated. I feel welcomed into it. But I have not had these expectations of perfect permanent maintenance imposed upon me by a designer I have no say in. And so I think that's, you know, there will always be arguments. There will always be arguments. And part of the psychological shift
00:18:27
Speaker
that is inevitable and has to happen is away from this obsession with everything looking like an old-fashioned public park, which had a team of 30 gardeners working on it. No, it's not. It doesn't exist anymore. But we perpetuate them in developments, which is the worst possible way of doing it, really. So I think it's all in the design. It's setting the expectations in the right way, right at the outset, such that those kinds of consequences don't arise. And more interesting possibilities do arise, to answer your question, sorry, which is that,
00:18:58
Speaker
Actually, I don't feel excluded from this. I'm going to take some seeds from this interesting wildlife garden bit of the site. I'm going to put them in my garden because I've seen how many butterflies. Or the Manko isn't a traditional Manko. It's a ranger service. This is happening a lot more now. And they knocked on my door and they said they've got an open day next weekend. So I'm going to go to that. They'll tell me what their aspirations are for the site. And I've got some ideas I'd like to contribute.
00:19:26
Speaker
and suddenly it changes and there'll be friction and there'll be arguments but they will not be these kind of catastrophic head-butting arguments that result in no one ever being happy. There'll be some kind of consensus building around a shared space that we can all enjoy in different ways because it's barely heterogeneous, it's diverse in the spaces that it offers us and then we can all find a space that we feel content with.