My experience of directing the heritage led renewal of the Old Town of Edinburgh, part of the World Heritage Site shaped my understanding of integrated investment and development.. The Old Town suffered from planning blight due to the 1960’s road proposals.
The challenge was to develop the vacant or underused sites, replicating the fine civic grain and mixed use, to improve the quality of the public realm, and to ensure that residents enjoyed a quality of life, visitors enjoyed the amenities and attractions and businesses thrived. This process was driven by the need to conserve, protect and enhance the heritage and was a lesson in the principles of what makes sustainable places.
I apply this lesson to place making and add the other essential ingredients of partnerships, governance and skills for all stakeholders investing in making their place sustainable.
The key to achieving quality of place is ensuring that the clients’ representative – which may in fact be comprised of partnership teams or departmental teams have the appropriate skills and knowledge to make collaborative decisions that achieve the clients ambition.
There are three key stages for ensuring quality of place; ensuring the brief fully expresses the clients ambition for the Master Plan or the project; the criteria for selecting the procurement route and evaluating the quality of design and value for money of these solutions; the procurement of the construction contract and its management. In previous roles I have ensured that corporate plans incorporated policy objectives.
As a commissioner of development ensured that standards are embedded to achieve policy objectives, as commissioner of the Regional Design Review, ensured, on the clients behalf, that quality standards were being addressed by the proposed design solutions and that tender evaluations were reflective of the clients requirements and priorities.
Mixed use development enhances the vitality of place and mixed tenure enhances the quality of neighbourhoods.
Experienced in planning and delivering mixed use developments and housing I can find solutions for this challenge. Experienced in adding value to development through my understanding of sustainability and quality standards for the built and natural environment gained at through policy and implementation experience.
Good practice. Regeneration is a complex process and requires finding ways to ensure that when commissioning interventions that good practice in procurement, the design solution and evaluating tenders is followed.
As the commissioner of the Design Review Service for the North East I established processes that enabled clients and teams to achieve their potential resulting in some cases award winning schemes.
I will continue to support clients and teams to benefit from adopting good practice in by promoting knowledge exchange. Examples of my work include:
Establishing the Design Review and Enabling Service, a peer review service that resulted in better design solutions.
Leading area regeneration programmes to revitalise the Old Town of Edinburgh , a World Heritage Site and the Eastern villages of Stirling. Supporting the regeneration Plan for Vilnius Old Town.
Service design for the reform of procurement for Scottish Social Housing.
North East Judge for the RIBA and Constructing Excellence Regional Awards.