Liveable Neighbourhoods and Culture

Phil Bixby is back from a trip to France and thinking about liveable neighbourhoods and culture (views are entirely the author’s…)

I’m just back from a week in France with Caroline – planned as a lazy stay in Lyon with some walking and food. We stayed in a small rented house in a suburb called St.Just – across the river Saone from the city centre, atop one of the hills which line that side of the valley. I found the neighbourhood fascinating – it had much to say about how to make a part of a big city (the broad urban area has a population over 2m) fit the lives of those who spend time there.

St.Just has a lengthy history starting in Roman times and there are still buildings and streets from the middle ages – you can do an online tour of some of them here! It’s pretty dense – most of the buildings are between three and five stories; there are a few small squares, mostly space left where oblique roads meet. The opportunity has been used to put trees in most of these spaces so there is some green in the streets, and more recent efforts have been made to pragmatically introduce plants for pollinators.

The streets are lined with building fronts. Importantly, these allow for a variety of purposes. Many are the fronts of houses or entrances to apartments, but many are businesses which serve the neighbourhood. At the end of our street (1 min walk) there was a kebab place, a serious restaurant, a butcher, an osteopath, a scooter garage. A further five minutes got us to a bakery, hairdressers, a bar, a laundrette, library and much more. There were two mini-markets within that same distance, making it a firmly walkable neighbourhood for everyday life.

Across the street from us was a primary school and alongside parents walking kids there, the morning streets were full of teenagers heading to a local college. There had been a fairly aggressive policy of reclaiming street space for pedestrians – a *lot* of bollards restricting traffic – and this meant that while there were occasional traffic jams, it felt safe to walk or cycle amongst.

Lyon has created really good segregated cycle infrastructure in the centre. This was less apparent in the narrower streets of St.Just but there were many, many cycles and electric scooters. About nine out of ten bikes were electric assist (as befits a place atop a serious hill) and Lime hire e-bikes were very well used – blokes in work wear, women of all ages. Some with helmets, most without. Connections with the city centre were brilliant – buses every ten minutes until late at night (and when the French do bus lanes they don’t worry about inconveniencing others) and a funicular down to the old town – just ten minutes’ walk over the Saone to the centre.

All of this contributed to a place which – and this might sound odd – you could “feel”. There was life everywhere which animated the streets; people perched on barriers or benches, conversations in the shops spilled out, and the bars and cafes took over the parking spaces outside to create terraces. There was lots going on – one of the local bistros was run by a photographic enthusiast, having a darkroom and running courses and events. This was not, as far as I could see, a gentrified area – physically it was in many places pretty scuzzy – but it felt utterly alive and safe, and as a visitor I felt instantly, comfortably at ease. I’d reckon living and/or working there would be easy.

I had a conversation a couple of months back with the York Central master developer’s lead person on cultural strategy. She asserted “culture happens in the public spaces, doesn’t it?” No, I’d argue – it’s much more complex than that, unless you define “culture” incredibly narrowly.

Culture comes from the lives we lead and the way they bring life and character to places. For it to be rich, the places need to provide space for a real mix of activity to happen – they need to be “porous” enough for different activities to take hold. In a neighbourhood with old buildings this tends to happen naturally – shops and businesses will historically have been mixed in.

If we’re creating a new part of the city we need to consciously provide this opportunity in the way we design buildings and neighbourhoods. The ground floor frontage of a house or apartment building tends to be impermeable in order to create privacy. The frontage of a shop or café or hairdresser needs to be transparent. Design for flexibility needs care and thought.

Commerce is about more than “Grade A office space”. It is about small businesses and local economy. It’s about networks of people who know their neighbourhood well and provide for it, and it’s about bringing wealth to communities. But in the creation of a new place, that needs to be part of the brief, and the design needs to respond to it – and inconveniently that requires some complexity in the development process.

But if we want places full of life and wellbeing – “a community made through exchange” – then we forget this at our peril.