Edaw's name is everywhere these days. The urban design consultancy, just six years old in the UK, has been cleaning up in masterplanning competitions from Milton Keynes to Croydon, Belfast to London Docklands, Southampton to Nottingham. It is even doing a study for the Corporation of London on the burning issue of the moment – the demand for tall buildings in the City.
The ubiquitous acronym has been translated by one senior company source as Excessive Drinking And Whingeing. But director Kevin Murray, currently EDAW’s public face and president of the Royal Town Planning Institute, offers a less risqué interpretation. “Staff say it means Eight Days a Week; clients say Every Day A Workshop. There are others, but they’re too rude to mention.”
Murray, 41, who joined EDAW in 1995, is equally low key on the subject of the firm’s run of success. “Don’t say we’re cleaning up,” he implores. “No one will want to talk to us.”
One would have thought the firm credited with reinventing Manchester’s bomb-devastated city centre could afford to be a little more bullish. But Murray attributes his guardedness to the precarious fortunes of urban design firms, where commissions are hard fought and easily lost, fees are low and jobs are short. “To win some of the big ones is a lot of work,” he says. “You can spend tens of thousands of pounds on a commission and then lose it. It’s a challenging business.”
Urban philosophy
Murray’s reticence about EDAW’s success also reflects his philosophy of urban design, which he says requires “an element of humility”. “Urban designers are effectively expressing someone else’s plan,” he says. “You have to understand the relationship between the place and the people. And you need the ability to share that vision.”
Until recently, most people thought urban design was a few bollards, coloured paving and spray-on walkways. These days, city development partnerships are commissioning “urban design strategies” that are free of drawings and read like philosophical tomes. Some say it sounds like money for old rope.
So, what does EDAW actually do?
“Basically,” says Murray, “we review the strengths and weaknesses of a place with those who know it well – the local community, traders, the property market, the police – and develop potential ways forward based on our own experience. We don’t parachute in with the answer.” He adds: “It’s like being a consultant civic surgeon. It’s thinking about what to fix to keep the patient alive.
“We call it DEEP fusion. It sounds terribly jargonistic, but it stands for Design, Environment, Economy and Planning. We are a multidisciplinary practice that tries to practise the fusion of those elements.”
The jargon hints at the firm’s US roots. EDAW was founded in San Francisco in 1939 by architect-planners Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams, and now has 22 offices all over the world. The UK office was established in 1994 when it bought CD Planning, which had just bought itself out from Conran Roche. The US connection seems a dubious distinction, as urban design in the USA has often meant the packaging of plots to maximise commercial floorspace. But Murray points out that EDAW’s US designers are devotees of “new urbanism”, which he describes as “a rethinking of the making of places driven by some key individuals in the States … a planned,
mixed-use settlement with a design code that’s trying to make a coherent place”.
Has the US approach rubbed off on the UK arm of EDAW? “Colleagues have done work for Disney, such as the Celebration settlement in Florida. I used to be critical of the Disney theme park approach, but Disney’s new urbanism has some interesting messages about putting people at the heart of development.”
This may sound like so much motherhood and apple pie, but Murray believes in this people-based approach. He devotes a large part of his time to public consultations. In fact, Every Day A Workshop is not far out. “I did four workshops in Nottingham last week,” he says. “It’s very taxing. But consultation is crucial to urban design. We consult children, community groups, business groups, developers and investors and mediate between them. Then we come up with a composite strategy and get everyone buying into it.”
Architects as urbanists
He believes architecture as object is too highly prized. “I am anti the object in isolation,” he says. “There are people who think that all they need is a Guggenheim, one big sexy lump of building, and everything will be OK. But we can tell them the story about how the Guggenheim is integrated into a regeneration strategy for the whole of Bilbao.”
Murray hopes that more architects will become committed urbanists. “Architects as definers of space are crucial to urban design, but they need to develop an urban design philosophy so that we can work with them on pieces of cities.” Such a philosophy is, he says, what underpins good masterplanning: “Urban design is leading with both the spaces and the buildings. Masterplanning can get stuck in the buildings and forget about the spaces.”
Murray also thinks that a rift between planners and architects dating from the 1980s needs to be repaired if urban regeneration is to work. “In the 1980s, planning got pulled away from design, and architects ended up being designers of private-sector schemes against the planners, who were the regulators. Before, there were many more architect-planners who worked on both sides. That’s what we need – blurred skills working on different sides.”
In his view, this “spatial thinking across different areas” is needed not just in city planning departments but in all major brownfield landowners and developers.
The biggest threat to urban design, says Murray, is that it is seen as a passing fad. “We need to educate ourselves professionally so that urban design becomes an integral part of the philosophy of planners, architects, developers and surveyors.”
