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Designing Places

Coalhill, Leith, Edinburgh

Opportunities for achieving design quality

Spectrum Building, Glasgow

There is a potential for promoting good design every time anyone does anything that will, in some way, shape the physical form of development: setting a budget, laying down standards, writing a policy or a brief, drawing up a plan, instructing a designer or builder, or designing a building or a space. Appropriate physical form goes hand-in-hand with an appropriate use. In every local context the potential for good design will be different.

Opportunities for creating a sense of identity

Distinctive landscapes, natural features, buildings, streets, street patterns, spaces, skylines, building forms, practices and materials that should inspire patterns of new building.

Opportunities for creating safe and pleasant spaces

Places where a street would be livelier and feel safer if a building had windows, doors or active uses on to the street, rather than presenting a blank façade; places where footpaths and open spaces would feel safer if buildings overlooked them; places with potential for living over shops to provide inhabited rooms overlooking streets and to encourage evening activity; places where the distinction between public or private space can be made clearer; places where a gap in an otherwise continuous line of building frontages along a street detracts from the street's quality, and could be either filled or made into a usable, attractive space for pedestrians; and opportunities to create a sense of enclosure by enclosing streets, squares, parks and other spaces by buildings and or trees of a scale that feels right.

Opportunities for creating easier movement

Opportunities to ensure that the density of development is highest where access to public transport is best; opportunities to site bus stops more conveniently and to make them safer and better lit; opportunities to make railway stations accessible by foot from all directions; roads or footpaths that need to be better connected into well used routes, so that the presence of more people makes them feel safer; public spaces that need to be better linked into a route that is well used by people on foot; opportunities to encourage cycling; and places that pedestrians go to and from which need to be connected by more direct routes.

Opportunities for creating a sense of welcome

Places where new landmarks could create or improve views and help people find their way around; places where views need to be opened up; opportunities to mark places that act as gateways to particular areas; places where better lighting is needed to improve safety, help people find their way around, highlight landmarks, show off attractive buildings or disguise eyesores; opportunities for creating distinctive works or art and craft; and places where better signs are needed.

Opportunities for making a place adaptable

Opportunities to ensure that new development or other improvements support a mix of compatible uses and tenures, helping to make the place one where people live, work and play, rather than having a single use and being dead after hours; and opportunities to make buildings and areas adaptable to a variety of future uses, by ensuring that they are not tightly designed to a particular use.

Opportunities for making good use of resources

Opportunities for new and existing buildings to minimise their use of energy through the way they face the sun, how they are sheltered from the wind by the slope of the land, trees and other buildings, and how they are constructed; buildings, sites or areas that are underused; building materials that are available from local and or sustainable sources; natural features that are important to conserve and emphasise; places where a park or green space needs to be created or improved; and opportunities to improve habitats and support wildlife, attracting and protecting living things.

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