Jai Sandhu - some ideas.

We know that the way we live in and use cities isn’t environmentally sustainable. So if we do want to sustain our ways of life, they will have to adapt. We have to choose which are the most valuable bits we want to hold on to, and which aspects we’re happy to look beyond and see the back of. Do we choose ever increasing income over time with friends and family, do we choose parking over parks?

So with York Central, if we’re going to create a whole new neighbourhood placed in the centre of a beautiful city, which is ideally sized for urban innovation, then we might as well do it right from the outset. Let’s design these optimisations and adaptations into the place, rather than quite literally building the same old problems and barriers in bricks and mortar (and hopefully timber frame) into our lifestyles. We can design everyday life to be sustainable by default. Sustainable by building neighbourhoods and connections that are bike, pedestrian (and even kayak?) friendly with comfortable and affordable public transport built in. What does prosperity mean to us, is it about what we earn, or the quality of how we spend time and interact? Let’s make generous landscapes that encourage community and help us look out for and look after one another. Let’s design into homes from the beginning ideas like passive solar heating; passivhaus; community energy schemes; district heating; utilising waste heat from bakeries and potteries; circular resource loops between households and businesses and community urban farms; natural infrastructure for flood prevention, cooling and water filtration; rainwater collection and grey water recycling; shared appliances of better quality; communal living and working areas. Somewhere amazing to live and spend time, which just happens to be environmentally logical.

Going beyond doing less bad, or doing no harm, is where it gets exciting. What if the places we live were proactively environmentally and ecologically beneficial? Carbon negative nature reserves for people to live in. As well as lower carbon buildings, could they be green too? Generally speaking what’s good for wildlife is good for us, we are a part of nature, we are wildlife, it stands to reason. A stable climate, food and material provision, clean air and water, wind shelter, shade in summer, fun, exploration, beauty, awe and inspiration; nature provides everything essential we need to live. Even the sweet smell of jasmine on a summer night. What if instead of starting with the idea of bare ground, we begin with nature in mind and make concessions to include our technological elements, gradually taking a natural landscape and removing only what we need to to make it habitable and functional as a city. In so doing, taking an approach which asks: ‘what are the excuses that mean there shouldn’t there be a tree here?’, rather than making the case each time that there should be.

Every surface, corner and rooftop in a city is a potential habitat for something. Influenced by parameters like microclimate, colour, shelter and food sources. Currently our urban habitat in York, as with many cities, roughly resembles sea cliffs, and so provides a great ecological niche for herring gulls, feral pigeons, and a couple of peregrine falcons. There are songbirds too, where citizens have given them attention in the way they’ve shaped gardens and conserved natural pockets of greenery. What I’m getting at is that the city is a landscape we design every detail of, a huge habitat we unconsciously design for something. If we thought of it in those terms, and were intentional about thinking from nature’s perspective as we design, we can deliberately create habitats for plants and animals which we particularly value. This is especially true with a project like York Central, where we have the opportunity to design not on a single building scale, but on a whole 110 acre site. Wildlife corridors and pocket parks, ponds, canals, green walls and rooftop gardens are all possible to plan in at scale and as a complete and balanced ecosystem. Amplifying this, the site is between the riverbanks and the railway verges, which are both long wildlife corridors reaching from the countryside on one side of the city through to the other, to which York Central could become a buzzing, birdsong filled interchange.

How far could we push these ideas if we wanted to, and really set our collective imagination to it. How far do we want to push it? For an urban setting there is a balance to be struck between totally natural and totally artificial, and what adaptations we would be happy to see to make our lives more sustainable, and every person will have their own sweet spot along that spectrum. This is a fundamental reason why York Central Co-Owned (YoCo) is very much about the co-: Co-owned, co-designed, co-created, co-inhabited. It is a huge area of our city centre, and in day to day use it belongs to us all, so we should all have a say. What would we actually like to see happen here as citizens of York, and at what level of ambition? Please feel welcome to come to our sessions and get involved as little or as much as you can. Together we can create the most complete picture of what York wants its new neighbourhood to offer back to the city.