The Maholian Way - Part Four: Building Strong Communities

The physical environment

I am sitting at an outdoor table of a café in Stockyard Park, a suburb of Cameron, New Galloway’s largest city. Above me is a pergola covered in grape vines with their leaves turning crimson, and I am facing a pond with ducks, and a fountain playing in its centre. With me is Dutch-Maholian architect and planner, Joris Van Tessell, and we are talking about the evolution of this neighbourhood, and the way this reflects changes in urban land use and architecture.

For the first sixty years of the twentieth century most of the area now covered by the suburb of Stockyard Park was an abattoir with an adjoining stockyard – hence the name. When the abattoir closed down, the whole area – including a neighbourhood of workers’ cottages considered a slum – was turned into a high-rise public housing estate surrounded by acres of open space.

The idea was that the residents of the estate and surrounding areas would have access to all this space, but in fact it was little used. With just a scattering of small trees, it was much too big and open to be inviting. The only people ever seen there were local gangs, a few scratch soccer teams and the occasional drunk.

At around this time Joris Van Tessell was a young architect in Amsterdam. He had travelled across Europe, and to Latin America and the Caribbean. He loved the intimate, intriguing urban spaces in the countries he had visited, as well as in his native Holland. He was much influenced by Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a book that celebrated such spaces in pre-modern American urban neighbourhoods and criticised their replacement by single-use localities, mass public housing and freeways.

Joris got to know a Maholian woman who was travelling in Europe, and they eventually married and settled in Cameron, where he established an architectural practice that later included town-planning as well.

By the early 1990s it was clear to everyone that the Stockyard Park housing estate was an urban disaster, and the Kincaid Government decided to demolish it and redevelop the site, assuring residents that they would be rehoused in the area if they wished. This was broadly accepted, but what was controversial was the issue of what to do with the open space. A relationalist approach to town-planning was starting to emerge around the country, but many people still felt that every bit of urban open space should be preserved at all costs. When Joris won a competition for the redesign of the area, the public reaction was sharply divided, because his plan did away with about half the open space (although a little recognised aspect of the plan involved the purchase of land in surrounding areas for ‘pocket parks’, funded by the proceeds of land sales on the estate and equalling about sixty percent of open space lost). The open space on the estate was to consist of a large number of smaller spaces interspersed with public and private housing, shops, cafés, workplaces, a community centre, an infant school and other facilities specified in the design brief. Details of the design and siting of all these facilities were suggested but left open in Joris’s plan, because public consultation to determine the development’s final form was a key part of the plan.

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