Helle Lis Søholt.

The Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the House of Lords Built Environment Committee. This is our seventh evidence session in our inquiry into high streets in towns and small cities. This morning, we welcome Helle Søholt, who is the chief executive officer and a founding partner at Gehl Architects. She joins us remotely from Copenhagen, where she is based.

My name is Daniel Moylan. I chair the committee. I will not introduce all the individual members of the committee now, but they have nameplates in front of them, if you, Helle, can see them. Of course, I will use their names when they each come to ask a question. As I say, we are very grateful to you for the time you are giving to us today. Our first question comes from Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer.

Q116 Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: Good morning. How do you define a high street in a town or a small city, and how do you see its purpose changing?

Helle Lis Søholt: Thank you so much for the opportunity to join this committee today. I hope you have had a chance to quickly run through the handout that I prepared for the meeting as part of my evidence. You may have read already in this approach that, in my view, the issue we are exploring around high streets today is one of a systemic character. It is not only a physical issue; it is definitely related also to the aftermath of retail and real estate changes that we are seeing in the aftermath of Covid. That is why we also need to suggest solutions in an integrated design approach.

My definition of a high street today differs significantly from what we perhaps defined earlier as much more of a retail spine through a town or a city. Today, we need to think about a high street as much more of a spine for the community. In that sense, we need to think about how that spine can be well integrated spatially, certainly in terms of functions and activities that speak to the needs of that community.

Q117 Lord Bailey of Paddington: Good morning, Helle. From your perspective, which is more important for a successful high street: good urban design or the shops and services that are available?

Helle Lis Søholt: Thank you for that question. I see those things as very intertwined. I do not think that we can solve these issues by focusing just on the physical aspect. Of course, being an urban designer, I very much value the quality of the design itself. So it does matter how we design the street layout and the integrated mobility system that we offer in it, but as important are the services—the so-called social infrastructure—that we offer in and around the street. It is incredibly important that the street activates and engages the community that is supposed to use the services in the area. We cannot address the liveliness of any given high street without considering those services. We need to think about this as a dual strategy or a dual integrated design effort.

Q118 Lord Bailey of Paddington: Thank you. Are there some essential elements of high street design that can help to increase the footfall and resilience in smaller towns and cities?

Helle Lis Søholt: I mentioned a few different approaches in my handout [1] that the committee might consider: how you might engage people; how we might try to break down silos and work across different partnership models; or how we might use prototyping methodology, which we have used successfully in cities such as New York but also in small towns, where we prototype different solutions and offerings before the most successful programmes are scaled up. We can consider a number of things that I mentioned in the handout.

If I were to boil it down to a couple of things, I would say that the two most essential and important aspects are: first, the integrated mobility offering—considering both how the high street is serviced by cars, public transport, pedestrians and bikes and how it is well integrated into the surrounding communities and neighbourhoods—and, secondly, how the community and local stakeholders are engaged and activated as part of the activation strategy for the space.

Q119 Lord Mawson: Good morning. How can local authorities balance providing access to high streets for cars, cyclists and pedestrians in towns and small cities, and what factors should local authorities consider when allocating space for parking cars?

Helle Lis Søholt: This is a really difficult question now, because we see in smaller towns across the UK—but this is certainly a wider European and Scandinavian issue as well—quite a lot of space being allocated to cars, both in the actual street design and in parking areas. We have obviously come to a point where, despite the fact that we have quite a lot of space allocated for cars, it is not necessarily servicing the activation level that we need.

We need to think differently about what is being offered. Shorter-term parking ability is incredibly important, so that we ensure that people can access the centre of the town by different modes than just cars. We should consider also how the parking areas can perhaps be converted into more local park areas, so that we can combine this strategy with climate adaptation strategies for the townships so that more green elements can start to be added that invite people to come to the high street or use the city centre or town centre differently.

We need to look carefully at how we maximise the number of people coming in and at how the space itself is designed so that we minimise the amount of asphalt available and give the place a more welcoming atmosphere. That is what we in our company would call a human-scale environment and what other cities have called a 15-minute neighbourhood or a 15-minute city design.

Q120 Lord Mawson: I was going to push back a bit on the earlier question, because it relates to some of this. Could you say a bit about how you have actually, in detail, involved wider sections of the community in some of the work you have been doing? You are on the right page with all of that, but what does that actually mean in practice and in detail, as far as the work you have been doing?

Helle Lis Søholt: Our approach is very much to measure what we care about, so to speak. We would always start by using public life metrics, such as counting in real numbers how many people are walking and cycling, and how long people spend in the town centre, what types of activities they are engaging in, and how that changes over the time of day, week, month or even year, so that we get more of that baseline understanding.

On the basis of these numbers, we can start strategising so we have a better sense of the issues that we are dealing with. Maybe it is that people are not coming consistently, or maybe there is an issue of certain parts of the population not using this space. It could be women or the elderly. It could be that we do not have the right mix of people that can ensure life happening more consistently over the day or the week. On the basis of this understanding, we can come up with different design strategies and test how these different design solutions can benefit the place.

As an example, in Copenhagen, we have been able to increase the number of cyclists over a decade to the level that we now have: 50% of the population in the city cycling to and from work and study, on an everyday basis. We know that cyclists spend as much money in local shops as people who own cars. People who bike spend their money in a way that is more distributed over the week because they do not shop as much at any given time. When we look at the money spent, it is the same amount that people spent on shopping, groceries and living locally.

To keep it very simple, this is a life, space, buildings approach—in that order. We have found it to be quite successful, learning from that engagement of the local community and designing interactions and strategies around that. We can also go further, and work together with companies to actually ensure and design the programming of ground-floor activities with local communities, so that we invite people in to take co-ownership and co-leadership on the different programme offerings. That is very much dependent on the size of the town we are talking about and how we can use this more actively.

Q121 The Chair: Certainly, in Britain, but I am sure this is true in Denmark as well, many of our towns and smaller cities are, from a retail point of view, the main point of service for a large penumbra of villages and rural communities that do not have a great spread of retail services among them. For many things, people will want to travel into the town or the small city, so the notion of a 15-minute city just does not apply. This traffic and custom are crucial to the commercial viability of the retail activities in the town or city. Are you not being rather dismissive of that demand when you talk about the 15-minute city and turning car parks into local parks?

Helle Lis Søholt: We see that very same pattern across other towns and cities for sure. In the nation of Denmark, where I work from, we think that by 2030, we might have all the retail offering available only in the five biggest cities across the country, simply because the number of online retail activities is growing.

You are absolutely right that we need to ensure this access to the town centres, not only because of retail, but also because of social gatherings, events and activities, as people still have a need to come together. I am not necessarily saying that we should take away all parking. I very much encourage a balanced model or an integrated mobility strategy or approach, where it is definitely still possible to arrive with a car and allow for that accessibility. However, it needs to be supplemented with better walking conditions, better cycle infrastructure, and, hopefully, public transport availability wherever possible.

We also see that this is very much a cultural shift that is needed, and we cannot necessarily just shift overnight from cars to bikes, for example. This has to be developed over a much longer period of time. But I see it as a very integrated approach.

Q122 The Chair: Yes, but it seems that what we are looking at here is how to help high streets thrive, and you seem to be driven by a desire to move people from cars to bikes. The two might be complementary—that is an evidential question—but they are two different imperatives. Which is the more important when it comes to designing high streets? Is it for the high street to thrive commercially, attracting people and sustaining retail to face the challenge of online alternatives, or is it the transport system and its contribution to climate change and health?

Helle Lis Søholt: If the high street is to survive, we need to increase, and have a well-balanced flow of, footfall to support any activity, be it retail, movie theatres or local community centres. Whatever the offering of the high street is, it requires a healthy amount of footfall through the space. People can then get to the high street by different modes of transportation. I advocate an integrated transportation approach to providing that access and increased footfall so that we allow people to come by different modes of transportation as much as possible.

The longer the time people are seen in a space, the more active we as human beings feel the space is. So, if we move quickly through a space by means of a car, we will feel that the space is less active. The slower we move through a space—where we can see each other’s faces, other people, other pedestrians and bikes, allowing us to experience the liveliness of a place—the more lively we as human beings experience the space to be. That is why we are concerned about getting speed down, getting people visible and out of their cars, and opening up streets—that is how we talk about it. It is not about closing streets for cars but about opening them up for different modes of transportation and different types of activities within them.

Q123 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: In a way, this progresses from the previous question. You talked earlier about breaking down silos, and one issue that people are often very concerned about in the centre of towns, for example, is safety. Can you tell us what design elements you feel can help to make a high street safe and welcoming for all users, particularly older and younger people? Perhaps you could deal with those separately. Ought we to consider any specific things where there is a vibrant night economy?

Helle Lis Søholt: It is incredibly important, when it comes to safety, that we consider the ground-floor activities. If there are long and blank façades—this is an issue where we have more retail spaces that are not activated—those places contribute to people feeling unsafe. The more we have continuously active ground floors, the better. We need to consider how places are lit and how we can visually have access to what is going on in those ground-floor activities.

Coming back to the aspect of life itself, the life and the activities themselves contribute to a feeling of safety. If we know that there are other people—if people, for example, live in residential units further up in the buildings and can overlook the street—that contributes to a feeling of a place being more active and safe. So, again, it is a combination of something physical and something related to the activities.

On nightlife, we have an expert in our team who specialises in nightlife economy. We see more and more cities introducing the idea of night mayors, because the night economy is incredibly important as we move more towards experiences and the experience economy, rather than only retail, in those streets. It is incredibly important that we think about how the design supports people spending time and not just moving through, entering shops and moving on. It is important that we think about people hanging out, spending time in the street and having a good time.

How can the design cater for those types of activities? Perhaps it could allow flexible transportation patterns so that you can drive through at certain times of day but not at other times of the weekend, for example. Those types of flexible models that can support lingering and spending time are incredibly important.

On children, and women in particular, we find it very important that streets, street design and activities cater specifically to women’s needs. If more women are present in a space, it is often considered more safe. We need to differentiate between the perceived safety and the actual safety that you might measure in traffic accidents or other things. So the perceived safety is incredibly linked to the types of activities: the more we can invite women and potentially families with children to come and have access to activities in the high street and the town centre, the better.

Q124 The Chair: Is not the night-time problem not so much the areas that have active nightlife but areas that have no active nightlife, so that, come 6 pm or 7 pm, all the shops are closed up and there is no, or very little, frontage activity? That is the point at which streets start to feel dangerous: there is no passive overlooking. Does traffic not actually help in those circumstances?

Helle Lis Søholt: Yes, that can help. It is definitely important. This is where it is important that we see the high street not as a spine in a vacuum but as part of a wider network. We need to analyse and understand how people access these nightlife activities using different lanes or streets to get there, so that we can maybe light those areas more specifically, ensure certain signage perhaps, and guide people to use the more active streets rather than the more remote ones. It is difficult to completely ensure the same amount of activity at that time of day, of course, so we can use lighting and other things to guide people to use certain streets rather than others. We can use signage directly in front of where we have the most nightlife activity.

Q125 Lord Mair: In your very interesting material that you submitted to the committee, you talk about a key element being the testing of new designs. You describe testing designs in pilot projects. Do you have examples of where you have done such a test and it has not been successful so you have had to change or modify your design? Can you describe such a situation?

Helle Lis Søholt: One of our most well-known examples is the piloting of the public space programme for the city of New York, which you might know about. It could be Times Square or Madison Square—any of those spaces that have been transformed. Over the past 10 years, more than 100 spaces have been created using this methodology across New York City. Again, the idea is to use the public life survey method as a starting point then come up with a design solution that can be implemented in a temporary manner.

In the case of New York, we basically widened the pedestrian areas and took out the through traffic of Broadway. Again, we measured the effect on public life activities—for example, how many pedestrians there were, the effect on traffic, and the effect on the local economy and local shops. Then, after half a year, we were able to prove to politicians that footfall had gone up by 11%. We had increased the flow of traffic through the area because we took out pedestrians who would otherwise be walking in a traffic area where cars were supposed to flow more freely. By activating the spaces, we could show that more than 75% of all people asked enjoyed the spaces more than was the case earlier. You could say that, by providing this pilot before it was made permanent through design, pavements, benches and so on, we could show the potential social, environmental and economic impact of these designs; we could then scale it up as a programme.

That was taken on as a government initiative, but later on it was turned around and turned into a form of economic support that you could get to any community that could come together and form a programming partnership for these various spaces. The ones that could come together and show that they had this partnership in place could then get government support to create a space. Using this pilot, we were able to scale up this programme over the entire city.

There are no limits to what you could potentially pilot. We have been piloting bus routes—for example, asking, “What is the impact if we de-route a bus route in the city of Denver so that we can repurpose and reprogramme the main street?” We have also been piloting community organisational efforts in terms of how to activate ground-floor activities and ground floors of buildings. In that sense, there is, in essence, no limit to what you could pilot and learn from this, but, in most Governments in most countries, in order for this piloting method to be used and be successful you will probably need to look into your permitting regulations. In the city of New York, for example, we had to permit these pilots as temporary and at a very early stage so that we did not have to do the normal environmental audit of the project. In other countries, there are other barriers to this type of working method. This is something that needs to be looked into further in the case of the UK to see whether any legislation is permitting or prohibiting for this type of working method.

The Chair: There is.

Lord Mair: Before we finish on this question, are there any examples of where your pilot designs needed to be modified? How did you change your design based on your pilots?

Helle Lis Søholt: Yes. We have lots of projects where we have piloted something then, when the permanent installation comes in, you might choose different materials—for example, ones that have much better longevity—or design things in a different way. I know of cities where we have been brought in. For example, some of the pilots in the city of Boston were not very successful because they were a bit afraid to pilot in some centrally located places so they started piloting on the fringes of the city. Those pilots were not successful because, basically, they were done in places where there was no need for a pilot and not much footfall in terms of people coming in. So I very much recommend that, if you want to use this type of methodology, you be brave and use the pilot where it is needed then use the pilot as a bridge to a permanent solution so that the pilot does not become a permanent design in itself. It is never, and should never be, designed for permanent use.

Q126 Viscount Hanworth: What can be done to improve urban design within the scope of existing street layouts and uses? Also, have any dominant opinions among European architects emerged recently? I have a perception that European towns and cities have not suffered from the encrustations of bad building that affect their British counterparts. Does that not make it easier to find solutions? Copenhagen is a beautiful city that hardly needs any improvement.

Helle Lis Søholt: We can find lots of places around Denmark and Europe where doubtful architectural buildings came up throughout the 1960s and 1970s, for sure. The question about heritage and local identity is incredibly important. We need to find again some kind of local character for each place so that we really cater for that existing environment and repair, you might say, the architectural space in itself. That could be by converting certain buildings, repairing buildings or even tearing down some of the bad buildings that have been built and which, in their design, kill the life of the space. Then we need to consider circularity of materials and everything else while doing that.

We need to come back to some kind of local character. Research done in Denmark on this matter shows that the real estate value can go up by 30% in both smaller townships and larger towns where we are able to repair and to ensure the local heritage and architectural quality of a place.

That includes buildings and public spaces together. Where we have a more complete environment that is true to its local character and heritage, we see building value go up and more care for that place from communities.

Viscount Hanworth: I observed that you said that the 1960s and 1970s was when the damage was done. I know eastern European cities—Budapest, for example, or Łódź in Poland—where there was not any building in the 1960s or 1970s, and I think that proves the point, but thanks for that.

Q127 Baroness Janke: Can you tell us about the key success factors in international examples of urban design, and what you believe national and local government in England could do to learn from and perhaps replicate their approach?

Helle Lis Søholt: The international precedents in this area are varied. Across Europe, we have been engaged in many beautiful places that have been fully pedestrianised and activated through this public life programming approach that I mentioned. We have also been the urban design lead for George Street in Sydney, Market Street in San Francisco and other places where we have a much more integrated transportation strategy, not just pedestrianising a space, but—in the case of George Street, for example—integrating a new light rail. This was an investment into public transportation going into the reactivation strategy for the activation of the street itself.

I do not think there is any one model, so to speak, but I say again that if you study any of those international key projects, it is an integrated approach that includes the built environment, transport, activation and programming.

Q128 Baroness Andrews: Congratulations on all your work. In your written evidence, you say that it is easier to do all these things in Europe, and indeed, from the sound of it, in Australia and in the States, than in the UK. You give four reasons for that. One is that we do not have enough resources; another is that we do not have enough long-term commitment; we have limited public expenditure funds for things such as transport; and we have the commercial homogenisation of the high street.

These seem to me to be pretty fundamental barriers to us being able to deliver to scale the sorts of transformations and integration that you are talking about. We could probably do the public engagement stuff, but how are we going to do the sorts of things that you are successfully enabling other countries to do, when we have these identified issues?

Helle Lis Søholt: That is indeed a big question. The most important thing is to ensure some kind of long-term vision when working with such integrated and almost systemic planning issues, which we are talking about here. I think it is incredibly important to address those barriers that I am mentioning. I also suggested some very catchy start-stop-continue recommendations at the bottom of that paper too, but, again, it is going to be incredibly important to ensure some kind of long-term plan for those cities.

Planning goes beyond any given four-year election cycle. To address those issues, we need to think a little bit longer term. Many of the neighbourhood operating programmes that we have in the city of Copenhagen, for example, are ensured an eight- to 10-year continued investment cycle into those neighbourhoods and the parts of the city that are suffering. That is the type of cycle that we need to work with.

With the case of George Street in Sydney, that was also a project that we have been delivering over 10 years. It is the same with Market Street in San Francisco, which has also been delivered over a period of 12 years. As I mentioned, in the case of New York City, with all the public spaces and bike infrastructure that have been delivered, that has been a continuous effort since 2007 up until now. Ensuring long-term thinking and that government funding programmes can be accessed is going to be crucial.

Baroness Andrews: Do you know anywhere in the UK where we are getting it right?

Helle Lis Søholt: I will not point to any given place. There are many beautiful towns in the UK, so there is such a great backbone to build upon. The physical infrastructure is there, and I am sure that there are also communities that have an interest in their towns and high streets being lively, liveable and active. The material is there, we just need to combine the two.

Q129 The Chair: I have a question to wrap up on the question of international comparisons. Some 15 or 20 years ago, the late Hans Monderman was delivering schemes in the Netherlands based on the principles of shared space rather than allocated space. Does that have any traction still, or is that now just ancient and local history? Does it still have any influence on design?

Helle Lis Søholt: We use shared space ourselves, but we are very concerned about spaces first and foremost being safe and experienced in a safe manner by—

The Chair: The demonstrable and paradoxical effect of the Hans Monderman schemes was that they were safer than the unshared spaces. That was the point, so it was a push to safety that actually underlay—

Helle Lis Søholt: It was a push for safety, and it does work when we look at speed limits being so low that cars are being cautious about the pedestrians and the cyclists moving through the space.

The Chair: The essential point was that the design itself—that is, the shared space—was the factor that lowered the speeds, not that you had a speed limit as a condition of having a shared space.

Helle Lis Søholt: We still use those designs in many spaces and places. It depends on how many cars and how big a town that we are talking about, in terms of whether that is still a feasible design solution or not.

The Chair: Do you have any particular recent examples?

Helle Lis Søholt: It is not recent, but in the city of Brighton in the UK, we designed the street of New Road connecting the Lanes district with the station area, as a shared street design model—I think one of the first ones of its kind as a reference project in the UK.

The Chair: I know that. Thank you very much indeed, that has been very helpful and very informative. We are most grateful.