The following report documents the result of expert critique, analysis and review of the sketch masterplan proposal created by participants at the INTBAU Scandinavian Summer School. The school was held in July 2002 at Fredrikstad and was hosted by Stiftelsen Byens Fornyelse (the Norwegian Foundation for Urban Renewal). The site in question comprises the large, abandoned Værste shipyard and ship building riverside area within the Fredrikstad metropolitan area.

Initial critique was provided by external assessor, architect and INTBAU Chair, Robert Adam, and later by urban designer and director of The Prince's Foundation's Urban Programme, Paul Murrain.

This report notes their key comments and details the refinements proposed for the draft master plan by consultant urban designers Dr Matthew Hardy, secretary of INTBAU, and Susan Parham, a director of CAG Consultants, who were asked to undertake a detailed review of the initial masterplan proposal. The report should be read as an adjunct to a revised sketch design and coding sheet being produced by Matthew Hardy and Susan Parham.

The scheme was generally considered to be an excellent contribution to the thinking about the site, and reflects the result of a process including public consultation (a public design "Charrette") and intensive work over a short period by the participants. The critique provided below needs to be set within the context of general appreciation of the excellent work done by the participants. Each of the reviewers had a range of positive comments to make about the proposed scheme. Below, their few criticisms are documented as these cover the design aspects which would need to be revised. Both said that these comments aside, the sketch masterplan formed an excellent basis for development in the next phase of design.

Key critical points from Robert Adam were:

• The area around the harbour appears to be too big and too open to work as an urban space.

• The roads in general are too wide, especially the proposed main road.

• Some blocks to the north west of the site are unresolved and too big.

Key critical points from Paul Murrain were:

• The commercial centre as shown is not in the right place. The centre should be on the main circulation route which itself needs to be rethought to increase connectivity.

• The public spaces are too large to be workable, enclosed places.

• Active frontages are needed on both sides of the road in the main centre of activity.

• The area on the harbour is too inhospitable in winter to work as shown. It needs to be more sheltered for climatic reasons and due to its relatively low catchment potential.

• Too much of the pedestrian catchment (using a standard model of a five-minute (400m) walking time) is not accessible or intensively useable. Again this has implication on the need to rethink placement of the main street layout and commercial centre.

These findings, and the intensive review work undertaken in Oslo in early October, suggested a series of changes are required to refine the scheme. We established the following organising principles:

• A key issue is to make the area work economically. The scheme must be configured to provide the most viable plan possible within the terms of sustainability and good urban design. The changes proposed flow from that assumption. Given its very large land area, and the likely pace of development need for the site in the city and subregion, the development needs to be approached in a staged way.

• It is important to create a design that provides for an intense commercial centre with ‘active frontages’, and avoid a land use mix that dissipates centre uses. The road and block pattern should support the creation of an economically viable commercial centre.

• The site provides exciting opportunities for harbour front housing to cater for the local and Oslo housing markets: on a sheltered canal, on south facing semi-public harbour frontages, with long gardens to the north shore, all with privately accessible boat moorings which are likely to make these housing types particularly saleable.

• The densities, heights and housing types should respond to the urban design potential of the site and provide a range of alternatives in line with local demography and housing preferences. Housing should range from harbour front apartments through tenements, to single family housing in groups around courtyards or on separate plots. The site offers opportunities to develop a range of sustainable wooden house typologies.

• The development as a whole should be designed to:

- Maximise views to the sea

- Preserve vistas along existing crane tracks to the historic shipbuilding cranes

• The large industrial heritage buildings should be left reserved for a range of land uses that could include innovative office developments. These should use ecological design principles. The buildings, 22 metres wide, are unlikely to be suitable for housing. Given their very large size and height, these buildings also create substantial shadows and the large shaded spaces to the north and east will not be suitable for housing development.

Specific changes proposed are as follows:

• The primary movement corridor and intersections have been located in line with ‘space syntax’ assumptions about the movement economy. The corridor thus responds to the areas where most movement is likely to occur.
• [NEED TO SAY THAT OURS ARE ASSUMPTIONS. SPACE SYNTAX ANALYSIS WD BE DONE AT NEXT STAGE]

• The large number of commuters travelling between Oslo and the Hvaler Islands, which creates traffic congestion problems for the Fredrikstad city centre, also provides great opportunities to activate commercial uses on the Værste site in the long term when a proposed linking bridge and road are built. However, plans for the Værste cannot assume the existence of this bridge in the near future. Accordingly, the road network has been designed to allow for movement during the initial phase with access from the west only, and for north-south movement in the future when the road and bridge links are built. Changes have been made in order to increase permeability and connect more closely to the regional, subregional and local road network, allowing for a range of future possibilities.

• The bridge link is proposed to be in the originally envisaged location to allow for the create of active frontage adjoining the existing buildings on the northern waterfront. This move also improves the potential for connection of the site street network to the subregional network to the south. As well as contributing to overall connectivity and legibility, it has also provided the opportunity to create a street with active uses on both sides - vital for a functioning town centre.

• In order to support retail viability and pedestrianisation, more access points have been created along the main active street frontages. Greater permeability in this area is important to the economic and social vitality of the centre.

• Many roads have been narrowed - bringing them into line with traditional urban road dimensions in Fredrikstad. This will improve the sense of enclosure of these streets when taken in conjunction with building typologies proposed. Together these will create appropriate height-to-width ratios on all streets.

• The movement network has been redesigned to allow increased vehicular permeability and legibility while retaining a pedestrian-oriented promenade at the water’s edge.

• The ferry stop has been moved to a location more accessible from the river, near the western end of the old dry dock.

• Improvements in connectivity will heighten the potential to attract one or more bus routes to the redeveloped area.

• Block sizes - both retail and residential - have been made smaller, especially in and around the centre, to promote a fine grain and high intensity of active uses.

• Block sizes have been based on the need to promote a variety of timber-framed house typologies on site. Blocks are now of appropriate size to accommodate a range of sizes and styles of housing based on a realistic assessment of both local and Oslo housing markets.

• The principles governing the existing block formation for the north east corner of the site have been accepted as proposed, with some rationalisation of block size and layout.

• Specific locations, grain, scale and densities for mixed use have been further developed including retaining a proposed school and relocation of the football oval to integrate with that development.

• Overall density has been increased, to improve the urbanity, vitality and economic viability of the proposed centre.

• Some service, commercial and industrial land uses have been retained or proposed in suitable locations.

• The road layout and block pattern, and the site density and land use patterns, have been designed around existing heritage industrial buildings. They now create landmarks or vista termination points in the urban design scheme.

• Other existing buildings, which house existing economic uses or present the possibility of economic use in future, have been retained in the design.

• A widened canal (refer to drawing) provides more opportunities for boat mooring associated with individual dwellings, improving amenity and increasing the desirability of this housing and the viability of the development.

• Similarly, in order to improve the economic viability of the redevelopment, the revised plan has maximised the amount of harbour frontage housing with private boat mooring.

• A continuous promenade at the water’s edge has been maintained around the perimeter of the site where existing wharf edges make this possible. Unconsolidated water frontages have been devoted to private waterfront housing.

• The design of promenades and harbour frontages favours the desirable southern and western frontages and existing wharf edges.

• Green spaces and harbour frontages have been reinforced and enclosed to create a more urban feeling.

• The revised proposal drawing shows how redevelopment could be staged to allow establishment of the central part of the site relying only on access from the west. Development of the more remote northern and western areas is assumed to become possible only with construction of one or more of the north-south road links.

• The centre has been placed to reflect staging possibilities related to the changes in site access over time.

Information in the form of a set of building typologies and a coding matrix will be provided. It is intended to ‘code’ the Værste site as a wooden city for reasons of sustainability and in line with Norwegian national policy on timber use. Use of timber can be justified not only on the grounds of sustainability but in order to relate to the history of the use of timber for housing in the area and the site’s own history as a local industry connected to timber.

[TIMBER BUILDINGS ARE ALSO HIGHLY PORTABLE AND ALLOW FOR MORE INTENSIVE DEVELOPMENT IN THE DISTANT FUTURE WITHOUT HIGH DEMOLITION COSTS]

The site constitutes a major, strategic land asset for Fredrikstad. In order to support the redevelopment of this brownfields site it also needs to be supported by relevant policies in the General Plan. The General Plan currently allows for development of a number of greenfields areas at some distance from central Fredrikstad which we argue would undermine successful use of the Værste site.

• First, greenfields development where brownfields are left undeveloped cannot be justified on grounds of sustainability which is best achieved by a more compact, contiguous urban form.

• Second, we assume that substantial infrastructure costs would be associated with development of these zoned areas for future housing as they are distant from existing urban edges and infrastructure connections.

• Third, their distance from the urban centre means they would be difficult to serve with public transport making them inherently car dependent.

• Fourth, their development would also undermine the economic viability of the site as providing a substantial housing alternative, thus wasting a key urban development opportunity.

We propose that to support the renewal of Værste, the municipality considers freezing the proposed outer suburban greenfield housing areas shown on the general plan. It should maintain a strong green belt around the built up area and look to locate as much new development as possible on areas such as Værste before sanctioning development on more distant locations.

October 2002

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