Call for Real Metrics

Lars Stenberg, Sensory Trust

Sensory Trust is involved with one of the current eco town bids that are being put together across the UK. One of our tasks was to provide sources of metrics with which to measure a successful greenspace strategy. Well now, here in the UK there are lots of metrics devoted to how many yards a park should be from a residential area and how many acres per person and so on. In Europe the metrics were the same only in metres and hectares. Metric metrics.

Of course these standards are important and need to be spelled out for planners and designers: no one wants to have to walk or wheel three miles just to watch the ducks on the pond. But if these are the only measurements of success then it might still be possible, just possible, to tick all the boxes and yet create a place that is unusable, inaccessible and loathed by those who live there. I venture to suggest it might have happened before. These are measurements of distance and area, not measurements of happiness, social cohesion or belonging. Just because you can measure it with a ruler doesn’t automatically make it a prime indicator of anything very significant. We’ve all heard it said that size doesn’t matter.

Or put another way, just because it's difficult to measure, does it mean happiness is not an important indicator? A quick wander through many of our cities' housing estates will quickly answer that one.

So that got us thinking here in the office. Where are the alternative metrics? The sideways-view measures of how successful a place is. We’ve been pretty busy at the Sensory Trust lately and research time was limited to ten minutes scouring the internet for some examples. This is not hard science.

The Project for Public Spaces in New York puts forward the twin measures of kissing and ice-cream licking as indicators of a successful public space. Frustratingly they do not indicate just how many ice-creams need to be licked on any given afternoon, or a breakdown of the flavours, and so more research is required. And of course, like so much research from the United States, it would have to be undertaken afresh in Britain to account for local variation in things such as ice-cream quality and tongue strength... for the ice-cream licking obviously. What are you like?

So there we have it. Not a very thorough list of indicators, but it’s a start. There must be more, and what better place to gather them together than on the Sensory Trust web site? So, how would you really measure the success of a public space? What’s your indicator and how do you measure it? It might be toddlers toddling, smiles smiled, volume of debates, or just bums on benches. Let us know.

Email us and we’ll put them all together into a set of real-life, real-world metrics that will shake the very foundations of urban and greenspace planning. Or, failing that, they might just cheer up your lunch break.

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