CONTEXT 184 : JUNE 2025 27 LEADERS OF CONSERVATION THOUGHT quality; its criteria are more utilitarian and it largely concerns ordinary, unremarkable buildings. It is more about performance than appearance, and it is an argument for the conservation of streets and districts, not just individual buildings. This second rationale for conservation raises another issue, which we might call the psychosocial need for stability. The constant desire to replace the old with something new, whatever its origins, creates environmental instability. Familiar townscapes are constantly changing, as new buildings and new highways replace old ones. The results of this process of change are difficult to quantify, but anecdotally at least, there is evidence that suggests that constant and destabilising change in one’s surroundings is related to mental and physiological stress. More recently, there has emerged a third rationale for conservation, with arguably a greater existential justification than the first two. Whereas we can ascribe responsibility for the identification of the economic argument to Jane Jacobs, responsibility for the third justification is more difficult to ascribe. It is the global warming argument. Every time that we demolish a building, every time we replace one with a bigger new building, we release carbon into the atmosphere, increasing the temperature of the planet. The cumulative sum of global warming threatens to eventually make our planet uninhabitable. Construction contributes a significant proportion of the total carbon emissions: 40 per cent by some calculations. This has led in recent years to a great deal of support for the retrofit movement. This is the idea that, instead of a new building replacing an existing one, the default position should be the repurposing of the existing one. This will entail some carbon emissions but of a reduced amount. Increasing research being done in urban design is directed towards the planning of cities with net zero carbon emissions. The 2021 Centre for Cities publication Net zero: decarbonising the city5 is but one of many diverse examples. Much of the agenda is to do with forms of transport and increases in density, but the retrofit programme forms a substantial part of the whole agenda. The retrofit programme is consistent with, and supportive of, the other two rationales for conservation that I have described. In a current conservation campaign that I am part of, our campaign group has combined all three conservation arguments. The campaign is against the demolition and redevelopment of a 1962 office and retail building in the centre of Birmingham, the Smallbrook Ringway Centre. This is a fine concrete building designed by the architect James Roberts, which its owner, the developer CEG, proposes to replace by three residential towers between 44 and 56 storeys high. The Smallbrook Ringway Centre was described by the author of the Birmingham Pevsner guide6, Andy Foster, as ‘the best piece of mid-C20 urban design in the city’. My colleague in the campaign group, the architect Mike Dring, has made a counterscheme that retains and repurposes the existing building. It delivers on all three conservation criteria: architectural heritage, economic reuse and carbon retention. It retains an architectural and urban design composition of distinction; it repurposes it affordably with a new residential use; and it has a carbon footprint that represents an enormous reduction in carbon emissions compared with the developer’s high-rise proposal. Far from being reactionary, conservation in this and similar cases is the most radical and progressive form of urban design strategy. Joe Holyoak is an architect and urban designer and a retired university academic, most recently course director of the graduate urban design course at Birmingham City University. He is chair of the Birmingham Conservation and Heritage Panel. The Smallbrook Ringway Centre, ‘the best piece of mid-C20 urban design in the city’ 5 Quinio, V and Rodrigues G (eds) (2021) Net zero: decarbonising the city, Centre for Cities, London 6 Foster, Andy (2005) Birmingham, Yale University Press, New Haven and London
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