‘The challenge was, how do you get people who are down on a place like Wealdstone excited? How can you help them see what you see what the town could be?’ says Daniel Lester, head of communications for Harrow Council.
‘How can you get them to envisage and to feel good about it?’ he adds.
It’s an age-old question for councils up and down the land, and they are hoping to answer it by being the first in the country to present their vision in augmented reality.
An augmented vision
Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that layers computer-generated 3D on top of an existing reality. In the case of Wealdstone, the user holds their smartphone or tablet over a printed map of the town and the developments come to life on screen in living, breathing 3D. People move in an out of buildings and buses whizz by and you can move your phone around to get a different perspective and angle of each development.
The user explores the developments as they listen to an audio narrative which guides them through the plans.
Harrow Council have recently distributed a map of the town centre along with their resident’s magazine, which goes out to 100,000 people. They are then instructed to download the app so that they can explore for themselves. It’s engaging and tactile, and the map is undeniably pleasing to the eye.
The words augmented reality draw up visions of a Blade Runner-style neon dystopia, full of towering glass skyscrapers and neon signs. But the plans for Wealdstone are much more grounded.
Their regeneration plans include redoing the town square, knocking down their current council office and building houses on it, rebuilding their leisure centre and building a new civic centre where a multi-storey car park currently stands. The AR map aims to seamlessly connect the four developments so that they don’t just stand alone.
‘Wealdstone used to be well regarded in the 50s and 60s,’ says Mr Lester.
‘It has great transport links [to Central London] but when you step out of the railway station there’s not much in front of you. It hasn’t had enough TLC which contributes to the fact that people don’t love the place externally.’
To change that, Harrow Council set tech companies a brief – come up with something that is both technologically driven and innovative, but this didn’t necessarily offer solutions that fit the town.
‘A lot of the groups we met were geared towards the private sector. They presented an image across Wealdstone that will make it cool and hip and trendy and will increase property prices, and you can understand the value of that for someone who is building two housing developments in Hammersmith at the high end of what people will pay for a property,’ says Mr Lester.
‘People who like French bulldogs will get very excited. We weren’t in the market for that,’ he added.
Firms also presented them with static CGIs of potential developments which were mostly night time shots of glass and steel.
‘I explained to them we are not even at the planning stage, this is a journey through that.’
Re-building pride in the town
Scott McCubbin is the associate director at Uniform, the company chosen by the council to adopt the AR technology they had built for the Greenwich Peninsula project.
He believes that AR could bring benefits that go beyond bricks and mortar.
‘It was about building pride in the town in a way that people will be interested in,’ he says.
AR still uses print, a medium that people are familiar with, and combines it with technology in a way that Mr McCubbin says helps to translate the bigger vision of what Harrow Council are hoping to achieve.
Both Harrow Council and Uniform fundamentally believe that AR can elicit emotion in ways a static model such as print or CGI can’t. The technology is designed to be permeable so changes can be made as it goes through planning.
‘We’re getting people to buy into what’s going to happen,’ he says. ‘It’s not always about the detail. It’s about the bigger vision of how it’s going to feel.’
Mr McCubbin believes it’s part of a broader shift by councils towards new technology.
‘A few years ago, most authorities and developers were quite risk averse and safe. They wanted something that’s photo real, but this doesn’t always give a sense of the place,’ he says.
‘AR is one of the things that local authorities, who are looking to do things differently, can do. We want to put residents in the picture. Its borne out of a desire to show people what we think the future could be like, and to get them excited so they can participate in the process,’
What Harrow have done is very bold. It’s a leap of faith but it also makes perfect sense. They could spend a fair amount of money on the same dry document which we’ve seen again and again,’ he adds.
An indulgence in times of austerity?
With councils regularly prefixed in the press with the words cash and strapped, is augmented reality an indulgence? And can they afford it?
Mr Lester is reluctant to name figures, but he is confident that the technology offers value for money to the taxpayer.
‘We don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have six figures, not even close. You have to get bang for your buck,’ he says. For Harrow, AR is a piece of the consultation jigsaw, which he says will always save money if it’s done well.
‘We’re talking about a regen programme that’s worth £300-£350m of capital expenditure,’ he says.
‘With this, you don’t have to do many redesigns and you don’t have to have a local person with an objection [late in the planning process] that you didn’t know about for that money to seem like peanuts in comparison.
I do think it’s good value for money. This could be the difference between doing or not doing it, let alone saving money or not saving money.
If you think of the number of boring, conventional column inches that people spend banging away at the same old same old about how you are going to regenerate an area.’
Some people will say how much did it cost? What a waste of money? Why do we need so many new houses in Harrow, I would rather we get an email like that about sheer quantity of homes, because that means that person is engaged in the process,’ he says.
Not an alternative gentrified demographic
The tale of regeneration has often been one of regret that councils and developers didn’t engage local people in a way that made them feel part of what is going on. AR could offer a solution to that – one that is simple to use and not technologically overbearing, and the council are looking forward to receiving feedback from the residents.
‘My worst thing is when you are changing someone’s environment and it’s a surprise, that the first thing they know about it is a crane,’ says Mr Lester.
‘It’s for the people who already live here, not for an alternative gentrified demographic.’