The Going Green report aims to reshape and reimagine Birmingham’s business district and reclaim it from the motor car, creating an environment that puts pedestrians and cyclists first and sustainability at its heart.
A key aim of this project is to tackle air and noise pollution, climate change, inactivity, diet and lack of access to green spaces.

Who is on the project team? 

Broadway Malyan, Greengage, University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University, West Midlands National Park.

Describe the context of this project and its neighbourhood and people?

Over the past five years Birmingham has been on a journey to become one of the UK’s most liveable cities.

Since June 2021, it has become the second UK city after London to create a ‘clean air zone’, levying a toll on vehicles entering the city centre in an attempt to reduce vehicle emissions and capture the associated environmental and health impacts.

In parallel with this initiative, Broadway Malyan has been working with a range of city partners to help reshape and reimagine the city’s business district and reclaim from the motor car, creating an environment that puts pedestrians and cyclists first and sustainability at its heart.

Five years ago, working on behalf of the Colmore Business Improvement District (BID), Broadway Malyan produced the Snow Hill Spatial masterplan, one of the UKs biggest and most ambitious urban realm programmes.

Since its launch, the masterplan has initiated a range of key interventions around the city’s Snowhill Station and wider business district, each aimed at creating more equitable streets with more flexible, adaptable and green public spaces to breathe new life into the district.

This has led to the development of a complementary piece of work by Broadway Malyan called the Going Green masterplan – a document developed in partnership with the Retail and Colmore BIDs, the University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University, the West Midlands National Park and the Greater Birmingham & Solihull LEP (GBSLEP) – a tool kit aimed at exploring opportunities for turning Birmingham from grey to green.

What is your design approach?

The Going Green report was initiated on two workstreams of gap analysis and appraisal that explored firstly, where was green infrastructure missing and secondly, how could green infrastructure be used to improve the place and social infrastructure.

The initial diagnosis revealed that like so many major conurbations in the UK, as pleasant as Birmingham city centre can be, it is almost devoid of any green infrastructure.

The green infrastructure that did exist was poorly connected and lacked the benefits of biodiversity, wayfinding around the city as well as building the character of place.

While there has been some incredible work in Birmingham in recent years, not just in terms of the Snow Hill work, there has been no co-ordinated approach green infrastructure that would help capture the multitude of climate resilience, health, mobility and ecological benefits that come from a green city.

The report captures data from a wide range of outputs and delivers a step-by-step guide – essentially an IKEA-type instruction manual on how to green your city and where the best opportunities exist to deliver environmental, social and economic value through green infrastructure, whether that is a simple street tree to the greening of a tramway. 

While focused specifically on Birmingham’s Retail and Colmore BID areas, in essence it is a blueprint that can be replicated across locations, enabling an incremental approach to interventions and installations at scale and cost that will enable the BIDs to deliver change as and when resources, funding and desire allow.

What is your climate strategy?

The report is about tackling a diverse range of challenges, felt in urban centres across the globe.

A key aim of this project and the culmination of the works in the city centre over recent years have been to create the best possible environment for people to both live and work, refocusing on the health and wellbeing of Birmingham’s residents and visitors by tackling air and noise pollution, climate change, inactivity, diet and lack of access to green spaces. 

The strategy emphasises the placemaking role in green infrastructure, not only adding environmental but social and economic outputs through the creation of features with greater value to wildlife and people, reimagining the traditional office-dominated spaces as a nature first environment. 

While a wide range of stakeholders were engaged for the report, the result of its publication has also been to bring together the BID areas’ community of workers and residents to explore how the report can drive a greener future for the district.

Through Colmore BID’s ‘Outstanding Places’ working group, made up of representatives of BID levy payers, BID officers and residents, a suite of potential future green infrastructure projects have now been identified using the report and an expression of interest has been submitted for multi-million pound funding from the Enterprise Zone Investment Plan (EZIP) – a strategy for nearly £1bn of investment by the GBSLEP and Birmingham City Council – which includes reimagining two keys streets within the business district and the greening of a multi-storey car park.

How have you engaged the community?

The importance of making cities move livable and ultimately more sustainable will be one of the great challenges of the post-pandemic era and increasingly we will need urban design strategies that are underpinned by a commitment to high quality climate-responsive public spaces that provide space for the population to breath. 

Our cities are heating up and this needs to be addressed with policies that adapt and mitigate while also focusing on reversing the continued loss of biodiversity and habitats from our urban areas.

This is why the partnership with the West Midlands National Park (WMNP) was so important. The West Midlands National Park, launched at Birmingham City University in 2018, is a 30-year vision for a new kind of national park – an integrated and holistic economic, social and environmental strategy incorporating all the land in the West Midlands and all aspects of land use. 

The ethos of the WMNP encourages working across silos, disciplines and practices to enable landscape where it was thought it couldn’t be and by adopting a visionary approach to transformation, enabling fundamental change to the heart of the city rather than a cosmetic cover-up. 

Central to the success of the Going Green approach will also be the importance of measurement, in terms of the impact on biodiversity, climate and microclimate, wellbeing and social impacts, each of which are outlined in the report using a range of strategies including activities that have been developed in consultation with the WM-Air team and the University of Birmingham.