Something improbable is happening in the Yorkshire Dales. In a converted barn, nestling in the hills high above the market town of Sedbergh, with the fresh smell of cut hay in the air, a small family firm of architects is rebuilding Iraq. Cities ravaged by war and diminished by years of neglect under Saddam Hussein, such as Nasariyah, Kut and Kufa, are being reimagined, virtually, using state of the art 3D-modeling software by specialists in masterplanning nearly 3,000 miles away.
“The cities we’re working on were neglected by Saddam Hussein, so they have little basic infrastructure,” says Elliot Hartley, 36, a director of Garsdale Design. But why can’t Iraqis redesign their own cities? “There has been a massive brain drain of professionals from Iraq over the years, and a lack of investment in local government planning departments, which means that the skills aren’t there – yet,” explains Derrick, 71, co-director and Elliot’s father.
More improbably yet, only one member of the family firm – which, as well as designing Iraqi cities, also specialises in local English conservation and heritage projects – has set foot in Iraq. And none of them has been able to visit the cities they have been commissioned by the Iraqi government to reconstruct.
Seven years ago, the Iraqi Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works awarded Garsdale Design a contract to develop a masterplan for Nasiriyah, a city in southern Iraq perhaps best known in the west after the battle fought there to oust Saddam in 2003. The Hartleys produced a masterplan for new homes, sewerage, water and electrical systems, and an integrated public transport system for a city that is currently home to 500,000 people, so that it can grow sustainably over the next 30 years and accommodate a population of nearly 900,000.
Garsdale Design has since won contracts to produce masterplans for three other Iraqi cities: Kut, Hayy and Nu’maniyah in Wasit Province, as well as an urban renewal plan in Kufa in the Najaf Governorate. “Masterplanning is always complex,” says Elliot, “but especially so when you’re rebuilding a neglected city from bottom up, and when they are such sensitive historical cities. For instance, Kufa is an incredibly holy place so you have to put in something beautiful and respectful.”
But how can Garsdale Design carry on working on rebuilding Iraqi cities while much of the country is being torn apart once again by war? “Local government in the areas where we have jobs is continuing pretty much as usual,” says Elliot. Indeed, most of Garsdale’s Iraqi work is in the Shia-dominated cities in the south, which remain so far untouched by the advances of Islamic State forces in the north. “We get emails from our Iraqi colleagues saying, ‘It’s not as bad as you think where we are,’ but they are in Bahgdad and southern Iraq. What we see as normal is different from their normal. But if you talked to people in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles, their normal is different from ours. I suspect the same is true of our Iraqi colleagues – they’re living their normal, which to us looks extremely dangerous.”
On the office walls of the Hartleys’ converted barn are the printed results of their work: maps colour-coded to designate business and residential zones, sewerage, gas and electricity systems, road networks, projected tramways; 3D visualisations of planned cities, also colour-coded so they can be easily read; and digital images depicting happy Iraqis strolling beside yet-to be-built mosques or in the courtyards of traditional Arabic houses, created right there in Cumbria using the latest European 3D modeling software.
“Remote working is always a challenge,” says Elliot with dry understatement. Especially, no doubt, when it involves redesigning cities halfway across the world that you’ve never seen in the flesh but only visualised virtually thanks to digitised maps, old masterplans and lots of data translated from Arabic into English by obliging Iraqi local government workers.
“We can’t go to Iraq because it’s too dangerous, but our colleagues there can do a lot of the survey work on the ground for us,” says Derrick, as he breaks off from responding to clients’ final comments on one of the consultancy’s masterplans. Derrick did attend a meeting in the Kurdish city of Erbil, but otherwise the face-to-face meetings with Iraqi planners have taken place outside Iraq – in Istanbul, for example, or even in the Cumbrian town of Kendal, 10 miles down the road from the Hartleys’ barn.
While Derrick and Elliot focus on city masterplans, Derrick’s wife, Barbara, the founder of Garsdale, specialises in local housing and conservation projects; and Elliot’s wife, Michelle, works on heritage and archaeology cases. Brother-in-law Kevin Wade contributes from his home in Bradford. One of the family’s great advantages is Elliot’s expertise in a 3D modeling application called Esri CityEngine. It means Iraqi cities are being reimagined with software that’s already been used to produce virtual backdrops in video games and Hollywood movies like Man of Steel and Cars 2. “These masterplans are not blueprints,” says Elliot. “In Iraq, such is the need for basic infrastructure – sewerage, power lines etc – that things will happen on the ground in response to urgent demands that mean we have to modify our masterplans accordingly. But the people on the ground are supposed to try to adhere to our masterplan. It’s a process rather than a product.”
Indeed, one of the great boons for the Hartleys is that Esri CityEngine allows them to remodel their masterplans unprecedentedly quickly to respond to late requests from Iraq or new data.
Over coffee at his workstation, Elliot demonstrates to me how Esri CityEngine enables the quick creation of large-scale 3D city models. “This used to take ages,” he says, finessing the design of a multistorey car park in a 3D visualisation of London. “It used to take ages to change one paramater. Now you can do it at the click of a mouse.” He quickly creates a purportedly Iraqi residential district on his screen, giving projected houses shady courtyards, frontages fringed with date trees and roof-top air cons and water tanks. Then he starts to draw a road on screen. “All the data I’ve put in the rule files means that it will automatically tell me how much it will cost to build that road that way. And then if I get feedback from Iraq saying ‘Move the road slightly to the left’, I can do that easily and at the same time learn what that change will mean in terms of costs and other parameters.” To my eyes, there’s a touch of the pleasure of playing video games to Elliot’s work – certainly it looks like great fun.
How can a little family consultancy in Cumbria beat off competition from bigger international firms specialising in the lucrative market of Iraqi reconstruction? (The question becomes even more intriguing given that Garsdale was originally established in 2003 by Barbara for small-scale housing and conversation projects: indeed, she is currently working on a nearby project to install the Yorkshire Dales’ first biodigester to convert cattle waste into usable fuel. “We have a lot of muck in these parts,” she explains.) The answer is that the family amassed years of marketable experience working in North Africa and the Middle East. “Derrick brought in the big work through his Middle East connections,” says Barbara. Though her husband initially worked in Surrey as an urban planner, Derrick later joined design and engineering consultancy giant WS Atkins International and worked on the firm’s masterplan for Tripoli in Libya. He and his family moved to Oman, and during Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait he was working on the city’s masterplan. He was compelled to go into hiding when Saddam’s tanks rolled into town. “We could see tanks lined up on the coast road from my apartment and we knew if we were found, we would have been used as hostages.” Undaunted, the Hartleys lived for a while in Kuwait after its liberation – it was there that Elliot did his GCSEs before returning to England to study geography and later town planning at university.
Those experiences and expertise gave Garsdale Design a competitive edge over their rivals. “We have lived and worked in the Middle East so we know what the Iraqis want by proxy,” says Derrick. “Because of our experiences in the countries there, we are committed to making things better for ordinary people in Iraq, where we can.” By that, Derrick doesn’t just mean improving living conditions for long-suffering Iraqis, but also training local planners, urban designers and architects. The Iraqi contracts have all been contingent on the Hartleys helping train Iraqi in their trade – such as the dark arts of GIS (geographical information systems), using data from CyberCity3D (a Californian firm producing state-of-the-art urban planning software and for whom Elliot does consulting work), manipulating shapefiles digitised from old paper maps, how to deploy data from householder surveys and UN population projections, or how to create rule files for software that can help create whole city neighbourhoods on your computer screen in a morning’s work.
Elliot has also been keen to spread to his Iraqi trainees the voguish gospel of smart cities, whereby intelligent technology is used to enhance our quality of life in urban environments by, say, minimising waste, measuring domestic water usage and managing transport routes. “Forget about smart cities – this is about smart towns and smart villages too,” he says. “There’s a gap between Iraq and the west in terms of smart cities, but that is closing.”
Hanging above Elliot’s desk are photos of young Iraqis who’ve visited Britain under the Hartleys’ aegis to receive training at Manchester and Liverpool universities, where Derrick teaches urban design part time. In a sense, then, the Hartleys, if successful in training, will be making themselves redundant: if they train Iraqis to do what they’ve been doing successfully, their input will no longer be required – which, with all due respect to the Hartleys, is what the Iraqi government hoped for in the first place. “We’re coming to the end of our Iraqi projects,” says Elliot. But business is nonetheless booming: he’s just hired another member of staff.
One of the intriguing ironies of Garsdale Design is that these specialists in designing cities have turned their back on city life in favour of working in the English countryside. I begin to understand why. The view from the barn is stupendous – beyond the roofs of Sedbergh is the grand range of the Howgill fells basking in afternoon sun. “I used to work for the London Borough of Merton, which at the time was a fun job,” says Elliot. “But now I want to keep working here.” He and Michelle have two young daughters, while his mum and dad live in a house next to the barn.
Only one stumbling block to remote working in this rustic idyll – broadband speeds. “I’m not saying it’s wrong for the government to spend billions on HS2 shaving 15 minutes off journey times from Birmingham to London,” Elliot says, “but that kind of money could just as well have been spent on installing a national fibreoptic network.” Upload speeds have been so feeble that Garsdale Design has in the past been reduced to sending DVDs of their masterplans to Iraq. “A national infrastructure is required, with high-speed broadband to rural areas that rely on it if they are to be economically viable.” Maybe it’s not only Iraqi cities that need masterplans of the infrastructure they need to bring them into the 21st century. Large swathes of Britain do, too. Perhaps that should be Garsdale Design’s next project.
Despite the violent crisis engulfing parts of Iraq, Elliot’s close connection with his Iraqi contacts gives him a cautious optimism for the future. “Especially now that a new government is being formed, our principal contacts believe that Iraq will stay together,” he says. “Iraq has such a capacity to be a great nation and I hope the people I have met can be supported to achieve that.”