The Richness of Cities Ken Worpole & Liz Greenhalgh

The Richness of Cities Urban Policy in a New Landscape
By Ken Worpole & Liz Greenhalgh 1999 £15

The Richness of Cities brings together the findings of twelve Working Papers on aspects of urban development produced under the aegis of The Baring Foundation, Groundwork, Birmingham City Council, the Glasgow Development Agency, Manchester City Council and Watford Council. The tenor running through these reports relies on joined-up thinking, innovative associations of ideas and a general commitment to an empowered, tolerant and self-reliant civil society. The final report constitutes a concise review of alternative urban actions, experimentations and lifestyles which make cities rich and resilient to decline. Diversity in this optimistic - or perhaps idealistic- perception of urbanity is advocated by like minded people which leaves out important urban forces such as the property developers, footloose businesses, speculative interventions, or less nice urban behaviour such as exploitation or violence. It treats deception as an anodyne sideline of more important overall long term benefits such as cheating at social security and it hardly mentions crime or juvenile delinquency. The message is deliberately one of the good city, one of perceiving urban problems as urban opportunities, one of harmonious bottom up cooperation.

The report is a model of readable language, clear presentation, logical structure and concrete proposals. It demonstrates that an entirely qualitative discussion can be just as useful and hard hitting than reams of statistical tables and anecdotal case studies. However, due to its conciseness, a mere 45 pages, it had to omit all the examples discussed in the working papers, including which cities were used as empirical sources. Instead it draws on a vast array of subjects covering every aspect of urban life, ranging from governance, to housing, planning, local economy, information technology, the arts, community capacity building, lifestyles, public space, learning and sustainability. Unlike linear shopping list approaches its pursuit of connections is bound to uncover contradictions. Its holistic ambition stops short of universal integration through urban regeneration and action and proposes binary policy handshakes instead. It links land-use planning with telecommunication, recognising the mutual effects between virtual reality and physical mobility; housing with education by opening up and outreaching educational activities into residential spaces; planning and governance with new forms of democracy, making both planning and local government more interactive and accountable; economic development and to overcome divides between capital and revenue expenditure and to convert welfare from passive consumption into active contribution to urban development; quality of life with social justice, empowering individual freedom to enhance collective responsibility, and culture with the environment, hoping for transfers between the diversity of urban cultures and often moralising single track environmentalism.

What has it to say about urban design? It is critical of over-reliance on visual aesthetics and professionals who are detached from the locality in question. In its opposition between high and low density urban development it sees the former advocated by architects who are also believed to be in charge of urban design and low density favoured by planners whose practices need to be democratised. According to their feedback from people, architects are concerned with the quality of buildings and urban design, while planners are concerned with land use and the regulation of appropriate functions.

This is a far cry from what UDAL intends to achieve across professional boundaries and this report is delivering pointers in the right direction away from economic and social fragmentation and gated physical areas to more participatory and urban policies, integrated urban development and shared maintenance. They insist on the need to evaluate urban interventions, both their short term and their long term systemic impacts. Thus publicly understandable outputs and forms of evaluation should be incorporated in every policy programme, together with a clear understanding of opportunity costs as every decision has a trade-off in a city. This could be the next phase of the Placecheck exercise undertaken by UDAL and the Urban Design Group. There is a final and in my view imminently pertinent warning of overhasty transfer of best practices as every urban setting is unique and warrants its own forms of engagements leading to its own best solutions. This should inspire exercises like Place-check and other government sponsored guidelines and best practice recommendations.

The report queries the priorities of the Urban Task Force whereby principles of design excellence seem to dominate social well being and environmental responsibility. It is keen to shift the debate on urbanism away from design professionals to those who address cities as hubs of human interaction and economic creativity, hitherto confined to business pages or tabloid comments on social pathology. Indeed, the chapters on alternative solutions for the urban economy are the strongest and most thought provoking in the report. Acknowledging the place of 'community' in the urban debate, the report underlines its ambiguous meaning, place for some, group of like-minded people for others, or self-assumed form of identity for followers of social movements. It prefers the notion of urbanity, as it gives a sense of possibility and opportunity which cities offer individuals besides other affinities and affiliation. In Richness of Cities urbanity is the cultural dimension or citizenship, a notion worth building upon for urban designers. #

Judith Ryser

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