The Chosen City

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The Chosen City

Nicholas Schoon, Spon Press 2001

The Chosen City can justifiably be called an epic book in terms of its subject matter and ambitions. Against a backdrop of what seems to be a century long national love affair with suburban living, Nicholas Schoon takes on the daunting role of being an advocate for the city, and largely succeeds. His heartfelt and often impassioned belief in urban living is illustrated not just by ample case studies, city visits and interviews, but by an account of his own family's flight from a Victorian terraced house in Greenwich, south London, to an inter-war semi-detached home in suburban Hayes and finally back to city living in an Edwardian town house on a busy main road.

Schoon's central argument is that restoring the status of cities as places where people will want to live, work and play must be priority for national and local government, developers, housebuilders, architects, planners and employers. Formerly the Independentnewspaper's environment correspondent between 1990 and 1998, Schoon is now a policy analyst with the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. The Chosen City was commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a social research and development charity.

The book starts in the nineteenth century with a comprehensive historical tour, commencing with the thoroughly unplanned explosion of cities brought about by the arrival of factories and improved transport links during the Industrial Revolution. He traces the rise of the great cities, the flight of populations to the urban fringes and growth of suburbia throughout the twentieth century. While the decline of old industries, transport improvements, economic recession and World War Two all took their toll on British city centres as places where people lived, Schoon argues it is the way in which planners and housing developers engendered low-density suburban living which primarily lies behind the dereliction and abandonment of so many urban residential districts.

The idea of the abandoned city is strongly reinforced by the grainy photographs taken by The Independent's David Rose, a photographer who has covered social issues across Britain, Europe and the developing world. Images of abandoned or cleared terraced housing in Glasgow and Newcastle underline how once thriving neighbourhoods have become derelict, while sterile visions of people-free, car dominated centres of new towns like Milton Keynes and contemporary commuter homes in Essex convey how post-war development practices have encouraged the separation of activities such as shopping, leisure and work.

Schoon examines in depth how planning policies, urban crime, advances and changes in transportation (and particularly increases in car ownership) have all encouraged a flight from high density, diverse urban neighbourhoods to the suburbs and beyond. Schoon quotes a 1902 article in which science fiction author HG Wells foresees a time when the spread of housing out of cities would lead to a distinction between town and country becoming impossible: 'The boundary lines will altogether disappear; it will become, indeed, merely a question of less or more population.' While the inter-war garden city movement, for example, did seek to create viable, well designed and attractive communities, its tendency was toward low-density housing which, Schoon argues, helps undermine the cohesiveness of urban areas. Garden cities and their post-war successors, the new towns, were also alternatives to existing city centres and so contributed nothing to these - and indeed encouraged more damaging depopulation of cities.

Schoon does acknowledge often ill-fated 1960s experiments with high rise, high density housing tarnished the image of high (or higher) density housing. However, he points out that well-maintained tower blocks can prove popular, especially with young, childless residents, and the private sector's success in converting many former office blocks desirable city centre apartments.

Despite a shift in recent years of national government policy towards prioritising the redevelopment of urban centres for residential development Schoon highlights how many local authorities, developers and house buyers are still keen on out-of-town development. Schoon is particularly critical of proposals made for the Town and Country Planning Association by respected town planners Peter Hall and Colin Ward in 2000. This envisaged solving the South East's housing problems by creating a ribbon of linked new towns on greenfield sites. Hall and Ward's desire to create ideal new communities on a clean slate avoid the messiness of working in existing urban areas, but like garden cities and new towns, Schoon feels their ideas would do nothing positive for the city centres. Instead of building new neighbourhoods spatially separate from existing, failing urban areas, Schoon believes they should effectively be annexed to city centres. Schoon advocates taxing undeveloped urban land to encourage developers to do actively rework it.

Informing and influencing Schoon's hopes for an urban renaissance is the work of another non-professional commentator on city living, the American journalist Jane Jacob's whose account of life in 1950s Greenwich Village in New York - The Death and Life of Great American Cities - he views as being 'amongst the most important and hopeful books ever written about cities'. Schoon is an advocate of Jacob's desire that planners and builders should stop creating grandiose transport, housing and commercial schemes in a mono-functional zones, and instead encourage a 'jumbled, multi-purpose urban fabric'. Schoon hopes that the New Urbanist attitudes which developed in the wake of Jacobs' work will become as well-known in Britain as they are in US and European urban planning and regeneration circles.

In a chapter entitled 'The Idea Home' Schoon explores possible designs for new urban neighbourhoods along with Martin Crookston of town planning consultancy Llewelyn-Davies. 'Higher densities and mixed-use neighbourhoods have to be made to fit with aspirations for good sized homes and gardens,' writes Schoon. 'They must accommodate people's wishes for privacy, tranquillity and contact with the natural world.' The solution proposed by Schoon and Crookston is thus deliberately traditional in many respects, proposing terraces of pitched roof housing built on a grid-based street pattern. The long sides of each street block would have terraces of three-storey family homes with long gardens. The short sides of the block would have cheaper two-storey houses with yards, while the street corners would be apartment houses. Instead of front gardens, these blocks would provide neat off-street parking bays. Schoon's proposal provides generously proportioned rooms and gardens, achieving a density of 60 homes per hectare: the average net residential density for new housing developments in England during the 1990s was 25 homes per hectare.

Despite having to chronicle the decline of so many urban areas, Schoon remains upbeat about the possibilities of urban living. Not only are central government and many councils, developers and housing associations willing to invest in cities, but the inherently dynamic nature of cities and their populations means that there is always the potential for improvement as well as decline. 'We still have choices,' he concludes.