Cities for the New Millennium

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Cities for the New Millennium

Marcial Echenique and Andrew Saint (editors), Spon Press 2001

This book reproduces seventeen papers presented at a conference held in 2000 at the Lowry Centre organised by the RIBA and the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture. The contributions are arranged in five sections, Compaction, Dispersal, Regeneration, Technical Issues and Lessons from History.

The most useful aspect of the collection is the way that the first two sections set out the conflicting arguments of those favouring the compaction against those advocating the dispersal of our cities. From Rogers and Burdett we have the physical case for the compactors. They put forward, not only the need from higher densities on brownfield sites, but also a requirement for a quality public realm - in all its senses from education to parks - that can make urban living a positive attraction for all sectors of the population. These are essentially the views put forward by the Urban Task Force.

Sennett adds to these arguments his inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics in which he celebrates the possibilities offered by city life, "the freedom of strangeness", for developing the potential of individuals. He suggests that the dialectic of "flexibility and indifference" characteristic of contemporary work has affected our relationship with the city. People no longer become attached to place, consumption becomes standardised and this standardisation begets indifference while destroying local meanings and the pressures produced result in a withdrawal from the public realm. He concludes by hinting that the urban design solution might lie in achieving complexity and mutual attachment through returning to the more complex spatial relationships which predated industrial capitalism.

Tony Travers, also from the London School of Economics, contrasts the British anxiety about high densities at home with the way they have always enjoyed its results elsewhere - Rome, Paris or New York - and goes on to point out the economic benefits of higher density for the public sector as well as the individual or company.

The dispersal side of the argument is put by Echenique who points out that the sprawling reality of the contemporary city is in contradiction to the preferred image of the professional designer for whom the epitome of urban life is the nineteenth century Continental city. He produces a carefully constructed and quantatively supported argument that this new sprawling city is the result of individuals freely responding to their preferences and adapting to new technology, and that their willingness to increase the time and money spent on travel results in increased income.

One could debate with Echenique whether "the greatest gems of modern architecture ... were mostly designed in a low density context". But surely we should be concerned to make special the ordinary places where most of us live and work as well as creating gems (see below for his co- editor's comments on this topic). As for our ability now to liberate ourselves from "the tyranny of proximity", tell that to the motorist stuck on the M25 or the fireman obliged to commute to London from South Wales.

Breheny in one of the longest sections demonstrates a more measured scepticism towards the compactors which he develops in considerable depth. Among many useful insights he questions the much-quoted Newman and Kenworthy comparison of density and petrol consumption in 32 world cities. He also notes that the compaction lobby is supported by local and national politicians of all parties as well as architects. The former realise that there are few votes in promoting house building on greenfield sites particularly as many of these lie in marginal constituencies. He also points out that the very same politicians are not happy with a high density approach to housing design and resist upward changes to density standards in their areas. He calls for a more reasoned and more objective debate and, while acknowledging support for an Urban Renaissance, suggests that the aspect of workplace location has been neglected and, since jobs are being decentralised from metropolitan areas, ignoring this process will jeopardise the whole compaction project. At the micro- level one of the contradictions he points out is the issue of provision for parked cars - a factor which is crucial in determining housing density. Planning guidance in its search for higher densities now aims for a maximum of 1.5 spaces per dwelling and it is assumed that the rest of the cars will just evaporate. Another flaw in the compactors' argument is their proposition that single person households will be content to buy single person units. With property as the surest form of saving (and this has been dramatically reaffirmed since the publication of this book), people tend to buy as much as they can afford.

According to Richardson and Gordon it is the same decentralisation of jobs in the United States which will make policies for densification and public transport problematical to say the least. They argue that the New Urbanist projects which advocate higher densities and a return to traditional street layouts have been most successful on greenfield sites and in any case have made little impact on the general processes of urban sprawl. It may be that they had to be demonstrated on this type of site (which may be an explanation for the sin of elitism levelled at them) but they are now being used as part of urban regeneration projects. The authors reject the criticism of the suburbs as engendering violence (Columbine High School), and obesity and in conclusion suggest that "increasing the compactness of American Cities may not even be desirable, but it certainly is infeasible". Because land prices will force higher densities, Smart Growth policies will probably gain some ground but the urban landscape in thirty years will be little different from that of today.

The three papers in Section Three deal with specific regeneration projects. Bloxham describes his firm Urban Splash which, acting as architect and developer, has invested in abandoned and derelict buildings in the apparently hopeless cases of the industrial cities of North West England and, through finding new uses combined with innovative forms of tenure, has brought residential and commercial activities to transform inner city neighbourhoods. In contrast to this entrepreneurial and market driven approach Annelies and Peter Latz describe how "imaginative landscapes" have been created out of industrial dereliction in the Ruhr. Certainly this has been achieved through considerable pubic investment, although questions of finance are never discussed.

In the first of two contributions from the Netherlands, Bhalotra describes his poetic approach to urban design including projects from an expansion of Amersfoort and the rebuilding of the Bijlmeer satellite town. He attempts an urbanism which seeks its inspiration in modern painting - Kandinski in the case of Amersfoort. This is refreshing and is very rare in the United Kingdom, but towns are not paintings to be hung on walls. They have to be able to evolve and change over time - the problem with Bijlmeer was precisely that - it cannot evolve so has to be demolished. One would have liked to know more about how the space between buildings is used in these projects because the experiments (and the clients) are courageous and the intentions admirable. Let us hope that they succeed.

For Christiaanse the Netherlands has become "a cross between a proletarian version of Los Angeles and a blown up complex of garden allotments", where uses are separated and undesirable confrontations are avoided. This sounds like a New Urbanist critique of the United State suburbs but the solutions advocated are very different and seem to contradict received ideas about the Dutch, for this writer doubts whether car use can be reduced and celebrates the suburban fragmentation of space.

A section on Technical Issues starts with another paper from the Netherlands. Frieling describes the Deltametropolis project in which politicians from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht declared that it was time to plan these cities as "an interconnected urban constellation". A far cry from the competition between towns and cities which seems to be the driving force of planning in the UK, this project set out to put forward design alternatives for the whole country. The exercise was based on politically defined alternatives expressed spatially and then used to explore different futures.

In the second paper of this section Baxter examines the role of infrastructure, not only roads but also those subsurface networks such as water supply, sewers and power networks which are such important generators of urban form. He argues that they are a neglected aspect of planning and he makes a powerful plea for a greater concern for them in Britain, which has consistently invested less and under- funded maintenance when compared with its neighbours. As we move to more self-contained systems for energy, water and waste, efforts will be even more focused on movement networks than they are today. This poses the problem, among others, of the need to come to terms with both the space used by stationary cars and the current congestion of the road system - both recurring issues in this book. Steemers examines energy in cities and reminds us that buildings account for twice as much energy use as transport so there are great gains to be made through building design and form. He comes down firmly on the side of the compactors to reduce movement but is more circumspect about urban compactness for building energy reduction. However in an interesting insight he makes the connection between the need to reduce car use (or dramatically reduce all types of pollution by other means) and the increased possibilities of natural building ventilation which could only be made possible after improvements in the quality of the external environment.

The final technical issue, raised by Comeiro, is that of disaster mitigation in cities. She deals with natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, and discusses various types of response from places as far apart as Mexico and Japan. It is disappointing that this paper does not connect with this dispersal/compaction argument, and of course since it was written we have an increased awareness of the potential for man made disaster.

In the book's final section three writers turn to history for the lessons which can be drawn from Edinburgh (Howard), London (Saint) and Moscow (Cook). In the first of these studies the quality of Edinburgh is celebrated with its first decentralisation through the building of the New Town (only possible after the building of the North Bridge - a public investment in infrastructure), which respects the topography and provides those qualities of urbanity which supported such a lively cultural life. It is only with the development of the twentieth century that the rupture with past patterns of urbanisation occurred to be followed by the familiar retreat into conservation.

Saint discusses the historian's dilemma about drawing lessons for the future from the past and comes up with four generalisations that will delight any urban designer. They are about the nature of the territorial boundaries of institution, the fact that building regulations matter more than architecture in producing the ordinary buildings that make up most of our cities - as opposed to the signature works so beloved of our architectural press, the importance of employment as the generator of development (also discussed by Breheny), and perhaps the most intriguing - how rationale analysis has always been followed by irrational intervention. He gives as examples the irrational location of London's railway stations or the Abercrombie Plan which ignored much available data such as that on journey to work. It may be that this rational/irrational dialectic derives from the difference between those professions which describe and analyse and those which prescribe. Finally Cook puts the compact/ dispersed debate into a Soviet Moscow context and describes how the proponents of the former prevailed until the collapse of the regime produced a "massive spontaneous suburbanisation". Policies as set out in the most recent plan are now moving towards the familiar ones of infill and redevelopment rather than extension. In particular the industrial areas of the inner zone are now very desirable locations from new development.

This book offers a rich, varied and stimulating discussion of the great themes which face our cities this century. However there is one major gripe. In a book which is an ideal introduction to so many topics, it is absolutely inexcusable that eight of the seventeen chapters have no references. This greatly reduces its utility to the serious student.