By Alastair Donald
Alastair Donald argues that everyone who values cities should be disturbed by current attempts to design communities
As summer turned to autumn, and credit crunch jitters to full blown panic over a depression, a leaked document from Home Office Minister Jacqui Smith predicted communities devastated by increases in crime, racism, and extremism. The opposition – never slow to chant ‘broken society’ – muttered darkly of many safety and security issues.
The ease with which problems in financial services came to be interpreted through the prism of individual and community behaviour suggests how much politics has changed in the past decade, and highlights the central position that community now occupies. From energy to education, and health to transport, policies are said to have huge significance for developing community.
In line with the shift, in 2006, the former Department of Environment completed its metamorphosis into Communities and Local Government and confirmed community building as the central aim of planning and urban design. Arguably the name change merely caught up with established practice. Yet can better urban design really create community? And given the space of cities has traditionally been associated with freedom to evolve our own relationships, should we even be trying?
The changing culture of cities
For community building urbanists, the main reference point is Jane Jacobs who famously argued that social capital emerges from small scale interactions, and that communities are born through these rhythms of everyday life. Whether progressive Richard Rogers or his New Urbanist opponents, the compact scale and permeable nature of Jacobs’ Greenwich Village neighbourhood is now seen as a model with community generating powers.
