No, Minister! The urban professions need a new direction.
BRIEFING NOTE #9
This is a series of briefing notes to yet another new housing minister. Here are some dangers to avoid, some well-trodden paths to be bypassed, and some barriers to thinking that need to be overcome (if we are serious about bringing about change).….and, oh yes, here are some thoughts on how to deliver this change! Please stick around long enough to make it happen.
‘Cities are victims of outdated thinking. Narrow reductionist thought processes linger under the influence of the pseudosciences, drawing from past philosophies that have little relevance today. We celebrate the good intentions of the two movements that in the twentieth century set about re-shaping urban life—garden cities and modernism. We mourn their faded dreams and regret the malign influence they exert from beyond the grave’.
So how did we think we could control something as complex as a city? In our developed world over the past three generations, we have arrested the process of urban evolution. We have forgotten how to do it for ourselves. So, we have lost the ability to build successful human habitats. Our current plans treat the city as an ordered, mechanical system where every variable must be entirely understood and managed, painstakingly controlled and legalistically prescribed for.
Both the planning and architecture professions are straight-jacketed by their origins. Planners can’t seem to shake off their Garden City roots, architects the Modern City ideals. Coincidentally, both are ‘anti-city’ in their intentions, treat the city like a machine, are highly reductionist, and this shows. Urban design professionals, in trying to ‘mind the gap’ between planners and architects, do not know which way to turn - so they play both sides. All are locked on a hamster wheel, pedalling blindly - demoralised and wanting. The thinking just goes round and round and design alone will not solve our problems.
Rob Cowan shows how the evolution of urban design theory in recent decades comes back to the same old thinking:
GARDEN CITY + Rural Location = Social Utopia
Social Utopia + Urban Location = Urban Village
Urban Village + Urban Edge = Sustainable Urban Extension
Sustainable Urban Extension + Remote Airfield = Eco-Town
Eco-Town + Government Hype = Sustainable Community
Sustainable Community + Least Contentious Location = GARDEN CITY
Radically different systems are impossible to achieve if the same people are asked to do the same things. Too often, strategies and practices are altered, but the underlying thinking is left unchanged. The problem is that there are no new urban theories out there to replace the teachings of Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier. You have to go back to the nineteen sixties to find any urban theorists who made sense. Many of these have died within the past five years. This is the time to relearn from some of these enlightened old masters who provided logical alternatives to the reductionist way we do things today but, weren’t listened to. There is so much to discover.
Rather than being scared of physical planning because of previous failures, we need to invest a new confidence in the process: this time, rooted in a clear understanding of how cities evolve. We need a new approach: a system that is both progressive and enabling—a system that embraces continuous feedback as a core operating principle. We need to embrace complexity and see the city in the context of a complex adaptive system and not in terms of utopian dreams that will never be realised. We need to think and act like gardeners, nurturing and creating urban change, not mechanics, continually looking to fix the problem. There’s no better time than now to have a serious debate about how we can free ourselves from the constraints that limit us.