Cities for the Next Millennium
ARCHITECTURE
By TERENCE BENDIXSON
HARDLY had Arnold Wesker's play about building a City Beautiful burst upon the world, than a Cabinet sub-committee was con- sidering the building of three huge new cities on Severn-side, Humber-side and at Dundee. Wesker may not have hit the jackpot dramatically but he seems to have been remarkably prescient.
The recommendation for the cities came from an official committee that has been studying the distribution of population in Britain up to the end of the century. Juggling with an expected increase of possibly twenty million, the task was to decide how many more people might be housed in existing towns and cities, and how many could reasonably be lured elsewhere, by the prospect of jobs and enticing living conditions. The reason- ing of the long-term population committee has yet to be made public by George Brown, but this is not the first time that the ins and outs of putting a quart of Britons into a pint pot of islands have been examined. Ever since the report of the Barlow Commission on the geographical location of industrial population was published in 1941, and even before, the subject has attracted academic attention. Now it appears to be oozing into the realm of public policy, as a logical continuation of earlier decisions to set up regional planning machinery and to tighten the screws of control over employment in and around London and Birmingham.
The proposals of the long-term population committee are an attempt to look at the physical resources of Britain as a whole, instead of in regional bits and pieces, and they therefore break away from the accepted practice of taking work to the workers. This policy, if continued indefi- nitely, would result in millions more people being obliged to live in already overcrowded areas such as South Lancashire and central Scotland. It would also perpetuate a demography dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, based on water power and coal fields that are no longer our bread and butter.
If we look beyond the immediate objective of reinvigorating the Victorian workshop regions, the need is to provide their inhabitants, or their inhabitants' children, with alternative cities to live in. This .may strike horror into the hearts of People filled with visions of belching sweat-shops, such as Warrington or Hanley, but their reaction is against one particular manifestation of the city.
Cities offer a choice of jobs, friends, schools and entertainments that are drawing people into them, from Canada to China. The task is to create new ones that are a pleasure to live in, that combine the visual delights of the village with the economic and social benefits of largeness. In other words, we need to build cities that are as much of an improvement on existing ones as Inigo Jones's Pioneering square at Covent Garden was on the medieval alleys of Tudor London.
This is a daunting job, and even in Britain with twenty-odd new towns under our belts—a bulk of experience shared by no other European country—we are pretty ill-prepared. Nor is it likely that a tithe of the time and expertise that are being poured into the Concord, or into satellite launching projects, will be spent on city- making. The priorities of our society are up the spout so far as that is concerned—although an important step was taken this year when Richard Crossman set up a Centre for Environmental Studies, under the chairmanship of Lord Llewelyn-Davies, with money to spend on re- search grants from the Treasury and the Ford Foundation. Unfortunately nothing has been heard of the Centre since, except rumours that a retired civil servant is to be its director-general.
The trouble with building cities is that it prompts questions of a most fundamental kind. The issue at stake is not overspill but civilisation. It is impossible to build a city without a clear view of the society that will live in it. A com- munity bent on defence will huddle together inside ramparts, a community of traders in livestock will form around a market-place where goods can be exchanged—but what should a twentieth- century city for a million Britons be like? Current thinking about city-making tends to be dominated by theories about transport or building. Among the transport pundits, linear cities are all the rage. These generally take the form of beads on a string, each bead being a neighbourhood of houses, a town centre or a cluster of factories, and the string being a monorail or, in the case of Arthur Ling's plan for Runcorn new town in Cheshire, a special road for buses. In most cases the aim is not to replace the motor-car, but to make public transport so speedy, and to bring it so close to the majority of points of departure and arrival, that it is often more convenient than private transport. But this has a special effect on buildings. In order to make the journeys on foot to and from the monorail or bus stops as short as possible, it is necessary to pack the buildings close together and encircle them with compensat- ing parkland.
This concentration is rejected by other pundits, who advocate a greater dispersal of buildings in order to give their occupants room to expand. In this type of plan, there is still a sprinkling of park, but transport tends to get channelled into a grid- iron of motorways at about half-mile intervals— as in Llewelyn-Davies and Weeks's proposals for Washington new town in County Durham. Still, the gridirons generally show the sinuous influence of Capability Brown, and are not so ruthlessly geometric as the digital streets of Manhattan.
There is no corresponding conflict of approach over how to build the houses, merely a difference of opinion as to how far the mass-production of buildings should be taken. Certainly a housing factory is bound to be as much a part of the service equipment of any new city as a telephone exchange or a university. These factories will make prefabricated panels or rooms and the result will be pattern-book architecture as in the eighteenth century. Now, as then, the difference between good and bad will depend on how groups of buildings are fitted into the landscape, and whether they enclose interesting or boring spaces.
And what of the people who may be arriving, in an almost Klondike rush, at these brand new
places? The reception of up to 6,000 newcomers a year at new towns has already demonstrated the difficulties of bringing together so many strangers who don't know where to find a plumber or how to get to the post office. Yet to build a city for a million people over thirty years would involve receiving 33,000 people a year. It is problems of the kind that make it almost ine%itable that any new city will be a cluster of new towns strung around an existing town--which presumably explains why the long-term population committee has looked in the direction of Hull. Bristol, and Dundee. This is only a taste of the implications of building on such an unprecedented scale. Everything from house heating to development corporations will have to be looked into, between now and the 1970s. when work on building these cities is likely to begin in earnest.
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