BOOKS
Destroyer or Preserver
By THOMAS PAKENHAM ONE day last July about fifty of the world's most successful town planners, architects and economists held a private Summit on board a luxury yacht moored off the island of Delos, in the Cyclades, and in that holy spot a pronounce- ment was issued that has since come to be known as the Delos Declaration. By the end of this cen- tury, we were informed, every town, city and village in the world could be built afresh; indeed, we could do more building in the next forty years than the world had accomplished in the last 1,963. For most of us who live and work in towns or cities it is hard to get this noble vision in focus. After so laboriously trying to bring our existing cities up to standard, could we really consider knocking them down and starting again from scratch? Bedeviled by the traffic problem, some of us have even begun to lose faith in the idea of the city.
Now it is a mystery why we ever believed our grotesque predictions about the motor-car. Year after year the motor habit grew, as the national income rose, and the motor industry staked our economy on the continuing ascent of the graph, But as planners we staked everything on the hope that the motor habit would pass. The result is that the avalanche of cars ahead will catch old and new towns absurdly unprepared. Already cars have begun to take over large parts of our towns: Bath's parades, Salisbury's precincts, Oxford's Broad, Cambridge's Lion Yard. Yet, as we see from the United States, there is a Parkinson's Law about cars. As the quiet places of the city dissolve to make room for motorways and parking lots, more cars rush in to take up the space, and even such heroic self-sacrifice of the city proves self-defeating.
At this critical moment, with a great wave of urban road-building ahead, Professor Colin Buchanan's monumental book* comes to our rescue. Commissioned by Mr. Marples in the spirit of apres mot le deluge, it is the most im- portant government report for some years, and the most eloquent book about town planning since Lewis Mumford's Culture of Cities came out nearly thirty years ago. Three other new bookst on other aspects of the same problem supply a useful record of successes and short- comings, and in their vision of the future they have a distinctly proto-Buchananist flavour about them. But Buchanan is the first man in this country, or indeed, one hears, any country, to put the traffic problem on a slab, as he says, dissect it and show what, in principle, can be done about it. It turns out, of course, that the traffic problerh is not really a problem of traffic at all, but of reshaping towns. A Renaissance figure spanning three professions—of architect, planner
* TRAFFIC IN TOWNS. Report of the Working Group under Professor Colin Buchanan set up by the Minister of Transport. (H.M.S.O., £2 10s.) LONDON 2000. By Peter Hall. (Faber, 55s.) NEW TOWNS FOR OLD: THE TECHNIQUE OF URBAN RENEWAL. By Wilfred Burns. (Leonard Hill, 42s.) Tim NEW TOWNS: THE ANSWER TO MEGALOPOLIS. By Frederic J. Osborn and Arnold Whittick. (Leonard Hill, 63s.)
and engineer—Buchanan has worked out a pre- cise balance for reconciling the conflicting claims of traffic and civilised towns, or, as he would put it more precisely, of 'accessibility and the en- vironment.' Buchanan's precision is sometimes his undoing as a propagandist (what hope is there of getting people to go to the stake for an 'environment'?), but generally his prose sparkles with fire unexpected from a profes- sional civil servant, as he was till he took a chair at Imperial College a couple of months ago. His devastating analysis of our urban troubles and his carefully hinged range of choices for the future ensure that philosophically, at least, we have now crossed an important watershed.
The book opens with a look over the abyss. By 'Horizon Year,' the year when we shall be fully motorised, there will be forty million vehicles in Britain, about four times as many as today. How ever can towns hope to remain civilised? Buchanan put the question a slightly different way: what new urban arrangements are needed to give better living conditions and allow more people to drive their cars to work or to shop? His reply is to devise a cellular pattern for towns and cities, rigidly divided like a honey- comb. There are living-and-working areas (the honey) and the road network around (the comb). In microcosm, most large buildings are already arranged in this way—that is, the rooms are kept quite separate from the corridors that sur- round them. Buchanan's 'urban rooms' are the parts of the town that people live and work in —the groups of shops, offices, markets, museums, piazzas, gardens, parks and, of course, flats and houses. They are not made completely free from motor traffic, any more than rooms are kept free from moving people, but traffic is limited to traffic that has business inside the urban rooms, by sealing off all through roads. Pedes- trians have one system of paths and ways within the areas, traffic has another on the network of roads outside.
The trouble is that many of our urban rooms —even a room only a mile across—would attract so much traffic that life inside would soon be- come impossible. For this Buchanan has devised his own law as an antidote to Parkinson's. In plain language it comes to this: If you want decent towns to live in you must agree on decent standards of comfort, safety and so on, and stick to these; then it's only a question of deciding how much you can afford to reconstruct the town to allow more people to drive about in it; but a time will come in a big city when you find that there is just not enough space to build all the roads needed, no matter what you are pre- pared to spend.
To illustrate the honeycomb principle, Buchanan and his team went on to do a series of planning exercises, including three alterna- tives, for the couple of square miles of central London south-east of Regent's Park. In the first alternative they tried the effect of total re- development. The result turned out to be some- thing on the lines of a gigantic liner: cars stored in the hold, service traffic on the car deck above, and three pedestrian decks above for shops and offices, joined by escalators to each other and to the patchwork of squares and gardens pre- served among the buildings. This sort of urban sandwich re-emerges on a larger scale in Dr. Hall's vision of the future: 'as the Dumills drive out of London by the New Kent Motorway, the expressways of London are a brilliant sight. When the first ones were built back in the late Sixties the pessimists confidently predicted that they would wreck London. By 2000 most people admitted that they gave it a new dimension, now trenching by the side of railway lines, now flying over the rooftops, now burrowing through the heart of the reconstructed shopping and office centres Buchanan oilers, as we have seen, one recom- mendation—minimum urban standards—and a range of choices. At one end of the scale is the vastly expensive London sandwich, at the other an area redeveloped only enough to arrange essential access and have decent urban stan- dards. Even to accept these urban standards will demand enormous political courage and skill for either party. For it means nothing less than re- versing the Ministry of Transport's policy for traffic in towns. Almost all those laboriously prepared development plans, the fruit of count- less public inquiries, must now go into the waste- paper basket. They would be, in Buchanan's own words, 'fatally damaging to the environment.' More politely, the same point is made by Mr. Burns, Newcastle's planning officer, whose book on the techniques of urban renewal includes a chilling account of current progress. A few towns, like Exeter, have provided modest sanc- tuaries for the pedestrian, foolproof against the worst that cars can do. But between these islands the pedestrian has to fend for himself. In town after town the road system has already been 'im- proved' and more 'improvements' are planned which together will rip the heart out of the towns. Mr. Burns describes the bombed cities, Bristol, Portsmouth or Plymouth, whose oppor- tunities for redevelopment glowed so brightly after the war. With dreadful single-mindedness the engineers have now driven their dual carriageways between the chain stores. Mr. Burns comments on Bristol : the redevelopment so far undertaken has certainly eased the flow of traffic; i.e., it has made it easier for pedestrians to get seriously hurt.' In fact, except for Coventry, the first big town in Europe to domes- ticate the motor-car, the bombed cities have been dealt a worse blow by their highway engineers than by the blitz. Even in purely traffic terms the results are dismal. So conservative were the engineers' estimates of future demand for cars that those roundabouts designed for the millen- nium are already beginning to seize up.
The New Towns, our greatest post-war achieve- ment in town planning, come nearest to passing the Buchanan test, largely because they were designed by teams, in which architect worked side by side with engineer, and because their planners had complete landlord control over all buildings. New solutions have emerged, archi- tecturally exciting as well as safe and conveni- ent: the romantic arbours of Stevenage, the great piazza of Harlow and Cumbernauld's tower- ing hill-town, the San Giminiano of Scotland. These and all the other New Towns Sir Frederic Osborn describes with the pride appropriate to one of the founding fathers of the movement. But, as Buchanan points out, even one of the latest batch of New Towns, Cumbernauld, is not designed for full motorisation. Its eight gigantic cloverleaves will seize up long before Horizon Year. Earlier New Towns will come to grief still sooner as they clog up with parked cars, their play streets invaded, their leafy neighbourhoods and cheerful piazzas lost in the surrounding desert of Mini-Minors.
Buchanan concludes that all towns over 80,000 in size will have to restrict some of their traffic. Precisely how? The school of left-wing econo- mists to which Dr. Hall belongs want us to use the price mechanism as the brake. Unlike Buchanan, Dr. Hall sees it not as a possible means of adjusting traffic to the network, but as the essential preliminary to assessing the traffic problem. If people have to pay the real cost, he argues, of the use of road and parking space in the great high plateau of property values at the city centre, more car commuters would use public transport and far fewer new roads would be necessary.
The real question, once the new urban stan- dards are accepted, is not how to restrict traffic — there are a wide range of methods at hand— but what limit to set. And here any government will find itself in a basic dilemma. As Buchanan shows, at the root of our feeling of love-hate for the motor-car is an idiotic divorce between the scale of private and public spending. We pay £900 million a year for vehicles and £100 million for the new roads to accommodate them. If we can't afford to spend roughly nine times more on roads we shall have to spend less on cars. Presumably this might entail nationalising the motor industry, or at any rate imposing a highly unpalatable car tax. But can we, on the other hand, afford to spend nearly as much on roads as on education?
Fortunately, the choice between more or less radical urban renewal in order to let more people use their cars does not involve, I think, such a clear-cut conflict of social priorities. It returns us to the luxury yacht and the Delos Declaration. Town rebuilding on a massive scale is now not only within our technical resources. It is essen- tial to society. All our town planning problems are beginning to converge at this point, and all interests coincide. To redeem the twilight areas, to restore museums and theatres to the heart of cities, to uproot industry and plant parks in the centre, tp build up the North to rival the South, this is going to need little short of total renetval for the industrial towns. It is already overdue. But could the motor-car, the destroyer, really turn preserver? The machine has always been amazingly manoeuvrable; if the motorist threw in his weight with the present campaign for urban renewal, he might just tip the balance.
Previous page
