Leave us alone
Tiffany Jenkins believes that ‘placemaking’ advocates are in danger of social engineering
‘Placemaking’ is the big new idea that will transform communities. Architects, quangos and the government are all interested in this method of improving public space. Town and city planners are embracing it enthusiastically. But, despite all the energy behind it, placemaking is backward-looking and assumes a great deal that is questionable. The process will cramp our style and sanitise our space.
Placemaking is ‘the architecture of everyday life’, explained John Sorrell, chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, recently. The thinking reverses the principles developed by Le Corbusier, as exemplified by his proposed redevelopment of Paris in the 1920s, and states that buildings should not be icons surrounded by space. Design, dramatic architecture and the wow factor are not important, it is suggested; it is the place between buildings that matters to most people. Therefore schools, streets, pavements, parks and front lawns need to be cleaned up.
The placemaking advocates have a small point. Iconic architecture has become a formula that has been replicated in too many major cities since Bilbao, with buildings often sited in an area with no thought as to why and how. Shiny and curvy buildings litter our streets, with little rhyme or reason. And the places where we live our local environment — are run down and neglected. They could do with a bit of attention.
However, proponents go too far in the claims they make for their work. It is argued that ‘their’ way of making a city or a town will create citizenship and community, will make people feel empowered and will even assist in the forming of acquaintances.
As the professors of architecture Lynda H. Schneekloth and Robert G. Shibley write in Placemaking: The Art and Practice of Building Communities, ‘It is not just about the relationships of people to their places; it also creates relationships among people in places.’ The idea is that place creates stability and happy citizens; that our local environment — if spic and span — causes comfortable and steady relationships and builds social capital. But this argument is flawed. Nice places are pleas ant, but they cannot build a new Jerusalem. Comfortable coffee houses, washed windows and green, clean playgrounds, while agreeable, do not magically create strong communities.
It is people who create partnerships and friendships — often around a common project, a shared outlook or simply just by taking a liking to each other. And we forge relationships with people at work or play not just because they live down the road or round the corner. There are times when we do not want to chat to our neighbours or smile at those we pass in the street, and it is not the job of architects to concentrate on our personal interactions.
We should be concerned about this goal to create relationships between people. When designing cities, planners should not be making it a priority to get us together. They are not matchmakers, and we can sort out whom we hang out with ourselves. Advocates of placemaking argue that the experts on a place are the local community, and it is they who should be consulted on how their environment looks and feels. There is, however, a thinly disguised longing for an idealised past, one of small towns and village life. In his speech on this issue, Bernard Hunt from HTA Architects sighed, ‘I struggle to find a single place built in the 20th century which is as enjoyable and as successful as the humblest street or square, village or urban neighbourhood built in earlier centuries.’ What if the public doesn’t want the ‘perfect’ picture this conjures up — home sweet home with a white picket fence and would prefer iconic architecture, or big concrete and modernist buildings? This view would not fit in with that of the planners, regardless of their apparently peoplecentred approach, as Lynda Schneekloth and Robert Shibley make clear: ‘Our culture denigrates the simple, mundane daily acts of maintaining the world.’ By everyday and banal, they mean ‘lovely’ activities such as ‘keeping the house clean, dealing with our wastes, rearranging the furniture, or maintaining our streets’.
When washing dishes, moving the sofa and dealing with waste is celebrated as a good thing, it is time to buy a dishwasher and get out more. There is a conservative and parochial streak in much of what is suggested by Schneekloth and Shibley. The everyday and ordinary are celebrated over the exceptional. While there is talk of the community, it is clear that what they want is a particular house-trained kind of person with a liking for organic food. There is a very clear agenda, and were the people not to agree with it they might well not be considered part of the community.
In his report ‘Living Spaces: Cleaner, Safer, Greener’, the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott made one of his more revealing comments: ‘Improving our public space is not about creating a sanitised, sterile, shrink-wrapped world.’ Which of course is what we will get. Placemaking is parochial. Advocates don’t want to create big and beautiful buildings for vibrant cities, but want instead to create communities that would resemble those in any small English town, with people doing housework and tending to their begonias.
All this sounds to me like social engineering. And put these plans with other policies which seek to control what happens in public spaces — no smoking or binge drinking, congestion charging, Anti Social Behaviour Orders for youths on street corners — and you wonder if behind what is being orchestrated is a vision of a calm and controlled group of people who drink in wine bars (just one glass, please), not raucous pubs with live, loud music and raised voices.
In fact, this vision of what makes a good place goes against the spontaneous building blocks of community. Such low expectations and the manipulation of public spaces are, in fact, anti-community. People should be able to decide for themselves which of the neighbours to talk to and how to wash their dishes — or whether to get a takeaway. Social bonds are created by exercising our right to choose with whom to congregate.
Follow the agenda of the placemakers and we will see sterile spaces without a genuine public. By all means build and experiment with buildings and the space in between them, but leave the rest alone. A sense of community spirit will develop only if people have their own space to meet, drink and do what they want to do, with whomever they want to. After all, whose place is it anyway?
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