ARTS
Tear up the old rule books
Where should 4 million new dwellings be built? Alan Powers investigates Whenever an estate of newly built detached houses appears over a cornfield in the course of a country drive, it produces a pain in the pit of the stomach.
The report of the government's Urban Task Force, entitled Towards an Urban Renaissance (E&FN Spon, f19.95), is a painkiller for such moments which has received wide publicity since its launch in June. The report is worth the hype, in that it represents a lot of thinking and informa- tion processing by a well chosen group of professionals. It is not designed to be read as literature, but it would reward reading and provide the basis for informed conver- sation, in the pub or at the dinner table.
Why, ask those people who do not live in these pain-provoking houses, should such evidently Ugly and apparently uneconomi- cal settlements be the main pathway for social aspiration? Are there not other ways of living? Setting aside, momentarily, the report's answers to these questions, the driving force behind it includes an equal and opposite condition, the vacuum of waste land or derelict buildings in industri- al districts, which, it is hoped, will relieve the pressure on those precious, over- farmed acres and their waving corn and suck into trownfield sites' some at least of the demand for 4.1 million new dwellings by the year 2020. This is rather like upturn- ing an egg timer, because the passageway between the full and empty glass bulbs is so narrow that any movement through it (rep- resented by 'loft' conversions in Clerken- well or central Manchester) so far only accounts for a small fraction of the sand grains looking for a home.
Towards an Urban Renaissance is mostly about the means of opening that bottle- neck, which has been created over a long Period by statistical methods which have lost sight of the larger picture and failed to look at things from the viewpoint of people on the ground. It has been reinforced by legislation, planning practice, insurance Policies and the provision of services such as schools and hospitals. The sections of the report dealing with economic incentives to Increase living densities in cities are among the most interesting reading. If taken up by government, they would consti- tute a considerable interference in a mar- ket for housing and lifestyles which is only nationally 'free' since it is constructed on fiscal and legislative assumptions that have become counter-productive. It needs planners to tear up their outdat- ed rule books on densities and road engi- neering safety factors, it needs insurance companies to level their rates on car insur- ance so that 'discrimination by postcode' ceases, and it requires flexible amounts of government funding to set the wheels in motion.
Whether such a freeing of the waters will produce the desired result is another mat- ter, for the report acknowledges that sup- ply and demand are at least geographically distant from each other. While developers are not demons, they have as yet few grounds for believing that imagination and forward thinking are ways of achieving profitability. Hence the other purpose of the report, to suggest how 'city' living can be made more attractive than the great majority of people so far believe it to be. This is a good thing in itself, made more practicable by getting a greater concentra- tion of people together. There are pho- tographs of exemplary projects, many of which are in Holland, very clean and decent and not frighteningly 'modern'. We even have a few of our own straws in this wind, like the redevelopment of Hulme, an inner suburb of Manchester.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place.
In scaled invention or true artistry.
wrote Ezra Pound in the Pisan Cantos. Towards an Urban Renaissance necessarily deals in large numbers and non-specific diagrams relating to structures of planning and transport, but its aims can be achieved only by working with particular and localised situations. This may sound like a truism, but in the ability to combine differ- 'You failed on a poorly executed drive-by shooting.' ent levels of scale lies the secret of its suc- cess. The word `sustainability' is frequently invoked, which is partly something that can be calculated numerically. through energy inputs and outputs but also, in a more sub- tle way, has to do with human happiness. This is as much a political affair as a matter of devising an ideal form of physical envi- ronment. The report duly acknowledges the virtual breakdown of local democracy in the 1980s. It has only fitfully begun its reconstruction, and in the completion of this process lies one of the greatest chal- lenges to the central government which has commissioned the report and has hitherto done little of its promised delegation of power to the English regions.
Towards an Urban Renaissance has pro- duced a critical reaction from advocates of less planning and interference, who suggest that not only has the horse bolted but that the horseless carriage can never again be backed into its urban stable and the door shut on it. As has happened before, those at the top (wearing their new Urban Task Force hats) are telling those lower down what is good for them, and their brave attempt to simplify a very complex problem risks becoming another set of rules. The two positions of planning and anti-planning are not necessarily incompatible, but their reconciliation demands a more flexible, well-informed and responsible form of local politics far removed from the present planning system. This includes the generali- ty known as 'countryside' on which the Urban Task Force have politely turned their backs, failing to recognise the com- plete interdependence of the two states and the legitimacy of people's desire to live close to nature and share in the responsi- bility for its well-being.
In urban and rural regions, planning needs to recognise the small ways in which happiness can be created, almost uncon- sciously, through the language of places, strung together to make a version of a musical sequence, responding to nature and amplifying it through human interven- tion. We all know these places and moments of delight, such as garden gates tied with string, flowers growing in the cracks of walls and trees overhanging roads, and have seen them tidied away through the process of suburbanisation. I am suspicious of the word 'vibrant' which is applied as a mark of esteem to the 'cities' of this urban renaissance. A gentle hum is good enough for most people and, like the music of the aeolian harp which Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other Romantics put in their open windows, it is produced by the harmonious and spontaneous interac- tion of man and nature.
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