Dreams of Cockaigne (Part Two)

Moving on from the visions of writers and filmmakers to the grand schemes of politicians, architects, planners and sundry other idealists and sometimes crazy people. I am not a fan. Too much energy and time are wasted on megalomaniac schemes far removed from the needs and desires of most of the population.

In the 1800s, at the behest of Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann turned a pestilential and overcrowded Paris into the ‘city of light’ of the Belle Époque. But the boulevards and open spaces owe as much to the wish of authoritarian governments to make it easier to control riots. In the long run it didn’t help Napoleon much; he was deposed after France came second in the Franco-Prussian War and ended his days in southeast London. 

Boulevard Montmarte 

Those lessons were not forgotten when they rebuilt Berlin and Warsaw after WW2. In contrast, the English, who preferred a laissez-faire approach to grand plans, rebuilt London after the Blitz in much the same way as they had responded to the Great Fire some 300 years earlier, by simply building anew on the same sites. Then, they ignored Christopher Wren’s rationalising master plan because it was expensive and ignored the fragmented land ownership. It is a shame they didn't learn from that when planning HS2!   

Wren's Plan for London

In the 1900s, Le Corbusier’s ‘modernist’ ideas spread from Europe around the world. His blueprint was the ‘Ville Radieuse’, and characterised by Chandigarh in India and Brasilia in Brazil. 

Ville Radieuse : The Concept

The scheme was lauded by architects and planners but wasn’t so popular with its inhabitants, who found it expensive to maintain and ill-suited to India’s climate and its growing and poor population. But at least it was built, unlike his plan for a transnational city from Barcelona to St Petersburg! Here are some pics of the latter: Chandigarh .

Chandigarh 

This is how it was partially realised (with a lot more greenery!) in Brasilia. 

Brasilia 

Lewis Mumford, a famous American planner who we will come to shortly, referred to Le Corbusier’s projects as ‘buildings in a car park’. You can make your own mind up, but I think there is an arrogance in his approach and that the world would have been better off without him.

If you want a serious dive into the history of planned city change, look for a free or secondhand copy of Mumford’s dated but comprehensive magnum opus, The Culture of Cities. (I found a free copy on an internet archive).

Jules Verne’s ideas about the inevitable growth of suburbs came to be widely accepted. In America, in the 1930s, Broadacre City was Frank Lloyd Wright’s apotheosis of suburban living, perhaps anticipating Ayn Rand in envisaging it as a settlement for all-American libertarian mini-capitalists.

Broadacre City 

Neither Le Corbusier’s nor Wright’s schemes were realised in anything like their totality and ran aground on rocky outcrops of financial and political reality. All were built upon the ubiquity of motor cars and cheap land. Later, Wright made a name for building nice but unaffordable houses, and Le Corbusier by selling his ideas elsewhere, mostly to autocratic regimes keen to look modern.

Appropriately enough, Wright’s massive model of Broadacre ended up in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and his real legacy is the attempt to get us to love a concrete modernism. A frequent complaint about these schemes is their lack of sensitivity to more traditional patterns of living; we often respond more emotionally than rationally to these attempts to reshape our lives and homes by people who think they know best what is good for us. Maybe this found its ultimate expression in J.G. Ballard’s novel ‘Super Cannes’, where the inhabitants of the hyper-functional modernist (and white) ‘Eden Olympia’ business park estate ended up murdering each other out of stress and boredom. 

Ballard

Hubris wasn’t confined to foreign parts. Fifty years ago there was talk in Britain of a floating city in the sea on the Dogger Bank off Great Yarmouth. The area is now covered in wind farms, an emergent reality not dreamed of then! 

City on theDogger Bank 

It isn’t difficult to find current candidates. As I write, news has broken that the Saudi government are backsliding on their commitment to the futuristic Neom desert city project, planned to cover an area the size of Belgium. Even for their oil-stuffed coffers, it has proved too much. Meanwhile, Trump’s son-in-law has declared that the American notion of a Gaza Riviera is planned to be a ‘catastrophic success’, so no ‘Plan B’ was necessary. Many others exist primarily in promotional videos and consultants' fee invoices. See:

https://bold-awards.com/8-futuristic-cities-shaping-urban-landscapes/

Many wild schemes started either with architects, who understandably prioritised the visual, or politicians, who prioritised the social. (I particularly liked architect Will Alsop's millenium idea of remodelling Barnsley as a walled Tuscan hill town!). In both cases, aggrandisement is as much a leitmotif as practicality, but in Barnlsey's case you have to admire their chutzpa! 

Barnsley? 

Looking back, who wouldn’t draw conclusions about power relationships from the intimidating scale of Pyongyang or the plans for new capitals of Equatorial Guinea or Indonesia? Others, like Abuja and Brasilia, seem primarily designed to give officials a nicer place to work and present a modern face that is somewhat at odds with the countries that spawned them. An exception, for the tourists at least, might be the mammoth schemes in the Gulf states, where I assume they believe that money will prove a defense against rising temperatures and sea levels.

Britain has a long history of planning new suburbs and settlements. I was involved in it myself. A frontrunner was Patrick Geddes, a Francophile Scot whose predilections in the late 1800s were more sociological than architectural and who was generally more interested in "constructive and conservative surgery" rather than the "heroic, all of a piece schemes". 

Geddes 

His ideas were followed by Ebenezer Howard, whose book ‘Garden Cities of To-morrow’ led to the creation of Letchworth and Welwyn, places that are to some extent all of a piece, but which are more modest than heroic. They provide a cautionary note. Howard’s ideas were diluted by financial shortfalls and design modifications that he didn’t approve of; the houses were never really as ‘affordable’ as intended, and high-maintenance layouts are ill-suited to modern realities. They also took up a lot of land and there is a decision to make about whether we want denser towns or less accesible countryside. 

Letchworth

The idea too off worldwide, Canberra in Australia is an example, and they do look better than the post-war ‘New Towns’ like Milton Keynes, Cumbernauld, Skelmersdale and the rest, where super-rational, monotonous housing estates and a bit of functional greenery have been draped around a boxy shopping centre and faceless office blocks. If the former has become relatively prosperous and the others not, this has everything to do with location and little with the architecture. The housing is usually the standard product of the volume housebuilders.

For entertainment, here are some ideas about designing for the future, dating back to when the New Towns were built. 1960s Modernism

More recently, a re-import from America has been held up as a model settlement for the future. Poundbury is King Charles' privileged indulgence near Dorchester in the Duchy of Cornwall, where his love of classical design has been realised in a regressive and nostalgic muddle of the aesthetic of a village and the reality of an urban extension. Many like it, but to me it looks artificial, like a Potemkin village and reminds relicas built in China which I blogged about here: Thames Town Shanghai. It is now virtually abandoned.

Thames Town. Shanghai 

The architect/provocateur Rem Koolhaas said that “the metropolis struggles to meet a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so it absolutely coincides with his desires.” They might be your desires, Rem, but you cannot assume that they are mine. There is always a worry about architects assuming they know what is best for other people, but it is clear that tastes vary and what is rational in one era and one place doesn’t always make sense in another. The idea shown below is 'Interface'. I imagine it looks best from a helicopter. 

Some years ago, you could try your hand at city building. The SimCity game is an example; born in 1989 and dying in 2013, it was basically a video representation of a spreadsheet covering the various constraints and trade-offs in planning towns, with mistakes leading to pitfalls ranging from virus escapes from labs to lions roaming the street and outbreaks of pie throwing. I was good at it, cramming a vast population of (mostly housed and employed) pixelated victims into my 14” screen. But the cities you could create were very much the car-centred and grid layout sprawl of contemporary America. I am very glad I wasn’t one of those pixels. 

Sim City 

If you could have transposed my ‘Sim City’ into real life and represented it in a film, I suspect that it would be Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Clockwork Orange’. Released in 1971, when skinheads were in their pomp, and mainly shot in Thamesmead in south-east London, it set nightmare scenes of uncontrolled urban violence in the then new, vast and unloved 1960s social housing settlement. In a neat juxtaposition of the relationship between the media and the society it represents, the film was blamed for kicking off ‘copycat’ delinquency, and Kubrick withdrew it. 

Clockwork Orange

Large-scale planned schemes of this sort have not, on the whole, worked out well. There is a good critique of the Thamesmead scheme here: Thamesmead : Failed Architecture.  The current tokenistic response policy response is to rebrand the estate as a ‘Quarter’, build a new ‘vibrant hub’ and re-equip the play space, the aim being maximum visible impact at minimum cost.

In some ways, parts of the future have already appeared, and sometimes the writers are better at gauging what will come to pass than, for instance, master planners. As the new emerges from the rubble of the old, a lot of the opportunities and threats seen in the movies are coming to pass. Some of the novels, such as Snow Crash, are positively prescient, in much the same way as Orwell, Jules Verne and Arthur C Clarke were. As William Gibson says, ‘the future is here but not very evenly distributed.’ 

William Gibson : Mona Lisa Overdrive 

The phantasmagoria of grand designs often have dubious social and political foundations and struggle to cope when technology changes faster than society with its currents of evil left unchecked and carried on tides of totalitarianism and nationalism. As Leonardo said, “the greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” Maybe we need a shortcut to seeing our cities in a new light? (In the imaginary Emerald City in Oz, everything looked green because they gave you green-tinted glasses on entry). 

Oz : The Emerald City 

Cities are complicated social, political and economic constructs, and most of their characteristics are not planned or gifted but emergent and the product of happenstance. Planning on a grand scale needs more than a dollop of authoritarianism but also needs to accommodate the likelihood of change. And it has to be coaxed into patterns which at least don’t obstruct its ability to respond to new challenges. So to my mind, practical plans must attempt to fuse those layers and not assume a blank slate.

For instance, if you build on green spaces, you are unlikely to get them back in the future, and if a place needs a lot of maintenance to keep its youthful good looks, it won’t get it. Budgets rule. Yet the dreamers of great dreams don’t start with that in mind. Some start with a ‘one size fits all’ solution, which actually fits very few, or treat it as a giant builder game. Others simply want to show off whizzy tech and radical architecture. In many places, such as the Gulf states, their high-rise millionaire’s paradise is built on the backs and the bones of the poor. And at the end of it all, as Hamlet put it, Denmark will still be a prison. 

Dubai Marina 

The cities in the world that are most appealing as places to live tend to be a real mixture of old and new. The new ones seem to lack visual interest, character, attractions and entertainment, and while places like Venice or Marrakesh are great to visit, they might not be the best places to live.

Venice: Keep to the footpath! 

It would be helpful if city planners could look back at the experience in the past and at how few mega-schemes have come to fruition and met the goals that were set for them.

None of this is intended to cramp your imagination. But that isn’t really the point, is it? My target here is the urban punditocracy of politicians and planners. It would pay to confront inconvenient truths and develop more honest and clear-eyed ideas about the trends that might have staying power and where they might take us. What will happen when the world gets warmer? And is there any chance of getting teenagers off mobile phones if playing fields are built over by estates with no provision for them? Maybe they should pay attention to the novelists whose plots are based on extrapolating trends rather than to assume that they are always just passing fads. 

We also need to ask harder questions about which visions come packaged with credible aspirations and implementation plans and which are not predicated on riding roughshod over the sensibilities of ordinary people. (The Dutch do this so much better than we do, but they too now have a housing shortage and serious environmental problems).

In short, changing places needs to be seen as an open-ended process, not a one-off design; it is the journey that matters, not the destination, and we won’t get the cities we want; we will get the ones we collectively deserve.