Today most people live in cities and conurbations, and their population is growing world- wide. According to the World Resource Institute and the Institute for Environment and Development, in 1986 and 1988–9 the urban population of Europe was 71.6% and that of the UK 92.1% of the respective total population (Elkin and McLaren with Hillman, 1991, p. 5). The city is accordingly the place that influences and shapes the life of a vast number of people. For this reason alone the quality of the city is of paramount importance. This in turn highlights the significance of planning and designing the city.
There are other and even more significant reasons why planning and designing the city is so important today. The most crucial one is that current urban development and urban living are today regarded by many as ultimately unsustainable because of the destructive burden they place on the environment. One of the causes for this destructive influence is believed to be the city’s very form and structure, which urgently require improvement.
This in turn highlights the vital role urban planning and design have to play in a process that attempts to rescue the global environment and with it the hinterland upon which the city utterly depends. It is therefore essential to spell out the significant contribution urban planning and design can and should make towards sustainable urban development and living by improving the city’s form and structure and, as a consequence, making the city a more people-friendly place and reducing its destructive environmental impact.
Urban Design Can Help Enhance the City’s Advantages
It is questionable whether so many people would live in cities if city life did not offer at least some advantages over living in the country. The city’s most important advantages are often said to be that it offers choice, an exciting lifestyle; it provides access to services and facilities; it has stimulating features and represents an intellectual challenge;
it offers comradeship; and, most obviously and importantly, it offers workplaces (Fig.
1.09).
1–09. Las Ramblas, Barcelona
However, all cities are different and some offer their citizens more advantages than do others. It is the main objective of good urban planning and design to create new advantages or enhance the existing advantages a ‘good’ city has to offer. A list of such advantages can be constructed by following Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs (Maslow, 1954). The various demands on the city thus derived form an excellent basis for the measurement of the quality of a city by establishing what levels of human needs and aspirations it is able to satisfy.
• On the basic level, a ‘good’ city provides for all the physical needs of its citizens: a place to live and work, a reasonable income, education and training, transport and the possibility to communicate, access to services and facilities.
• Beyond this, a ‘good’ city offers safety, security and protection, a visually and functionally ordered and controlled environment free of pollution, noise, accidents, crime.
• A ‘good’ city offers, furthermore, a conducive social environment. It is a place where people have their roots and children have their friends; it enables the individual to be part of a community and provides the feeling of belonging to a place, to a territory.
• Then a ‘good’ city has an appropriate image, a good reputation and prestige; it gives people a sense of confidence and strength, a status and dignity.
• Even higher up in the hierarchy of human needs, a ‘good’ city offers people a chance to be creative, to shape their personal space and to express themselves; it offers
communities the chance to shape their districts and neighbourhoods according to their needs and aspirations.
• And finally, a ‘good’ city is well designed, aesthetically pleasing, physically imageable;
a ‘good’ city is a place of culture and a work of art.
It goes without saying that urban design on its own cannot achieve a city that has all these properties, many of which depend upon social and economic conditions which need to be planned for. But design can shape the physical properties of the city and its districts in such a way that they can become the places for the fulfilment of people’s wants and
requirements.
History shows that the city has never provided for all the needs of all of its people.
There have always been some people who could ‘live the good life’ which Aristotle, in Politics, saw as the reason why people move into and stay in cities. But there have always been some people for whom the city does not provide the good life, and in today’s city the number of those living a miserable life seems to be larger then ever. Yet there are voices that tell us that cities are good for us, or at least that cities could be good for us, and for all of us ‘if strategic planning were restored, population densities maintained, public transport preferred to private cars, and urban street housing re-established and improved upon’ (Sherlock, 1991, p. 20). The suggested improvements would undoubtedly provide some of the essential qualities of a ‘good’ city as defined above, and they highlight the importance of urban planning and design.
Urban Design Can Help Diminish or Eliminate the City’s Disadvantages Clearly, the city also has, and has always had, disadvantages: it is frequently overcrowded, though not necessarily today in the UK; it is dirty, noisy, polluted, congested (Fig. 1.10).Furthermore, living in close proximity to one another may infringe upon people’s privacy and freedom, may deprive them of a truly personal space, indoor and outdoor. However, as a result of continuous urbanisation and, during recent decades, the lack of strategic urban planning and urban design to channel urbanisation into appropriate forms and structures, the city’s disadvantages have today become grave: it has started to destroy the very hinterland upon which it depends.
The City is No Longer Contained
Planning has reflected over the past century or so the principles of zoning, of the low- density mono-functional garden suburb and later of functionalism. As a consequence the city has been allowed to grow without limitation of its size and population. First the railway and later the car provided the required mobility and the city lost its compactness.
Few attempts were made to appraise the consequences of potentially limitless urban growth in terms of distances and journeys, energy consumption and pollution, congestion of roads and increasingly inaccessible central facilities. And the larger the city grew in size and population, the more congestion resulted, and the more the suburban exodus accelerated (Mumford, 1984, p. 584).
There is a counter-movement which started towards the end of the nineteenth century with people like Peter Kropotkin and Ebenezer Howard. The latter put forward a new physical form and structure for urban growth which would reintroduce a balanced and ecological relationship between the city—of limited size and population—and the countryside—of sufficient size to support the city with all necessary goods and material—as well as a balance between the varied functions of the city, again as a result of the strict limitation of its size and population. ‘lf the city was to maintain its life- maintaining functions for its inhabitants, it must in its own right exhibit the organic self- control and self-containment of any other organism’ (Mumford, 1984, p. 587). However, Howard’s model of a ‘town-cluster’, which we shall study in more detail later, was not
able to halt the growth and suburbanisation of our cities, perhaps mainly because the rate of expansion of the city in terms of land, industrial development and population was so high that control and containment would have been difficult (Mumford, 1984, p. 596).
1–10. Busy boulevard in Paris
Today the European city has, with a few notable exceptions, entered a post-industrial phase and its population is stable if not shrinking. What we have inherited, and are still continuing to develop further, is a city of huge dimensions that has by far outgrown its population. Many of the city’s workplaces, services and facilities are concentrated in a single core. The centre has lost its attraction as a place for living and people have moved into surrounding suburban housing areas and high-rise dormitories lacking any history, diversity of activities, cultural and other forms of infrastructure and a recognisable individuality with which the citizens can identify. Retail and other uses followed people into the suburbs and peripheral areas, endangering the viability of the city centre. The question has been asked whether we can speak of ‘cities’ or whether we must think in terms of ‘urban areas’ which ‘negate the concept of the city itself: they become “post- urban” phenomena, far removed from the traditional image of the pre-industrial and even 19th century city’ (Commission of the European Communities, 1990, p. 6).
The City is Zoned and Obliges People to Travel
First as a result of industrialisation, then because of the availability of mechanised transport (in the form of railways and later the car) and now because current planning often still reflects principles of functionalism, the city is zoned according to uses and this generates the need to travel from one zone to another. Of specific significance is the concentration of city-wide activities and facilities in the city centre and of housing in suburban and peripheral dormitory places. With a low average population density public transport is not really viable, not only because it has been underfunded for decades but
simply because in the suburbs and peripheral estates it cannot target a sufficient number of people to make it function economically. Therefore the car remains the more convenient and often cheaper means of inner-city transport for those who can afford it, but the ever-increasing density of vehicular traffic generates more and more pollution, congestion and stress in central areas. The problem with pollution may be solved, partly or wholly, with new emission-free fuels, but the problem of congestion remains.
During much recent political history the trend towards a car-dependent city was supported. Only in the past few years has central government in the UK made a U-turn and is now suggesting that in the city priority must be given to public transport (DoE and DoT, 1994). What has not yet been fully recognised, however, is that the objective to achieve a well-functioning, comfortable and economically viable network of public transport requires a review of land-use policies, population density and the form and structure of the city.
The City is Socially Stratified
The development of use-zones and specifically the concentration of public housing in suburban and peripheral estates—often with poor housing stock and landscaping, far from urban facilities and poorly served by public transport—makes such areas unable to fulfil all of people’s needs and, as a result, they become socially exclusive if not ‘the slums of the late 1970s and 1980s’ (Commission of the European Communities, 1990, p.
24). Those with higher incomes who can afford mobility and higher house prices move into advantaged areas in and outside the city (Fig. 1.11a). Those with lower and specifically those with no income who cannot afford mobility and higher house prices or depend upon the provision of social housing become trapped in disadvantaged areas of the city (Fig. 1.11b).
As a result, the city’s socio-economic stratification has been exacerbated to a considerable degree; there are now underprivileged areas with all the signs of deprivation including unemployment, lack of education and skills, ill health, drug abuse, vandalism and crime. In such areas, where people are physically isolated from and deprived of the economic, social, commercial and cultural life of the city, social unrest has become part of everyday life. A city with such a degree of social stratification is not sustainable. The only way to solve this problem is to make the city’s districts more equitable.
The City has a Destructive Environmental Impact
The city’s negative environmental impact has increased to an extent that now threatens the regional and global environment. The city’s hinterland that provides it with food, raw materials and energy is no longer the countryside surrounding it; now the city draws resources from all over the globe. The city has become the largest user and waster of raw materials and energy and the largest producer of liquid, solid and gaseous waste. The degree of depletion of raw materials and of pollution of land, air and water is truly unsustainable because if not reduced it will eventually destroy the very hinterland the city depends upon. Much of this has been widely documented in the literature (see Girardet, 1992; Elkin and McLaren with Hillman, 1991; Commission of the European
Communities, 1990) and is the basis of today’s intensive debate about a sustainable city form which will be reviewed in the following chapter.
1–11. Examples of housing for the privileged and underprivileged in Paris. (a) High-rise high-density housing at La Défense; (b) low-rise high- density housing on the lle de la Seine
The Role of Urban Design
As the struggle of Los Angeles with pollution and congested roads demonstrates, technological and scientific solutions may generate new and clean fuel, effective transport, continuous and renewable energy (Fig. 1.12) and the like, and behavioural changes may lead people away from a throw-away approach (a linear metabolism) to recycling and reuse of materials (a cyclic metabolism), But all these efforts need to be supported by an improvement—through urban design—of the physical characteristics of the city so that its destructive environmental impact is minimised, as proposed in a BBC2 Horizon programme, ‘California Dreaming’, shown on 11 February 1991.
It is the task of urban planning and design to enable and enhance the city’s advantages and to minimise if not eliminate the city’s disadvantages. The city must become more equitable; it must provide every citizen with a fair share of its advantages. On the other hand the city needs to be shaped so that a considerable reduction of noise and pollution is achieved, so that mobility is possible without congestion of roads and without pollu
1–12. Wind turbines in Rotterdam
tion, so that planned and spontaneous communication is possible, and so that people enjoy a high level of privacy and freedom. A ‘good’ city combines the central qualities of the traditional city—culture, exchange of ideas, a creative atmosphere, the availability of retail outlets, services and facilities—with the qualities of the suburb—privacy, solitude, freedom, quietness, good air, gardens, parks and promenades—without taking on the unsustainable characteristics of many of today’s suburban and peripheral areas—single use, low density, sprawl, monotony and car dependency.
The main objective of the first part of this book is to review the debate about a sustainable city form and structure, to formulate, as a consequence of this debate, a set of sustainability criteria for urban design, and to analyse the form and structure of city models that, I suggest, are more sustainable than today’s city.