urbanisation & planning: all articles

 

 

Moscow, famously, has a traffic problem. But apart from moving the capital, there isn't really an answer, points out Mumin Shakirov

Jane Jacobs's book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" changed the way people thought about urban planning, the street and the character of cities. Roger Scruton reflects on the relevance of its message today.

In “Cotters and Squatters – housing’s hidden history”, a veteran anarchist, writer, and educator explores the story of squatter settlements in England and Wales. From our cave-dwelling recent ancestors to the Diggers and the industrial revolution, from 20th mass squatting to modern claims that ‘The Land is Ours’, does the one-night house hold a key to the crisis in rural settlement?

Urban areas in Britain have acquired a degraded feel in parallel to the decline in public services. The director of the Pedestrians’ Association, which recently launched its “living streets” initiative, argues that a revival of walking is an essential part of a wider strategy to make public spaces flourish. The experience of Birmingham shows what can be done.

From the outside, planning decisions can seem bureaucratic and even corrupt. From the viewpoint of a local councillor in England’s rural North Wiltshire, the role of planning officers is a reminder of their human, and honourably professional, dimension.

The contrasting legacy of two “artist-architects”, each active in India on either side of the country’s independence, illustrates the need to see the architectural past in aesthetic terms. And it is Lutyens’ elemental classicism, not the modernism of his counterpart, that is a rich source of learning today.

Roger Scruton and Sophie Jeffreys are right that a planning process which fits people’s needs must be aesthetic rather than only economic or technical. But people seek novelty as well as coherence in their urban experience. The static certainties of classicism cannot contain modern longings. We must make cities feel, and be, ‘creative’.

Modernist architecture is more than a failure; it is a mistake. It has degraded our cities and ruptured the dialogue across generations essential to civic life. The future lies in a return to the principles of classicism: “fittingness” of building and settlement, part and whole, people and dwellings.

Land scarcity in Britain is a myth spun into fact by planning controls. To this extent Jules Lubbock is right. But the way towards individual freedom and community rebirth, says Prince Charles’s favourite architect, is not to collapse the controls, but through the careful release of millions of plots of land in variegated new settlements.

Jules Lubbock is wrong: dismantle the planning system, and people will want three cars and an acre, as in the US. The result? An urban disaster.

Passion spills over the fields of green and brown where a calm assessment of real alternatives is needed. Progress towards sustainability is possible, but requires a portfolio approach that addresses the needs of different environments and geographical regions.

The new urbanism represented by Richard Rogers is shallow and authoritarian. Its impulse to confine people in high-density settlements has disastrous social and economic effects. The truly radical answer is to dismantle the planning system, allow people to live where they wish, and nurture a creative mix between town and country. Let Swindon breathe, the Yorkshire Dales thrive, and Glasgow flourish!

City & Country’s two editors, one from the Wiltshire countryside and the other from Hackney in London, join forces in search of a new urban-rural relationship.