According to Jules Lubbock, People should be able to live where they want and not where planners or Richard Rogers and John Jackson want them to.
I agree with Lubbock and given the chance the majority of people would agree with him, too. So far, choices are extremely limited and excessively costly; Lubbock rightly points out that the limiting factors are primordially ideological and questions their legitimacy.
A collusion of contradictory interests, ranging from those of greedy landowners to those of mystic ecologists and socialist millionaires, all maintain the hollow but powerful myth about land scarcity. In order to raise attention to the scandal Lubbock needs obviously to sacrifice some sacred cows and on the way to exaggerate this or that, like the popularity of suburbia, on one hand, or the dogmatism of New Urbanism on the other.
However, it is a fact that:
- the price of urban land is excessively high due to scarcity.
- in the UK, scarcity of land is an artificially fabricated condition based on sectarian interests and not on an objective shortage.
- ,
Against the authoritarian planning controls which maintain this collective fiction, Lubbock proposes a laissez-faire, build wherever you want policy. I would say that his is an excellent polemic but not the best option for increasing and diversifying individual environmental choices.
Growing in freedom
What Jules Lubbock attacks is in fact less New Urbanism, as it has evolved in the US, than the dogmatic caricature of it as it cooked up by Richard Rogers and others in the UK. Lubbock is conscious of the authoritarianism of English planning. It goes back a long way and the recent White Papers (or the millennium village on the Greenwich Peninsula in London) are but the latest symbols. Terms such as sustainability, the people, ecology, village, urbanity etc are but brand names for selling Richard Rogerss latest needs for affirmation and domination at whatever public cost. I feel that Rogers, like any architect, deserves to be judged not primarily by what he claims and writes, but only by what and how he builds. The evidence is sufficiently overwhelming for any observer.
New urbanism is, contrary to Richard Rogerss version of it, not a transcendental ideology but a versatile technique of settling land. Even though its goal is to create or restore communities, it does not posit these as products of self-sacrificing fantasy but rather as structures which best serve the self-interests of human individuals and groups, be they families, companies or institutions, in rural or urban settings.
In order for such communities to work, they need to evolve certain patterns of public spaces, of density and size, of hierarchy, of admixture and proximity. Their complexity, however, should not result from social engineering, but needs to be allowed to grow through a variety of complementary activities developed on neighbouring plots, forming urban frontages along streets, squares, parks or countryside within an urban masterplan.
The case for New Urbanism
New Urbanism is neither a political nor a religious ideology.
New Urbanism, as defined on the Congress for New Urbanisms website, is an urban design movement that burst onto the scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. New Urbanists aim to reform all aspects of real estate development. Their work affects regional and local plans. They are involved in new development, urban retrofits, and suburban infill. In all cases, New Urbanist neighbourhoods are walkable, and contain a diverse range of housing and jobs. New Urbanists support regional planning for open space, appropriate architecture and planning, and the balanced development of jobs and housing. They believe these strategies are the best way to reduce how long people spend in traffic, to increase the supply of affordable housing, and to rein in urban sprawl.
It is a development technique that may be used or abused by any political regime; it is however profoundly marked by democratic participation, and user-satisfaction is a priority. As a theory it is based on traditional settlement patterns but as a practice it is very young. It is being complemented and perfected by experiences all around the world. It cannot, therefore, be an orthodoxy yet. The question of greenfield versus brownfield sites is not a dogmatic but a political question. In a New Urbanist perspective, Lubbocks proposal is not an existential issue, but merely a question of how much, where and in what form.
What limits the spread of New Urbanist principles in Europe is the stultifying ignorance of its principles in architectural and planning schools and professional bodies, and hence the absence of capable experts.
On the other hand, New Urbanism is not nuclear physics. Intelligent and good-willed technicians and developers can learn its principles in the literature which is now being spread by the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU) via books and the internet and above all by planning workshops (charrettes) which are now undertaken worldwide. Or you may simply visit NU sites like Poundbury, the new Dorset villages, Seaside, Celebration, Kentlands, and many other projects that are underway.
A practical ideal
New Urbanism proposes an alternative to suburban sprawl. It is not against the individual home, but proposes structures that serve the needs of individual homes. It is not against suburbia, either, if a lack of it could be identified
People are generally not scared of development but of unpractical and unpleasant forms of it.
New Urbanism is becoming popular because, after 50 years of modernisms failed promises, there exists at last a theory and a practice that delivers pleasing and practical forms of rural and urban development.
To sum up, Lubbocks proposals, of reducing the cost of building-plots by their multiplication and universal availability, can better be satisfied via New Urbanism techniques than by laissez-faire.
I suggest a concerted release of several million building-plots of various sizes and uses, grouped in about 500 new hamlets, villages, urban quarters and cities of 1,000-20,000 people placed across Britain. This would satisfy the development wishes of the majority of individuals or groups, radically deflate the cost of land and remove the pressure from the south-east. A parallel urbanization of suburbia and brownfield sites would open further avenues of urban development.
