Urban places are essentially manifestations of organised chaos. Some are great places but many are not. Ensuring urban places are great is key to the quality of life of the greater part of the world’s population.
Yet most people don’t really understand what makes a great urban place and often people don’t appreciate how hard it is or how long it takes to deliver positive change in the city. People can usually set out what they want in a city, but quite often don't know how that can be achieved. In some cases people seek other features which conflict with achieving the characteristics they seek. For example, many people want to be able to drive and park everywhere. But they also want the places they work, walk and shop not to feel like urban motorways choked with cars. Or they seek a large house sat in a large garden, with a vibrant local pub nearby. But if everyone lives in big houses with big gardens it means relatively few people live in a given area, and if the density is too low there just won’t be enough people to support that local pub.
As a species we have an unfortunate habit of looking at cities from the perspective of individual buildings or from above like birds. We watch programmes like Grand Designs, we portray cities by long shot images taken from a drone hovering high above. Yet the space we occupy is at street level, in the spaces between the buildings. The way these buildings interface with that space is what we experience. Many cities are obsessed with vanity buildings, yet in many such places when you get down to the street level, the places people occupy are often barely habitable and choked with cars.
Just look at this promotional picture of Dubai:
And view the street level from Google:
Clearly the street scene here is not the nicest place from which to experience the city, but it is the place where humans experience it from.
You will never experience the city from the perspective the promotional shot suggest.
For the half century or so from the end of the second Great War, cities were viewed as problems. People proclaiming to be experts hacked into them, ripping up vast swathes of them to drop in urban expressways and brutalist buildings. Different uses were separated, homes and industry were moved from the core, many cities grew into great low-density sprawling suburban places.
As it became obvious that many of these interventions failed, it led many to mistrust those proclaiming to be experts and to a dislike in many of modern buildings, particularly in the UK. Many people still blame these modern buildings for the failure of the places they personify. Yet the responsibility for failure mostly does not lay in the buildings themselves, but in the way the buildings relate to spaces around them and to the other buildings facing them.
The pre-car city was generally structured around an interconnected grid of streets which made it easy to walk anywhere. Sat on these streets were buildings with the front of the building facing the street.The front of buildings also faced the front of other buildings and the back faced the back of others. Urban places of the post war-era broke all these basic rules: monolithic buildings were stuck in large areas of poorly designed or inaccessible green space, with the buildings not interfacing with the green spaces or the streets and with many of the green spaces barely used. Street networks were fragmented with lots of dead end roads or arteries designed for cars rather than people.
Cities are challenging places to turn crap into quality. Good urban practitioners now understand the factors necessary to make great urban places, but these factors are little understood beyond a small pool of people. Even these people are not experts, they have merely got further down the path of never ending learning. Even today multitude of different professions responsible for delivering change in the city: planners, engineers, surveyors, architects etc all too often work in silos and don’t understand the interface between each others role and unfortunately focus on individual buildings.
Actually instituting positive change in urban places is incredibly challenging as so many (often hidden from view) issues and challenges arise. Yet this is knowledge everyone should understand, knowledge the public needs to hold so it can properly engage with change in the city, enabling effective opposition to negative change and empowering people to support positive change.
If you have got this far then please watch the summary in the intro video:
Want to take a Streetview tour round the Lloyds Building CLICK HERE Just head straight on and then turn right at the traffic lights.
Done here? Move on to Section 2.
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