The Sound of the anti-Suburbans

16 Nov 2005

Over 100 architects, planners and academics joined Richard Williams, Robert Adam, Jules Lubbock and Martha Schwartz for the second Prospect debate on urban anxiety.

New urbanism is fast becoming the new orthodoxy. Today the basic principals of the new urbanists – that we need to encourage people to live in urban environments, that medium density, mixed use is good and that there is something morally corrupting about suburbia – are seen as common sense to many design professionals. These ideas are grounded on a fundamental assumption that the post-war comprehensive redevelopment programmes and the New Towns were overambitious and too far reaching and that only a pragmatic, gradualist response to place making is appropriate.

The Prospect debate, entitled Urban Anxieties, was inspired by a new book published by an Edinburgh-based academic, Richard Williams (The Anxious City, Routledge, 2005). Williams asks some highly challenging questions about the attitudes and assumptions that underpin contemporary urban policy. He argues that we are creating new city centres that are geared to an urban lifestyle that is alien to most of the city’s residents and users. Here is an edited transcript of the speeches given by each panel member.

Richard J Williams has been lecturer in the department of History of Art in Edinburgh since 2000. He teaches visual culture from 1945 to the present, with particular interests in the representation of the city, critical theory and sculpture. Richard Williams\'s current research focuses on the modern city, in particular its representation in architectural discourse.
I want to preface my remarks; whatever my criticism of contemporary urbanism, I couldn’t do it without the work of contemporary architects and urbanists. I found something admirable in everything that I wrote about. They have produced remarkable things, particularly Martha Schwartz’s work in Manchester. My criticism really is for the clients, which are in some senses ourselves. I wanted to question the assumptions that are developing about city life because any common sense view needs interrogation.
My book The Anxious City looks at how that concept of anxiety might have a broader relevance for the city as a whole. My argument looks at the picturesque, but it is motivated by a real fear of my own, that we retreat into picturesque aesthetics when we fear the present. When cities develop a neurotic fixation with the picturesque, they are probably on their last legs.
What did I mean by anxiety? I didn’t mean realistic urban fears such as the fear of terrorism, crime or disease, although these things were an important context. Neither did I mean neurotic urban fears such as agoraphobia, nor did I mean the fearful perception of the city by its users and its inhabitants. Instead I meant something that may seem smaller, namely a long-standing professional fear of the city and the attempt to mitigate its effects through such aesthetic modes as the picturesque. ‘Townscape’, the urbanism promoted by the Architectural Review in the 1950s, is one very concrete expression of this, but I traced this idea from then to the present day. England was a good case study; it is one of the world’s most urbanised nations but has one of the most highly developed anti-urban cultures. Informed by Raymond Williams’s book The Country and the City (1973), itself highly anti-urban, I argued that most of the defining national images were rural. This culture was so ingrained that it was impossible to view objectively. I meant to invoke 18th-century aesthetic theories associated with Edmund Burke, Price and others, as well as the tradition of aristocratic tourism to Rome, in which there were a set of rules for creating a good picture that suggested informality, roughness and naturalness.
In relations to the city I meant a tendency to regard the city as a source of spectacle for the visual pleasure of disinterested observer, who by implication lives somewhere else. The development of the city is an object of tourism that one visits, but does (thankfully) not inhabit. I argue that this lack of real engagement with or commitment to the urban springs from a fear of it. The picturesque mode is the only acceptable way of presenting the city for those that are fearful of it. There is nothing wrong with the picturesque per se, but when it is the only acceptable positive mode of urban representation, it profoundly distorts our understanding of city life. This culture shows the city as a two-dimensional picture rather than three-dimensional space, emphasising visual spectacle, monuments and icons, looks at city life as theatre and finally it conflates city with city centre.
The picturesque mode diverts our attention from the economic social and cultural process that make cities happen in the first place and from which we all need to learn. It does not allow us to come to terms with the knowledge. Here I refer to the work of Richard Sennett, that city life is “nothing if not hard”. People become city dwellers because city life has profound benefits, mainly economic benefits that could not be had another way. Our anxieties about city life produce unrealistic expectations about what city life might be.
On the grounds of the picturesque that I criticised various projects in the book, starting with Richard Rogers’s 1986 project called London as it could be, which re-imagined Trafalgar Square as an Italian piazza, full of locals that engaged in a leisurely passeggiata from Soho to the River, an agreeable image and beautiful drawings, yet without the density of population that you would find in Rome, the Church and the patriarchal society, such social rituals would be impossible in London.
I criticised some aspects of central Manchester’s redevelopment, whose reinvention since the 1990’s is one of Europe’s most extraordinary urban successes. As impressive as the new monuments and public spaces were, I also felt uneasy that almost everything in this phase of development was so spectacular concerned with surface or image, with creating an agreeable picture that could be marketed and sold. The process produced such unevenness in the housing market, with some of Britain’s most expensive and cheapest housing rubbing up against each other.
The problem is that the majority of city residents live outside of the city centre and do not have any real engagement with the centre. What can we do about this condition? I suggest we might abandon the picturesque as a mode of perceiving. It speaks of our fear of the urban rather than a real engagement with it. We should look for more realistic modes of imagining urban life. Many of the reviews of the book have picked up on my relatively favourable coverage of Milton Keynes. I stand by this. It still seems to me that it has been in recent decades the only full-scale attempt to image a realistic, anti-picturesque urbanism. It has been criticised, rightly, for its over-reliance on the private car, but otherwise its imagination of the city as a mobile, polycentric network is actually much better in tune with contemporary life than 16th-century Sienna. Milton Keynes has its problems – it is in many ways a dreary place – but as a theory it’s worth exploring again. I am not suggesting it as a solution, but returning to it as an idea might help us imagine a more modern, less anxious way of city life.

Robert Adam trained at the University of Westminster and has practiced in the city of Winchester since 1977 and co-founded his practice, which became Robert Adam Architects, in 2000. He is currently working on master plans for Western Harbour and Granton Harbour in Edinburgh. Robert Adam’s contribution to the classical tradition is internationally acknowledged, both as a scholar and as a designer of traditional and progressive classical architecture. Adam founded the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU) in 2000.
I remember that in Milton Keynes you used to get a subsidy to go there and you had pay it back if you left before a certain time, I think it was three years. People used to hold three-year parties when they were released from the necessity to stay. I am very grateful for this idea of anxiety; anxiety is a state that we live with all of the time. The idea of the anti-urban is very interesting. Britain’s in a unique position in that we do have an anti-urban culture. We were the first industrialised country in the world and we were the wealthiest country in the world for 100 years, with huge urban expansion. We did not have any wars, and we invented the suburb; it was one of our most successful exports. Politicians and people like me refer to the suburb as ‘a monster’, but it is where 66 per cent of the population lives. The curious thing is that we have now moved from industrial anxiety to a suburban anxiety. The other thing that we face is the failure of the post-war city. The orderly, hygienic, nicely stratified and zoned modernist dream actually failed and practically everybody admits that it failed. So we have this great problem now; we have to turn to this thing called urbanism, which is suddenly terribly fashionable. In the past ten years everyone has produced a charter or a report that says that urbanism is really terrific. We look to the traditional city, even Richard Rogers goes to the traditional city. I was in Berlin for the Council of Urbanism and John Prescott rubbished the modernist city and amazingly the German minister rubbished the modernist city, although he did say that things should look like they are new. So this is a big problem for us all. I think that this is a very important moment, urbanism is suddenly very fashionable, suddenly very interesting. It seems to solve a lot of problems, but actually there are lots of problems tied up in it.
I have listed six urban anxieties. First, there is identity anxiety – who the hell are we and why are we here? Why do all of these places we visit look the same? The second one is stimulus anxiety, or why is it all so boring? The next is agoraphobic anxiety, then future anxiety, architects’ anxiety and innovation anxiety. Architects have a real problem with urbanism; it’s the new megalomania. They’ve discovered that you can’t change the world through buildings, but my god you can do it with urbanism.
I have a great principle that you should all live by which is; If it works – do it again. Sometimes you don’t know why things work, but if they do, why not just do it again? It does tend to produce the picturesque and it tends to create architect anxiety because it runs entirely contra to the architectural culture that believes that innovation is a stand-alone virtue. Innovation is all right for widgets, but it is intrinsically risky and it is not all right with the way people live, to take risks with people’s lives and how you make people’s lives for the future is not a risk that should be taken lightly; you only innovate when it is necessary.
So to future anxiety. The one thing that we know about the future is that we don’t know what it is. Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present and is adaptable to changing needs and functions and you get that from diversity and complexity.
Architects have real problems with urbanism because they are trained the wrong way round. They start with function, move to buildings and then they sort of think about where is it is going. Actually functions are very temporary, buildings are fairly temporary but urban fabric is very permanent, sometimes it lasts for hundreds and thousands of years. The really important thing about the urban fabric is that it must be able to support change of function and diversity.

Jules Lubbock is an expert on British architecture and town planning; his Tyranny of Taste explains how British architecture and design has been shaped by economic and moral concerns. He is co-author of A History of British Architectural Education, Architecture: Art or Profession. As architecture critic of the New Statesman and a speechwriter to the Prince of Wales he helped promote the policy of new urbanism.
Richard’s book is an attack on the things that we call new urbanism or the compact city and he has done this through a series of case studies. He argues that these betray a uniquely English anxiety about cities. However picturesque, well designed or even popular these places are, Richard argues that they are authoritarian and overly policed or surveyed place and designed only for consumption and tourism. Above all, they are sites of contrived spectacle and theatricality.
I share with Richard some strong concerns about new urbanism. It is the new establishment, the new orthodoxy in town planning and it is purveyed by uncritical propagandists in the architectural profession and among journalists. But I don’t share his thesis and his blanket criticism. Take Poundbury; it’s a huge success commercially for the Duchy of Cornwall and it’s very popular with its residents. It was designed to be a model of a by-law system that allowed a degree of individual freedom and aimed to give people the sort of thing that they wanted. But of course it shouldn’t be the only model. But it is an English tendency to have a single model policy; it’s the product of an extremely centralised state.
I agree that the Barcelona model is absurd. Barcelona has had the highest drop-in population year by year since the 1960s of any city in the western world. This is also true of the other pavement café cities that some of the new urbanists go for. With the exception of London, in the last 15 years the cities of the developed world have witnessed a flight from the city. This phenomena is not uniquely English; it’s European and it’s North American. But I don’t buy the anxiety thing, is it the anxiety of people that live in the cities, or the bourgeoisie, or of architects and architectural commentators? People leave the city for many reasons, not necessarily that they are anxious.
I don’t understand Richard’s point about authoritarianism. He attacks Poundbury because it has by-laws or rules, or codes, but the New Town in Edinburgh had codes; they were designed to create a certain kind of visual order. People who chose to live there, chose to live there because of the codes. The great example is David Hume, who had a running row with one of his neighbours who broke the codes. I don’t see a problem with that; that is not authoritarianism. Also I don’t understand what is wrong with consumption, it is very nice. I don’t see what the problem is with tourism – what is the problem with spectacle and theatricality? At first I thought he must be a communist, but I think more accurately he is a Platonist and also a puritan. Plato didn’t like consumerism and he didn’t like the theatre, although he was authoritarian. I think Richard’s solutions, although he doesn’t tell us what they are – he rests on critique, I think would also be authoritarian.
I think we need to be much more empirical in our judgments, less ideological, more scientific, more sceptical, more provisional. What is good, what is bad, what works. We need to pay attention to market research and polls. The CABE produced this poll which they immediately disowned, which found that 30 per cent of the population wanted to live in bungalows, 29 per cent in village houses and 16 per cent in Victorian terraces. We should pay attention to what people actually want. At the time modernism was developing, Mass Observation demonstrated clearly that 80 per cent of the population wanted to live in cottages with gardens, but these finding were ignored. The New Towns do pay some attention to them, we must pay attention. As JM Keynes said, “when the facts change I change my mind”. We must be prepared to listen and change our views.
Good places are Paternoster Square and the route across the Millennium Bridge, the British Library, Poundbury and Celebration, the inter-war suburb, Harlow New Town, and Milton Keynes. I think you will find there are no single solutions, there is certainly no single policy that government ought to impose. We can have density and new urbanism, but let’s also have some very low density, the disperse metropolis. These are not exclusive; I would argue that we also need so-called non-places.

Martha Schwartz is a landscape architect and artist with a major interest in urban projects and the exploration of new design expression in the landscape. As principal of Martha Schwartz Partners in Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, UK, her goal is to find opportunities where landscape design solutions can be raised to a level of fine art. Schwartz is an adjunct professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
I guess I come here from a very different place – it’s called the United States. I wish I could take you on a flyover so you could see what is going on there. When I come over here I feel like a pig in shit. It’s so great, all of the things you people complain about – I can’t believe it. You guys are very lucky. Who has spent a lot of time in LA? I happen to like LA, but even in my hardcore Americanism and as much as I like to be hip and modern I am not sure I could cut it.
LA is basically just a humongous grid of strip shopping malls. As an academic and an urban form it’s pretty damn interesting, but it is the most ugly difficult dysfunctional place to live in. The idea is for multi-centres connected by road but the quality of life just sucks; there is no place to walk around and it takes 40 minutes to go anywhere. Atlanta, I did a workshop with Enric Miralles with a bunch of architects and artists looking at the Olympics and he was waxing eloquently about Atlanta and the city structure, but 60 per cent of the downtown area is surface parking and it’s because people don’t want to live in the city.
You guys sent over all of your puritans to us, hence George Bush, and it’s all coming back to bite you now. For very understandable reasons, people spread out because they could, we guzzle gas because we can and we consume because we can. We are still in denial that there is global warming. We are an avidly suburban nation, we hate our cities; there are more deeply dysfunctional reasons. We have inherited your love of the picturesque, which I have been battling with for my entire career. We don’t invest in our cites. Poor people tend to go to the cities where there is some kind of welfare, basically the poor people, the people of colour go to the cities and everybody that can tries to get out. Then we do our highway planning to cut off people.
There are demographic shifts in the US where people are leaving the prairie states because they are finding that, even with all of the technology, we can farm in that environment, but the great shift is still out to the suburbs. I think it is a terrible long-term strategy to promote and promulgate suburban living, just because everyone wants to do it. It is an unsustainable, unecological, dead-end long-term strategy for all of us. OK, people really want to live in the suburbs but that is not where ideas and culture come from. We need people gathered together for densities, for libraries, theatres, and art museums and schools and universities; the suburbs can’t support that. So people spend their whole lives going backwards and forwards to their suburbs and leave the investment in the city and the growth of the culture way behind.
If we were to move the population of China into the United States then we would start to deal with the kind of densities that you guys deal with. Our population is going up but it will never be enough to force us to start to tend to these issues. My hope is that you guys are much more ahead to us in dealing with energy and ecology. We are just going to drive ourselves until the well is empty and then we are all going to freak out, then there will be a rush back to the city. We don’t have the leadership that will lead us and maybe the people aren’t so right.
In my own landscape practice I pretty much refuse to do picturesque. The problem with thinking about landscape as grass and trees is that most people don’t understand that we are building our landscape; it is a constructed artefact. Everything outside of the building is the landscape; it is not just parks and plazas, it’s streets and alleyways and the dumpster areas, it’s the trains and the subways. That landscape is much bigger than the public squares and plazas. I like that area, that is my meat, because it is so untended, but in fact it makes up our own self-image.
I really think that one of major anxieties is the fact that we have so much choice now. We choose to go where we want to go, we choose the car we want, what house we want, what partners we want, what colour we want and when it comes to buildings, they don’t have to be straight up and down anymore; window sizes are whatever you want. The computer has created so much possibility for us that we are not exactly sure about how to go about our business. I don’t understand why the picturesque is about the 18th-century painting. I think we can go with the picturesque, but it needs to be a new version of the picturesque for our time.

The Prospect debate was sponsored by the EDI Group and the venue for the event was kindly provided by Redevco, the developer for 40 Princes Street.