Just over twenty years ago Nick Matthews, Editor of Town and Country Planning, asked me if I would write a quarterly column for the magazine. I called it Urban Design Matters. A little later, and rather late to the blogging party, I began publishing the contributions in an obscure corner of The Bartlett website and after that at https://matthew-carmona.com (where you are now). This contribution makes 100 blogs and provides a good excuse for a bit of reflection.
Talking the talk
Urban design emerged out of parallel physical and social agendas, and these have been moulded, extended and melded over decades, although at no time faster than the last twenty years as successive crises – climate, ecological, financial, health, and demographic – have shaped thinking on how cities should respond. In the time I have been writing this blog, place quality has risen up the agenda in many parts of the world; the diaspora of urban design (if such a thing exists) has become ever wider; and the agenda that urban designers are concerned with has grown almost exponentially.
Sustainability, healthy cities, social justice, liveability, urban ecology, and smart technologies were clearly on the agenda twenty years ago, but their foregrounding in recent years has increasingly shone a spotlight on the potential of urban design to contribute to multiple policy priorities at once. All this can be seen in the policy agendas of different tiers of government around the world and on up to pan-national priorities of bodies such as the European Union and the United Nations. Each have realised that how we shape and thereby use urban areas is critical to our response to crises, and more positively, to how we build just and sustainable cities. Unfortunately, while we increasingly talk a good talk, we less often walk a good walk.
Walking the walk?
Although the challenges have become ever more critical, our responses have often remained the same in that more often than not we persist in building patterns of development that are profoundly unsustainable, unhealthy, inequitable, unliveable, ecologically barren and plain dumb!
On the whole, we know what we need to do to shape more sustainable urban places – the evidence is very clear. We need to build more dense (up to a point), connected (locally, strategically and electronically), mixed (typologically, socially and functionally), characterful, self-sufficient (low carbon) and green (bio-diverse) places that are both flexible and resilient through time. And we have long-standing exemplars that we can confidently point to, to show us the way. The problem is that none of this is particularly sexy in narrow architectural terms, which perhaps explains why new developments come along from time to time that are hyped as paradigmatic, but which turn out to be (quite literally) built on sand.
The latest is The Line, the proposed 170km linear city to house nine million in a single 200m wide, 500m high, mega structure stretching through the Saudi Arabian desert. As a student in the late 1980s I remember being captivated by the drawings of Archigram. Now, Archigram’s veteran frontman, Peter Cook, is enjoying a new lease of life leading what in any other location would be viewed as a flight of fancy, but which given the Saudi bank balance, may just happen! Personally I love both the Blade Runner and Dune films, and the images released suggest a blending together of the two. But architectural fantasy, like science fiction, might be best left on the screen.
In Saudi Arabia, the question apparently being addressed by this new development is: What is the new model of development that can house a growing population in a sustainable way? On the face of it a highly laudable subject for enquiry and experimentation. But in a country that has spent the last fifty years growing its cities into some of the most sprawling, low density and unsustainable cities in the world, I wonder if a better question might be: How can the opportunity provided by a growing population be harnessed to make existing cities more sustainable? This is a question we need to ask in many places (not just Saudi Arabia), and essentially means delivering the qualities already listed: more dense, connected, mixed, characterful, self-sufficient, bio-diverse and resilient. How to do this in different parts of the world is a conundrum that could certainly benefit from the Saudi Billions.
Going round and round
Of course one of the wonderful things about writing an urban blog is that one can safely carp from the side-lines while others get on with the job of actually making things happen. Walking the walk is inherently more challenging than talking the talk!
For my part, I have undoubtedly written plenty of stupid things over the years in this blog and elsewhere. Fortunately, words generate little carbon, and while in this electronic age they are endlessly searchable, most, like old fashioned newsprint, are quickly forgotten by new words and new (or recycled) ideas. What we build, however, has a much longer impact, both locally and globally, and, like academic ideas, we need to subject it to proper interrogation and critique before breaking ground.
In this sense architectural intuition and big bang vision-making is not enough, and where we have tried it, it has often let us down. Instead, we need more incremental change, driven by constant innovation and creativity, but also by a profound learning along the way about what works and what does not, and a deep understanding of both physical context and human needs. Our great cities continually show us the way.
Looking back at the 99 previous blogs, I notice that I have become more verbose and probably more grumpy too, both, no doubt, a consequence of age. Age, on the one hand, builds confidence, meaning that I feel more secure in saying what I wish to say without worrying too much about who is going to criticise it. On the other, age gives experience. Not (unfortunately) in the sense that I am any better at making arguments now than before, but, in the sense that many of the issues that come up now I have seen before. Issues and approaches seem to come round on a cycle, often in some shinny new wrapping, but in essence representing the same thing.
This seems particularly so in the UK where the policy context is somewhat fickle. Indeed, many of the contributions in this blog have attempted to track the tos and fros of English design governance, a story full of fascinating twists and turns for aficionados like me (perhaps just me!). The same, rather more dramatically, goes for development projects. Linear cites, for example, are hardly a new idea and have been continually rejected on the basis that their rational functionality is quite the opposite to what the greatest cities offer, namely places that are messy, complex and forever changing (more like Peter Cook’s Plug-in City than Le Corbusier’s Radiant one).
For me, the experience of writing a blog continues to be intensely cathartic (if also a bit messy), and over the years Urban Design Matters has provided me an outlet to variously: let off steam about something that stimulated or infuriated me; try out ideas before developing them into something more significant; reflect on experiences (usually trips overseas) in a structured way; ponder new trends and policy positions; and generally do what professors are supposed to do – profess.
As there is always more to say, I will continue to say it. All I can ask is, please bear with me!
Matthew Carmona
Professor of Planning & Urban Design
The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL
Matthew Carmona 