From the category archives:
Architects like to think of their work as social theory made real. Conversely, paging through the examples in James Howard Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month is like reading a stack of freshman essays on Smith and Marx written by students who didn’t do any reading and were too drunk to come to lectures.
Incidentally, I had no idea that the Dark Tower of Barad-Dur — eye of Sauron and all — is now located in Nashville.
I “promised”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000696.html to come back to the new urbanism and crime issue. But as it happens, David Sucher — more knowledgeable than I — “has done a pretty good job”:http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2003/10/centerfield_cri.html of responding to the alarmist and misleading “Operation Scorpion report”:http://www.operationscorpion.org.uk/design_out_crime/policing_urbanism.htm . And don’t miss the comments to his post, especially from Matthew Hardy of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (“INTBAU”:http://www.intbau.org/ ).
“Iain Murray links”:http://www.iainmurray.org/MT/archives/000381.html to a “police-sponsored report”:http://www.operationscorpion.org.uk/design_out_crime/policing_urbanism.htm claiming that housing estates built on “new urbanist” principles are more vulnerable to crime than private estates built in cul-de-sac format incorporating the notion of “defensible space.” Interesting stuff, especially since many of the ideas that inform the new urbanism are very influential with both local authority planners and amenity societies. I’m a little sceptical when too much is claimed for design. Just like carpenters thinking that a hammer and a nail is the answer to all problems, architects like to put everything down to design (I’m sure I’ve stolen that line from Colin Ward). And I’d like to know more about the other factors distinguishing the two environments studied in the report. But this certainly warrants further attention.
UPDATE: I’ll try to say more in a few days. But a more careful look at the police document suggests that this isn’t a matter of comparing the experience of similar communities but rather a “projection” of data some of which is derived from experience of estates from an earlier period which (according to the police) incorporate “similar” design features.
On the design front, I understand that the police SBD philosophy frowns on features like recessed porches and collonades (good for hiding) leaving us with the a general flattening of building surfaces. Attractive? I don’t think so.
Do “conservatives”:http://www.iainmurray.org/MT/archives/000381.html and “libertarians”:http://nataliesolent.blogspot.com/2003_10_19_nataliesolent_archive.html#106672975377523361 really want their urban spaces designed according to a police approved philosophy? Really? Do the urban environments people like, such as Bath, Venice, Florence, …. (fill in your preferred name) conform to Secured By Design principles? As I said, more when I’ve got a moment…
In recent weeks the hit TV programme on British TV has been Restoration, which invites viewers to vote for the dilapidated country house, castle, factory or mausoleum they most want renovated. Patrick Wright has been a shrewd observer of the “heritage industry” since the publication of his landmark _On Living in an Old Country_ in the mid-1980s. He has a good essay in the Guardian on the ambivalence of restoration and on the often -attached social snobbery. He reveals, among other things, that it was veteran anarchist Colin Ward who coined the phrase “heritage industry” in the first place. I’ve been active in Bristol Civic Society for the past few years, and the tension Wright points to between a backward-looking conservationism and the desire to preserve and build a well-functioning urban environment is one that I see played out all the time. Read the whole thing.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s latest post – The Fabric of the City – deserves a wide readership, both for itself and for the wealth of resources it links to. Lots of stuff about New York’s transportation infrastructure, abandoned subway stations and so on. There’s something about abandoned stations (especially underground ones) that calls to mind murder, mystery, romance (the stuff of old movies basically). There used to be such a station, perhaps more than one, on Berlin’s U-Bahn. It was part of the West Berlin network but was situated under East Berlin. The trains would pass through slowly, the old station was illuminated by a few 40w light bulbs and (I think) sometimes there were East German police on the platform with dogs.
OpenDemocracy has a short piece by Paul Barker on the late Cedric Price and the idea of the Non-Plan. Here’s a quote that will delight some and annoy others:
bq. “Architects”, he once said, “are the greatest whores in town. They talk in platitudes about improving the quality of life, and then get out drawings of the prison they’re working on.”
The idea of the non-plan sounds fascinating:
bq. He and I collaborated on Non-Plan, an anti-planning polemic, which infuriated architects, planners and assorted do-gooders. The idea emerged during a conversation I had with Peter Hall, geographer and planner, in the late 1960s. Both of us were appalled at the disasters that urban planning had brought about. We wondered if things could be any worse if there were no planning at all.
bq. What worried our critics, who were many, when the four of us published our Non-Plan issue of New Society (20 March 1969), was their uncertainty about our political stance. Was this anarchism? Or deep-dyed conservatism, a precursor of Thatcherism? Our essential point was that you should always think very hard before telling other people how they ought to live. They had their own preferences, which ought to be respected.
bq. We suggested carrying out a Non-Plan test. Four districts should be freed from all controls, and we could then judge whether the upshot was any worse than what happened with the controls on. To make readers sit up, we chose four much-cherished slices of English countryside for our test. The resultant incandescence was highly satisfactory.
I’m intruiged, and mean to find out more.
The Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences, where I am presently ensconced, is a great place. It has amiable institutions such as Morning and Afternoon Tea, for instance, which make it possible to pass the entire day moving from one sort of break to another. It also has lots of interesting people in it. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find any of them because they are all located in the Coombs Building. On the other hand, you may bump into them while you are looking for your office again.
I’ve been interested in buildings, architecture and cities for about ten years now. Truth be told, probably for much longer than that: but I’ve been conscious of it as an interest for that time. It is an enormously interesting and absorbing subject in more ways than are worth enumerating here. But one of the aspects that has interested me as a philosopher and borderline social scientist is the way in which buildings and cities are records of human reason in the face of all kinds of practical problems (social, topographical, economic, weather-related, material related) at the same time as being items of great aesthetic importance. Form, style, design are all products of human trial and error and what emerges is often striking and beautiful. Sometimes the product of an individual’s vision; at others the result of the accumulated strivings of numbers of people working without any general conception. (Often, for cities at least, the best results have come when humans have worked blind; and the worst when some architect of other has been given free rein.)
The new issue of Prospect includes a rather meandering piece by Samuel Brittan on baby bonds, basic income and asset redistribution. A central issue in this area is how to finance such proposals, and that’s something Brittan gets down to at the end of his article. He canvasses Henry George-style proposals for land taxation and also mentions inheritance taxes, but finally comes up with a somewhat odd suggestion:
… a very simple practical proposal, why not auction planning permission? Many local authorities have approached this piecemeal by making such permission conditional on the provision of local services such as leisure centres, approach roads and so on. But why not return this windfall to the taxpayer in the form of asset distribution and let citizens decide how to spend it?