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DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES

design and planning concepts that we use. They did not arrive fully formed at our pencil tips and com- puter keyboards! Some continue recent trends, or reclaim discarded or outdated concepts; others are deliberate reactions against perceived mistakes of the past. Our ideas come with a history, and we are guided in our practice by the knowledge of how they were derived and how they have been used (and mis- used) by professionals in previous times and places. But first we must be careful to define what consti- tutes our ‘history’. Historians and critics are often Figure 1.1 Alton West Estate, , , tempted to seek some overarching ‘grand narrative’ as Architects’ Department, a framework for their arguments (we are no different 1959. Bold versions of Le Corbusier’s Unité in this regard except that we are wary of the process d’Habitation are set in the soft landscape of south and its results!) and for much of the twentieth London, creating an image of the modernist dream. century the history, theory and practice of modern Compare this image with Figure 1.4. architecture was presented as a unified, coherent story by writers such as Hitchcock and Johnson the masters being interpreted by less talented pupils, (1932), Pevsner (1936), Richards (1940), and but increasing popular discontent, particularly Giedion (1941). In this tale of the ‘International against programs of urban reconstruction in Britain Style,’ the heroes were Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and in America, gradually made the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilbersheimer, modernist position untenable. the artists and architects at the Bauhaus, and other Within these unpopular urban settings, the pioneers of the modern movement. Under the intel- architecture itself was disliked; the new buildings lectual leadership of this new avant-garde, a primary were decried as dull and boring boxes. While archi- task of modern architects was to rid society of the tects loved to use concrete, either poured-in-place or environmental and social evils of the polluted indus- as precast panels, citing its ‘honesty’ or ‘integrity,’ the trial city, where workers lived miserable lives, public perceived this material as unfriendly and crowded into unsanitary slums. In place of the old, hostile. The uniformity and abstraction of the Inter- corrupt Victorian city, modern architects envisioned national Style puzzled and dismayed a public used to a bright, new healthy environment, full of sun, fresh a richer and more conventional architectural lan- air, open space, greenery and bold new buildings free guage of historical detail and imagery, even in the of the trappings of archaic historical styles. It was a most modest of buildings. Over time, redeveloped terrific vision and a fulfilling professional mission. urban areas bred a form of distaste and antagonism The replacement of cities perceived as outdated among residents who lived and worked there. In par- and corrupt brought a bright new optimistic face to ticular, the large tracts of semi-public space that were urban design. In war-ravaged Britain during the the norm in much urban redevelopment from the 1950s, new blocks of flats rose heroically from the 1950s through the early 1970s, gave rise to unfore- rubble. Some were sited, like those at Roehampton, seen and uncomfortable ambiguities about social in west London, in -like settings deliberately behavior. This ‘free’ space for sunlight and greenery reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s evocative drawings (see prescribed by modernist doctrine was achieved only Figure 1.1). through the destruction of old patterns of streets and All was not sweetness and light, of course. urban blocks. Implementation of the vision varied, and a tangible This open space was neither truly public nor gap was revealed between the promise of the utopian private, and its consequent lack of spatial definition vision and ‘real-life’ achievements on the ground. blurred boundaries and territories, raising issues of Within a couple of decades, the planning and design control and management, and ultimately of crime philosophies of the modernist agenda were being and personal security. Few people living in the large, questioned by the public. Planners and architects first modern housing redevelopments of slabs and towers took a defensive position. They suggested that the favored by modernist theory felt safe or comfortable, bleak urban environments people were complaining or felt sufficient ownership of the open spaces around about were simply the result of the great visions of the new buildings to help take care of them. The list

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CHAPTER ONE ● PARADIGMS LOST AND FOUND

of failings in urban renewal and redevelopment problems of social inequity and racial tension. With schemes grew to such length and seriousness that the hacking to death of a British policeman at ultimately it was impossible to treat these problems as and hundreds of riot police assailed teething troubles or poor applications of visionary by fire bombs, the tragic modernist blocks came to ideas by less-talented designers. As urban historian stand, like Pruitt-Igoe before them, for everything John Gold has pointed out, a movement predicated bad with modernist city planning and architecture. on functionalism as a core belief could not withstand Thus, what were truths for one generation quickly criticism about its dysfunctional consequences became doubts and finally anathema to the next. (Gold, 1997: pp. 4–5). Faced with this ideological void, the younger genera- The conclusion was unavoidable: the ideas them- tion of architects and planners sought to construct a selves were seriously flawed. Critic Charles Jencks new set of beliefs, and several premises of modernist famously ascribed the ‘death of modernism’ to the urbanism were radically overhauled, and in many precise moment of 3.32 p.m. on July 15, 1972, when cases overturned. Many aspects of the search for new high-rise slab blocks in the notorious Pruitt-Igoe concepts focused around the recovery of more housing project in St. Louis, Missouri were profes- human-scaled spaces and an architectural vocabulary sionally imploded by the city (Jencks, 1977: p. 9). that connected with public taste. As we discuss more Completed as recently as 1955, the buildings had fully in Chapter 3, early postmodern architecture in been abandoned and vandalized by their erstwhile the USA during the 1970s and 1980s incorporated inhabitants to a degree that made them uninhabitable. ornamental classical details and elements of pop Earlier, in 1968, a gas explosion and the consequent culture in an effort to bridge the communication gap partial collapse of another high-rise block at Ronan between architects and the public. In the UK, this Point in east London severely eroded the British trend to glitzy ornamentation was also present, but a public’s confidence in the safety of modernist high- more substantive move was a return to an appreciation rise residential construction. of vernacular building types and traditional urban The tensions of urban life burst into the open dur- settings. Just as the inclusion of ornament and kitsch ing the British urban riots of the 1980s. Like their into postmodern architecture was a conscious viola- American precedents in the 1960s, the riots were the tion of modernist principles – a definitive rejection of product of a clash between mainstream white culture the reductive, abstract aesthetics that had ruled and a black subculture built on deprivation and professional taste for several decades – postmodern disadvantage, and were mainly focused on older urbanism resurrected the traditional street, identified urban areas of concentrated poverty, such as Toxteth in modernist thinking as the villain and cause of in , Moss Side in , Handsworth urban squalor. in and in south London. The This renewed appreciation of traditional urban unrest and violence reached spectacular levels with forms was presaged by Jane Jacobs in her landmark the Broadwater Farm conflagration in , book The Death and Life of American Cities ( Jacobs, , in 1985, and this was significantly 1962). Her description of the vitality and life on the different from the other urban areas of racial tension. streets of her New neighborhood contrasted Broadwater Farm was a ‘prizewinning urban renewal poignantly with the crime and grime of the urban project of 1970, (which) had proved a case study of wastelands produced by urban renewal, and while her indefensible space; its medium-rise blocks, rising criticism of modernist planning and architecture was from a pedestrian deck above ground-level parking, largely dismissed by professionals during the 1960s, provided a laboratory culture for vandalism and by the 1980s her book had become a standard crime’ (Hall, 2002: p. 464). text within this developing counter-narrative. Le There were several influential efforts to link this Corbusier soon became the arch-villain of the new urban unrest directly to the failures of modern archi- history, with his revolutionary and draconian propo- tecture and planning (e.g. Coleman, 1985). Although sals for ‘The City of Tomorrow’ identified as the the social, racial and economic situation in 1980s source of everything bad about modernist urbanism Britain that bred the riots was far more complex than (see Figure 1.2). Like countless other urban design the cause-and-effect argument about the physical professionals caught in the midst of this great revision environment, the simplistic connection was a com- of architectural and planning ideology over the last pelling one in the public mind. It was easier to blame 30 years, we (the authors) have often promoted the architecture than to deal with the deep-seated our ideas of traditional urban form and space by

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