Cities – It’s the System, Stupid!

We seem to be heading inexorably towards most of us living in cities. This has some clear advantages: More space left for nature: Infrastructure can be more concentrated, and therefore cheaper and less polluting: The interaction of people in cities often leads to greater innovation and cultural richness. The lack of nature though can be a problem for people of an ecological persuasion. Perhaps they’d prefer innumerable eco-villages interspersed with farming and nature. But then, unless people were willing to lead very simple and sedentary lifestyles, this could really be a less eco-friendly alternative. There are some interesting attempts to combine nature with large buildings. Time will tell how these will cope in the long-term. But I wonder about trees and plants lifted 15 storeys above the earth. Is this not the plant equivalent of putting animals in zoos? When it comes to these kind of ecological options, it has to be said that people display a distinct ambiguity. Most people will say yes, we must have more renewable energy, we must care for nature, we must live within our ecological limits, we must, in short, SAVE THE PLANET! But then again, most people, when choosing for themselves, will make anything but the correct choices for the environment. Perhaps this will change before long. Perhaps we will be forced to change. But in the meantime, there is no use designing for people the way we think they should live. We need to design for people AS THEY ACTUALLY ARE! So we can ask, what should cities be like, to allow people to feel that this is a place we long to live in – a place where our souls can feel at home? At this point, it’s easy to become critical of how cities have ‘gone astray’ over the last several decades. The predations of modernist architecture in particular – and of modernism’s awkward offspring, post-modernism – have wreaked havoc. Architects have their dreams of fantastic buildings, but when their projects are set down into our old familiar and comfortable streets, the effect can be anything but pleasant. The architects now use this rather odd term – ‘intervention’. ‘Have you seen my intervention on Main Street?’ they say. And we say, WTF? But we have to remember what a city is really about. A city’s about what humanity, collectively, thinks is important. And just as we saw the ambiguity that individuals demonstrate with their lifestyles when it comes to ecological issues, the same story is played out on a much bigger scale with cities as a whole. We could say that – despite all the rhetoric about ‘community’, ‘place-making’, ‘eco-cities’ and ‘walkability’ – the city actually demonstrates THE SYSTEM! And you just can’t beat THE SYSTEM! So what do I mean by the system? I hear you ask, dear reader. Well, our dominant system in Western nations is a consumer capitalist one. And that’s why the big buildings in our cities are often banks, corporate headquarters and shopping malls. Because these are our true priorities – this is where the power and the money is. It’s also why these buildings seem to jostle for prominence and squash their neighbours. Plus, we are in love with personal autonomy. So private transport dominates every city, sometimes to the total exclusion of anyone stupid enough to be a pedestrian! Let me tell you, despite the good intentions of a significant number of architects and planners, we cannot design our way out of this mindset. The only way for it to change is either for PEOPLE to change, or THE SYSTEM to change. In fact, because people make the system and the system makes people, then BOTH would need to change before our cities would be any different. Personally, I think that’s bad news. It breaks my heart to see cities trashed by another gleaming corporate icon to power and commerce. But think for a moment what it would be like if a dictator (let’s call them a benevolent dictator) imposed incredibly strict planning laws and created beautiful cities of parks, sweeping terraces and boulevards. The city would be car-free, eco-friendly, based around small community hubs, with amazing public transport and with everything in a vernacular style of architecture that local people had voted as their favourite type of building design. Sound idyllic? Would you think that people would be pleased that a strong dictator was able to impose this kind of top-down decision-making and give us what we might consider the ideal kind of city for the 21st century? But wait, oh no! Someone wants a car! Someone wants to build 20 storeys of offices when the rules say there’s a maximum of five. So, unfortunately, even in this unlikely scenario, we’d end up with an awkward compromise. The dictator’s cities would be sort of what we know we should want, but also not really who we are – again, just like the ambivalence over ecological issues we noted above. Hope, perhaps, lies elsewhere. Hope lies in rebellion. And as you’ve probably figured out by now, it’s not rebellion of an architectural kind. It can only be a rebellion that is about challenging the system and about changing people. What then does that rebellion look like? It is, inevitably, small-scale for now. It is those places you come across where nature is allowed to flourish, where people work with her and not against her. There’s tree-planting and food-growing, forest gardens, permaculture and regenerative agriculture. There are off-grid buildings that are full of soul and enchantment – buildings that respect the land, the climate and the seasons. Like I say, it’s small-scale just now – and compared to the scale of a modern city it feels like something of a hippy circus. Could it ever scale up to a population of a million? Ten million? It’s difficult to know what that would look like. As I said right at the start, a landscape that is essentially just an endless expanse of eco-village is not necessarily going to be a good thing, even if it were more ecologically-sustainable. There are visionaries out there who dream big and try to imagine future cities on a grand scale. And I’m all for that – I’m all for dreaming. But I’ve written this so that we might get a proper grounding for our dreams. What are people REALLY like? What do our cities REALLY say about us? And of course, IT’S THE SYSTEM, STUPID! Until we address these issues, then we cannot make a start.