2010: the Coalition, the Cuts, and the Cities

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone. I’ve got to admit I’m falling victim, just like everyone else, to the massively uninspired ‘what have I learned this year?’ post. My only excuse is that the five day long eating marathon has somewhat dimmed my capacity for originality.

Despite my dislike of New Year’s Eve parties, I’m pretty glad to be seeing the back of 2010. In Britain the Conservatives are driving a truck pretty much every civilising advance of the past seventy years. Secondary education, heathcare, childcare, local government, not to mention the poor bedraggled universities, are all financially cut and circumscribed in their remit. Despite the protestations of Clegg and Cameron and the rest of them that this is merely a financial shake up, the ideological overtones are obvious. Moreover, the very notion of the British citizen is being reformulated as the sometime-pillars of the welfare state are redefined as luxuries or ‘choices’ rather than rights. But as gloomy as things are even here, things are even worse in Ireland as all the words (emigration, IMF, unemployment, and most of all, ‘failure’) of the 1980s return.  I’m not saying I’ve high hopes for 2011, but at least it’s a fresh start.

The ideological tensions of coalition policies are beginning to play out in British cities. The anti-student fees protesters, UK UnCut as the trade unions did a pretty good job of getting their voices heard and getting their point across through taking to the streets in pretty large numbers. I suppose the most worrying tendency which arose out of the month or so of almost daily demonstration is ‘kettling’, which is now seen to be the police’s stock answer to any protest, however peaceful. I suppose I should hardly be surprised. Since the government appears to have removed our rights to many of the services of the welfare state, I don’t know why I thought for an instant that they might respect our right to protest. Instead they immediately label every single demonstrator as a troublemaker, and immediately create an unnecessary antagonism between peaceful protestor and so-called guardian of the peace. The landscape of the city once again becomes an ostensible devise of vigorous state control, and the links between capitalism and urban space are reinscribed.

But over-enthusiastic state policing is merely a small part of the prospective future of the majority of Britain’s cities. Many of Britain’s  cities were built by, for, and in response to, a Victorian industrial boom, and ever since the end of that long era of manufacturing in the 1970s, they have been struggling to readjust and reinvent themselves. That there has been a long, slow malaise in many of Britain’s northern towns which is taking years to improve is hardly surprising when everything from the skills of the population to the layout of the streets is orientated towards industry which no longer exists.  During the noughties the previous administration poured a huge amount of money into conteracting the problems of these post-industrial cities. Gateshead, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow and Belfast among others all had their town centres rebuilt, in some fairly problematic alliances between commercial developers and the state (leading in many cases to the privatisation of the very heart of the city). Even more offensive was the use of cowardly words like ‘urban renewal’ to mean ‘social elevation’ when failing council housing was cleared to create pristine owner-occupier apartment blocks. Nevertheless, the sad truth is that the Labour government’s urban policies were far more successful than anything that had come before, and overall the improvement of quality of life in many inner city areas is clear to see. Although we once sneered at the post-modern architecture and grandiose projects of the Blair years, they were hugely important interventions into landscapes which were physically crumbling and socially deprived due to the long impact of industrial decline.

Back in the good old days, I thought this was an immensely stupid looking building

Although its still early days, it seems pretty clear that the days of large-scale flagship projects for the inner cities are over. Local government has already had its funding slashed (n.b. ‘cuts’ have been renamed ‘savings’), leaving it all the more exposed to the lure of capital from private contractors and unable to provide the basic amenities and services which are essential for a functional urban environment. PFI projects for social housing refurbishment have already been scrapped in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Hull, Nottingham, Northampton among others. If the state-sponsored social and cultural projects which did so much to reinvigorate the inner cities during the last ten years are dumped by this administration, then it seems to be fairly sensible to predict a return to the urban malaise and discontent which characterised the Thatcher years. At their best, British cities are places of culture and opportunity but they also require an interventionist state to keep them this way.

 

Celebration USA! Disney, Pastiche, Surburbia and Me

Did you read in the news recently that Disney’s town has had its first murder? The Mouseketeers are ringing their ears, while most commentators appear to be pushing the whole line that one murder in twenty years isn’t all that bad.

If I’d been confined to a town named Celebration, who knows what I might have ended up doing. This place seems like hell. The houses in a range of selected styles, which are only allowed to be painted a selection of pastel colours; while the town square is lit by fake gas lamps and features a range of ye-oldie shops selling nick-naks; there is even a plastic Christmas Tree. The website informs me that it is ‘now snowing nightly’, despite the 90 degree heat. Above it all presides the Disney Corporation, described most excellently by the Guardian as ‘the Vatican with mouse ears’ (oh the mental images).

The worst thing about this scene, however, is not the sinister rodent overlord, but the kitsch and what it represents. The pastel colours, the gas lamps, the front porches and even the typescript used on the shopfronts is all evocative of a bygone age. There really isn’t much modern architecture here, and when it appears its modernist-pastiche, evoking like Grease or Dirty Dancing the ‘golden’ disappeared America of drive in movies and Friday nights at the milkshake bar. It meant to evoke a different America, a better America from forty, fifty, eighty years ago (it’s certainly not a constant) where streets were cleaner, where families stayed together and where a neighbourhood was really a neighbourhood.

 Things were better back in the good old days.

You’d never get me living in Celebration, and it’s got nothing to do with Disney. If I’m honest I can’t see that much difference between this theme-park creation and all the Barratt estates which cover the flood plains of Britain. But I hate the suburbs and I admit it might be my own fault. Maybe it’s because being driving distance away from a public house makes me uneasy. Maybe it’s because I’m not so good at spending time on my own. Maybe it’s all the clean windows and polished doorsteps. Whatever it is, the idea of spending more than two days in a semi-D on a housing estate makes me want to pop open the valium and get started on the gin. Desperate Housewives eat your heart out.

But no one seems to mind my objections, and over the years Celebration, with its pastel colours and olde time shops has flourished. So whatever happened to the American Dream? Why are we all looking back to a bygone America of the past when the continent was meant to represent the future? Let get something straight. Patishe and historicist architecture is not cute, and it’s not just a style. Its an ideological statement of conservative values, a spatial articulation of a reactionary position that the ideal path for the future is to return to some golden past (which , in America, seems to coalesce somewhere around 1957). But this is all clearly rubbish; there is no golden past and the fifties may have been a time of nice Cadillacs but they also were a time of segregation and oppression. That a town exists constructed on these very values is a terrifying statement of the current state of America.

You’ll understand that this means that when I’m killing time buying aubergine curry in rusty tins from newsies on Cowley Road I can argue that it’s a radical statement of my faith in the future.

Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles

Reyner Banham is my idol. I love Los Angeles. Everything works.

The Architectural Legacy of the Celtic Tiger

Is it just me or as the fug of the Celtic-Tiger hangover clears, is it becoming strikingly apparent that the overall architectural legacy has been pretty poor? Many easy targets spring to mind, including but certainly not limited to: the miles upon miles of Dublin which splurges on unendingly towards Naas and Louth; the invented archetypal nowhere of City West business park and many others like it which appear to provide an anodyne substitute for urban forms and commercial centres these days; the monstrosity that is the hotelscape of Ballsbridge (even in this context, the Four Seasons Hotel, a neo-Georgian skyscraper must get a special mention for being exceptionally crap); and who could forget the horrendous housing estates (somehow simultaneously cheap and ostentatious)  which got us into this darn fine mess.

  

Smithfield still looks pretty nice.  

  
 

Its not all bad though, right? Many of the buildings on the south side of the Liffey from the centre to Ringsend are pretty good looking and consist of some really great detailing and inventive use of materials. Trinity College’s new library, with its sheet wall of glass over the cricket pitch is not only beautiful but also incredibly functional. The extension to the National Gallery is wonderful: cool, airy, restrained and constantly surprising. The LUAS is great, both aesthetically and for what it does to the city. It’s not often architectural criticism goes where I’m about to, but it actually looks like fantastic a shiny slug, and it does a wonderful job in linking up bits of Dublin (although it could have done much, much more). Much of Temple Bar (although pre-dating the Celtic Tigers height) is pretty good too: intimate courtyards, sensitive and imaginative reconstructions and restorations and some nice uses of urban space (when these urban spaces aren’t being over taken by British booze cruises, that is). 
   

Broadstone Station looking a bit shabby.

But what becomes apparent as I try to take in the changes is just how much has stayed the same. Some of this stasis must be recognised as a good thing. While the property boom of the 1960s tore the heart out of much of the eighteenth-century core of the city, these areas were not targeted in the same way in the nineties and noughties, and indeed, there was enough money sloshing around that some even found its way into preservation. North Great Georges Street is pretty snazzy these days, Castletown has been completely restored, as have many government departments (best of all, the Department of the Taoiseach on Merrion Street). Some masterpieces still stand derelict: Aldborough House boarded up and quietly rotting, Broadstone Station stands among a herd of Dublin Buses, and Henrietta Street still slowly and quietly decays . I suppose the most important thing is that they are still standing at all. However, much has remained the same which really should have changed during the good times. Unbelievably after nearly twenty years of prosperity built on the construction industry, the best buildings in the city still date from mid-century: Michael Scott’s Busaras and Paul Korelek’s Berkley Library stand out as far superior to anything that has come since.  Ballsbridge and Celbridge have been transformed, but walk around the Coombe or Church Street and there still are many cleared sites and closed buildings. Sameness also describes architectural styles. Once upon a time architects so despised the legacy of British building they went out of their way to build in contrast to their former rulers—with some pretty shocking results. In this context the acres of recent Georgian pastiche is pretty surprising as well as incomprehensible; the jarring between scale and style—as well as host of other objections—can only make one long for the brutal but imaginative solutions of their forebearers. 

  

 Henrietta Street surviving. 

 

But then again you get what you pay for when urban development is utterly funded by private finance: little ambition in terms of design and even less desire to build in areas where the returns aren’t certain to be good. It is not only Ireland’s balance sheet which has suffered because of the developers, Dublin’s skyline hasn’t faired much better. It was a boom which lacked vision or ideology or any sort of ambition beyond making money for the rich, and this vacuum of intelligence and thought is all too apparent in the architecture and town planning which it produced. After nearly twenty years of continuous growth we are left with the shocking realisation that in the inner city very little has changed.

How do you preserve a modern building? Oxford City Council, St. Clement's Car Park and the Florey Building

There’s a planning controversy taking place near to where I live in Oxford. The Watkin Jones Group has made an application for planning permission to develop the site currently occupied by the St. Clement’s car park as a thirteen storey accommodation block for students. It is a pretty complex story, and a lot of vested interests are jostling for position. Residents claim that the proposed thirteen storey flat block would disrupt Oxford’s skyline, while local businesses are insistent that the reduction of car parking spaces would have a critical impact on trade. However, there is also a severe shortage of housing in Oxford, which is tending to result in the residential community around the Cowley Road being priced out of the market by wealthier students. I suspect another factor will prove to be crucial in how this story plays out: Oxford City Council is set to earn £3.57 million from the sale of this site; at a time when, due to cuts, the Council can’t afford to implement the Magdalen Road Controlled Parking Zone I can’t see them turning down that inducement to care about the accommodation of its studious population.

St. Clement’s car park is also home to the Florey Building, designed by James Stirling, and accommodation for Queen’s College. It was designed in 1966 and finished in 1971; as the last of Stirling’s glass, steel and tile series of buildings for universities (how we can only wonder at such a grand and ambitious period of investment), the earlier buildings being at Cambridge (Selwyn College and the History Faculty) and Leicester (Engineering). It’s a grand segment of a sphere on stilts, consisting of student rooms arranged in a semi-circle orientated to the northwest. On the carpark side, its walls are faced in Stirling’s signature red tiles, but it is seen to its greatest effect from Magdalen deer park. From this angle it is a bowl of glass and steel rising ghost-like through the mist of the meadows. The Florey building was part of Stirling’s attempt to rethink the forms of the modern university, and to reimagine the principals of modernism itself, dismembering and recombining its forms in order to reinvigorate an aging style. Its geometric forms of glass and steel look back towards the early era of the machine aesthetic while the unrefined components and strong structural forms bring a new unpolished hulking power to the design. To me, it is one of the best buildings of the university. It’s certainly much more progressive and intelligent than much of what the institution has built since (the Sackler Library, Magdalen’s Grove Building, Hertford’s Graduate accommodation, I could go on...).

 Stirling's nice little drawing of the Florey building.

I admit that the fate of this building may seem peripheral to the social and economic forces playing out over the fate of the carpark, but it’s worth considering. If the new flat block is allowed, it will cut the Florey building off from its original site, and dwarf it in scale; indeed, this argument has been used repeatedly by the car park’s defenders. It is well known that Queen’s College sees this building as an enormous, leaky and malfunctioning burden, so they might just try to sell the site to the developer. But how do you preserve a modern building? Stirling insisted that he was a functionalist; like his predecessors in modernism he argued that his buildings he designed took their form from meeting the needs and requirements of those that he designed for. If this is the case, then surely the way to preserve a modern building is to replace it. If its design no longer meets the needs of Queen’s College, and if the way it is using the land no longer maximises its potential, then surely to take the rhetoric of the modernists to its logical conclusion would be to knock down their buildings and in their place create structures better suited to the needs and tastes of the present day. To be sure, these architects were dispassionate enough in their treatment of the past in their own time (remember Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris?).

But this reading all might be a bit too simple. Any more than a cursory reading will reveal that St irling was anything other than a pure functionalist. He built a glass bowl on stilts, for god’s sake. Interesting, yes; functional, no. Furthermore, the modernity of his designs was hardly unadulterated either. As described above, he looked back as well as forwards to create a complex form of interlacing references. Stirling’s (and the rest of them: the Smithsons, Ladsun etc.) were far more complex in the way they built than the way they barked.

 Functionalist? It looks like a teacup.

Fifty years after the post-war ‘welfare architecture’ building boom, the fate of these explicitly modern buildings now stands at a crisis point. And due to their experimental use of materials and explicitly theoretical designs, the question regarding their survival or replacement is far more complex than those regarding their historicist predecessors. This all has considerable relevance for the future of the St. Clement’s car park. On balance, this student accommodation shouldn’t be built on a tiny, sensitive site. Moreover, it shouldn’t be built on the carpark that serves Oxford’s very few remaining independent shops. However, it’s the celebrity in the carpark which draws media attention, and which could prove to be instrumental in forcing the council’s reversal.

Sim City 2000: twentieth-century cities, urban modernity and my fourteen-year old self.

I’ve been thinking about Sim City 2000 a lot. I think I should start playing it again. Not this new fangled-The Sims stuff. All that social engineering micro-management makes me a bit uncomfortable and should be probably left to creeps or Nikolas Rose’s grad students. No, my interest is in the future-once, macro-civilisation game, Sim City, and in particular, the version it came out roughly around 1997.

Day one. Not a lot to report but sheep, tumbleweed, and me. Everything going OK.

In this game, the object is to build a ‘successful’ urban community. Really, there is no object, as the game has no ending, but the rewards-system is based on a criteria based roughly around the ‘happiness’ of your citizens. You start out with a rocky bit of terrain, maybe with a bit of sea and a bit of a river and some red earth. At this stage most of the icons are greyed-out. All you can do is build some houses, maybe a road and a couple of convenience stores, and sit back and hope that people come. If you are lucky (I’m lucky), houses are bought, families move in, people start buying groceries. As they consume, you can tax, and therefore build more homes with your honestly-earned electronic money. As more people move in, the icons become ungreyed. Surpassing a population of 5,000 gives you access to building libraries, hospitals, and schools. You can lay waterpipes and electricity lines to keep the lights on and the plants watered. With these lower-tier amenities the ‘happiness’ of your citizenry increases, more people arrive, you get higher taxes so you can build build build. Fingers crossed, the population then jumps above the next designated threshold. More and more amenities become available! You no longer are just supplying the population of BurritoVille (n.b. I like towns named after snacks) with milk and bread, and fixing their broken arms, but providing them with Saturday night bread and circuses! Stadia, shopping malls, cinemas all become available! In an effort to cater not just for body, but also for mind and spirit you keep building. You become the Donald Trump of your own virtual world, in feverish lust for increased capital, and more ungrey command-tools, you add miles of anonymous suburbs to lure more and more taxable-citizens to your very own computer generated Los Angeles. High-rises! Inner-city motorways! Airports! Fusion nuclear power plants!

 That's the family friendly fun I mentioned. Lets go see a ball game and pay some taxes kids!

Year 200. Beginning to worry I might have gotten a little over-excited by my desire to build. Not many parks anymore. 

In an effort to gain access to more taxes, more capital and more amenities, the entire screen is eventually filled by buildings, leaving no rural hinterland to my modern metropolis. All the free space goes in an effort to continue populating the city, until you gain access to “Launch Archologies” (their name, not mine!): self contained towns of 200,000 people that hover a mile above the rest of the population and exist within their own ecosystem. By this time their large shadows and huge energy usage also leads to large areas of urban decay (yes there’s code for that in Sim City too). Apparently once you’ve built fifty Launch Archologies, they explode/set off to find new worlds to be introduced to the proud civilisation of my happy Burritoistas. I wonder why the annihilation of my townsfolk though their more-than-probable firey death in a Quixotic search for a Brave New World is really such a good thing.  But its their game not mine.

All this raises some interesting questions about the nature of urbanism and the megolamaniacs who wrote this programme. I admit it, I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about what this game meant about the city in the 1990s and urban modernity more broadly. The model of urban design upon which it is based is one which Robert Moses would recognise, and which was predominantly accepted throughout the twentieth-century: a vision of the city as a place of the future, a place of continuous destruction and recreation, where increased property prices, increased population densities and increased consumption were held up as aspirational values. From first glances it appears that the game designers probably hadn’t read their Jane Jacobs. But then again, to pretend that she, or the multitudes like her put any more than the smallest dent in the ongoing trajectory of 20^th century city is to write history through textbooks not places, so maybe the fact that there is no ‘allotments’ button or ‘co-operative store’ icon is a good thing. But maybe this game is actually cleverer than that. This hyper-real, mass-market computer game where everyone can shape their vision of the city, but you are constantly pushed towards a 1960s city of urban motorways and high rises seems to be on further reflection a grandiose and bizarre in-joke. It is constructed around the self-help of Jacobs, the simulacra and populism of Venturi, and inevitably the urban forms of Moses. In a game where to win is to make your city so unbearable that your citizens live inside air-controlled chambers, ready to shoot off to discover a more inhabitable planet is a nice sort of neat irony. Its a nice way to end the twentieth century anyway.