Urban rescue - report of the Urban Task Force on urban regeneration in the United Kingdom

Architectural Review, The, August, 1999 by Richard Rogers

It is a marvelous vision for a country which is in very many ways badly behind most of the rest of Europe, and it is a challenge to the British Government. Rather than a sniper's rifle, Rogers has brought a blunderbuss filled with over 100 miscellaneous projectiles to his task. The approach is understandable in view of the complexity and intractability of urban problems. Much of what the Rogers report urges is conventional wisdom, and that, with the diffuseness of approach, may enable a busy government to avoid implementing more than a few token recommendations.

Despite Deputy Prime Minister and Government environmental co-ordinator John Prescott's welcome of the report's intentions and recommendations, and despite the New Labour government's overt commitment to improving environmental quality, it is often difficult to see that official commitment is to more than quantity. Almost all public projects are now procured with the design and build (d&b) system: to say the least, it has yet to be demonstrated that the method produces good quality buildings on a regular basis.

Public buildings not generated by d&b emerge from the private finance system (PFI - what in the US is called BOOT: Build, Own, Operate, and Transfer). In Britain, this has yet to show that it can produce any decent architecture at all. Pasqual Maragall, mayor of Barcelona at the time when it started to become the cynosure of world cities, contributes a foreword to the Rogers report in which he says that 'the trick in Barcelona was quality first, quality after'.(12)

Whether the English establishment can even recognize quality in contemporary architecture is very moot: dramatic gestures like huge domes created by the d&b system yes; subtle and carefully thought-out urban interventions, no. A case in point is the Ralph Erskine designed Millennium Village, next to Rogers' Dome in Greenwich and intended by the Government to demonstrate sustainable urban design, which is cited in the report as an encouraging model. As we go to press, the British executive architects, Hunt Thompson Associates have left the work because, they say, the initial innovative ideas have been eroded by the process.

Yet Maragall and Rogers are surely right. There is absolutely no point in generating better planning machinery, or more sophisticated ways of funding urban projects if results are second rate. Indeed, as the '60s showed, without a noble and humane set of values, streamlined procurement of city work can lead to huge disasters, many of which are now being demolished or radically altered.

Britain's economic and political circumstances may be as favourable to major reorganization of cities as they were in the '60s. It will be catastrophic if chances which the Rogers report outlines very clearly) are again dissipated and sacrificed to the expediency of letting big contracting and developing business rip. If that happens, Britain will remain the slum of Europe. P.D.

1 Urban Task Force, Towards an Urban Renaissance, E & FN Spon, London, [pounds]19.99.