City shifts: cities are continually in flux, but recent changes in the prosperity of many industrial nineteenth-century ones offer exciting possibilities for generous architecture and urbanism

Architectural Review, The, March, 2004

Curious things are happening in the old industrial cities of Europe. Towns as different as Leeds, Leverkusen and Lille are being transformed by new prosperity: people, particularly the young and the old, are beginning to move back to live in city centres. After decades (in many cases almost a century) of decay caused by the decline of heavy industry, new economic activities, usually based on services, are beginning to cause demand for housing, shopping, workplaces and leisure in areas that previously seemed hopeless. Alas, the same does not seem to be happening generally in the United States, though it is in Canada--particularly in marvellous Vancouver.

At the same time, the nineteenth-century fabric of European industrial cities has been renovated (often well, but sometimes disastrously). Suddenly, fine old buildings sparkle again, forgotten squares and streets have new life. New architectures of very variable quality have begun to emerge to complement the old. It is distressing that the centre of the new Birmingham seems to have its tone set by Future Systems' huge new, blue voracious slug (AR October 2003) apparently designed to devour the customers of Selfridges. It is sad that the new centre of Lille should be dominated by Portzamparc's boot building (AR September 1993), so gross and scaleless compared with the remaining old fabric, and setting the tone for other modern vulgar and crass object buildings.

But we must not despair. Of course, energetic economic activity always produces absurd buildings as well as fine ones: the most absurd will be out of fashion soon, and be replaced when they are seen by new generations for what they are. And we should remember that for all disastrous new buildings, there are those that help to make up for them: the Pompidou Centre by Piano and Rogers (AR May 1977), the Waterloo Terminal by Nicholas Grimshaw (AR September 1993), Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim (AR December 1997) are all works that dignify and ennoble their cities.

At least in Europe, city centres are active again. Change is driven by the new economics, the transformation of society they generate, and sadly, slowly as yet, by a vague understanding of what the British Urban Task Force (1) called the 'ecological threat'. The Task Force, which undoubtedly produced the most thoughtful discussion in the '90s of the nature of change in European cities, argued for the possibility of creating 'a political, professional and cultural framework which can respond to new economic, social and environmental drivers by giving priority to the development of compact, high-quality urban neighbourhoods over the continued erosion of our countryside ... We can create towns and cities that have enduring economic strength, founded upon new knowledge-based industries employing skilled local workforces. We can create beautiful places that are socially cohesive, avoiding disparity of opportunity and promoting equity and social solidarity'. (2) Richard Rogers, who chaired the Task Force, is plainly a descendant of the William Morris of News from Nowhere, that wonderfully delicate and didactic little novel about how societies and cities might evolve, given efficient technology and human grace.

Belt of desolation

But in News, there are no cars (they had scarcely been invented when Morris wrote). The appalling rule of the civil engineer over the fabric of civilization, a reign which so dominated and horridly destroyed our notions of decent urban life in the second half of the last century, is surely coming to a close--at least in Europe, if not in much of Asia, Africa and the US. Yet transport remains absolutely vital to the nature of civic life. Describing Rotterdam, the forerunner of the late twentieth-century European boom cities, Henk de Bruijn argued that its main characteristics, 'expansion of scale, globalization, containerization, clustering, added value', (3) were the main drivers for its regeneration. He also suggested that environmental awareness was one of them, but there is, as yet, little evidence that environmental issues are reflected in the great port.

Yet environmental issues must inform all our future decisions about cities. In Rotterdam, like the other cities that became great in the nineteenth century, the centre begins to be repaired, however around it, before you get to the flourishing suburbs, there is a belt of continuing desolation: an area in which the poor huddle, industries decline and the fabric falls to bits. It is often dominated by transport infrastructures: railway lines (sometimes defunct, and sometimes much more trafficked than they were designed to be) or motorways (think of the Parisian peripherique and Birmingham's dreadful Spaghetti Junction--or indeed almost the whole of LA outside the centre).

Cities may not be able to function without efficient transport, but efficient transport is not the mainspring of the city. As Michael Sorkin remarked of Chandigarh, the great exemplar of twentieth-century planning, 'seven categories of road traffic are distinguished--based on speed--and the city is designed efficiently to separate them. Likewise in a kind of nightmarish Taylorization of caste, the city distributes residents ... among more than a dozen different income-based housing types.