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

'The result is a city altogether different from the older Indian cities, their indigenous styles of motion that so appalled the fastidious Corbusier'. (4) In fact, Corb's plans (the transport ones at least) have largely been altered by the amazing and sometimes genial age-old Indian chaos of which Sorkin suggests that progress through the 'sluggish maelstrom' of traditional Indian cities is humanly satisfying because it encourages 'local negotiation for the right of passage'.

Such rights have all but disappeared from the rings of desolation round the urban centres (though in various ways, they may have started to be re-installed in the centres by, for instance, congestion charging systems like those of London and Oslo). It is vital to restore human decency to the desolated cordon, and it is perhaps possible that new geometries and understanding of the relationships of humanity to nature may provide part of the answer.

Folded landscapes

A great deal of rubbish has been talked about the liberating powers of the computer to allow non-Euclidean geometries to enable the construction of entirely new forms and spaces. Sometimes, as at Gehry's Bilbao, the results are spectacular and urban life-enhancing. Too often, such geometries have provided flashy architects with the power to waggle themselves about, destroying human scale with blobs and other such snot. But there are signs that that the new geometries, used thoughtfully, can really begin to civilize the dreadful problems of the unhappy extra-central ring. Perhaps folded landscape can incorporate inflexible traffic infrastructure, to relate green suburbs to increasingly greening urban centres. Folded landscape has as yet been little explored, but we have enough examples to show that the approach is really worth pursuing. Foreign Office Architects' pier in Yokohama (AR January 2003) shows how modern transport and Walter Benjamin's flaneurs can be conciliated. As Luca Galofaro commented on the current extraordinary blossoming of landscape art, 'the landscape becomes the new field of action in which the "users" stop being normal observers and become indispensable elements for the definition of the space that hosts them'. (5)

I do not mean to say by such things that we can remedy the plight of the poor who live in the grim circle, nor that we can turf or forest them over with wacky landscape schemes. But that we should look at the dreadful problems of such areas with the flair and zeal to invent possible new futures for everyone that our profession had in the 1950s and '60s. We were wrong then, because we believed that architecture, by itself, could solve social problems. But we should not forget or trivialize the mighty powers of architecture.

In partnership with others, from social workers to civil engineers(even), from bankers to big city bosses (as well), we can have a very great deal to offer. Let's begin to think and start inspiring again.

P.D.

1 Towards an Urban Renaissance, Final Report of the Urban Task Force, Chaired by Richard Rogers. E & FN Spon, London, 1999, p27.