CityReads│London Manifesto: Give Citizens Freedom to Live Well

/  75  /

London Manifesto: 
Give Its Citizens the Freedom to Live Well

“A city will struggle if it can no longer house the people in various occupations”, The Observer architecture critic Rowan Moore, wrote in his new book Slow Burn City, “London needs an intervention if it grow to 10 million; therefore, he declared a manifesto for the change”.

Rowan Moore, 2016. Slow burn city: London in the twenty-first century, Picador.

Source：http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/10/manifesto-london-10-million-citizens-freedom-rowan-moore

Picture source: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/rowan-moore/slow-burn-city

Slow Burn City describes London in the early 21st century, the global cityabove all others.Moneyfrom all over the world flows through it; its land and homes are tradablecommodities; it is a nexus for the world's migrant populations, rich and poor.Versions of what is happening in London are happening elsewhere, but London hasbecome the best place to understand the way the world's cities arechanging.

London is dazzling and exciting but also struggles to deal with thepressures created by its success. It is unable to offer many of its citizens adecent home, and its best qualities are threatened by speculation. ModernLondon tests to the limit the idea that, when it comes to the growth and organizationof a city, the free market knows best.

Some of the transformations London has undergone were creative, otherswere destructive; this is not new. London has always been a city of trade,exploitation and opportunity. But London has an equal history of publicinterventions, including the Clean Air Act, the invention of the green belt andcouncil housing, and the innovation of the sewers and embankments that removedthe threat of cholera.

The city must change, of course, but Moore explains why it should do sowith a 'slow burn', through the interplay of private investment, public goodand legislative action.

Following is an edited extract from Slow Burn City.

Cities change. They renew through consuming themselves. Districts areremade and repurposed, populations churn, buildings are adapted or demolishedand rebuilt. A city’s fabric is made out of the raw material supplied by thepast and becomes the raw material for the future.

London has a particular ability to change in this way: areas that can movefrom one social group to another and between ethnicities, or from industrial toartistic.

In the first decade and a half of the 21st century, London started consumingitself with accelerating voracity. Change tended in one direction, towards theconversion of all qualities into investment value, especially that ofresidential property. Most obviously its desirable areas, its quite nice areasand even those that were just about tolerable were being priced out of range ofmost of its citizens.

Such change tends towards sterilization and irreversibility. It threatenedqualities that might have been thought fundamental to the city: itsavailability, generosity, fluidity and social diversity.

The ideal is that cities burn slowly. Their social ecologies and physicalforms should renew through change, not be devastated by it. A community and aplace cannot be bound together forever, but neither should city-dwellers bethreatened with uprooting every few years. Being an ideal, such a city issomething never perfectly attained. London, with its adaptability, itsvariegation and its areas of slackness and redundancy, has long been anoutstanding example of a slow-burning city, but its phases of growth and crisishave also had their drastic aspect.

Put simply, the pattern has been one where private interests have beengiven freedom to create, to exploit and to grow up to and beyond the point ofdisaster – fire, disease, overcrowding, sprawl, pollution. There is then majorpublic intervention, in its own way unprecedented, such as the London BuildingActs, the sewerage installed by Joseph Bazalgette, council housing, the greenbelt, the Clean Air Acts, the protection of heritage through conservation areasand listed buildings. These interventions are not only technical, but alsopolitical, social and cultural. To make the sewers, for example, required theinvention of a new form of city government.

After 35 years in which private interests have again led the growth of thecity, it is time for another adjustment. There is already something wrong witha place that expels its poor and puts decent homes beyond the reach of many ofits citizens. A city will struggle to succeed if it can no longer house thepeople who teach, clean, nurse, treat, make, repair, build, plan, design,create, cook, serve, police, drive and entertain. If the city is to grow to 10million, the current responses will be – as they already are – inadequate. Intheir failures, they are also causing damage to the physical environment of thecity, wasting its opportunities and endangering its richness.

It might seem strange to speak of slowness when London is dynamic and itschallenges urgent and when past forms of intervention – the sewers, councilhousing – have been dramatic. The actions needed now are not modest. But,paradoxically, large-scale intervention is needed, to allow a city’s humanecologies to flourish.

Take, for example, self-build housing, a concept promoted by governmentsright-wing and left, but, despite the inspiring work of Walter Segal atWalter’s Way in Lewisham, almost never achieved. This is because would-beself-builders can’t compete with the land-buying powers of property companies.It would require public authorities to designate land on which individualscould build their own homes.

However, Itshould be remembered that the municipal is not always virtuous and that atleast some of the damage done to the city has been in the name of planning.Arguments in favour of spontaneity and against overdetermination by officialsneed to be heard. Planning and no-planning, both of the strategies are provedto be beneficial and both have been prone to abuse and appropriation by specialinterests. Plan kept at bay the kind of housing crisis that London now faceswhile It also created the waste and rigidity. The spirit of non-plan, at bestit enables both bottom-up initiative and entrepreneurial wealth creation;besides, at worst it allows the seizure of common assets for profit.

The truth is that London needs all ofeverything: plan and non-plan; popular action, public intervention andcommercial investment. They have their own forms, their own benefits anddisbenefits, their own extremes. The ideal for London is their vigorousco-existence. 

A manifesto for London

The ideal of London is that it is availableand open. It gives opportunities and freedoms. Its common assets can beshared by all. It is competitive but generous. All identities arepossible, but not mutually exclusive.

The city has two main needs：

• new and accessible homes

• enhancement of the qualities thatmake a city worth inhabiting

MAKE HOMES

It is clear that, in the early 21st century,the most critical issues facing the city are to do with housing. It is acrisis of price and supply that:

• creates a class of people who canno longer afford to live in the city

• creates a class of people whocontinue to live in the city at the cost of accepting exceptionally poorliving spaces

• generates favelas: beds-in-sheds,grossly overcrowded flats

 It has other damaging effects. It:

• distorts choices in personallives, in relationships, in decisions whether and when to have children

• inhibits the free movement ofpeople, and of labour

• exiles people vital to thefunctioning of the city.

  It has been created by:

• national government policy thathas encouraged house price inflation for a generation

• restricted supply and high demand

• the inability of the privatesector, at any time since the 1930s, to meet need by itself.

  It will only get worse as the populationincreases. Therefore:

• more space must be made availablefor new neighbourhoods

• government (national,London-wide, local) must build when the private sector won’t; governmentsshould own land and guide building on it in the public interest

• national government must stoppushing up the price of homes.

  Ways to make more space include:

• making existing streets denser:two storeys can become three, four can become six

• intensification of outer suburbs,especially in their centres, without destroying their essential characters

• building on formerly industrialland, but not at the expense of vital businesses

• building the transport, schoolsand other essentials for making new neighbourhoods work

• towers, if they fulfil theirpromise of being well designed and in the right place

• building (with care) on the greenbelt.

The green belt, invented for the benefit ofLondoners, is now causing the city to suffer. Building there could notonly create more places to live, but also give more people access tonature. The traditions of making town houses with gardens, admired byRasmussen, could be revived. A dull field, given to the city, can make a richer contributionto human life than when left alone.

       These options do not exclude eachother. All are needed. All require planning.

People who oppose building near their homesoften have good reason to do so. They should therefore be able to share inthe benefits that come from new development.

MAKE NEW PLACES. 

PROTECT THE EXISTING

Reverse the degradation and erosion of thecity’s shared spaces and encourage new ones to match its expansion. As thebest parts of London are removed from the reach of most of its citizens,it is essential to make good new places to replace them.

Stop further devastation caused by tallbuildings to the Thames and other parts of London, both long distance andclose up. Enforce the principle that the more conspicuous a building is,the more care should be taken in its design.

Planning has to support the qualities thatmake shared spaces succeed, including the relationships of buildings toeach other and the qualities of the surfaces.

A city is not a gigantic housing estate. Supportthe vital places that are not homes: for working, sociability, knowledge,health, imagination. These include high streets, gardens, factories,clubs, markets.

The city should include slack space – placeswhere people can do their own thing, create urban gardens, allotments andplaygrounds. Again, an acre of such space is worth more than an averageacre of green belt.

Value the already-there when making the new.

PLAN

Simplify planning rules; reduce the roles ofopinion and obscurity.

Employ more planners; value and pay thembetter. The amounts spent on guiding development well are tiny comparedwith the billions spent on construction. Investment in intelligence earlyon saves waste later.

Require that definitions of sustainabilitytake embodied energy intoaccount.

Conceive areas of new development as placesnot diagrams. Consider the spaces made in three dimensions. Recognise thequalities that make a place distinctive and successful. (Clue: it may notbe topiary.)

End abuse of terms. Something described as“public space” should be fully public. Ignore words of puff such as“iconic” and “world class”.

Planning is not just the mitigation ofdamaging proposals, but the active encouragement of areas and buildingsthat enhance the city.

DON’T PLAN

Planning does not mean that planners make alldecisions themselves, but create conditions in which local and individualinitiatives can flourish.

Let there be places for large and smallenterprises. Let there be zones of hyperdensity, if the market wants it,and self-build housing, Canary Wharfs and Walters Ways..

Give London the freedom to make the most ofits resources and energies. Give its citizens the freedom to live wellthere and make the most of the city.

---

And, indeed, the city is fascinating and exciting, but the biggerpoint is this: if London is so brilliant, why not apply that brilliance morewidely, such that it can boast to the world of its public housing and cityplanning, the unrivalled intelligence and beauty with which its new towers aredirected, its city-transforming ways of draining rainwater, its encouragementof thousands of projects to build homes, grow gardens and improve streets? Whynot apply the ingenuity that currently goes into massaging the planning system,such that multi-level basements might be permitted beneath historic houses, toaddressing the city’s larger needs. Which would in the end benefit everyone,including those overseas investors that London’s politicians have been so anxiousto court.

London hasan ability to reinvent itself decade by decade: why not make its next inventionbe the rediscovery of its generosity?

Related CityReads:

（Click the title, or enter Official Account and reply number ）

CityReads ∣Notes On Cities

"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat, 

posts our notes on city reads weekly. 

Please follow us by searching "CityReads"  

Or scanning the QR code  above