Remaking Cities (Routledge Revivals)

Contradictions of the Recent Urban Environment

Alison Ravetz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135007027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book, published in 1980, is an iconoclastic account of one of the pillars of the welfare state, British town and country planning, between 1945 and 1975. Always a fine balance between central control and market forces, it was challenged by strains within and between the environmental professions and protest by people dispossessed or alienated by re-shaped urban environments. Remaking Cities critiques the export of western-style planning to the developing world and reviews initiatives rooted in different understandings of 'growth' appearing in those years.

Nearly forty years on, many of the same issues beset us, notably the depressingly familiar inner city problem, despite countless reports, funds and 'programmes'. But now our infrastructure and services, once publicly owned, are privatised and fragmented, and local government progressively relegated. The very core of planning, development control, is being pared in a struggle to regain the 'growth' which led to our current crisis. This gives fresh importance to the need for new modes of creating liveable, sustainable environments, emphasised in this important work.

PART ONE:

THE CREATION OF A STYLE OF PLANNING

1 PHOENIX RISING: THE CREATION OF STATUTORY PLANNING IN THE 1940s

1 Rejection, and the ‘Clean Sweep’ Approach to Town Planning

When there is a grievance, a wrong to be righted, or a feeling of sacrifice and reward deferred, it is natural to indulge in day-dreams. So it was with Britain in the Second World War. Civilian combat came not by the poison gas that had been expected but by land-mine, incendiary and high-explosive bombs and guided missiles. For most of the cities affected the blitz was concentrated into a few months between September 1940 and May 1941. Liverpool, Plymouth and Birmingham had eight major attacks each; Bristol six; Glasgow five; Coventry two and Exeter one. London had 71 attacks. By the end of the war two out of seven houses in Britain were either damaged or destroyed – in parts of the East End of London 96 out of every hundred. An incalculable number of other buildings were lost, including shops, offices and other workplaces.

Cut through the middle, its stairs and grates dangling and its contrasting squares of wallpaper in tatters, the small working-class home looked pathetically seedy, even slightly obscene. Anger at its destruction was dwarfed by an older, vaster anger at the society that had permitted its creation: a society of poverty, slump, unemployment and class conflict. For many, indeed, the war against Fascism was but a culmination of all this, and they believed that out of the fire a better order must come. So in A New England Professor Adshead (as the author was quaintly styled on the title page) pleaded that

Now in the year 1941, surely it is not too early to prepare plans for a New England, a New England that must be built with good, though not necessarily lasting material, but which avoids the vacillating mistakes of the past.¹

So new and confident plans were prepared. Between 1939 and 1950 over a hundred were published, for small and large towns, counties and regions. The authors were, variously, local officials, independent planning consultants and groups or organisations concerned with planning. Meanwhile in 1940 Winston Churchill, as Prime Minister, had appointed Arthur Greenwood, a former Minister of Health, to be Minister for Reconstruction, and Sir John Reith, who had made his name as the first director of the BBC, to be Minister of Works and Buildings. Fully occupied at first with national defence, Reith soon turned to planning for peace; for as he later confessed, he was frightened of being unprepared for peace, with its inevitable inflation of land values.²

The Barlow Commission had already been appointed by the government in 1937 as a result of its anxiety about the economic depression in South Wales, the north-east and some other regions, and the concomitant drift of population to the south-east, where the economy was expanding. Reporting in January 1940, when the threat of air warfare was another cause of concern, the Commission suggested that population distribution was largely dependent on control of land use, and that there was a need further to investigate this.³ Reith then commissioned the Uthwatt Report on land values, and later the Scott Report on the utilization of rural land.⁴ He also asked for plans for post-war redevelopment from the London County Council and the City of London.

A series of Acts followed, which formed the structure of modern British town planning: the Distribution of Industry Act in 1945; the 1946 New Towns Act; the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act (superseding two interim Acts of 1943 and 1944); and finally the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act. Parallel Acts were passed for Scotland. Not appearing in the galaxy of new Acts, but nevertheless fundamental for the operation of the post-war planning system were the public health and slum clearance statutes that were carried over from the inter-war, and indeed in some instances from the pre-1914, period.

Reith himself, to his infinite regret, was not made the first Minister of the new Ministry of Town and Country Planning. He was distrusted by Churchill and had to content himself with token honours for the rest of his life. To others besides himself his removal from the task he had begun so well was a tragedy, for

he was the one man in the country who, had he been available, would have been able to understand and lead to some creative purpose, to the ends of the world if need be, the near-fanatical enthusiasm of those of us back from the war.⁵

Visions of what post-war Britain could become were by then the substance of books, articles, films and exhibitions throughout the land. Many remembered how Sir Christopher Wren had tried in vain to remodel London after the Great Fire of 1666 – the News Chronicle, for instance, called for a new capital ‘modelled on the divine simplicity of Wren’s Plan’.⁶ Backed up with the legislation now being created, these visions would ensure that an entirely new order arose from the ashes of war.

But this new phoenix was a very different sort of bird from the old. In astonishing contrast, for instance, to post-war Poland, where the communist regime rebuilt what the Nazis had so remorselessly destroyed almost brick by brick, British planners regarded the blitz as a providential and a cleansing process. Hitler, it was suggested, had accomplished overnight what decades of planning effort had failed to do, and he had razed the very sites most needed for the overdue restructuring of towns. It was only regretted that he had not gone far enough; and at least one well-known architect-planner offended his Forces audience by taking a professional and ‘somewhat coldly impersonal and technical view of bombing destruction’ which nightly threatened to kill their distant loved ones.⁷

Because it was loathed, much of the existing urban fabric was seen as wholly expendable. Its size and formlessness were felt as overwhelming.

The districts melt into one another in great, shapeless, blurred agglomerations. If he lives on the fringe, perhaps [the citizen’s] district will be distinguishable from the rest because it has been recently built, but it is as likely as not that it will have no coherence, no centre, and that it will be empty of atmosphere, a sort of negative dormitory.⁸

Indeed, the notion of formlessness became almost an obsession. The famous and revered planner, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, repeatedly referred to a ‘vast sea of inchoate development’ in which the places he would recognise as having any character at all had been all but drowned.⁹ Similarly, members of the MARS (Modern Architecture Research) Group, who were ideologically in quite the opposite camp to Abercrombie, agreed about the ‘vast urban agglomeration’ of London.¹⁰ As a more recent writer has remarked, it was a professional blind spot: for as the planners and policy makers passed to and fro, ‘nothing on the railway viaducts through suburban London or suburban Birmingham seems to have caught [their] eye … as possible communities.’¹¹ But as their distance from the centre increased, and they entered low-density middle- or upper-class suburbs, their attitude to the urban fabric became less severe, and they tacitly conceded that the outermost suburbs could quite properly be left alone.

These excepted, there was little in the town that was expected to remain after planning had had its way. ‘We shall keep, and improve, what is good; but that is a tiny part of the whole.’¹² Besides the bombing, the falling in of many 99-year land leases was due quite soon, and this would enable the authorities to take possession of sites at a reasonable price. The reconstruction that would follow was no more than an extension of the military war: a war, this time, against disease and social wrong.

The war is no mere conflict between nations, it is part of a great battle for the establishment of a civilisation, in which mankind may live in friendship, in conditions that make a full life possible … A change from the chaos and squalor of our present cities is one of the foremost of these conditions.¹³

It was reasonable then to suppose with F.J. Osborn, one of the most militant lobbyists for town planning, that towns would be ‘very largely rebuilt in twenty to twenty-five years’.¹⁴

The English hatred of large, overcrowded and industrial cities is traditional, and virtually as old as such cities themselves. London was the ‘Great Wen’ of William Cobbett in the 1820s, and its filth, crime and dilapidation were later depicted in many of the novels of Charles Dickens. Dickens again pilloried the northern industrial city in ‘Coke-town’ of Hard Times. Mistrust of urban decadence and squalor is embedded in the English imagination – so much so that apologists for the metropolitan city, with its excitement, anonymity, tragedy and whimsy, have created another, counter-literature.¹⁵ But this relates only to London: virtually no one had a good word to say for the big provincial towns. By the end of the nineteenth century, there was another cause for alarm, besides their factories, pollution and slums: that of the sheer scale of urban sprawl, with jerry-built houses spreading like an ugly stain over the countryside. This is a common theme in the pages of H.G. Wells and others, and it provoked a sort of hysteria among discriminating country-lovers in the years between the wars, when ribbon development was able to proceed with little hindrance. The roads that encouraged such development also brought peace-shattering motorists, ‘hordes of hikers cackling insanely in the woods … fat girls in shorts, youths in gaudy ties and plus-fours, and a roadhouse round every corner and a café on top of every hill for their accommodation’.¹⁶ As the nation gathered itself for war, there were forebodings that evacuation schemes would make further inroads into rural peace.

The reaction against unplanned industrial urbanism is so well known that, though it is often referred to, its implications are seldom probed. Britain was the first country in the world to industrialise. Its corporate rejection of the urban environments that resulted was a rejection of its own economic basis, of its history, and it might be said, of self. The Modern Movement in architecture, which was beginning to gather a small British following at this time, explicitly made its goal the adoption of methods, materials and forms appropriate to industrialism, whether in homes, buildings or the whole urban environment. Yet it too, no less than the traditionalists and romantics, rejected the existing towns, buildings and houses that were the typical products of an industrial society.

Self-rejection, whether by societies or individuals, is always a momentous thing. To be carried off, it needs a vast amount of self-confidence; but since the rejection arises in the first place from an absence of confidence, this easily degenerates into false bravado. Again, few situations are absolutely destitute of good; but rejection is so emotionally charged that it must reject good with bad, discarding babies wholesale with bathwater. A ‘throwaway’ attitude to existing environments or situations recommends itself to governments because it seems to offer clearly defined aims and can be a great rallying point. It also agrees with the impatient, aggressive apprehension and manipulation of reality that characterises Western European society. In the 1940s it was felt that ‘the environment of the great majority of the people of these islands must be classified under … hugger-mugger, waste, and ugliness’,¹⁷ and the simple answer was thought to be to replace it by a planned environment that was logical, efficient and beautiful.

The result was a ‘clean sweep’ philosophy of planning to which all the parties that were in any way concerned with the built environment subscribed. A few were sensible enough to see that planners could never in fact start entirely from scratch, but in the 1940s future possibilities were dazzling enough to encourage the hope that somehow this might be so. For one distinguished writer on planning, it was deplorable that planners were not ‘always able to detach themselves from the actual environment and to behave as though they have a clean slate and all eternity before them’. The blitz had accomplished much, but he regretted that churches, town halls and such things had to be treated as sacrosanct, and that a planner should have ‘to compromise with bric-à-brac of this kind and must very often spoil his plan in the process’.¹⁸ Planners were exhorted to be ambitious and think on a large scale. ‘It is the clarity of their thought and the daring of their surgery that matters.’¹⁹ The really great monuments should be respected (and they had in fact been protected by earlier Acts going back to the nineteenth century); but architects had traditionally been educated to appreciate great buildings as monuments in isolation from their surroundings, and bomb damage offered a golden opportunity to clear all the urban undergrowth from around them. So to the architect-planner Thomas Sharp, the author of a best-selling Penguin paperback on town planning, everything added to the urban environment in the previous hundred years reflected only ‘utter black and hopeless degradation’.²⁰ Sharp was celebrated for his great sensitivity, and he was commissioned to do plans for historic cities like Exeter, Durham, Salisbury and Oxford. Apart from their glorious Gothic cathedrals and buildings of similar calibre, he felt that there was little worth preserving in them. ‘The watchword for the future should be – not restoration, but renewal.’²¹

So various attitudes and interests combined to make the clean-sweep style of planning the prevailing post-war style: compensation for the war; traditional loathing of big cities and industrialism; redress of poverty, bitterness and social divisions; the distribution of population; the agreed need to take firm control over the post-war land market; and what appears in retrospect to be an almost boundless professional self-confidence among architects and others involved with town planning.

2 The Roots of Statutory Town Planning: Sanitary Regulation and Model Planning

In the 1930s there grew up an informal alliance of people representing different political parties and interests, who were agreed on the necessity for national economic planning, not so much for its own sake (for many felt that such planning disagreed with British democratic ideals) but as a desperate last bid to compete with the dictatorships who apparently planned effectively. Many British intellectuals, indeed, admired Hitler for his ability to ‘get things done’. The alliance included the politicians Harold Macmillan and Stafford Cripps, the one later to be Conservative Minister of Housing and subsequently Prime Minister, while the other was Chancellor of the first post-war Labour government. It was also supported by academics, writers and many others. Town planning was assumed to be a legitimate part of national planning and had its own small but stalwart band of propagandists. As well as professional architect-planners like Patrick Abercrombie and administrators like F.J. Osborn (the manager of Welwyn Garden City), it owed much to Neville Chamberlain, who a decade before his term as Prime Minister had served as Minister of Health and did much to bring in a comprehensive planning system.

The nineteenth-century origins of statutory town planning (as distinct from the Georgian town planning that was practised by private developers) are well known as related in many places.²² Statutory planning had two main roots, one of which came from reaction to the rapidly expanded, unplanned and un-serviced town of the industrial revolution. After a series of steps from the 1830s this led to the setting up of the Local Government Board in 1871 and the 1875 Public Health Act. The public health inspectorate was the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One The Creation of a Style of Planning
• 1 Phoenix Rising: The Creation of Statutory Planning in the 1940s
• 2 Principles and Images of Statutory Planning: The Inevitability of the Style
• Part Two The Application of the Style: The Segregated City
• 3 The Failure of the 1940s Planning System: The Contradiction of Land Values and Development
• 4 Restructuring the City in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: The Parameters
• 5 The Segregated City
• Part Three Agents and Agencies of the Built Environment
• Introduction
• 6 The Technology of the Built Environment: The Crisis in Building After 1945
• 7 Controlling the Environment: The Environmental Professions and their Crises
• 8 The Export of Planning: Western Planning in the Ex-Colonial World
• 9 Experiencing the Environment: People, Place and Space
• Conclusion to Parts Two and Three: Criticisms of a Style of Planning: The Transition to a New Consciousness
• Part Four Cities in Crisis: Coping with the Contradictions
• 10 The Urban Crisis, the Planning Crisis, and Alternatives to Development
• 11 Coping with the Contradictions: The World in a New Light
• Bibliography
• Index