Global urban planning a disaster
Planners have designed cities as if resources such as land, fuel and
concrete were unlimited, and waste has been something to dump as
cheaply and as distantly as possible, according to an article in New Scientist (17/6/2006, p.38). Worse, they designed cities around cars rather than people.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s costly blueprint: Heading the field in this
respect has been the US, where the architect Frank Lloyd Wright
provided a blueprint for modem America in his “Broadacre City”, a
suburban idyll of homesteads connected by an endless lattice of
highways. The model became a global template, stretching from Milton
Keynes in the UK to Brasilia, the modernist new capital that Brazil
built in the middle of its central savannah in the late 1950s.
Cars ahead of community: This generation of city builders
“worshipped at the altar of the automotive god, and idealised mobility
and freedom”, says Peter Hall, professor of planning and regeneration
at University College London. They thought that community living was
over and that in the future people would have no desire for local
neighbourhood.
Bad ideas reinforced: This idea was embraced in the 1960s by one
of the most influential figures in urban planning, Christopher
Alexander, professor of architecture at the University of California,
Berkeley, who said that when your friends don’t live next door,
neighbourhoods became not just irrelevant but stifling “military
encampments designed to create discipline and rigidity”.
Planned cities become disasters that don’t work: The problem
with this kind of thinking is that the resulting cities lack the
flexibility that would allow them to respond to the wishes of their
inhabitants. They just don’t work. As a result, Alexander’s philosophy
has turned many cities, especially in the US, into social and
ecological disaster areas, teeming with socially deprived
neighbourhoods whose inhabitants are forced to rely on the polluting,
petrol-guzzling car to maintain the illusion of freedom.
Grand plans are never fulfilled: Cities have never grown in the
way that urban planners imagined says Michael Batty of University
College London, which is why the grand plans are rarely successful.
Cars are the key: The best that planners can hope for is to
intervene at decisive points and let human nature and market forces do
the rest. Planners and architects now agree that to improve the social
and environmental condition of cities the top priority is to cut car
use.
New Scientist, 17/6/2006, p. 38
Source: Erisk Net
