Pro-city, positive thresholds and a new language for the development professions?

What's' wrong with cities? When asked baldly like that most people would say, 'nothing', and we agree...so why do we still try to make 'better versions' of them by imposing ideas that where crafted to destroy the old principles and provide a template for 'something better'?

The bedrock of so many areas of urban development, from traffic management, commercial mortgaging, insurance, building regs, to housing choice have been shaped in response to a build up of planning requirements that where anti urban in their ethos. This 'anti-urban' lineage can be detected also in the language used in the professions. 'Over developed'...'capacity'...and town cramming' are only the tip of the subconscious anti city, iceberg. Mired as it is in the garden city tradition, it gives an automatic edge to so much of the development process.

We need a new language that reflects celebration of the positive attributes of the big city, urban massing and configuration!

'New Urbanism', 'Smart Growth' and 'Towards an urban renaissance' have ironically introduced some, ostensibly' new, pro-city, terminologies, but their actual meanings and potential application have been lost in the wider anti urban continuum of the planning world. So now people TALK of 'building places', 'neighbourhood approaches', 'shared realm' and 'mixed use' but we blithely still build housing and separate trading estates, 'secure' by design housing layouts and 'cultural quarters', all at densities so woefully low and so utterly disconnected as to make 'place making' impossible. We must have the meaning and intent of the new language as well as the airy phrases.

We still see projects being built of exclusive use and 'open aspect' insisted upon as a holy of holy principle, when they know that the 'common land' will have to be ringed by ugly security fencing before the structure is complete! Over looking distances, resistance to 'enclosure' and terracing underpin developments that are misguidedly called 'urban renewal'! We still have traffic formulas that dictate the intensity of development...how do London, NYC and Tokyo cope without them? Incredibly productive high streets that form the heart of their local communities as well as being vibrant, economically, are regarded as 'obsolete'...and we are still building ghetto's!

A draft (anti) tall buildings policy that has been doing the rounds in Liverpool since summer 2003, not only intends to limit growth by imposing the farcical notion of a spatial/townscape design envelope, but actually states that issues of housing and sustainable density will be interpreted in accordance with perceived 'needs '....basically admitting that what is intended is inherently unsustainable...such is the power of intransigence and boneheadedness in Liverpool!

We need to take a step back and ask What, actually, is a city? How do they work? and is what we do in Liverpool building up, or dismantling its urban functionality and potential? Then we can perhaps begin to frame policies that are genuinely appropriate to the needs and aspirations of a fast recovering city.

So how about some positive city-building codes and ideals? Given that Liverpool is a commercial city and its future lies in regalvinising its position in that role, how about taking this as a baseline and seeing what criteria are needed to ensure success?

Why not some MINIMUM residential density thresholds, below which no development would be given permission? Not only would this then ensure that we where hitting baseline levels that we need in each downtown district, but they would begin to indicate the appropriate massing and height of buildings suitable for each available development site, ESPECIALLY given all those low level 'historic buildings of value' that we wish to preserve in our environment!

That would be just the beginning! Commerce could develop the floor space it NEEDS, rather than have it dictated, so not having to make hard decisions about whether to stay downtown. How can we utilise the built environment to help entrepreneurs to build the city's wealth assets?, etc...and so on

Shouldn't we see that codes designed to preserve the aspect of the many hundreds of Georgian market towns in England are not only inappropriate but utterly irrelevant in a city the size and dimension of Liverpool (the principles applied are exactly the same in Liverpool as St Albans according to the heritage line)

The dangers of taking the heritage agenda to extremes is a continuing theme of DL, but of course it is not the current heritage agenda that caused the destruction of our cities and it is not our objection to principles as applied in the rest of the city. Many heritage principles are, ironically, sensible urban neighbourhood principles.

It is the accumulation of 'progressive' ideologies that have caused the greatest destruction of the urban fabric, and has tied us into using the same flawed formulas to alleviate problems caused by previous programmes which, used the same formulas, in a continually downward spiral, of which excess ideologies amongst heritage communities is but a reaction to, and a symptom of, generations of wanton destruction.

A root and branch approach is needed in all fields related to 'urban development' Like Soviet Communism, the system is unreformable, but first there has to be a change in perceptions that agree that what we currently do is counterproductive, largely harmful, to our aspirations to revive our cities and their communities.

If we want the city to restore its international role then surely we need different principles to guide how we allow the physical landscape to accommodate this ambition?

© 2004 Downtown Liverpool