The Death of Urbanism. Marcus White
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the 1956 Housing Act, councils had been paying a premium for construction of blocks of flats. The apartments became filled with the current underclass and were beset with social problems and crime.
Le Corbusier’s dream of concrete towers floating over lush landscapes was misread and reproduced ad nauseam without any of the pizzazz of his own built versions such as the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France. Instead of the green landscape rolling under the towers, the pilotis (columns) were filled in or became a landscape of car parking. A pivotal moment for these high-rise buildings occurred prior to 1973 in East London, when a structure known as Ronan Point partially collapsed due to a domestic natural gas explosion killing several occupants (Delatte Jr, 2009).
Contemporary atmosphere of loss
In the previous sections, we outlined three critical ‘healthy urbanism’ themes that occurred during historic moments within an atmosphere of optimism for an urban design future that was more connected, more beautiful, and healthier than what had come before.
The visionary example of Haussmann’s Paris, and the holistic approach of Ildefons Cerdà in Barcelona demonstrate urbanism coming of age. These urban designers were grappling with balancing issues of movement by considering transportation and network connectivity. They were studying aesthetic unity and visual composition by designing for the human experience and composing from the human perspective. They were also responding to a desire for improving public health through their development of urban design procedures responding to desires for access to daylight, airflow, and sewerage in growing cities.
When we think about the atmosphere of contemporary society’s urban concerns and wants, they appear somewhat more pessimistic than prior urban desires. The use of the grid expressed the ‘civilised’ nature of Roman society, perspectival urban compositions reflected cultural advancement, and the boulevards of Haussmann and chamfered grids of Cerdà were an expression of enlightened design defeating the disease and pestilence of the past. The focus of contemporary urban design is far less aspirational. We no longer talk about the future being better than it is now, we use terms like ‘sustainability’, that the best we can hope for is to sustain the lifestyle we currently have, and ‘resilience’, that we expect things are going to get horribly worse with a myriad of crises, and we hope that we can return to pre-crisis status quickly.
The driving force behind urban aspirations and desires now is based on perceived losses. The loss of cheap fuel due to peak oil; the loss of environmental stability due to climate change; the loss of time due to long commutes; the loss of social diversity due to planning regulation induced social segregation; the loss of health due to a worldwide obesity epidemic; as well as the continuing fear for a loss of amenity due to urbanisation and densification are all realities for which society needs to adjust and prepare.
In the following chapters, we will explore these loss-focused objectives and desires, as well as various responses to the suggested death of urbanism. We use the analogy of ‘coping with loss’, as the structure for our review of prevailing current and emerging urban design paradigms and their associated design techniques or ‘procedures’. We use Kübler-Ross’ concept of ‘five stages of grief’ from her book On Death and Dying, published in the pivotal year of 1973, with each chapter exploring a ‘stage of grief’ with its corresponding urban design paradigm.
In the First Stage: Denial chapter, we explore the coping mechanism of refusal to accept that the ‘diagnosis’ is correct, comparing terminal patient denial to advocates for business-as-usual urban ‘sprawl’ development, and some of the significant problems with this denial.
In the Second Stage: Anger chapter, we examine the placing of blame that can occur during difficult times of transition by examining anti-development community groups and attempt to tease out some of the underlying reasoning behind their anger.
In the Third Stage: Bargaining chapter, we move on to discuss the strong desire of terminal patients to want to go back to the way things were before they had been presented the bad news. We compare this yearning for the past with the revisionist New Urbanist design movement attempting to understand the embedded use of nostalgia and promises of ‘clean’ urban order.
In the Fourth Stage: Depression chapter, we study concepts of depression, starchitects, digital-procedural fetishism, and community co-design.
In the Fifth Stage: Acceptance chapter, we explore the idea of accepting our fate and making the most of the time left, presenting an optimistic manifesto that includes strategic densification, making speculative plans, proposing smarter community participation, and putting forward an integrated performance-based approach to urbanism.
* ‘Bogan’ is Australian and New Zealand slang term for describing a person whose speech, behaviour and appearance are considered uncouth or unsophisticated, often dedicated fans of 1980s heavy metal bands such as Mötley Crüe or AC/DC who epitomise the ‘boganesque’.
† The Burger King business name was already trademarked by a takeaway food shop in Adelaide when the franchise was first being established in Australia and was consequently renamed Hungry Jacks.
‡ A ‘groma’ or ‘surveyor’s cross’ was a primitive surveying device that used vertical staffs with cross members hanging plumb bobs. The surveyor’s assistant would walk ahead and move around until their staff lined up with the surveyor’s plum bobs.
§ For a prime example of a grid laid out indiscriminately over undulating topography, see Bullitt, the 1968 police thriller film starring Steve Mc-Queen, directed by Peter Yates, distributed by Warner Bros, where a 390 CID V8 Ford Mustang and two 1968 V8 Dodge Chargers chase each other around the steep streets of San Francisco becoming airborne at intersections. This example exposes the mismatch of 19th C gridded street layout, steep terrain and the speed of the 20th Century car.
¶ CIAM: Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne, (International Congress of Modern Architecture) founded in 1928, in Switzerland, group of Modernist architects led by Le Corbusier, Hélène de Mandrot, Sigfried Giedion with Hugo Häring, Pierre Jeanneret, Hannes Meyer and others.
** Not to be confused with Jon Snow ‘The Pouting Bastard of Winter-fell’, short-lived ‘King of the North’ and the second most disappointing resolution of a character arc in GOT Season 8.
†† Sorry, that pun was irresistible.
First stage: Denial
‘this can’t really be happening’
Business as usual – continue to cul-de-sac(k) the city
The first stage of grief is denial. According to Kübler-Ross, denial is a healthy part of dealing with the uncomfortable and painful situation of their impending death. Denial functions as a buffer after unexpected, shocking news, allowing people to go on functioning as if nothing has changed. While they slowly come to terms with the shocking news, they go on with ‘business as usual’. For the patients described by Kübler-Ross, denial allowed them to not face the truth that their way of life was coming to an end, a hard-fact that they were not ready to hear.
Among the over two hundred dying patientswe have interviewed, most reacted to theawareness of a terminal illness at first withthe statement, “No, not me, it cannot betrue.”
One of our patients […] was convincedthat the X-rays were “mixed up”; she askedfor reassurance that her pathology reportcould not possibly be back so soon andthat another patient’s report must havebeen marked with her name. When none ofthis could be confirmed, she quickly askedto leave the hospital, looking for anotherphysician in the vain hope “to get a betterexplanation for my troubles.” This patientwent “shopping around” for many doctors,some of whom gave her reassuring answers,others of whom confirmed the previoussuspicion. Whether confirmed or not, shereacted in the same manner; she asked forexamination and re-examination, partiallyknowing that the original diagnosis wascorrect, but also seeking further evaluationsin the hope that the first