Michael Gove’s speech a few days ago set out a radical plan for which will be music to YIMBY ears: an ambitious raft of housebuilding—where people want to live—to be combined with public services, active travel, and, in the much-discussed case of Cambridge, lab space. This isn’t the first time a government has announced schemes of urban improvement on a grand scale. In the extent of its ambition, Gove’s speech recalled the construction of New Towns, a futuristic vision spawned in 1946 which eventually gave us a raft of new places like Harlow, Milton Keynes and Cumbernauld.
If we look past the flavour of radicalism and futuristic optimism, though, we should pay attention to a critical difference between the vision Gove is sketching, and the vision of New Towns in the mid 20th century. The New town was conceived specifically to scatter urban growth, ‘relieve pressure’ on London: in other words, the New Towns were all about decentralisation, spreading out, and spreading thin. Gove’s speech, conversely, is all about turbocharging existing urban centres, building places where people already want to live, and building labs where scientific demand is already fuelled by an ancient and thriving university.
Urban theory has moved on a great deal since the mid 20th century. So has architecture. It’s more than appropriate, therefore, that Gove’s ideal for the future learns some lessons from the past. First of all, his emphasis on active travel, and high density, should be applauded. It’s critical that solutions to the housing crisis do not pump up more demand for automotives, pollution, and social disconnect. The latter features are all too familiar from the ‘Barratt Boxes’ along snaking roads, which are unfortunately among the easiest designs to get through our current planning system. The atomised, asphalt laden developments drag the reputation of development as a whole through the mud, or rather tarmac.
Jane Jacobs observed, more than 60 years ago, that public parks and green spaces are useless—and even dangerous—without good homes and businesses giving people a reason to go there. While she was writing, modernist planners were building enormous blocks of flats situated in blank lawns without shops, businesses or services nearby. The idea was that perfunctory green spaces would somehow ‘improve’ the residents. Decades of experience, and a fair bit of empirical research, has demonstrated that this model of mass housing was a failure. The model was deeply paternalistic, and came from a generation of architects who studied Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture very closely indeed (a translation of a series of essays in French known as Vers une architecture).
Corbusier may be revered for visionary housing projects like the whacky, sculptural beast that is Unites d’Habitation in Marseilles, but the social theories that underpinned these projects are alarming and intimately connected with authoritarianism. Corbusier wrote to Benito Mussolini requesting from him the ‘gig’ to completely demolish and replace Addis Ababa that the Italian fascists had recently annexed. He had another dream, too: to demolish most of Paris and replace it with rows of identical X-shaped tower blocks. It’s also interesting to reflect that the hero of modernism, Corbusier, was also a fanatic about cars from the earliest point of their adoption (his Vers une Architecture essays were written in the 1920s). His writings about the ‘cancer’ of café culture and his obsession with hygiene unmask the fact that the architect preferred machines to people.
YIMBYs, developers and politicians alike must reject these top-down, ‘improving’ models of hyper-ambitious construction. These failed models of the past are the “brutalist blocks or soulless estates” that Gove lightly gestured at in his speech. Our mission is not to tell people how to live, to ‘educate’ them with clean lines, rectangles and plate glass, but to give them spaces to live, exercise, shop, buy, invest and work in whatever way they please. Not only does this kind of ambitious development work very well, but it’s also popular.
The way one does this is by building densely, but not principally in tower blocks, and mixing uses so that people have reasons to walk from building to building, keeping streets alive and safe for all their users at all times of day and night. What these buildings should look like is something of a trick question: they shouldn’t be built to a single pattern but with a diversity of forms and a playful use of solid materials. Le Corbusier, his followers, and Adolf Loos before him (see his polemic Ornament and Crime) jointly declared war on architectural ‘styles’, judging that decoration and play with materials other than concrete, steel and glass, was somehow morally wrong.
An vision of what a new quarter of Cambridge could look like from Tom Harwood, generated using Bing AI.
With a century behind us and these firebrands, it seems they may have lost. Architecture with style, decoration, and at least natural or traditional materials, remain far more popular than prefabricated structures with minimalist styling. One thing to note about minimalist architecture is that it ages poorly due to the vulnerability of its materials and the difficulty of repairing them, and a perfect geometric form ceases to be perfect when it is crumbling. The most popular and important examples of modernist development have notably survived under the wing of well-funded institutions: ‘plate glass’ universities like the UEA, or the the City of London’s Barbican.
None of this is to say that the new urban extensions (not ‘new towns’) must be executed in ‘traditional styles’. Rather, diversity, mixture, and quality should be the order of the day, countering when modernist mass development was all about separating businesses and housing, about categorising, standardising and controlling people’s lives and tastes. Yes, architectural history is key to learning how to design buildings beautifully, but it should be seen as a mood board, not a rule book. Overall, Gove’s speech is an important moment, setting out a template for solving our planning-related woes, whether they relate to housing or lab space. Learning lessons from past mistakes, without running away from our responsibilities and opportunities to make things better, is vital. Whatever government takes on the batten next year, they should pay attention to these lessons.
