Shrinking Cities

Standpoint 06 / March 2004

Martin Pawley---------------------------------------------------------------------------A DISURBANIST MANIFESTO---------------------------------------------------------------------------

If all the problems are urban problems, why should we expect the answers tobe urban answers?
To see beyond the unresolved mixture of past and future technologies it isnecessary to skip a generation and try to visualise a new non-urban settlement beyond congestion or administrative boundaries. A network fertilized by‘short wave’ technologies rather than a museum propped up by old fashioned‘long wave’ street patterns, railways, motorways and bus lanes. These ‘long wave’
technologies are all heavy, slow and expensive where ‘short wave’ electronic
technologies are lighter, cheaper and more efficient in their use ofresources. For example, to have created a non-electronic equivalent to amobile telephone network 140 years ago, when the first London tube tunnelswere being excavated, would perhaps have been possible, but it would haverequired an army of runners, signallers and controllers, a project far too
massive for even the greatest tyrant to have organised. Yet today we canachieve the same result easily by entirely different means and without a pennyof public money: our telecommunications corporations can create not just one
mobile telephone network but as many as we want, not just national networks
but international. What we cannot do either easily or cheaply is replicate
or repair labour intensive 19th century infrastructure. There is a cycle ofprogress in these matters. We have been there, we have done that. We can't
go back and do it again. What we can do now is something else.
Meditation on a traffic jam
Ever since the dotcom boom it has been common knowledge that developments incommunications and information technology have annihilated distance -- if not
absolutely today, then nearly enough to promise the simulation of close proximity tomorrow. Today it is already part of business routine to teleconference around the world, with the participants meeting nowhere in reality but
everywhere in cyberspace. But to know this, and what it portends, and to act
upon it appropriately appear to be two different things. As a result we seem
reluctant to follow the conquest of distance to its logical conclusion in theabandonment of movement, even though -- as the car phone and the mobile phonedemonstrate -- it is movement as well as distance that is under technological attack, and will be increasingly in future.
Today mobility is prized but increasingly redundant, if only in so far as instantaneous communication on its own makes great tranches of human movement -for example daily commuting into crowded cities -- potentially unnecessary. Indeed it is already clear that uninterrupted personal communication by mobilephone is the reason why traffic congestion -- which threatens mobility -- hasso little apparent effect on the operations of the economy. This is because, unlike overcrowded trains delayed for one reason or another, cars locked in a stationary traffic stream are still unalienable destinations in themselves; spacious comfortable air conditioned recliners in a vast linear chat room that canshrink and grow by the hour or the day of the week. If the spread of crawling
traffic with its tidal flow of metal capsules, carried plankton-like from exit
to exit on the motorways, was not still treated as though it were an anomaly
rather than as a direct intimation of the shape of non-travel to come -- it would
either have been criminalised for reasons of pollution or starved of petroleum
long ago. In fact it is one of the key indicators of the new age of immobility.

-2-Notwithstanding many such indicators, immobility in our culture is still deplored. Because of our historically unprecedented capacity for movement andcommunication we live in Venn diagrams of overlapping circles, moving physically in cars and trains and planes, but also communicating from locations
that lack any meaningful materiality. In this paradoxical way we guard ouratavistic, energy guzzling, disease spreading privilege of physical mobility-- a tradition barely 200 years old in a world that measures its history inmillions -- and one in which it is already being eroded away by the increasing ease with which we can communicate with one another without moving fromour chairs. The present circumstance makes clear the promise that we have thepotential to choose -- having become a species that can live either as aplant, rooted to the spot, or as an animal with nomadic propensities. All that isrequired of us now is to decide whether to insist upon mobility, or to relinquish it in favour of a solution to the greater problem of urban densities.
Fall of the pre-electronic city
Fourteen years ago, when I was writing Theory and Design in the Second
Machine Age, I was eagerly awaiting the completion of a global electronic
network that would trigger a massive redundancy of urban real estate and bringabout a market in virtual estate instead. At that time I believed that theworld economic recession that had begun with the stock exchange crash ofOctober 1987 would be seen by historians as the beginning of an urban collapse in which the historic 'Treasure House' conception of the city would
lose its value and cities themselves would become no more than salvage dumps:
vast accumulations of wreckage left over after a process of accelerating urban
decay following the end of urban investment.
Confronted with economic failure, which seemed to be overtaking them as the1987 plunge deepened into the international recession of the early 1990s, allcities seemed more and more to consist of the detritus of consumption, theirsupposed wealth revealed as a confidence trick propped up by a ‘credit culture’ that was no more than the consumption and re-consumption of obsoleteforms, so as to preserve all that was extravagant, wasteful and outworn. Asa result all cities, I was sure, were ultimately headed for a fate of abandonment comparable to the evacuations that characterised the urban policies
of Europe's cities under aerial bombardment in the 20thcentury.
In the course of this massive process of urban bankruptcy, I believed, one of
the first casualties would be art historical urban planning, the perpetuated,
pre-revolutionary art of the pursuit of axes and vistas that epitomised allthat was old and outworn, mad and meretricious about the 'treasure house' urbanism that had overtaken the 1980s so that every old building was considered
to be of priceless value, even if derelict and unusable except as a museum ofitself. As far as the urban world was concerned a transformation would takeplace comparable to the defeat and diminution suffered by painting at the handsof photography, or cinema at the hands of television and video. And part ofthis rupture with the past would be a sudden demonstration of how easily thetechnological simulation of reality could supplant real proximity.
Proposal for a ‘Special Rural Dwellings Programme’During the 1980s a new city network was built in non-historic Europe, only it
was not called a city network. While forests were cut down to provide paper todebate the architectural merits of single buildings, all over the continent millions of square metres of warehouse and distribution centre floorspace was being constructed at breakneck speed. Outside the old towns and cities, at thousands of exits on nearly 50,000 kilometres of autoroute, one million newcommercial complexes were springing up with no reference to urban context or thesupremacy of history at all. In England more than 100 out of town shopping centres were projected, 39 of them more than 10,000 hectares in covered area.
This new 'abstract urbanism of the trade routes' -- its locations are often
only designated by numbered road exits -- was ignored by critics of architecture and urban planners. Yet in economic terms it soon became far more im--3-

portant than the sum of all the 'Art_historical' architecture built in ourancient towns and cities over the last half century. It has taken warehousing, distribution and retailing out of the cities altogether. According tothe London property research organisation Applied Property Research there
were at the end of the 1990s no less than 690,000 hectares -- 6.9 billion
square metres -- of land currently effected by non-residential ‘abstract urbanism’ in England and Wales alone. In and out of recession, out of town superstores and their associated distribution centres are still the biggest
growth area in development. In Britain, while architecture critics agonise
about what should happen on a 0.4 hectare site in the City of London, hundreds of thousands of hectares were developed along our motorways and majorroads on sites that are already becoming the nuclei of dis-urbanised non-residential 'towns' where a direct and adequate local road network leads to andfrom service areas with ten car parking spaces for every square metre of floor
space -- not one for every 50 square metres as in London or Bristol.
All that this network of non-residential infrastructure requires to absorb
the overspill from overcrowded cities is a permanent population of its own
in the shape of low density settlements liberated from the rural planning restrictions that began in England with the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act.
These restrictions were originally intended to protect land required for foodproduction from sporadic and inappropriate development, but in recent years
they have increasingly been interpreted as an almost biblical injunction to'save' the whole of the countryside from development of any kind.
Repeal of the 1947 Act might seem unlikely were it not for the recent seriesof crises in agriculture resulting from falling produce prices, and the BSEand FMD epidemics of 2000 and 2001, which have illuminated the non-competitive status of subsidised food production at the latitude of Hudson Bay (whichis where Britain is). The spin off from these events has revealed that the'industry' responsible for supplying lunchtime sandwiches to office workers
has a larger turnover than farming, and that large areas of so-called farming land are without useful purpose. Furthermore, under pressure of theseevents, the principles of the 1947 Act have been breached already by the diversification of land use permitted to farmers faced with cheap food imports
and falling subsidies. Drawing the teeth of the 1947 Act could permit farmers and other landowners to sell off house building plots in selected locations on condition that they took advantage of attractive landscape features
such as copses, woods, valleys and views, so as to permit the ensuing
dwellings to be invisibly sewn into the landscape with minimal visual intrusion. Preliminary investigations into such a measure, suggest that between
1.5 and 2 million housebuilding sites within range of existing distribution
nodes and A-road and motorway junctions would come onto the housing market
within a year of the launch of such a scheme, which would immediately releasemuch of the pressure for more building land in the South East of England.
The Special Rural Dwelling (SRD) sites made available would be most numerous
in the least populated parts of the country, and least numerous in the densely
populated South East, thus applying an immediate counterbalance to the 'town
cramming' favoured by urban enthusiasts today. The Special Rural Dwellings
Programm (SRDP) will create post-agricultural, dispersed settlements,ephemeralised, entropic and evenly distributed. One that is contrary to thewhole tradition of high assumed value that still rules our old 'Treasure
House' cities. This form of settlement will mark the coming of an urbanismof insignificant, undifferentiated, uniformly distributed particles without
heritage, without history. In conformity with our age we shall see the public open space of our cities leak away into instantaneous electronic communications and transportation networks. With the advent of a Special Rural
Dwellings Programme the flexibility of our built and mobile environment would
spread like a net over all the whole country offering ease and freedom inplace of urban strife.
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