11: Post-traumatic urbanism and radical indigenism
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Cities, Design, Indigenous, Coronavirus, Covid 19

This simple notion — that all your basic everyday needs, from education to commerce to healthcare to culture and so on, are located within 15 minutes walk or bike of your front door — requires a way of thinking, planning, designing, and acting that I was first introduced to in Sydney, almost 15 years ago, by Adrian Lahoud when we were both involved in University of Technology, Sydney (Adrian is now at the Royal College of Art).

Lahoud’s concept of post-traumatic urbanism was based on research into cities like Beirut and Berlin, exploring the super-local infrastructures of everyday life, and the purposeful redundancy built into cities that cannot promise that a bridge, say, will be there from one day to the next. This means not just one large pharmacy or baker or police station, for example, but many small ones, a more dispersed distribution pattern mimicking what network designers would call ‘redundancy’ (if one goes down, there’s another within reach.) In the context of cities, that kind of effectiveness also generates community, health, diversity, and local economy.

This is counter to much of the efficiency logic of recent decades; witness the growth of super-hospitals, versus more distributed patterns of healthcare. This, despite exemplary work like Stroke Pathways demonstrating the folly of that centralised, efficiency-led thinking.

The smart city agenda, somehow still going despite everything, has always been easy to skewer for its efficiency mantra. Cities are not about efficiency, and never have been. The most meaningful urban experiences are generally the most inefficient. But this lack of efficiency is also why they are naturally resilient, if their design patterns follow the purposeful redundancy described above.

Our food systems have been made overly-efficient, via ‘just-in-time’ practices, as the unnecessary panic buying has quickly revealed (just as the Queensland floods did.)

“Think of efficiency as a high-performance engine. Under perfect conditions, it delivers maximum power and minimum waste. However, that very efficiency makes it less robust. Highly efficient systems have no slack, no redundancy, and therefore no resilience and no spare capacity.” — Helen Lewis, The Atlantic, 26 March 2020

A post-virus edition of post-traumatic urbanism will be a topic to revive imminently. And yet, well outside of such immediate urban trauma, I’ve used the concept on numerous urban development and city strategy projects, due partly to its simple, graspable common sense, as well as the broader forms of value it can generate. Some version of the idea underpins the recent contribution to the Mayor of London’s strategy for high streets, as well as current projects here in Sweden. It certainly informed the Non-Grid ‘network urbanism’ concepts which worked their way into strategies for major urban developments in Amsterdam and Melbourne.

Again, these are urban patterns we needed to reinforce and reiterate anyway; the virus may force us to move more quickly in that direction.

Cities remain fundamentally resilient, including dense cities. Assuming we move past social distancing, and even the present fear of touch of shared surfaces, we can bring back our sense of cities as threads and knots of social urban spaces, with all the tactility and texture that implies. Perhaps the virus will give us pause to consider how to ensure they are even more resilient, aligning the distributed network urbanism patterns of post-traumatic cities with the post-systems thinking, nature-based infrastructures touched on below. In the post-trauma redesign, if we motivate for it, we may be able head off the much greater urban trauma likely from the climate crisis.

Contrary to some positions that could emerge from a bacteria-centred redesign, this means the very opposite of the concentrated, centralised, securitised, privatised, overly-sanitised places that at least one strain of urban planning and development has been creating over the last few decades. The shorthand for that pattern would be malls, big box retail parks, and global-finance-theme parks like Hudson Yards and the like. This is not a resilient structure; it is not “the green reed which bends in the wind” but “the mighty oak which breaks in a storm”, if you like. Such ‘places’ are horribly exposed at times like this—and thus emptied fairly quickly, and valueless, a stranded asset.

Whereas, outside of their dwellings, many people are currently inhabiting the smaller pockets of space in and around their neighbourhoods: local parks, even just copses or patches of grass or playgrounds; the street corners (talking at a safe distance) of diverse, scaled-well high streets, that can actually speak to and articulate the local communities they sit in; the little knots of interaction that make up a genuine neighbourhood; “a labyrinth of small, intimate territories, a random constellation of stars”, as Aldo Van Eyck wrote about his distributed playground systems for healing the scars of post-WWII-traumatic Amsterdam.

A key text, particularly if we extend the idea to a social life beyond humans

If we built on these themes of open, distributed, decentralised, networked, ‘small pieces loosely joined’, multiplied-many-times with massive diversity and purposeful redundancy, and pivoting around the social life of small urban spaces—organised into Baran webs rather than the Legrand star—we would likely find a far more resilient pattern for city life, and urban growth. If we then fundamentally reorient that around a hugely increased emphasis on biodiversity i.e. not just human-centred design, stretching from the street corners out to the distant fields of agriculture and landscape that support them, we solve for climate, health, social justice, and pandemic simultaneously. That extends the ideas of social life to include the many other natural elements that ‘socialise’ in our cities.

(These patterns, in pre-virus mode, were the essence of the plans and sketches my old team did for Amsterdam districts, which I’ll share in more detail one day.)