Megamalls, walkable cities and ‘la Londonisation’ August 6, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Communities, Design, Europe, London.1 comment so far
The general reaction to the interim report of Kate Barker’s inquiry into the planning system seemed to be that it was a bit of a damp squib, with much less enthusiasm for major reform than was expected. But Anna Minton worries that Barker wants to promote out-of-town superstores over small-scale city shopping on the basis of efficiency (or at least redress what Barker might see as the current bias towards the latter). She contrasts what she sees as the increased privatisation of public space in Britain with Jan Gehl’s vision of an open, bustling, diverse, pedestrian-friendly public realm. I’ve just started reading Gehl’s Life Between Buildings myself, and his arguments for a walkable cityscape are certainly persuasive. But there’s a difference, I think, between that and simply trying to preserve the state of urban commerce in aspic, as the Parisians seem to be attempting:
In Paris, French policy makers have become so concerned about the British experience that they have described the trend as “la Londonisation” and have introduced planning regulations specifically to prevent it. As a result, about half the shops in Paris will have restrictions placed on them to prevent changes of use, so that a foodshop remains a foodshop and a bookshop or a greengrocer cannot become part of a mobile phone chain.
If true, I find this policy fairly nutty. What’s good for Parisians today won’t be good for them always, and specifying the particular use of each property surely goes way too far.
Tear down the high rises? March 22, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, Communities, Design, Europe, Housing markets, International, Regeneration.add a comment
In an oldie but goldie post over at the AHI blog, David Smith argues that “High-rise public housing never works. Never has worked, never will work”.
Overall he makes a very convincing case, and mostly I agree – high-rise housing filled with poor people has been a disaster here in the UK as much as in America or France. How much of this was down to the physical form of the buildings? Just about all of it, says David, though I think the examples he cites demonstrate that the kind of inhabitants matter too. Maybe high-rise blocks wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t populated with high proportions of bored, workless young men, for example. Here in London, some local authorities have moved the families out of their towers, refurbished them and converted them to 100% sheltered housing for the elderly, for example, so there may be some use for some of these buildings after all. As for the rest, I agree with David – tear ‘em down.
The post raises another issue for me. David quotes this passage from Christopher Caldwell in the NY Times Magazine:
If you don’t vary the housing units in a given neighborhood – if you fill entire quarters of the city with standard-issue monoliths – you condemn upwardly mobile people to constant movement. The only people who develop any sense of place are those trapped in the poverty they started in.
Again, I agree. But doesn’t this apply to the private sector too? Here in London, most new private supply consists of one or two bed flats in high-density developments. There’s plenty of demand for them (for now) and no doubt they do the job for their inhabitants for a few years, but you can’t raise a family in them. So should planning authorities do more to guide the market towards producing fewer, larger homes to keep families in the inner city? Won’t this just drive up prices for everyone? And can we really have ‘mixed communities’ if the only family housing in inner cities is for poor families? I don’t pretend to have the answers to these questions, but I think we need to be asking them.
Not-very insular living in ancient Rome March 14, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Europe, History of housing.add a comment
Here’s the perenially excellent AHI blog on the world’s first apartment buildings – the
insulae of ancient Rome, the only solution to a city of a million people on a site of little over 400 hectares:
Built of brick, probably unplastered and little ornamented, they were entered from exterior stairs that led up, over a ground floor of shops, to corridors off which opened single rooms that were numbered. Each room had its own window of mica or selenite, translucent enough to remind you morning had arrived. Some rooms had small balconies for taking the evening air (and disposing of garbage and night soil) …
the insula became the standard form of Roman middle-class as well as working-class housing; and not merely in Rome, for there are numerous examples in Ostia and Pompeii. It combined shops and workshops on the ground floor, flats on the floors above, thus achieving mixed uses in every block: a form that can be found in Italian and larger French cities to this day.
