Town & Country Planning, January 2013
Christmas is a deeply conservative time of year, delving deep into the medieval-Dickensian subconscious that we all share – and which comes out in the stagecoaches and icy Victorian skating scenes that are still on the cards around my house as I write.
So waking up from Christmas, as we have to every year, it is sometimes quite hard to get the head around the future – and around the emergence of China in particular and the huge impact it is likely to have on the lives of our children, and probably also our own.
The sheer scale of the Chinese cities is terrifying in itself. The vast apartment blocks, the spare cities built inland in case of tsunamis, the whole enterprise is mindboggling and there are plans for urban homes for another 300 million Chinese in the next quarter century.
Whenever I really want to depress myself – a rare occurrence – I look at the extraordinary photo, published in Fortune magazine some years ago of the tiny apartment windows blotting out the sky, as far as you can see.
It is a frightening vision of an inhuman, inhumane future, a kind of perversion of Le Corbusier’s vision of cities, where every family gets a shelf and an allocated few square feet of glass to look out on everyone else’s shelf. It is a vision of humanity entirely removed from the earth and the seasons.
But in the same magazine some weeks ago, there was a fascinating interview with the American urbanist Peter Calthorpe, who has been asked to design six new Chinese cities – and to do so to a sustainable human-scale pattern that claws back something of the lost localism of high density megacities.
Calthorpe is a fascinating figure, based in San Francisco though actually born in London, and an admirer of Ebenezer Howard. He is one of the founders of the ‘new urbanism’ in the USA.
As an American architect and planner, he has spent most of his career battling – not high-density Chinese megablocks but low-density California Little Boxes-style suburbs. That was the spur to create what he called Pedestrian Pockets, with a mixture of densities, and a mixture of uses, linked to public transport and clustered around a green centre.
Calthorpe is the great enemy of sprawl and an advocate of human-scale development, which seems to me to be the heart of localism in planning. He even describes the Chinese mistake as “high density sprawl”.
High density sprawl will not work with urban highways, long-distance commuting and the other aspects of California life. It barely works in low density Los Angeles.
“As the Chinese create more and more superblocks of apartments and giant shopping centres, they’re destroying a whole stratum of their traditional walkable society,” says Calthorpe. “The Chinese used to live on the streets in wonderfully social ways, being able to stroll or ride their bikes to cafes and small shops. This creates an affordable, vital urban lifestyle.”
Five years ago, the Chinese began to pilot a series of eco-towns based on clean energy and now they are beginning to worry away at the implications of that for urban design. Calthorpe’s breakthrough came when he was asked by the mayor of a new town in south west China, called Chenggong, to redesign the plan from the usual series of superblocks to something more human.
The solution borrows something of Calthorpe’s Pedestrian Pockets, redesigning the city around a series of small blocks of 500 units each, with green courtyards and where it is possible to walk or cycle to shop or eat out, and – as he puts it – “where neighbours can actually recognise each other”.
What is interesting to the authorities is that they can make more money selling off the plots of land, because small developers are able to bid as well – and there is enough space for parks as well.
There is something vital here for the future of humanity. If China, with all its energy and resources, can shift the pattern from the unsustainable and inhumane, then there is hope for everyone else.
Even better if the inspiration comes partly from a pioneer English Edwardian town planner, the founder of this journal.