The failure of simplistic land use and building systems driven by profit and hyper-efficiency was singled out as the main culprit for shortcomings in urban living by experts at the ISSUES Brave New City event on Wednesday 30 September.
The uniquely structured event brought together representatives from across the urban design, building, architecture, research and environment sectors, using film clips from ITN Source to spark off a debate around the future of Scottish cities, and to answer the following questions:
What will the cities of the future look like? How will we live, work and play? What choices can we make now to secure the urban future we want?
Panellist and City Design Leader for Edinburgh, Cav. Riccardo Marini, predicted a change in the system, saying that the relics of a Fordist approach to public policy, governance and building, driven by low cost and efficiency, had not created places in which people wanted to live.
Marini said: ‘We all instinctively know a good place when we see it but the system is not delivering place making; it is not delivering places in which we want to live, work and play.’ Marini concluded that creating desirable, liveable places, was the key to creating sustainable cities.
In order to exemplify the absence of placemaking in modern building and design, Marini selected a clip displaying a cityscape and asked the audience to identify the city (right). Many suggestions were offered – Hong Kong, Chicago – but no one was able to identify Sydney without the addition of the Harbour Bridge.
Joining Riccardo Marini on the panel, John Thomson of Scottish Natural Heritage, agreed that a rethinking of the drivers behind new building was the key to creating future sustainable cities. Mr Thomson, Strategy and Communications Director of SNH, suggested that a city built around the ‘5 minute pint’ (where city dwellers can reach the local shop or pub in five minutes) was most desirable for future urban living. He said: ‘the cities of the last 50 years have been centred around the car and this has amounted to a loss of detail and the banishment of people from cities and towns. The cities of the future must reverse the trend by considering people first and by looking at planning and building on a smaller scale.’
Mr Thomson kicked off his talk using footage of the French sport of Parkour or Free Running (below): the physical discipline in which participants run along a route, attempting to negotiate obstacles in the most efficient way possible. For Mr Thomson, Parkour (or the art of moving in English) exemplified a city in which the human being on two legs is king, one that is completely at odds with the towns and cities created in the last 50 years but a valuable lesson for the future of modern urban life.
Several audience members also questioned whether building projects were driven by the right quality criteria, one member insisting that ‘the sticks and carrots’ that drive the system need to change. Another suggested looking to Scandinavia and Northern Europe for guidance, where small scale, integrated development and increased powers to public servants contributed to creating more liveable, desirable and sustainable cities.
Panellist Paul Jowitt, Professor of Civil Engineering at Heriot Watt University and Executive Director of sustainability consultancy SISTech, agreed that existing cities had failed to create cohesive networks and was resolute that community building was the key ingredient to ensuring the sustainability of future cities. These communities were those created by the city dwellers themselves but also by those bodies tasked with urban design, building and research. Professor Jowitt said: ‘Cities are very complex networks of people, roads, places of work, education, socialising and communication. Creating an overarching city network that links all these is only possible by building a community among those tasked with its creation: planners, architects, public officials, builders, researchers and the urban community itself’. Professor Jowitt used clips of pre-war slum clearances in the UK (below) to exemplify the absence of modern community building.
Coping with the effects of environmental change was also foremost in the panel’s considerations of the future of Scottish cities. Panellist Mike Groves insisted that city economies must adapt for the changing environment and used the example of Aberdeen and the city’s potential to transform from Europe’s oil capital to a Renewable Energy hub. He said: ‘from the industrial revolution onwards the economy has shaped the environment but in the future the environment will shape the economy. Employment has a huge and immediate impact on cities and Aberdeen will be an interesting place to watch out for’.
Brave New City was organised by the ISSUES project as a means of connecting key thinkers in the area of urban sustainability. ISSUES is the knowledge transfer arm of the Sustainable Urban Environments Programme – an EPSRC funded portfolio of research looking at ways of improving sustainability in the urban environment. This includes research related to a variety of sectors spanning Transport, Building, Urban Planning, Water and Waste, Energy and Pollution. The ISSUES team is based at Heriot-Watt University and Cambridge University. See http://www.urbansustainabilityexchange.org.uk.
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