How do we want to shape Place?

Place shaping has been integral to our make up as human beings since the beginnings of the first settlements that we created; maybe even before then in an expression of space, place and environment through cave art.  

Historically, our cities evolved mostly by coincidence or proximity to particular geographic features such as a river, a valley or a hilltop. As society evolved, we sought to carefully and deliberately plan the urban form. Exactly one hundred years ago today, Second Garden City Limited became Welwyn Garden City Limited and a spacious, leafy new town was born, one which has stood the test of time. 

To achieve spaciousness of this kind on our crowded island today would probably mean sacrificing the greenbelt, but perhaps this is justifiable. This visionary urban planning and design set the scene for what later became the New Towns movement.

The high watermark of the total urban planning ambition in the UK was arguably reached just before the Second World War when Donald Gibson was appointed at the age of just 29 to be the first City Architect and Planning Officer of the City of my birth, Coventry. His brief was to re-fashion an historic but congested Medieval centre into something truly modern and exciting, designed for the very cars coming off the City’s many production lines. 

With hindsight, whilst the results may seem in some respects unnecessarily brutalist, a quality of environment was provided that would have seemed extraordinary to most urban dwellers at the turn of the twentieth century. 

Where is this kind of vision today? In the twenty-first century we have proceeded somewhat cautiously in the West, perhaps scarred by the rear-view mirror commentary of twentieth century planned townscape. The action and the growth has been in countries like China. 

We have added more high-rise living to many of our urban landscapes. However even in growth economies like China, there has been a desire for something more humanist in scale, reflecting the kind of space and place that Welwyn Garden City embodied, with Thames Town just outside Shanghai being an example of this. 

Questioning what our towns are for is a good starting point in any consideration of townscape. The challenges we are currently facing with COVID-19 notwithstanding, we human beings like to meet, we like to engage, to trade and to share ideas (maybe these are all one and the same, today). 

These are the very basic elements that brought us together in urban clusters in the first place and it is unlikely that the desire for these very human elements will change. The nature and value of buildings and of the environment that surrounds buildings must, however, change over time.   

“The future of townscapes, especially in towns of architectural or historic interest, is closely connected with the economic viability of their fabric and buildings. Obviously, no town can survive long unless its inhabitants, its ratepayers, can make a living there. Only exceptionally do towns subsist as museum pieces or as predominantly tourist attractions.”   (Townscapes, Burke G, 1976).

So when we have time to take stock in a post-COVID 19 world, perhaps we should reflect on how we should fashion our townscapes for the generations to come. Public authorities as well as private enterprise and communities themselves are likely to have a major role to play.

Should we be building visionary new green garden cities as Ebenezer Howard did with Welwyn Garden City, 100 years ago and give up the idea of a greenbelt, integrating this into the urban form? Should we seek to inject new life into the existing urban structures and forms or should we go high rise as we have been doing more and more in our major cities? What do you think?