In an article for the London Observer (19.07.09), Tristram Hunt posited that " Suburbs are derided by snobs, yet they are the best hope for our future."
In this, he completely missed the point. Hatred of suburbia is not snob-driven. It is in our nature to live in high-density surroundings, from the nest to villages to industrial cities. This is how animals function. We are happiest and least stressed when everything and everyone we need to make our life complete are within touching distance, and cities work because the citizens are able to come out of their homes, assemble and exchange ideas.
Suburbs, the enormous swathes of miniature manor houses, which largely grew with the spread of private car ownership, are the antithesis of human nature, and are only attractive to those who actively court alienation, a life spent zooming between work and the telly with no danger of connecting to society.
The current vogue for second houses (and even first ones) in the countryside for city workers shapes up as the vanguard of Antisociety. Try taking a walk along any 'quiet' country road in England and parts of Wales, but especially in the so-called Home Counties, and you will be overwhelmed by the new country people, roaring back and forth in their tin boxes between their little hidden homes and town work, the pub or a supermarket. This pattern of life is repeated in suburbia.
But easily the worst aspect of suburbia is that unlike the Great Mistake of the Sixties, the high-rise blocks (many now being thankfully dynamited), these interminable rows of little castles with their lovingly tended little gardens are 'facts on the ground'- the castles are places, no matter how cut off from their neighbours and society, which resemble real homes. Prefabricated boxes in the sky weren't able to exert such a sense of proprietorial belonging.
Unlike the natural high-density growth of villages and cities, suburbs swallow up huge chunks of greenery, too. As the glaciers retreat, the suburbs advance.
The most disturbing, and saddening, tendency in urban planning now is for cities to raze their ancient terraces, the infrastructure of community; and high streets with homes, shops, pubs, businesses, cafes all rubbing shoulders, to replace them with randomly scattered low-density inner-city suburbia. Often living streets, part of the 'internet' of the city, have been replaced with the town planning equivalent of the apple-pie bed: tiny, worming cul-de-sacs. Someone must have thought this would redress the balance after the high-rise Sixties; but the truth is that those old schemes or estates had so much empty space between the blocks, space with no pubs, shops, cinemas, or shelter of any kind, that in effect this is a repeat of the old disaster. Leave your car behind, if you have one, and go for a walk through suburbia. You will see how vast and bleak it is. This has nothing to do with snobbery.
Lord Richard Rogers chaired something called the Urban Task Force, which made a report in 1999:
ReplyDelete“For the first time in 50 years there has been a measurable change of culture in favour of towns and cities, reflecting
a nationwide commitment to the Urban Renaissance.
People have started to move back into city centres: in 1990 there were 90 people living in the heart of
Manchester, today there are 25,000 residents; over the same period the population of central Liverpool has increased fourfold.
[That would be a multiplication of 16]
Building densities have increased, from an average of 25 dwellings per hectare in 1997 to 40 dwellings per hectare in 2005, making better use of our land and resources.destiny. ...Thanks to these measures, and a period of sustained economic growth and stability, England’s cities are very different places from the post-industrial centres of unemployment and failing public services of twenty years ago. English cities have established themselves as powerhouses in the UK economy and centres for cultural innovation.”
This does not apply to all English Cities. Sheffield centre for instance is given over to motorways and offices. And it has bypassed Scotland entirely. To give as an example, Glasgow. In that once dense and thriving metropolis, the historic eastern tenemented high street, London Road, was razed in the (possibly) final act of municipal vandalism and in its place there is now an inner-city low-density suburb.