Urban Living—What makes good design in cities?

Urban Living—What makes good design in cities (in the present day)?

Rather than using slides to illustrate my words I’m going to show a ten minute slice of Glasgow, a random ten minute walk from my studio to my lawyers and then to lunch. It’s a route I’ve walked hundreds of times that never bores me because there’s a robustness and complexity and change-ability about it that keeps it interesting. This, for me, is a good place to ask the question:

What is good design in urban settings, in the present day?

It’s a strange question to be asked; “what makes good design in cities”—“in the present day”—as if I could ever find the answer to such a question.

Previous generations would have confidently and answered this question, sure that theirs was the only right answer.

The Victorians answered this question by destroying medieval Glasgow. They completely re-planned and reconstructed the city according to their need for power and desire for wealth, all carefully disguised as social ‘improvement’. The Victorians erased everything that had gone before them, leaving behind only two medieval buildings: the cathedral and the Provand’s Lordship.

Modernism too, swept through Europe and took some of Glasgow with it, demanding that the city now conform to a new ideal. But Glasgow’s horizontal rain dissolved the Modern experiment before it gathered the momentum—there wasn’t much call for Brise Soleil in the land of rickets. But Modernism’s failure to modernise Glasgow and turn it into a Birmingham or a Liverpool sent the planners and improvers scurrying back to the safety of sandstone and monolithic legacy of Victoriana that endures today.

Personally, I take the question, “What is good design in urban settings, in the present day”, as a warning.

As any of you who live in cities know, good urban design is much more than great architecture or signage and sewage systems. It’s much more than affordable transportation that actually takes you where you want to go. It’s even more than the service and product industries that many of us help create through our architectural, interior, product, graphic and interactive design.

But I do think, “what makes good design in cities, in the present day”, is a good question to ask because it’s only now, today, that it’s become acceptable not to have the answer to such a question. This says how much the role of the architect or the designer has changed in the last twenty-five years. I sincerely hope that design has moved to a less arrogant and more useful position, one where it can play a really useful role as part of a team in helping to create great places to live.

We now know that successful, thriving cities are complex and fragile environments that can be easily destroyed. They’re much more than the sum of their physical parts, much more than what we can touch and see.

I think that the things that make Glasgow work well as a city are the same things that make Manchester and Dublin work well: a happy mixture of people in secure jobs who live out the larger part of their lives in the city and energised by a thriving community. Above all else cities need active people. They must also have:

Individuality—Cities need to be allowed to become themselves. To do this they need planner, politician, strategists and people who are brave enough to risk being different. Cities that manage to keep their local pubs and not automatically build another Modern Art Gallery just because it’s what the best-dressed cities are wearing this year. Cities also must have:

Ambiguity—A good city should be complex enough to make you work hard to get under its skin. It’s got to have more than a good shopping street to be a success. It must have enough content to be different things to different people on different days of the week. It might have the most exclusive shopping this side of London, but swathes of the city are given over to peddling second-hand underwear and false teeth; it may have an international legacy in art and architecture, and in football. They should also have:

Depth—So they reveals more of themselves to you over time. You should be able to live in a city for a lifetime and never fully comprehend it – it should hold you, enthrall you and make you sad to leave it. It should be capable of making you feel at home and yet you should still find parts of it where you’re made to feel like a complete stranger. Like a classic text a city must have the depth to satisfy. You will be able to randomly dip into its pages and find surprises and treasures, or read one page every day for the rest of your life and still feel satisfied. But great cities also must have:

Conflict—A good city should force you to touch someone, have an argument with someone and provide you with a civilised means of interaction and escape. To do this cities must be dense, with alleyways, public spaces, public toilets, parks, churches and other clubs. Density is the precondition for bumping into someone in the first place. You must feel able to talk to strangers without having to do it on the telephone. But cities must also have:

Cohesion—They must have a physical consistency, textures and materials that make them homogeneous. They must be one city not a collection of separate parts. Transportation is an important part of this. You should be able to walk from one part to another, and run, and cycle, and use a car, or a bus or a train. How a city talks about itself: its centre and East End and West End, Rive Gauche, Southside or riverside reveals to you its different faces, its perceptions of itself. Cities are living things and like us they have a:

Memory—The collective memory of a city betrays its history, depth, cohesion, conflict and ambiguity. Memories of industrial might or educational excellence or scientific discovery live on in the hearts and minds of subsequent generations while architecture marks tragedies, victories or merely bears witness to the passing of time. Memories provide clues that help us to fix a steady course for the future. In fact memories often have as much to do with future aspirations as with the past events. For its our aspirations that really matter.

Aspiration—drives change. If a city is static it becomes Brugge; a shopping enclave surrounded by canals; a city crystallised in time and trapped by tourism.

Whole cities are much too complex to design. I wish people would stop trying to regard them as large corporate organisations, branding them and giving them logotypes and straplines. Good design in urban settings means wielding the power of change with a light touch, resisting the temptation to replace much with little, much you can see, touch or define with the little you can. It’s very easy to upset the delicate urban ecosystem. Good design in urban settings means protecting the special places that give cities their unique personalities, their idiosyncrasies, their beauty and their ugliness.