The case for cities that never really demolish, love child’s play, handle your data respectfully, truly take back control, and more
The Guardian’s Cities section is about to close down - their sponsorship by the Rockefeller Foundation coming to an end.
Going by the range and pertinence of the articles that are embedded into the section editor’s final column, you’d have to say that it was an ideal patronage relationship - the paper evidently having a free editorial rein to investigate all aspects of our planetary shift into urban living.
They’ve given themselves a bravura send-off by commissioning five articles titled “The case for…” - critical-utopian visions for the future of cities. We’re happy to curate and promote them, with a few samples of each argument:
The case for cities that aren't dystopian surveillance states
Cory Doctorow:
…There’s nothing wrong – or new – in the idea that we should sense what’s happening in our built environments and alter how our systems perform to respond to those sensors’ observations.
There’s nothing objectionable about adding more trains when the system is busy, or recording accurate usage data to inform our urban planning debates.
The problem is that the smart city, as presently conceived, is a largely privatised affair designed as a public-private partnership to extract as much value as possible from its residents while providing the instrumentation and infrastructure to control any civil unrest that such an arrangement might provoke.
Far from treating residents as first-class users of smart infrastructure, they are treated as something between gut flora and pathogen, an inchoate mass of troublesome specks to be nudged into deterministic, convenient-to-manage patterns.
It needn’t be this way…If we decide to treat people as sensors, and not as things to be sensed – if we observe Kant’s injunction that humans should be “treated as an end in themselves and not as a means to something else” – then we can modify the smart city to gather information about the things and share that information with the people…
The case for never demolishing another building
Oliver Wainwright:
The wrecking ball has always been the great symbol of urban progress, going hand in hand with dynamite and dust clouds as the politicians’ favourite way of showing they are getting things done.
But what if we stopping knocking things down? What if every existing building had to be preserved, adapted and reused, and new buildings could only use what materials were already available? Could we continue to make and remake our cities out of what is already there?
We might have no choice, given the way our voracious urban consumption habits are going. In the UK, the construction industry accounts for 60% of all materials used, while creating a third of all waste and generating 45% of all CO2 emissions in the process. It is a greedy, profligate and polluting monster, gobbling up resources and spitting out the remains in intractable lumps.
On our current course, we are set to triple material extraction in 30 years, and triple waste production by 2100. If we stand any chance of averting climate catastrophe, we must start with buildings – and stop conceiving them in the same way we have for centuries.
This is not just about adding more solar panels, biomass boilers, and all the other bolt-on gadgets to tick the green assessment boxes. It requires a fundamental shift in our attitude to materials.
“We have to think of buildings as material depots,” says Thomas Rau , a Dutch architect who has been working to develop a public database of materials in existing buildings and their potential for reuse. There are now over 2.5m square metres of building matter logged in his Madaster database, and he is currently working with the city of Amsterdam to catalogue the components of every public building in the city.
“Waste is simply material without an identity,” he says. “If we track the provenance and performance of every element of a building, giving it an identity, we can eliminate waste.” [Editor’s note: See Vinay Gupta’s/Mattereum’s comparable plan to use ledger/blockchain technology to measure material throughput]
He has developed the concept of “material passports”, a digital record of the specific characteristics and value of every material in a construction project, thereby enabling the different parts to be recovered, recycled and reused.
His firm recently put the principle into practice with its new headquarters for Triodos, Europe’s leading ethical bank, which he says is the world’s first totally demountable office building. With a structure made entirely from wood, it has been designed with mechanical fixings so that every element can be reused, with all material logged and designed for easy disassembly.
The case for truly taking back control – by reversing the privatisation of our cities
Dan Hancox:
…Water ownership is a battle the private sector seems to have been losing. Since 2000 there have been at least 110 cases of remunicipalisation in the water and sanitation sector in France alone.
In 2008, the capital reclaimed its water from the private sector – saving €35m in its first year, reducing tariffs by 8%, reinvesting profits into maintenance rather than paying them out to shareholders, and increasing free access to water and sanitation for the residents of Paris.
Sparkling water fountain in Paris
The agency, Eau de Paris, even installed free fountains providing sparkling water – a comically French idea, perhaps, but cheap, and good for the environment, preventing thousands of plastic bottles from heading to landfill sites. It also illustrated an important point: when our urban infrastructure is owned by the public rather than profit-making corporations, everyone – not just shareholders – can have nice things.
The word remunicipalisation does not lend itself to catchy slogans. It is, perhaps, somewhat alienatingly wonkish: in-sourcing civic infrastructure is not generally thought of as sexy politics. But its popularity is on the rise worldwide.
The Transnational Institute (TNI), a thinktank in Amsterdam, has been banging the drum for years. Its latest report, The Future Is Public, identifies more than 1,400 cases of remunicipalisation since the turn of the millennium, in more than 2,400 cities across 58 countries.
The local services brought back into public ownership range from social care programmes in Selangor, Malaysia to privatised housing in Berlin, Germany; from waste services in Winnipeg, Canada to public transport cleaning in Seoul, South Korea.
The report brims with success stories: the Chileans benefiting from dramatically lower drug prices since 40 new public pharmacies were created; the 141 new publicly-owned telecommunication providers in Chattanooga, Tennessee providing internet service to locations where private companies had decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.
There has been a 47% cut to electricity use in street lighting in the Bulgarian city of Dobrich since it was remunicipalised in 2018, when the local government installed energy-efficient LED bulbs…
The case for designing cities around the needs of children
Harriet Grant:
Last year, we reported an exclusive story: that a new housing development in London had erected a wall to prevent children in the social housing section from using the communal playground.
Within hours of the story being published, news reporters from across the UK turned up on the doorstep of the Baylis Old School development in Lambeth. All the major political parties condemned this “segregated playground”, and a few days later the developer, Henley Homes, backed down. Workers came in to tear down the wall.
The story had not just an immediate impact but an ongoing one – and not just politically but also among architects, urban planners and developers. At Guardian Cities, we were contacted by other people living on segregated developments.
Many of those have since been desegregated. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, responded by outlawing segregated playgrounds in the city – and then the Conservative housing minister, James Brokenshire, went further, saying he wanted an end to all forms of segregated play across the UK.
None of this would have come to light if not for the women on the estate, who had been fighting for their children’s right to play. Despite the Baylis Old School development being advertised as “family-friendly”, many of their neighbours considered play to be a noisy intrusion.
When mothers living in the private apartments discovered their social-housing neighbours weren’t allowed to join them in the playground – let alone encourage their kids to play – they were furious.
“Our industry should be grateful that these women stepped up and drew attention to what was happening,” said architect Dinah Bornat, an expert on child-friendly design who has given talks on the segregated playgrounds scandal to architects and planners.
“The story now comes up frequently,” she added. “People recognise it now as something to avoid.”
But while developers might be steering clear of something as obviously and literally offensive as walls in playgrounds, it’s clear that our cities are steadily being divided in many other ways…
The case for making low-tech 'dumb' cities instead of 'smart' ones
Amy Fleming
…For urban landscapes increasingly vulnerable to floods, adverse weather, carbon overload, choking pollution and an unhealthy disconnect between humans and nature, there’s a strong case for looking beyond old technologies to ancient technologies.
It is eminently possible to weave ancient knowledge of how to live symbiotically with nature into how we shape the cities of the future, before this wisdom is lost forever.
We can rewild our urban landscapes, and apply low-tech ecological solutions to drainage, wastewater processing, flood survival, local agriculture and pollution that have worked for indigenous peoples for thousands of years, with no need for electronic sensors, computer servers or extra IT support.
“There are so many different ways you can rewild cities,” says Julia Watson, a lecturer in urban design at Harvard and Columbia Universities, author of Lo-Tek: Design by Radical Indigenism [promo video here]. And it’s not just a case of plonking an ancient system in a city, but rather adapting complex ecosystems for different types of places with their own unique requirements.
Take a current proposal she is working on for the high-rise city of Shenzhen on the Pearl River estuary by Hong Kong. It was once a fishing village, then a textile town, “and it just skyrocketed,” says Watson.
“All of the fishponds and polders and dykes and wetlands that absorb all the water in that delta landscape are being erased. So the city is developing in a way that’s erasing the indigenous resilience in the landscape.”
But you don’t have to erase to go forwards, she says. “You can leapfrog and embed local intelligence, using a nature-based traditional Chinese technology that’s climate resilient, ecologically resilient and culturally resilient. And we can make beautiful urban spaces with them as well.”