One concern of mine is to consider how we can treat our neighbours ethically by crafting the physical city in such a way that it can be easily used by all of its people – so that not only able-bodied, well-off adults with cars but also children, the elderly, the poor, the blind, the halt, and the lame can have freedom of movement and convenient access to all the good things that cities offer. We can strive for no less if we imagine ourselves to be a just and ethical society. Political and economic freedom in the abstract mean little without any practical freedom of movement or action.
Good urban design enables people to get around safely, efficiently, and in pleasant surroundings, creating value in a fairly direct and obvious way. Nevertheless, good urban design also creates value indirectly by enabling a city’s people to create value and make it available to others through free exchange. At one level, we are concerned with the cities hardware; at another level, we are concerned with the software – with what people do in the city. As we shall see, the most important thing that people do in cities is exchange things – goods, services, and money, but also ideas, beliefs, knowledge, and love – with other people.
Exchange depends on proximity. Moreover, proximity is business of cities.
At least it used to be. After World War II, and increasingly after 1960, urban form fundamentally changed with the rise of the regional shopping mall, the large discount store, the fast-food franchise, the office ark, the motorways, the insular residential subdivision, and the functional segregation brought by land-use zoning – in conclusion, suburbanisation. Proximity and connectedness – which were a matter of course in the re compact, intimately scaled city of the past – have been replaced by fragmentation and separation, both in the expanding peripheries and, increasingly, in the decaying and urban-renewaled interiors of cities. Exchange of goods, knowledge, and ideas is uninhibited. Television, radio, the Internet and email now provide an artificial proximity, but this is a pale imitation of the real proximity of a glance at the shop window and a visit to the neighbours.
I am not a geographic determinist. An arrangement of urban space that facilitates exchange will not solve all urban ills. Connectedness and proximity are, I believe, necessary conditions for a healthy economy, culture, and community, but they are not the only necessary conditions, and they are certainly not sufficient conditions. Nor do I entertain nostalgic yearnings for the supposed golden age before automobiles, expressways, television and Tesco.
I do, however, entertain a reasonable and practical hope that these and other features of contemporary culture can be integrated into a coherent framework that facilitates many kinds of exchange and preserves not just the sense of community but the fact of it. That is the guiding principle behind this new urban terrain.
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