Hustle and Flow: Garden City Revisited
by John Manoochehri
'It is the lack of this pleasure in daily work which has made our towns and habitations sordid and hideous.' William Morris
In the 19th century the city died and was conceived again. The medieval urban format, with organic growth around monumental centres, became violently distorted with the rise of industrialism, and the modern working class that crowded into cities to support it, and collapsed. Shanties, slums, and essentially unplanned and overloaded human settlements started to dominate urban form and shape lives of millions across Europe, and above all in Britain and the east coast of the US. Some claim this industrial revolution was the cause of urban degradation, and others suggest the industrial rush to cities simply exposed the weakness of unplanned, vernacular urbanity.
And so, partly in reaction to industrial progress, and partly as an extension of it, new, visionary planning of entire cities began to emerge. The vision of many 19th century plans was to reduce the sheer ugliness and struggle - the daily hustle - of the standard urban inhabitant, the industrial worker. Planning concepts that fundamentally overrode the mess of the post-medieval urban forms rose up at grand scale: zoning of urban functions, vehicle-dominated streetscapes, high-rise blocks, large-scale public utilities, and more. This was often proposed as the creation of not just convivial living environments, but visualised as ideal settlements. One of the strongest anti-industrial planning concepts in the late 1800s was the Garden City, with nature, culture and agriculture neatly integrated in a green utopia. Fast forward 100 years, and it's dejà vu all over again. The industrial revolution is in the doghouse, but this time it's global. From the 1970s onward, a post-industrial age of critiques flourished, claiming the machine age was destroying itself, not so much through uninhabitable, squalid cities, as the unsustainable consumption of global resources. Everything began to be looked at through the lens of sustainability, and this meant ultimately studying the throughput of resources for any human system - from household, to city, to country, to globe.
Today, the project of designing the sustainable human settlement is long overdue but coming into play very fast. Green on the skin-surface is not good enough: it has to be green in its veins. This is a design project of a new level of complexity, because not only do the resource systems of urban life need to be reworked, the urban experience needs an upgrade too. It's as much about controlling the resource flow, as about reducing the hustle.
Today's European urban inhabitants aren't crushed by unplanned proximity - they are overwhelmed by planned distance, in particular the physical wastefulness and social fragmentation of cities zoned according to the post-medieval, 19th visions. They don't need more consumer goods to raise their standard of living, they need less to raise their quality of life. If the city-dwellers of today need the same as urbanites of 100 years ago, it's a still-strong hunger to be close to nature and a living countryside.
The Garden City is being loudly re-imagined, to solve again the challenges of local urban conviviality, this time with the global dimension of sustainable resource use.
