ABSTRACT
Natural environments may be ‘natural’ for us, but most of us live in cities.1 Urban cultural and social diversity let ideas and economic activities interact and cross-fertilize each other to a high degree. But cities are hardly natural environments: not what humankind has grown up in. Urban life, therefore, brings a whole new set of conflicts between inner (archetypal) needs and outer (contemporary) surroundings. Cities aren’t subject to natural time: they don’t sleep. But we need to: and to relax, unwind. Our life is therefore divided between enmeshment in urban activity and withdrawal from it: public life and home life. Metabolically, time has a breathing rhythm. By day, we’re active; at night, we recuperate.2 Modern life’s 24-hour light, warmth and stimulus availability, however, so blur diurnal (and seasonal) rhythms, that the hour (and the month) often aren’t obvious without thinking. Nonetheless, an archetypal echo still remains: stimulus outside home by day (sallying forth to hunt) and energy-restorative security at home (cave-life) after work. Like industrial toxins on workers’ overalls, we bring the day’s stress home each evening. Homes, therefore, have a spirit-renewing role. For this, they must feel secure: tranquil islands sheltered from the super-stimulation all around them. This is the reverse of rural life: there, we step outside to breathe in calm. Additionally, urban homes must resolve greater conflicting requirements and constraints than elsewhere. They need more privacy, but also calming, tranquil long views; more light, but also more protectiveness; more space, which land-prices prohibit; and quiet, rare in cities. Privacy has two aspects: sensory and territorial. Traditionally, living half a level up provided visual privacy. Flower-bed obstructions outside windows or windowsills raised above passer-by eye-level by sloping ground, however, obviate steps so are more disabled-friendly. Some cultures have a whole series of transition-spaces to buffer quiet private havens from the noisy, impersonal and public: community-realm, street, courtyard, staircase (wheelchairs need lifts), four-flat lobby. A dark low tunnel leading through into light (common for European communal courtyards) is both territory portal and ritual experience. Contrast this with living in a caravan (trailer) in a city: you abruptly step from public-realm – with one set of behaviour expectations – into private living space – with another. You can survive in it, but it offers little spirit-recuperation. Security is only one of our needs. We also need social contact. With lots of people around, this should be easy. But cities can be lonely places, with informal meetings strangled by alienated inhibition. Alienation is a fact of urban life: with too
many strangers too close, we don’t dare to relate to them. I doubt anything contributes so much to social malaise as anonymity – the feeling that you know nobody and nobody cares whether they know you. Re-meeting the same people in different circumstances grows community. This is inverse-scale related: unavoidable in hamlets, routine in small communities, rare in cities, impossible on the Internet. Social ‘translucency’ reduces as size increases.3 Community-formation is further inhibited by our increasingly privatized lifestyles. We drive our own cars, have our own washing-machines and equipment instead of using buses and launderettes, and lending and borrowing. Without sharing bus-queues, even getting to know next-door neighbours isn’t easy. Doing things together – from childcare and cooperative maintenance to sport – helps make friends. Kick-about football areas, resident-managed community rooms, mechanic-tool-clubs, food-buying co-ops and allotment plots give such opportunities. How people meet, however, is supported or hindered by surroundings. If I wanted to obstruct community-formation, I would design apartments where nobody would dare let children out to play, where the only places we see others are concrete access balconies, scarily underlit corridors, lifts and refuse-chute points: none conducive to relaxed conversation. For the better-off, en-suite garages may be desirable, but if we drive to work, to shops, friends and entertainments, how do we meet our neighbours? Dutch, German and Danish studies show how parking that is restricted to ends of streets builds community.4 In walking to our cars, we meet neighbours. With automatic garage doors, we don’t. The more activities overlap in the communal realm, the more chance meetings. Shops have a role here. Virtually every family buys groceries. Supermarkets are driving-distance apart, so we rarely encounter neighbours there. In, and walking to, local shops we do. But without enough customers, these can’t survive. As we like to
combine errands, grouping shops with health-clinics, recycling-points, workplaces and playgrounds increases customers. These grouped facilities centre neighbourhoods. Just as market towns’ spacing resulted from easy horse-cart range, such neighbourhood centres should be within easy (5-minute) walking-distance of homes: a quarter mile (400 m). Otherwise, once in cars, we might as well go to somewhere bigger. Although supermarkets out-compete on price and range of goods, local shops can out-compete on convenience, conviviality and attractiveness. If they – and walking routes thereto – don’t, they won’t last long. Meeting people, sociability, only happens on foot. It’s also about slowing down. But life is speeding up. We need only read an old novel to notice the faster pace we’re now used to. One characteristic of over-speeding, whether driving, eating, speaking, at work or in daily living, is that we don’t notice it. Stimulation increases until it crosses the threshold of stress. Some consider the number of psychiatrists in New York proportional to the pace of life – a pace clearly manifest in the speed at which people walk. For health, high-speeders need holidays in slow-moving places. All of us, however, benefit when places give inducements to stop. To encourage us to stop, not just pass through, places must be inviting. Otherwise, they’re little used. In draughty, shaded sandpits, merely wire-fence separated from heavy traffic, few children play. Few parents sit on the surrounding concrete benches. On landscaped roundabouts’ benches, never anyone. Delight is vital: climatic delight, multi-sensory delight, visual delight. This suggests sun-traps in cool season, leafshade and sparkling water in warm; focus on life sounds: people, birdsong, leaf-rustle, water-ripple, street-music. Also enticing aromas: baking, coffee, garlic-grills, fruit and flowers. As such delight-magnets encourage lingering, more people are around. Life breeds life: more symbiotic activities, more reasons to be there. Urban vitality depends on concentrated, varied and visible human activity. But we also need relief from stimulation, places to rest. Pavement cafés and back-protected low walls for people-watching offer this. Soul-recuperative oases include parks, greens and archway-portalled walled gardens – sun-filled and dapple-shaded. Nature-permeated places give respite from ‘involuntary attention’ – situations demanding continual alertness. Water, in particular, is the greatest of all calmers. Almost every city has grown up around water, its commerce, power or bridges bringing them into being. Yet some cities fill docks with rubbish and use riversides for major roads, car-parks, warehouses and industry. Even riverside parks aren’t relaxing if edged by fast roads. Most small streams are now underground sewers, their disappearance a major loss to topographic understanding. Only a few cities, like Freiburg, let streamlets rush beside streets, cleaning air and enlivening mood.5 Water is perhaps the greatest environmental asset any city has, yet how rarely is it developed! Space relieves stress. Over-crowding increases it. So is density a stress factor? Or is it just a measure of how many people can be packed onto a site? Attitudes are emotively coloured by historical-cultural factors. Whereas New World settlement was founded on generous open space, in continental Europe a millennium of foraging armies made protectively walled urban (or nucleated village) life the norm.6 Spatially, high density doesn’t have to mean high buildings. In fact, as these need space around them,
they’re typically no higher density than traditional row housing. This space, however, is so overlooked that it’s neither private nor inviting to sit or play in. Socially, higher densities support more facilities. With densities below 30-35 homes/ha (12-14/acre), shops don’t have enough customers within walking range; below 40 homes/ha, bus services aren’t viable.7 Conversely, many think stress is proportional to crowding;8 and crime to density. More people around, however, generally increases security: neither muggers nor burglars enjoy being watched at work. Higher densities, however, mean spatial compaction and increase street activity, crowds and traffic, hence noise. This compromises some sorts of places. But others need these qualities. Silent, empty or over-broad, a shopping street becomes a ghost. Different activity-mixes need different place-moods. This suggests appropriate densities and which streets building entrances should or shouldn’t feed. Urban experience doesn’t work in less-than-urban space. Traditional European shopping streets often have 1:1 height-to-width proportions; medieval ones typically 3:1.9 1:1 proportion, however, feels quite different in a two-storey street or a 15-storey canyon. At 1:2, three-storey buildings broaden a street into a market; but six-storey ones, into a parade avenue. Both have the same building density, but in one all the people are in a relatively narrow street, in the other there’s so much space for traffic that it dominates place-mood. There’s also a dimensional aspect: 23 metres (75 ft) being the limit of face and voice recognition.10 Southern European medieval squares rarely exceed 80 ft (25 metres) in width.11 Christopher Alexander recommends squares be 60 ft (18 metres) wide.12 As compressed activity makes public spaces feel adequately populated, Jan Gehl considers they’re always better too small than too large.13 The smaller public spaces are, the more human their scale. Trees, awnings and curb-edge colonnades narrow streets’ perceived width. Bends, road-ends and out-jutting buildings can ‘deflect’ or ‘terminate’ views, making inhumanely long strips into a series of smaller places.14 Whereas view-closing high buildings can feel like prison walls, twisting streets of low buildings give human-scale.
