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THE ROLE OF HISTORY
The community design professions have several
choices today regarding the role of history. From one
perspective, the architect or planner may choose to
ignore history altogether in pursuit of a vision of an
unfettered future. Or, thinking that the search for
solutions to today’s complex urban design problems
leaves no time or place for the ‘esoteric’ study of
times past, a working professional may choose to
pigeonhole history in the realm of academia.
Conversely, the professional who views his or her
efforts as being part of a larger narrative, one that
acknowledges the past as being relevant to the prob-
lems of contemporary practice, will likely address
the role of history more positively. We hold this lat-
ter view regarding the importance of history to urban
design and planning. Some of the urban concepts
and values we use in our work stretch back (at the
very least) to the beginning of the industrial revolu-
tion in the late eighteenth century. We will argue in
several places throughout the book that some urban
concepts are ‘timeless,’ and can be found in western
cultures in many periods of history, but for our
purposes here, the late 1700s usefully define the
beginning of what we might call the modern era in
city design. It was then, just to the south of London,
that the first modern suburbs started to develop.
As a pair of seasoned teachers and practitioners, we
strongly believe we are more effective when we
understand the sources and the histories of the urban
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DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
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design and planning concepts that we use. They did
not arrive fully formed at our pencil tips and com-
puter keyboards! Some continue recent trends, or
reclaim discarded or outdated concepts; others are
deliberate reactions against perceived mistakes of the
past. Our ideas come with a history, and we are
guided in our practice by the knowledge of how they
were derived and how they have been used (and mis-
used) by professionals in previous times and places.
But first we must be careful to define what consti-
tutes our ‘history’. Historians and critics are often
tempted to seek some overarching ‘grand narrative’ as
a framework for their arguments (we are no different
in this regard except that we are wary of the process
and its results!) and for much of the twentieth
century the history, theory and practice of modern
architecture was presented as a unified, coherent
story by writers such as Hitchcock and Johnson
(1932), Pevsner (1936), Richards (1940), and
Giedion (1941). In this tale of the ‘International
Style,’ the heroes were Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius,
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilbersheimer,
the artists and architects at the Bauhaus, and other
pioneers of the modern movement. Under the intel-
lectual leadership of this new avant-garde, a primary
task of modern architects was to rid society of the
environmental and social evils of the polluted indus-
trial city, where workers lived miserable lives,
crowded into unsanitary slums. In place of the old,
corrupt Victorian city, modern architects envisioned
a bright, new healthy environment, full of sun, fresh
air, open space, greenery and bold new buildings free
of the trappings of archaic historical styles. It was a
terrific vision and a fulfilling professional mission.
The replacement of cities perceived as outdated
and corrupt brought a bright new optimistic face to
urban design. In war-ravaged Britain during the
1950s, new blocks of flats rose heroically from the
rubble. Some were sited, like those at Roehampton,
in west London, in park-like settings deliberately
reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s evocative drawings (see
Figure 1.1).
All was not sweetness and light, of course.
Implementation of the vision varied, and a tangible
gap was revealed between the promise of the utopian
vision and ‘real-life’ achievements on the ground.
Within a couple of decades, the planning and design
philosophies of the modernist agenda were being
questioned by the public. Planners and architects first
took a defensive position. They suggested that the
bleak urban environments people were complaining
about were simply the result of the great visions of
the masters being interpreted by less talented pupils,
but increasing popular discontent, particularly
against programs of urban reconstruction in Britain
and urban renewal in America, gradually made the
modernist position untenable.
Within these unpopular urban settings, the
architecture itself was disliked; the new buildings
were decried as dull and boring boxes. While archi-
tects loved to use concrete, either poured-in-place or
as precast panels, citing its ‘honesty’ or ‘integrity,’ the
public perceived this material as unfriendly and
hostile. The uniformity and abstraction of the Inter-
national Style puzzled and dismayed a public used to
a richer and more conventional architectural lan-
guage of historical detail and imagery, even in the
most modest of buildings. Over time, redeveloped
urban areas bred a form of distaste and antagonism
among residents who lived and worked there. In par-
ticular, the large tracts of semi-public space that were
the norm in much urban redevelopment from the
1950s through the early 1970s, gave rise to unfore-
seen and uncomfortable ambiguities about social
behavior. This ‘free’ space for sunlight and greenery
prescribed by modernist doctrine was achieved only
through the destruction of old patterns of streets and
urban blocks.
This open space was neither truly public nor
private, and its consequent lack of spatial definition
blurred boundaries and territories, raising issues of
control and management, and ultimately of crime
and personal security. Few people living in the large,
modern housing redevelopments of slabs and towers
favored by modernist theory felt safe or comfortable,
or felt sufficient ownership of the open spaces around
the new buildings to help take care of them. The list