The aesthetics of planning
We hope that we have opened up the debate over planning a debate that has been either prematurely closed or strategically avoided by those charged with making major decisions about the environment. Modernists, post-modernists, pre-modernists and anti-modernists have all promoted their vision on this site; planning has been both attacked and defended with equal vigour, and some of the complexities of the planning process have been brought to our attention.
Despite all the conflicts and disputes, however, we have been both surprised and gratified by the measure of agreement among our contributors. In particular there seems to be a widespread rejection of Jules Lubbocks original claim, that planning is not the solution but the problem. Moreover, contributors have converged on the view that the principal purpose of planning is aesthetic, and that the aesthetic is not a trivial side-constraint on building but the very essence of the enterprise.
The major disagreements have therefore involved aesthetic values, some promoting classical or pre-modern styles, as symbols of permanence and settlement, others arguing that permanence and settlement are no longer the human norm, and that the built environment must change to accommodate our newly mobile lifestyles. With a few exceptions, however, people seem to agree that the high-rise office-block vernacular of modernism is an offence to every genuine lifestyle, since it has neither life nor style. Whether we move back to the pre-modern or forward to the post-modern, we must find a way to free ourselves of the modernist chains.
Seeing the disputes in this way, we come to recognise what many of our contributors have emphasised in their different ways, namely that the planning process, as currently conducted, does not reflect the desires, tastes and aspirations of ordinary people. Those who must live with the effects of planning decisions are not those who take them, and the process of consultation and appeal is biased towards the big developer and the self-appointed expert. Our purpose on this site is to promote thought, analysis and discussion, and not to deliver policies. Nevertheless, we hope that our readers include policy-makers too, and that they will recognize the need for radical changes in our planning process, so that the real wants and needs of the people can find a voice in it. If the people had their say, then they would vote, we feel sure, for both conservation and innovation, and against the stagnant stylelessness that is now the norm.
Transport: the threads of experience
So to our next topic, which is transport. 11 September has vastly affected our perception of global travel. Aeroplanes put people in touch as they were never in touch before, and at the same time they spread grievance and aggression around the world. And what was becoming the safest mode of transport is now perceived as a terrible danger.
Although we cannot ignore these recent events, we will be looking at transport and travel from a wider perspective, as crucial factors in the redefinition of space and of the relation between city and country. As with planning, our approach to transport issues will be based not so much on statistics or competing economic theories and ideologies, but on how travel is lived and felt in everyday life in towns and cities, in rural areas, and as forms of communication, leisure and escape. We are interested in the relationship between mobility and lived experience, and what kinds of lifestyles and assumptions about mobility might be put forward as alternatives to the growing cult of hyper-mobility and speed.
We shall, therefore, be looking at how human culture is endlessly torn between stories of settlement (and place) and stories of travel and adventure. Has place lost its ability to satisfy human need in the modern world, which only endless movement can assuage? Can economies only function today as modes of globalisation, requiring the abolition of distance and place? What happened to the idea that electronic connectivity would suppress the need for endless human movement, as well as that of goods and services?
Furthermore, we are interested in the relationship between modes of transport, and their penetration into everyday life and cultural identities, whether in the historic association between certain kinds of transport modes such as walking (the rise of Romanticism), the bicycle (female emancipation), trams (the gondolas of the people), the tuk-tuk in Thailand, bullet trains in Japan, and four-wheel-drives in California. Naturally, we shall have to dwell in depth upon the cult of the car, perhaps the most transforming artefact ever invented, for some people the symbol of unprecedented freedom, for others the sign of our modern bondage.
Finally, for the moment, we shall be asking people to reflect upon the way in which forms of transport have radically and irrevocably altered the look of both city and country, from canals and motorways cutting through the rural landscape, to drive-in restaurants and grid-locked cities. As with planning, our concern is to elicit the widest range of views and experiences.
Further details of this new topic will shortly be forthcoming. Meanwhile, we should like to encourage you to accept the invitation from Clarissa Brown, to share in her project to dramatise the crisis in the countryside, and so give it a voice in the city.
