Urban rescue - report of the Urban Task Force on urban regeneration in the United Kingdom

Richard Rogers

The main theme of this issue is interiors, but it coincides with the publication of Richard Rogers' report on the regeneration of cities, which is of much more than British importance. Hence the issue starts at one end of the spectrum of architectural activity and continues at the other.

In Britain, the Urban Task Force, chaired by Richard Rogers, has produced a large report(1) packed with proposals intended to bring 'people back into our cities, towns and urban neighbourhoods'. Tellingly, it was published within a week of the Beijing Charter being accepted unanimously by the UIA, the body which claims to represent the architects of the world (p15). Both Charter and report emphasize the need for what the British document calls 'a new vision for urban regeneration founded on the principles of design excellence, social well-being and environmental responsibility'.(2) Rogers' team is unequivocal in declaring that 'successful urban regeneration is design led',(3) but design alone will not be sufficient: 'it must be accompanied by investment in health, education, social services, community services and jobs'.

In more detail, the report calls for increased urban densities, 'the most compact and vibrant European city, Barcelona, has an average density of about 400 dwellings per hectare', whereas even the densest and most lively parts of London like Bloomsbury and Islington get to between 100 and 200 dwellings per hectare. What the report does not mention is that a large proportion of the dwellings in for instance Islington have private gardens, though the point has been picked up in some sections of the British popular chauvinist press. While Barcelona may perhaps be the most lively city in Europe, neither its climate nor its traditional culture make it a perfect pattern for high density living in more northerly latitudes. Nor does the report touch adequately on the fact that many of Britain's nineteenth-century cities like Newcastle and Manchester, which do have high-density housing in their centres, are often disastrous at the moment, with whole terraces standing vacant, and property having literally negative value.(4)

But the Rogers report is quite clear about the fact that contemporary domestic densities are often just far too low for a European country with a very limited land mass (or, for that matter, any kind of country in a world threatened by ecological disaster). A clumsily organized planning system and the total imaginative inertia of the big housing developers has led to over-release of greenfield land, lack of social cohesion in the suburbs and decay in traditional centres.

Much stress in the report is laid on achieving functional and social mix for both societal and environmental reasons. And on setting up clear hierarchies of transport (particularly the public kind) to minimize land-take and increase social interaction. Environmental priorities should guide land management: 'commitment to a sequential approach to the planning and the phased release of land [should prioritize] recycling of land and buildings'.(5)

Rogers' report calls for a national urban design framework 'to disseminate key design principles through land use planning and public funding guidance'.(6) This is one of the many recommendations intended to raise public consciousness of the quality of the environment, which range from injecting the basic principles of urban design, development and management into relevant school subjects (history, geography, art and so on)(7) to setting up regional urban resource centres and promoting design competitions. In many respects, the programme is similar to the pioneering Norwegian one, published in 1993.(8)

Even though Rogers says that 'there are essential issues that fall outside the remit of [the] report - education, health, welfare and security',(9) the document has astonishing range, with over 100 recommendations. Boldly, it tries to counter the dreadful legacy of the Thatcher years, that long period of decline and decay, when urban 'pessimism and under-investment' were the rule and Britain was modelled on the US. In England, 'we are', says Rogers, 'probably 20 years behind Amsterdam and Barcelona'. But the picture is not yet totally disastrous. For all Thatcher's attempts to convert Britain into a province of the US, there is nowhere on this side of the Atlantic which quite echoes the horror, squalor and awful despair of places like Camden, New Jersey or downtown St Louis. Not yet at any rate, and if the Rogers report is even only partly implemented, there probably never will be.

By 2021 it foresees a total turnaround in the fortunes of English cities, with the present trend of urban depopulation replaced by net growth, social disparity reduced, sustainable development, and substantial reductions in take-up of countryside for development. 'England will have at least five of its major cities in the top 50 European cities on any set of measures of quality of life offered for residents, businesses and visitors.(10) None of our cities will by that time be in the bottom third of any such list.'(11)

It is a marvelous vision for a country which is in very many ways badly behind most of the rest of Europe, and it is a challenge to the British Government. Rather than a sniper's rifle, Rogers has brought a blunderbuss filled with over 100 miscellaneous projectiles to his task. The approach is understandable in view of the complexity and intractability of urban problems. Much of what the Rogers report urges is conventional wisdom, and that, with the diffuseness of approach, may enable a busy government to avoid implementing more than a few token recommendations.

Despite Deputy Prime Minister and Government environmental co-ordinator John Prescott's welcome of the report's intentions and recommendations, and despite the New Labour government's overt commitment to improving environmental quality, it is often difficult to see that official commitment is to more than quantity. Almost all public projects are now procured with the design and build (d&b) system: to say the least, it has yet to be demonstrated that the method produces good quality buildings on a regular basis.

Public buildings not generated by d&b emerge from the private finance system (PFI - what in the US is called BOOT: Build, Own, Operate, and Transfer). In Britain, this has yet to show that it can produce any decent architecture at all. Pasqual Maragall, mayor of Barcelona at the time when it started to become the cynosure of world cities, contributes a foreword to the Rogers report in which he says that 'the trick in Barcelona was quality first, quality after'.(12)

Whether the English establishment can even recognize quality in contemporary architecture is very moot: dramatic gestures like huge domes created by the d&b system yes; subtle and carefully thought-out urban interventions, no. A case in point is the Ralph Erskine designed Millennium Village, next to Rogers' Dome in Greenwich and intended by the Government to demonstrate sustainable urban design, which is cited in the report as an encouraging model. As we go to press, the British executive architects, Hunt Thompson Associates have left the work because, they say, the initial innovative ideas have been eroded by the process.

Yet Maragall and Rogers are surely right. There is absolutely no point in generating better planning machinery, or more sophisticated ways of funding urban projects if results are second rate. Indeed, as the '60s showed, without a noble and humane set of values, streamlined procurement of city work can lead to huge disasters, many of which are now being demolished or radically altered.

Britain's economic and political circumstances may be as favourable to major reorganization of cities as they were in the '60s. It will be catastrophic if chances which the Rogers report outlines very clearly) are again dissipated and sacrificed to the expediency of letting big contracting and developing business rip. If that happens, Britain will remain the slum of Europe. P.D.

1 Urban Task Force, Towards an Urban Renaissance, E & FN Spon, London, [pounds]19.99.

2 Ibid, p1.

3 Ibid, p49.

4 Power, Anne and Katharine Mumford The Slow Death of Great Cities? Urban Abandonment or Urban Renaissance. Y.P.S. 1999.

5 Report, p211.

6 Ibid, p80.

7 Ibid. p169.

8 AR August 1993.

9 Report, p7.

10 This seems a rather modest aim: London must already be in the top league. Leeds, Bristol and even Birmingham have obvious hope of getting there with sensible and sustain ed effort.

11 Report p311. This is a much more difficult challenge.

12 Ibid, p3.

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