Earlier this year we heard of the death of the great American novelist Kurt Vonnegut. He knew all about the remodelling of urban environments, having been one of the few to survive the fire bombing of the German city of Dresden in 1945. Vonnegut made the destruction of this city and its inhabitants the focal point of his most famous novel, Slaughter House Five. Towards the end of his life he wrote about how he enjoyed living in his local New York neighbourhood, celebrating his habit of wandering about at leisure, fulfilling his daily tasks. The conclusion the author drew from this later convivial urban experience was characteristically to the point. He maintained that, 'electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different'.
In England our incoming Prime Minister Gordon Brown has recently stated his desire to build five new 'Eco-Towns', each being home to 20 000 souls whose footprints tread lightly on the planet. This commendable initiative represents the Holy Grail of commissions for urban design consultants the world over. The current generation of urban design practitioners often look back with envy at the power and influence given to their predecessors. The present scheme is tantalising because it represents our chance to put into practice all we now espouse and believe in. The jostling to be one of the chosen masterplanners for these five sustainable communities will be intense.
But what will those selected to produce the plans for Prime Minister Brown's Eco Towns propose to do? One thing they will not need is yet another treatise, academic or otherwise, which spells out the principles of a sustainable community or place. Surely we know by now what these are? What we do not have are enough pragmatic examples of how to get there from here.
No doubt many places will be cited as models to follow, from Frieburg to Poundbury, Seaside to Hammarby. The last two decades have seen the international urban design community carving out a new way of thinking about how to plan, organise and shape future settlements that will enable their inhabitants to live a sustainable, benign lifestyle. Then again, how superficial is it to write about people's 'lifestyles', when so few in the world have the chance to really shape or influence the environments in which they play out their existence? Who knows, if we in the west can work out how to do this sustainable settlements stuff then surely we can import our visions abroad to developing nations. Bearing in mind that this is already happening, in the instance of Arup's plan for Dangton in China, which purports to be the world's first truly sustainable city, and Norman Foster's recent proposals for a zero carbon, zero waste city in Abu Dhabi.
Prime Minister Brown is right to address the need to provide his country with affordable eco housing in new sustainable settlements. But by doing so there is an opportunity being missed. Better still would be a challenge to existing towns and cities to set out their own innovative and compelling strategies for becoming more sustainable. It is this sort of thinking that would really make a big difference. The practitioners of urban design could be the champions of such an enterprise. Understandably bedazzled as we are by the temptation to help form entirely new places, we need to look closer, and more critically, at our existing settlements and homes for solutions. If we can avoid the temptation to indulge in social engineering, and rid ourselves of the conviction that places which look more visually attractive are somehow automatically better places in which to live, then our profession can make a significant contribution to addressing the current and future impact of climate change.
In doing so, caution and humility must be observed. There are few supposed advances in architectural design or town planning that have not been accompanied by a supporting statement which spells out, in an often naïve and self-justifying way, the necessary social and economic benefits of designing in this hitherto unthought-of manner – from the city visions of Le Corbusier to those of the New Urbanists. What we should aim for are urban design-based strategies that will result in the establishment of the type of walkable, people-friendly neighbourhoods Vonnegut loved and celebrated. This is no small task. It is incumbent upon all those charged with creating sustainable environments to make and repeatedly emphasise the link between the planning, design and layout of the places in which we live and their contribution to lessening the impact of human behaviour on our planet.
Kurt Vonnegut's most quoted phrase was ironic, 'So it goes'. This fatalistic view of the world cannot be the mantra for our collective future. Perhaps there has never been a more important time in which both local and global communities need to take charge of their destinies. Change is clearly inevitable. Now, more than ever before, the issue is the extent to which we are at the mercy of change or in control of it. This might be summarised in the reordering of Vonnegut's famous phrase. Taking charge is to adopt the more proactive mindset, 'It goes so'.
A sustainable environment consists of the type of people-friendly neighbourhoods Vonnegut valued and enjoyed. We must quite literally put in place strategies that help create these qualities. These would be urban centres whose success can be measured by, among other things, the extent to which they enable and encourage their inhabitants to 'fart around'. If the urban design community can rise to this challenge then it will have come of age. For it is only then that we will be seen and valued as one of key agents capable of addressing the dilemmas and agendas of our own generation, while also being a group of professionals whose skills, talents and insights can help fulfil our obligations to those who have yet to come.
