‘Stadtluft macht frei’, as the German mediaeval adage had it: ‘Town air makes free’. For all the difficulties associated with urbanisation, particularly since the industrial revolution, that adage holds good. It was difficult for medieval monarchs, just as it is difficult for modern dictators, to suppress the culture of cities. Their wealth-producing nature, and their inherent concentration of citizens give them economic and political influence which has proved even greater than that previous measure of power – land ownership. Yet the study of cities, and the relationship between the various conditions and forces which influence their development, has rarely been at the top of the architectural agenda in recent decades. This may have been the result of embarrassment at the legacy of the Corbusian Modernists, who viewed helplessly the dilution of profound and powerful ideas by weak or cynical clients, and technological developments unseen by the pioneer Modernists, for example the environmental impact of the car. And there must have been some embarrassment at the way in which city planners of yesteryear seem to have provided suitably robust streetscapes and public spaces, very useable today, a silent reproach to much more recent city planning, obsessed with zonal separation. It certainly wasn’t highway engineers who made zoning the most important element of city architecture.
It may also be that the attractions of designing object buildings have outweighed the complicated and long-term business of creating new areas for urban life; architecture, as Cedric Price frequently remarked, is a slow business, but not quite as slow as making city quarters or even cities themselves. And for every Brasilia, it seems, there is the accompanying peripheral urban wasteland, a condition by no means confined to developing countries. The outskirts of Paris provide another unhappy example. (Both cities show, incidentally, that iconic buildings can co-exist with both good and bad examples of urban grain and city architecture. It is foolish to assume that icons, in general, either promote or deny irbnanism, even if an opposition might become evident in relation to a particular site. It is time to put this argument to rest.)
The fact that the 2007 Venice Biennale is devoted to the subject of cities is thoroughly welcome. What is encouraging about Richard Burdett’s curatorial approach is the refusal to treat growth simply as a problem or threat, but rather as offering rational choices as to how those cities determine their futures. That also applies to cities which are shrinking, sometimes for the good, as a result of ‘diet urbanism’. In either case, city planning is the opportunity to create more desirable conditions, not the occasion for passing the smelling salts. We do not have to be overwhelmed by the prospect of demographics changed beyond recognition, or a world table of cities in 2050 very different to what we have today. ‘Mega-cities’ will become, if not a commonplace then certainly more common, across the globe and across this century. Those responsible for them (and that means mayors, planners, engineers and architects taking decisions today), have at least one advantage over their forebears: enough knowledge to avoid the worst of the mistakes made by the first wave of industrialising cities, and to note the crucial importance of decisions over infrastructure, waste management and what is sometimes called the ‘ecological footprint’ of a city in determining its future shape and size. They will also have to take account of a new element in the urban condition: the atomising effect of digital technology on the lives of individual citizens and cultural sub-groups. The complexity of this emerging condition will equal the complexity of cities themselves.
