Building consensus
By Pip Cheshire,
Who rules what you builds?
[Architecture]
Seaside, a town on the Gulf coast of Florida in the United States, has become a common destination for those interested in new directions in urban design. The beachside community is a celebrated attempt to build a town according to the development principles known as New Urbanism, an approach which tries to emulate the qualities of apparently random, mixed-use spaces that evolved naturally before the impact of modern design and planning.
Fans of Seaside, and other towns like it, call it a triumph of urban design. Critics call them manufactured fantasies. You might know it as the set of the film The Truman Show.
Proponents of New Urbanism place more emphasis on the quality of public space than the making of individual private buildings, thinking that what matters most in cities and towns is the public experience of the total built environment rather than one individual building. Hence Seaside’s strict rules about the design, colour and style of all built elements; roads, fences, landscape, houses, shops and offices. This approach contrasts with the more individualistic approach that has dominated architectural practice and which the town’s founders claim have blighted America’s and the world’s towns and cities since the middle of the 20th century.
The debate raises some interesting questions about the degree to which private objects need to be controlled in order to create better public space. The assumption of New Urbanists is that unfettered private enterprise will beget yet more modern slabs with their poor public spaces. This is more than an academic issue as it has real implications for architects who find themselves increasingly ensnared in controls intended to protect the good, the bad and the ugly of any pre-modern building.
Not so long ago, city councils believed that the public realm was not much more than what’s left after the exercise of individual property rights. Thus the domination of busy pedestrian facades in the Queen Street valley by bland bank frontages and blank-faced parking podia was seen as the natural, if somewhat unfortunate, product of a healthy marketplace. While this view may suit free market purists, the public is no longer amused and is calling for better public spaces.
In Auckland, the Hubbard administration has ridden into the new century on a white charger of concern for the public realm with a plethora of controls ranging from the somewhat confused—if well-meaning— considerations of the Urban Design Panels to a more pervasive and reactionary protection of anything old enough to harbour borer.
While one can hardly argue with the aims of making better towns and cities, the nostalgic architectural style that underpins the New Urbanists’ work and the current privileging of old buildings in Auckland is somewhat at odds with the city’s cultural makeup. The combination of an increasingly multicultural population with escalating expectations of the quality of public space requires a range of design and planning skills that city authorities have not yet developed. Where once the city controlled development through the statutes and formulae of the District Plan, contemporary expectations of urban life demand a much more sensitive range of tools.
The New Urbanists have an increasingly well-tested toolkit for engaging in urban development and correcting the ills of unrestrained private development. It is, however, one that relies on a combination of assumed common values within the citizens and a fairly authoritarian agency underwriting the project.
I’m all for the idea that we need to give precedence to public space but those of us engaged in the making of public space, the buildings which surround and form those spaces and those seeking to control our designs need to ensure we reflect the many tongues with which this city now speaks.
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