It's a real pleasure to be given the privilege of introducing... for another year, this year's, the lecturer, for this very important occasion. I was particularly amused by the very charming way I was introduced.
Everybody who introduces a speaker, particularly if they have a strong interest in the subject at hand, has to bite their tongue to avoid expressing powerfully held opinions. And I think, sir, you were a very good example of that, and if I may say so. I admire your restraint. Now, you want to hear from Andres Grani, not from me. But if I may, I would very briefly like to try and set out the context of why he is so important potentially to us in Hertfordshire, and in particular in this part of Hertfordshire.
and also to remind you of how well he already knows us. The reason I... I know, Angus Rani, is because I have a daughter who lives in New Orleans. And when I was looking for a Chancellor's lecturer about five years ago, I think it was 2007, my daughter said, I think the Japanese foreign minister would be extremely dull. And she may have had a point of course.
The man you really ought to ask is my friend Andres Drani. who's had some remarkable ideas about rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina. And so began an association between Andres and me, and I hope Hertfordshire, which will be of enormous benefit to all of us who live here. He delivered a remarkable lecture all those years ago. He conducted a theoretical architectural charrette, which was part funded by large half-tour companies and held under the auspices of the University, which began to examine how Hertfordshire would deal with the pressure for more housing.
If we have to build more houses, and after all most of us who live here are pretty reluctant to see that happen, but if we have to then it seems important that what is built should be places where people want to live and work and which we can be proud of as we are of Letchworth and Winningham in the city. And Andres Vani is one of the paladins of new urbanism. He is somebody with an extraordinarily fertile mind.
He learnt an awful lot of... the beginnings of his ideas from studying British examples which have been studied particularly in the United States but all over the world and very often more on it in the breach and the observance back here. He has, I think, some extraordinarily fertile further developments in his mind, which he calls tactical and lean urbanism, which as time goes on I hear people come back and talk to us about.
meanwhile, as your chairman so rightly said, I think somebody with his experience, his ideas, and his imagination, the fact that he's prepared to come back again and again to Hertfordshire to talk to us and to interact with us is a hugely good sign, and I hope that, like me, you will welcome him here, and I know that what he has to say will be of enormous interest to us all. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor No. So, Andres, to you.
Thank you very much, it's all very wonderful introduction. I also thank you for giving me a deadline with this lecture. I can't emphasize enough how so many of us these days actually work to really frightening events.
events like this one. If I were not ready, it would be a disaster. And so I was able to finish this piece of work, which may have taken years.
It would work for you, so thank you. Whenever I come to England and Scotland, where I've worked, and thank you very much for getting us through the recession, where I've worked so much in the last six to eight years, I like very much to contextualize what an American is doing. doing here.
And the general theme is that the amount of interaction that we have in planning between the United States and Britain is extraordinary. Among other things, all of our best cities, in fact, the only ones of our best cities were actually established while we were British essentially and we still go back to Charleston we still go back to Savannah we still go back to Boston those are the models we return to and they're really they're not our city they're they are essentially our cities town planning is one of the things the British do well now they do other things quite well as well you know when I've had an opportunity to learn that but town planning is a particularly strong skill set of the British all over the world and not least garden cities the but the and by the way some very very strong planners. For example, the first regional plan in the United States, which is possibly the first regional plan in the world, was by Thomas Adams, who was a British planner in New York, the New York Regional Plan.
So there's a lot of back and forth, and it's particularly relevant in the Garden City, so I would like to contextualize that relationship actually with some history. Our Frederick Lowell Olmsted came here to study Capability Brown and went back to the United States and actually designed hundreds of of parks but also quite a lot of urbanism, including his first and best town called Forest Hills Gardens. Howard was at the United States, was in the United States in Chicago no less, studying and must have seen Forest Hills Gardens. So that influence actually came from Britain and then came back here. And it's almost impossible to believe that he wasn't influenced by Forest Hills Garden.
that they're extraordinary, these extraordinary... places where actually nature and urbanism are in balance, which have been so influential. And so that is one important bit of context, because I always feel that I have to credentialize myself in Europe. The second thing is why now? Why my particular interest in the Garden City, when I'm actually, you know, I've been for 40 years a town planner, but the Garden City looms larger and larger.
And one of the things I would like to do today is to take the past tense completely out of the discourse and say, this is the model of the future. You know, and that's what this presentation is about. It isn't just about, you know, Howard and Dessoirson and Unwin as some kind of historical artifact.
The lessons there are not only excellent, but I would like to make sure that you do make the case they're unavoidable. It's the only way to think about cities. And that's the case I want to strongly make.
Now, specifically why now this year, three things have happened that were, in my business, it couldn't be avoided. One was that there was the most extraordinary prize put out by the Wilson Foundation for 400,000 pounds for a 10,000 word essay. And you know, 400,000 pounds is $800,000 these days.
It's a lot of money for 10,000 words. This is like Norman Mailer gets paid that way. So there were apparently almost 280 entries, among which were ours.
We did it quickly. And the topic was the Garden City. Like, what's up with that? 800,000 pounds for an essay on the Garden City.
And then of course the coalition government, as I can put out, at least, you know, sometimes we read this in the States and you don't read this here, but somehow we learn about it, is that they've actually said that they would like to designate two garden cities. And it was by name. It wasn't, we'd like to designate 800,000 units, you know, in the London Arc.
It wasn't a vague numerical presentation. presentation, they said, we want two garden cities by name. That's extraordinary.
That is a commitment to an idea that's very, very strong. And the third thing that happened is that Bob Stern, by the way, this is the result of your deadline. I actually wrote a book, which will be hopefully published soon. And the images that I am presenting, actually, I could read you the damn thing. It's not long.
I've learned never write a book that takes more within an hour and a half. I have to read. No one will read it. But rather than do that, I could read it. It's short enough.
But I've never actually read a lecture. So at the expense of precision, I will actually just speak extemporaneously. It's what I'm used to. But there's there's stuff in here that I will not approach extemporaneously. There are some some finely argued points that are in here and not not what I'm going to say today.
The. The third thing that happened is that we have a remarkable person called Robert A.M. Stern. Robert A.M. Stern has one of the largest practices in the United States.
For the last 15 years, he's been certainly the most successful dean in any architecture school at Yale. This man builds dozens of buildings in the United States. He writes many books, and he doesn't waste his time.
The extraordinary thing about Bob Stern... is that he doesn't waste a minute. And yet, he wrote this book, Paradise Plan, the Garden Suburb, and the Modern City. In it, he explains, without wasting a word, how 700, he covers, listen to this, 735...
garden cities in 30 countries. 735 garden cities. You know, you can argue, well, that's one of the most successful British exports of all time.
You know, 735 garden cities. But it's not just remarkable in terms of quantity. I know Bob Stern very well, and he doesn't waste time. He thinks this is very important. By the way, this book, I weighed, I don't know how much it weighs, but I weighed it relative to my dog.
You know, I know my dog weighs 11 pounds. And this book is at least 11 pounds. It's a magnum opus. These three things happened this year.
And so when I was invited to come here, I said, let me take this. very seriously indeed. And so this is what I'm going to present today. Now, there's Bob Stern's book and Howard's book of more than 100 years ago. This book has essentially never left consciousness.
You cannot learn architecture or planning without reference to this book. it's more or less been in print forever and it is it's a difficult book. It is not a brilliant book.
And one of the cases that I want to make today is that the idea of the Garden City prevails despite the rather primitive presentation, at least, let's not say primitive, but out-of-date presentation of Howard. And it also prevails despite the fact that he was not a compelling personality. Now, I haven't seen a video of Howard speaking. But I understand people who did, that he wasn't scintillating. Now, that is not, that is actually good, because what it says is that this was not an idea that was imposed by charismatic personality or a charismatic book.
It was a charismatic idea. And that, I think that's actually more important, because the idea transcends the present. It transcends sense the circumstance.
So what is the fundamental idea? The fundamental idea, you can actually look at this, or you can look at this. Now look at this man in perfect repose.
Look at the man in perfect balance. This is the model of equilibrium. Okay, you can just see it.
By the way, when you see a photograph of this type, this is probably the most famous photograph of Howard, other than one of him looking very dull speaking, you know, behind a podium. And you say, this is not a good speaker. I can tell from a mile away. He's not a good speaker.
But you can tell from here that his personality comes through. The repose, the balance. And this is exactly what is seen here. Now, what is brilliant about this idea, and you all know, by the way, this is the most famous... famous diagram in all of urban planning.
This is like Serlio's Five Classical Columns. It just imprints itself in your mind and you never forget it. Every student knows this diagram. What does it say? It says that there's the town, and here he lists the positive and negative traits or qualities of the town.
Positive and negative. And then he says the country and the positive and negative traits of the country. and then he says the town country which is the guard city And he chooses only the positive ones of both. And then he says, the people, where will they go? Okay, now notice the proposition here.
How can you possibly go wrong? What's best with the town living, what's best with country living, and let's just come up with a concept that has the best of both. What I would propose is that this requires, the proposition here, is unavoidable because he's actually proposed utopia. He's actually proposed what used to be called in the 19th century, the city of utopia. upon the hill, what used to be called Jerusalem.
Now, I know this is corny, but I'm going to read you one of your great poets. Okay, William Blake. Listen to this.
Okay, this is William Blake. I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. Okay.
The aspiration, impossible, but the aspiration to build Jerusalem lies here. And by the way, Jerusalem is international. Okay, wherever, the thing about Bob Stern's 735 towns...
is that they're in 30 countries. And I'm talking about Malaysia. I'm talking about Brazil. I'm talking about, you know, places that have had very little interaction with England. You know, even in the...
the 19th century. This is a pervasive idea. So this is the first thing I encountered when I realized that this idea had incredible currency. The Wilson Prize, the coalition government, Bob Stern's book. I said, let's take this seriously.
Why is this so alive today? And so I took it. And here's that magnet, low rates, plenty to do, low prices, no sweating. Field for Enterprise, Flow of Capital.
By the way, this is a typical English empirical hodgepodge. It completely drives, you know, we pragmatic Americans, the Scottish are certainly driven completely mad by this kind of thinking, and the French can't stand it. So this is very much an English conception of whatever works best.
And what I did to update it is I took a series of the pairings, And I updated them. And what happened... to Howard, let me just read them because it's important.
He basically comes right down the middle. He says, a garden city should be a separate community but dependent on a center. So it's Wellwyn as a completely separate community, but 20 minutes from London, for which it is also dependent.
He says, there has to be a quantity of open space, i.e. the green belt in the park but also an intensity of urbanization. You get both, you get that balance that he always speaks about, the urbanized land and the open land. He says you need a range of jobs and you need a range of housing. And this is what we all speak about today.
How do we get the jobs, housing balanced? That will reduce the community that causes the pollution. He says we need private transportation and public transportation. You know, this garden city accommodates cars. It also accommodates public transit.
You know, there's the rail. It's also quite walkable. You know, that's very new, both the car and public transportation and balance. London doesn't have that.
London is for example very balanced, there was only public transportation. And then he says, and this is very famous for, there's food production and food consumption. The size of the Greenbelt is sized to actually feed the people in the city.
You know, that was the argument for the Greenbelt. What could be more modern than that? Localism and food and food production.
Then he speaks about recreational facilities and cultural facilities. Yes, we know there are going to be fields. Okay?
Yes, Yes, you're going to be healed, but there must always be theaters like this. It must be subsidized. And by the way, for the really heavy culture, that's one of the reasons we go to London.
So he actually has a consciousness that it isn't just about playing cricket. There should also be very high-level culture. He balances that out. And then fascinating, absolutely fascinating, this place was put together by financial benefactors, people who donated money for the good that it would create, but he also has four problems. profit investors.
There was actually a return expected. That is an extraordinary hybrid, you know, both of them. So what does he leave out?
He only leaves out two things, which are now modern. He leaves out the balance of energy generation and energy consumption, which we're so concerned about today with zero carbon. carbon, and he also leaves out the water recycling and water consumption, which actually I think is a bit of a theology, but people are very interested in what do you do with water as well.
You know, you're not, is that exactly... a country that's running out of water. Arizona is, but England isn't.
But nevertheless, it's part of the theology of living ethically. So what we did is we took this kind of slightly out-of-date thing, you know, bright homes, gardens, no smoke, no slums. We took this magnet of the town country and updated it. And here you'll see something which is called the equilibrium that he's interested in. And then there's something that I'm going to speak about over and over again which is the standard deviation.
What is standard deviation? Okay, standard deviation, remember this prize that we applied for, and incidentally we didn't get it. There were 279 applicants of which 10 divided the prize. I looked into economics, because after all the judges were to be economists, and I looked into it, and I realized something very interesting.
never lose their reputation regardless of how thoroughly they blow it. You know, so the economists melt down the world economy under their advice. We take their advice, everything melts down every eight years in the economic cycle, and then we call them back to fix it, the same guys.
Now what happens to planners? Planners are given a great deal of authority, i.e. when the new towns were built, the post-war new towns. And by the way, I need to take parenthetically, speak about that a bit.
Do you realize that the success of the garden cities was such, the trust that was actually deposited on the hands of the planners was such that in the post-war period, they said, Instead, the British said, do with us what you will. We trust you completely. And what they did is they said, demolish entire neighborhoods of cities.
This happened in the States also. Demolish entire neighborhoods and displace them to these innovations, as yet untested, called Newtown. And they had all come back with these ideas that they had seen in Germany and, you know, the modernist ideas of...
Well, you know very well what I mean. The new towns are not garden cities. There was an entire experimental overlay of towers in the park where the poor would be housed.
Completely unprecedented, completely untested, and yet we trusted the planners so much that we let them do what they wished. We actually gave notice to tens of thousands of people and said, you will move out because we have a better idea for you. And furthermore, we're going to build 20-something new towns in 10 years without any consultation whatsoever.
It's an amazing thing to actually think about 1945 in Britain. And what happened is, and I've met some really old folk who were there so excited about the new towns. You know, when I was working here in Hatfield and Hartford here in general, there were old folk who said, we were so excited, and then my husband, actually I'll tell you a story.
my husband was so excited excited that when we moved in I had to divorce him. He could never see past the disaster. I swear I heard that. And what happened was that the disappointment was so great that all power was taken away from the planning profession.
And what you see now is a system, a series of protocols, a series of bureaucratic impediments, a series of consultations, a E-E-E a conception of such impediments that this is the only country with a capitalist system that cannot deliver housing for its people. People with money, I can pay. I can pay for a mortgage. I need a house.
I'm a young person. I need to live 20 miles from London. And you have, just in this county alone, an 85,000 unit housing deficiency. How do you get that in a capitalist country. How do you get it?
These are people who have the wherewithal to pay, and you have such a constrained market that you can't deliver. I know this is the world you inhabit, but This is the air you breathe, but it's extremely unusual. You know, this is the kind of thing that happens in Russia, in East Germany.
You know, communist countries have housing deficiencies, capitalist ones don't. So what's up with this? What's happened is that the new towns were such a shock.
There was such a break in the confidence of the planning profession that you do not allow them to make a move, good or bad. Everything is suspected. It is always better to keep the open field. It is always better to keep the fallow, unused potato field.
than to have the housing you need. And this is a result of the crisis, the dismal performance of the new towns. And so one of the things I'd like to achieve here is to slowly rebuild the planning profession by establishing some kind of objective standard that can actually lead to not only trust, but the know-how that they can actually even, because part of it is you don't trust the planners, but they also have zero self-confidence. They really aren't certain, you know, that what they do is good.
And the proposition here is that the economists don't get in trouble. The planners get in trouble. The economists don't get in trouble.
And I thought that was really curious. How did they achieve that? Well, this is what they do.
They have something called the standard model. And the standard model says an economy works best when it has, say, 4.5% unemployment, and it has a growth rate of 2.5% GDP, and the debt is no more than X. You know, they have a series of 5, 6, 7 metrics.
And they say this is the ideal. Now when the wheels come off that cart and you start getting inflation or you start getting unemployment and everything comes off, they're not associated with the failure. They don't say, Mr. Planner, you really blew it. They're associated with the standard model.
The planner said, oh yes, oh yes. We deviated from the standard model. And what they're experts at is the deviation.
Nothing taints their reputation. They're associated with the standard. standard model, which is the utopian model, they're not associated with the failure.
And so you bring the same guys and girls back again, the very same ones, and say, could you fix it? So the proposition of this paper is, if the planning profession could establish a standard model, which we say can be associated, this city upon the hill, the Jerusalem, and they associate themselves with this proposition, Then when it goes wrong, they'll say, yes, yes. bring us into fix it to that standard model.
But the problem is that the confidence has been so broken by the planning profession that they actually don't have a standard model. It's all about innovation. It's all about experimentation.
And what's happening is, I do agree as an architect, which I am, that experimentation is worthwhile at the scale of a building, say, particularly a civic building, but you do not experiment with urbanism. Urbanism affects too many people too long. one must be very, very conservative in terms of what the ideal is.
And the proposition here is that the ideal was put forth by Howard, and it was put forth as a standard model. And it is all about equilibrium. You stay within the range of all the variables. And if you do that, the humans thrive.
And whenever humans thrive, there's an ethical imperative. There are effects behind. this.
You know, there's something about this that's the right thing to do. Now, in the paper, I ran across this business of platonic perfection and Aristotelian ranges. And one of the things I find, which I will not mention today, is that Howard was through and through an Aristotelian, where virtue, virtue is having neither too much nor too little. And virtue is not what can be, nor what is, but what ought to be.
there's no platonic ideal somewhere in heaven it is what ought it to be that idea, what ought it to be ask a planner today in Britain what should it be and they'll say we don't know we have a process there'll be a process, we're in an automatic protocol we really don't know what it ought to be and so you get all sorts of charlatans one after the other who have ideas oh we're going to try and do this, we're going to try to do that It's going to be high rises. going to be circular cities, it's going to be this and that. You have a whole series of druids.
In fact, you know, there are architectural professions here that come up with one scam after another. And you try, willingly try, and they try and fail. And so, when you look, they're always saying, oh, don't look, when you say, well, what about that?
That didn't work out. They say, well, don't look at that. We don't do that anymore.
This is what we do now. And the great scheme of the charlatan is saying, oh, this time it will work. And I find the entire country, the British system, is actually subject to a whole series of charlatans coming up with the next idea, whether it be the Echo Village or whatever interpretation of a new town, or whatever the mayor of London is saying about building towers in the Southwest.
And it has very little firm basis. And the firm basis, the only possible firm basis, is Howard's idea. The idea of equilibrium of all possibilities.
That's where humans thrive. Okay, so what I've done is I've taken Howard's diagrams and updated them. For example, here's the Howard diagram, the second most famous diagram.
There's the central city, and there's a countryside, which is the green belt, and there are the subsidiary cities, which are the garden cities, and there are connections between them. By the way, the garden cities are not self-sufficient. They require the whole belt of garden cities.
Okay, they're not, the hospital is not necessarily... necessarily in this one, the hospital may be in that one, the university may not be in this one, it may be in that other one. So the Garden Cities works as a series of links, and it is dependent on the central city, in your case, London. And so, where do you locate them? He locates a certain distance, there's countryside, etc., etc., there's numbers like 32,000 population, etc., but the really, the second thing that I think you should pay attention to was the contemporaneous Sir Patrick Geddes, the Scotsman, who was another person of equal, actually of greater brilliance, and by the way, a great deal of connection with the United States as well, Patrick Geddes, he would come to America and drive people completely crazy, and I can document that, by ceaselessly speaking about the valley section.
And what he wanted to do was say, there's an ecological imperative. There are places that are called, there are hills and forests, and their riverfronts, etc., and on them, they're actually to be treated differently. He was the first man that made a correlation between the existing natural environment, the valley section, which is the fundamental, actually. It's all, all, all, every country, every place is more or less as a high ground than a low ground, and what you do with it.
And what happens is we take the existing, what I'm proposing is we take the existing system of geographic information, GIS, you know which tells you, gives you all the information of what's happening, and it will automatically give you a protocol that says there are natural preserves, agricultural reserves, the natural preserves are permanent, the reserves are actually quasi-permanent, they are the garden towns, the garden suburbs, and then the garden neighborhoods that are within the cities like that. And we've never correlated. We've never actually...
taken the great amounts of GIS information and these are the relevant there are over 58 variables in GIS currently these are the ones that are relevant to urbanism and use them as an automatic protocol that tells us where these places can be and so the discussion of where should we have a garden village here should we have a garden city there where should we build is actually entirely politicized and it is actually given the decision is made made for the people of the edge. of whatever settlement you have that says, oh, I'm accustomed to having this view. And that view, therefore, because I'm accustomed to it as an open space, therefore it's a green belt. Okay, now that is a complete kindergarten.
That's at the level of kindergarten. You know, it's neither a designated green belt, nor is it legally a green belt. It's just somebody having an opinion that they're accustomed to the view, to the open view.
So long as you have that discussion, the builders will sneak through, the house builders, and put places in all the wrong places. Because if you imagine that building isn't happening already, you're very wrong. It's happening at a tremendous rate of the lowest quality by builders who get through in very small projects under the radar screen, under essentially ruining Britain. This idea that you cannot designate where growth can happen, and I know very well that you don't designate that.
It's a kind of competition. It's all random. ...is most powerful and most adept and best funded gets it. If you do that, you will ruin Britain. Britain is not being preserved at the moment.
Britain is being ruined. And may I say it's being ruined worse than Dallas. Because you have the combination... of American sprawl, which is American auto-dependent sprawl. That's all you're building.
There's little houses everywhere that you have to drive everywhere to get your ordinary daily needs. You're getting shopping centers. You're getting office parks. Everything's about driving.
And on top of it, you're apologetic. So it doesn't even have that vitality of North Dallas. Because the Americans are not apologetic. They have a marvelous time, don't they, sprawl? You cannot combine American urban patterns with Lutheran penance.
It doesn't work. If you're going to actually ruin the earth, enjoy it. So what you have now in Britain are some of the saddest suburban subdivisions you've ever seen. They really are sad places. You can say, well, Dallas is awful.
You can say the American system is awful. but I'll tell you It has a lot more vitality than your suburbs. Right now, you have the worst possible combination.
And the builders, I repeat, are sneaking through because you have no ability, no objective ability, to actually designate where and what type of community can happen. Okay, the next one, this is a more rare diagram of Howard. This is one of the triangles within one of his garden cities.
And although it has some pretty dopey ideas when you look closely, So this is essentially an unapologetic. diagram. For example, there's to be a crystal palace here, and the shops are here, and et cetera, and there's a great deal of park and so forth. What he does introduce is the idea of differentiation.
He does say that there's stuff that's happening at the center, there's stuff that's happening in the middle, and there's stuff that's happening at the edges. Now, although what he actually proposes is out of date, it really is utterly out of date, the idea that what happens in the center and happens at the edge is actually a declension of lifestyles is very important. And so we updated it with Geddes' Transet. And here you have the urban core, the general urban area where the high street is, you have sub-urban, you have general urban, which is in transition, sub-urban, and et cetera, and you go like that.
Now what What does this do for you? This actually gives the Garden City Humans are different. Humans have preferences.
Some people love to live in the cities. Some people love to live with their little yards and their houses. Some people can't stand the thought of having a car. Some people very much enjoy having two cars. And furthermore, it's not only different and it's not economic, there are different levels at different times of your life where it makes sense.
When you're young, there's nothing better than being in the city because there's a nightlife, there's a lot of genetic material. around particularly after hours that you can sample you know that's your job your job is to increase the amount of generic genetic material you're exposed to and then you actually find a mate you settle down you have kids and it doesn't work so much you can't go out at night so much the apartment is quite oppressive etc and so you find a little house and then if you're successful and you play your cards right you get a bigger more comfortable house and then when you retire you might actually see say, you know, I don't like driving anymore. Take me back to the city where I can walk around to their daily needs.
What happens is there's a declension of places to live that actually correspond with both your economic and your demographic profile. Howard talked about this, and it can be updated very, very closely. The Garden City actually has all of them.
Now note what's happening in Britain. In Britain you get people like the Mayor of London saying, forget the garden cities, we're going to build everything in the southwest and it's all going to be high rises at 60 units to the hectare. That doesn't work, because there's so many people that are...
desperate for a house, that they'll commute an hour and overpay drastically to have a simulacra of a house with a simulacra of a yard, because it makes more sense. What's happening is the discourse, the discussion, the debate is so dumb, it's frankly so stupid, that it's actually people saying everybody will live in a high-rise and will pretend that the builders aren't building houses by the 10,000. That is the discourse in Britain right now. And it hits the papers absolutely raw.
It's this or that. Howard would never do that. Howard would say we need to...
declension of everything. We need the dense center and we need everything else, including, by the way, some people living in relatively large sites in the suburbs. So what he brings forth is the idea that if you, madam, if you prefer to retire in a cottage, sir, if you prefer to have an exciting life in a city close to the theaters, madam, if you prefer to live in a loft, if you're an artist, do you know what the real answer is?
It's you're all right. None of you is wrong. You're all right. You're all correct. You have a right to your happiness as self-defined.
and the garden city, the declension of the garden city city in the transect that's represented here is the only possible answer. Every other answer will distort it. Every other answer, if everybody has lived in a high-rise and everybody has lived in a dull house with a yard, you will have a very large percentage of the British population unhappy and actually questioning the system and questioning the government. This would never occur in a garden city because the garden city has the full declension from apartments to estate, to estate houses. Now, another, this is, well, that last drawing is not well known of Howard's, this one is very well known.
So, this is what he says, that yesterday you have living and working in smoke, very much a 19th century conception. By the way, you don't have to to worry about pollution because it's now banned from English-speaking countries. We now have third-world countries doing the pollution stuff. There's no, you can't pollute in the United States or here. So this is out of date.
Then he says, today, today, yesterday, today, living in the suburbs, which are nice and sunny, but working in the smoke, you commute in, and then tomorrow, living and working in the sun, well in Garden City. Now, what he does here, he establishes for the first time a sense of time, that it isn't always permanent, that actually the city can evolve. It's what we call successional urbanism. Now, the way of thinking that says the cities used to be polluted hellhole you know, the dark satanic mills, and they become heavenly and sunny later, that's really out of date.
But what is not out of date is that you cannot establish a city from the beginning in what I would call its climax condition. You're not going to build the exciting downtown at the beginning. You won't have the theaters.
You won't have the jobs. You won't have all of the things that he's talking about. You will begin in an inaugural condition, which essentially will be housing.
it'll be able to evolve. Cities molt and molt and molt again. London was a shantytown in Shakespeare's time. If you drank the water, you died. It was nothing but mud and pigs in the street.
Honestly, it looked like Peru. You know, I've seen the lithographs. And yet it became, you know, sleeker and sleeker and more curated until it's the beautiful, wonderful commercial city where everybody wants to live. That happened successively. The conception that you begin with one one thing and end up with another, but that you have to have that ultimate Jerusalem, or that ultimate city upon the hill in mind is very important.
And so we bring this up, and we say, okay, so there's the first generation. By the way, when I started studying, a generation was 19 years. You spoke to a sociologist and said, what's a generation? He said, 19 years.
By that time you transmit, and by that time you've had children, well, that's gone. Generations of 30 years now. Okay, so I took a 30-year modern increment of generation, which is 30 years.
And they said, the first generation, which is up to 30 years, it's all right if you're a village. It's all right if you have housing, and it's mostly houses, and you have just the shops for your ordinary needs, and you have a little bit of places where you can actually have the amateur theater troupe, and a couple of churches if you still believe in that, and so it goes. Okay, but 30 years later, 30 years later, it's very important that you become a town.
You have to set it up so you can evolve into a town, and then finally you have to set it up so you can evolve into a city. And if you don't do that, we want to know why. Why is Hatfield Newtown forever in its teenage clothing?
Why is that town center never evolving? What's up with that? On the other hand, you look at Welland, and you say Welland had pretty scarce shops, did it not, when it started out? Welland didn't have a jobs-housing balance.
It was very low on jobs. People still commuted to London for their fun. That was the first 30 years.
In the second 30 years, other things happened. And actually partially thanks to the war, you got the industry. And then finally, in the last 30 years, you actually got your shops.
You have a full complement. of shops in Welland. Welland was able to evolve.
Stevenage can't. Stevenage is stuck in its teenage years, not to say infantile, you know, not to say it's still an infant, but it ain't going anywhere. What if...
London were Stevenage, it would still be Shakespearean mud and pigs on the street. Okay, so this is a very interesting concept. It also permits something that I think is, which is what I'm getting at, it permits you to judge and compare.
One of the things the planning profession has, it doesn't have a standard model that can compare this to that. I mean, has anybody ever compared seriously Welland and its performance with Stevenage and its performance, or for that fact, Harpenden? Has anybody done that?
Is there a method by which you can compare all three and say, well, Stevenage does this better, Harpenden does that better, or St. Albans does that better? They're all here in Hertfordshire. They're all in front of you. You experience all of them, right?
You know very well, subjectively, what's what, and what you prefer, and which one does better. You know very well that St. Albans blows the doors off Welland in certain ways. And you know very well that Welland blows the doors off St. Albans in other ways.
But do you know what it is? Can you ask a professional, and the answer is no. So there's all this very, very soft, subjective kind of presentation, in which, well, perhaps this is good, or the planner says, well, why don't you, I don't believe up.
I don't believe it's good enough. Go off, redesign it, guess right. Or they devolve it entirely to public discussion forever, in which nothing happens.
The knowledge is right in front of you, right here in Hertfordshire County. This is the number one laboratory in Britain of different ways to do things. You have St. Albans, you have Stevenage, you have Welwyn.
You don't need any more. That's what you need. And by the way, you do have the suburban sprawl stuff.
forth. The obviously terrible stuff, the housing estates, you have all four in front of you. Has it ever been brought forth so that you can actually analyze it?
No. Well, we're getting at this, and one of the things you can't compare something 300 years old with something 30 years old, but you can actually project it and say what would Stevenage be like, etc. Now, I did a little bit of that to show you. Now, this is the least known of Howard's diagrams, and it's go the master Master Key, and in the index of this book, I actually, it's almost illegible, but I pulled this out and I did it.
And what he says is, this is where the power resides, which is the lever. And he lists a whole bunch of very esoteric, and by the way, he has no sense of taxonomy at all. It's whatever, you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
So he has, it says, this is the lever, and then this is the barrel, which is science and religion, and these are the words. This is... is what's affected. Okay.
And then he has parts cut away, which is what's not affected. Now, I was just hearing a little discussion here about the mess you have because decisions are being made at the county level. For example, you have a certain kind of street light here in Welland that doesn't coincide with the new standards that the county has done.
So you have to dedicate yourself in a public discussion, probably an entire political campaign, name, to save your lighting so that you don't end up with Cobra Head lighting, you know, suitable for parking lots and highways, which would destroy your nightlife and well-being. And that was so clear to me. I said, well, that's a decision that's being taken at the wrong level.
There's a problem of subsidiarity. Who decides about this park? Who decides about the parking?
Who decides about where the taxes go? Who decides about the level of maintenance? There's an enormous number of things that have to be decided. And the friction comes up because the decision is not being made at the right level.
All sorts of intelligent people are in charge, and all too often the decision is wrong. It's the wrong decision. And people ultimately say, democracy doesn't work. It's just not working. The outcome is sometimes good, sometimes bad, but it's too random.
This wasn't the deal I bought into with democracy, and it wastes a great deal of time. deal of time and among other things no one really good wants to run for all office, because they're actually brought up and they have power over things they have no, they shouldn't have any, and they don't have power over what they do. So, there's a theory of governance called subsidiarity. And the theory emerged strongly in the 30s, and it said decisions are best made at the level where they have an effect.
And it actually goes further to say that the decision should be made at the most local level that can competently made it make it by the smallest possible group that would affect would be affected by it at the latest possible time and so when you start studying this you realize that at the top of that topic that these are the decisions that need to be made these are decisions typical of urbanism and if I could read I can't quite read them sure you're spared that okay but these These are decisions that have to be made, and these are the levels at which decisions are made. Okay, from the household, to the street, to the block or the neighborhood, to the city, to the county, to the country, to the EU. Your decisions are made at every one of those levels.
And when you see what the decisions are, you realize that this decision should be made at the level of the household, the block, etc. For example, the level of chickens. Are you allowed chickens? Can you have chickens at home?
Well, that doesn't make sense at the level of the city because some people have balconies and chickens don't do well in balconies. But also, rooster, it should be made at the level of the household because you might have a rooster that affects the neighbor. so the correct level to make a decision decision is the block.
A block can decide to have chickens, and another block can decide not to have chickens. And the street can happen at the level of the street, and maybe some architectural decisions are usually at the level of the street, not the whole city. And I have, you know, I'm in this business of resolving contentious issues, and I find that I can resolve them almost in a Solomonic way by actually putting the decision to be made at the correct level.
And we say, well, that shouldn't be decided by the city. or conversely, that shouldn't be decided by a neighbor. What typically happens in the United States is that a school has to be placed somewhere.
And there's a very good site where the kids can walk to it. So who do we activate to decide whether the school is to be placed there? Well, we activate the neighbors.
And all the neighbors say, I don't want a school. First of all, because I'm used to having that as an open space. And secondly, I don't want the traffic. So the neighbors say, I don't want the school, even though it's a very good place to have the school.
school. And so the school then gets put in the suburb where the kids have to be bused 45 minutes to get there. Very obviously the wrong place. What happened? We asked the wrong level of subsidiarity.
You don't ask the neighbors for a school, you ask the community as a whole. The community as a whole would very easily arrive at the palpably correct decision that the school should be there where the kids could walk to it. And that's a very typical issue of subsidy hourly. not being applied intelligently.
So we take this system in which all these people decide through religion and science to decide these things, and I put it here, and I realize that actually who decides? All these people decide, right? These issues get decided by these people.
These issues get decided... By the way, there's a couple of things the EU can do. Don't discount them entirely.
There are a couple of things they're in charge of, and that's okay. Just don't tell them what your cheese should be like. Wrong level of subsidiarity. Okay, the EU should not.
And all the bellyache is, you know, can I please make my cheese the old way? Why are the Belgians deciding this? Okay, so what I find is that all these levels of subsidiarity actually occur within the city and the county. It's between the city and the county. And it's not that the decisions aren't made by the EU or the country as a whole or the household, but what I find is that you give the power of the city and the county to convene.
See, the city and the county have the power not to decide, but to convene. They should convene these people. They should convene these people.
And if you convene the right people at the right level, the decision will tend to be intelligent. And lo and behold, what's so interesting about this is that it actually ended up looking like a key. You know, a little bit like this.
Now, this is pure serendipity, but it's interesting. Now, subsidiarity... is all the talk now in the United States. Because we've always had that problem. I suppose you do as well, I just don't track it.
What's Brussels doing deciding things? What's Whitehall doing deciding things? What's the county doing deciding about our streetlights?
What's up with that? A lot of confusion. It all has to do with the wrong level. In the States, of course, we have a federal system that's very, very clear.
And the great contention in the States is whether the federal system, i.e. Washington, will decide or whether this state should decide or whether the city should decide. And that's where you see a lot of the debate from the left and the right in the United States, is the debate of subsidiarity.
So anyway, what I'm showing you is every one of Howard's diagrams get updated. Now notice something here I want you to set, I'd like you to see. The magnet tells you the what.
What is to be judged. This diagram tells you the where. Where do the garden cities occur? And then there's another where, which is within the garden city, where's the allocation?
Where do the houses happen? Where do the town centers happen? Where do the shops happen? Where do the fields, where do the farms happen?
farms happen. That's all allocated. That's the where.
And then there's the when. When should things kick in? Is it too early to have the shops? Is it too late not to have the shops?
You know, give you a series of judgments. And then here we have the who. Who decides? I mean, are you seriously going to actually compare the top-down system that gave you 21 post-war new towns in 10 years with what's going on now in which everybody has to be consulted?
You know, there's hippie communes, you know, that are community, you know, I know one very well called Binhorn in Scotland, you know, that are actually absolutely communitarian. Every decision is made by the community. And then there's top-down garden cities. New Delhi, absolutely top-down, incredibly efficient.
New Delhi was built in a decade, brilliantly done, top-down. You get a viceroy, you get a dhaka. Okay, Findhorn takes 50 years. You don't have 60 houses. So what do you get when you get New Delhi?
What do you get when you actually have the system of Findhorn? They're both garden cities. It's absolutely remarkable the range between Findhorn and New Delhi. If you look at it through the lens of Howard, they're both garden cities. and the variable is who decides.
And one of the things that seriously has to be considered is whether you want a kind of finthorn system in which everybody gets consulted forever to get your 86,000 units of housing that you need in Hertfordshire. And I would actually propose not. I think that there needs to be some more top-down.
Now, where this comes in Howard, by the way, notice, remember one thing about Howard? That the ideal garden city actually had management, top-down man management and bottom-up democracy. It's really a remarkable conception, and it's typical of this balanced Englishman, looking always for equilibrium, that he says if there are two ways to do things, we'll do it both ways.
We'll do management and democracy. And one of the reasons that these towns happened so well and so quickly is because of that. By the way, where things started going wrong in Welland is when it was nationalised in 19... 1948 and you lost the local and it became absolutely top-down and all sorts of things were thrust upon you and then of course you Recovered with the Thatcherite initiatives and it became something else and I'm going to speak about that later Okay now This is a topic that happens later When we finally did the analysis, which I'm about to show you this is the shocker Okay, we came up with a system of analysis a system of deviation Thank you. And what was so curious is that actually the differences, objectively, between the Welland garden cities, the historical St. Albans generation, and the more recent post-war garden cities, was not that different.
It wasn't that different. yes Welland is much better excuse me, Welland is better but not as much better as you would think think. I was frankly kind of shocked. And I realized that actually the aspirations of the Garden Cities, in terms of all the equilibriums, was actually pretty much Garden City stuff. The problem is that they completely threw away Raymond Unwin.
And I would propose that you cannot think, ever think, of Howard without Unwin. Howard couldn't draw. He didn't have a sense of design.
he didn't have a physical he didn't have an artificial artistic bone in his body. But Unwin did. And it's the combination of Unwin and what he did, not only in his book, Town Planning and Practice of 1909, which very quickly followed, actually, the Garden Cities of Tomorrow of Howard. It was only a few years off.
But that Unwin was not only a really good designer, but he was as good a polemicist as Howard. And they must both be considered an equal measure. Because, frankly, if Howard had designed the Garden Cities, who knows how far it would have gotten.
It was actually Unwin's ability, polemical ability, in town planning and practice, and the export image of Letchworth, what Letchworth looked like, what it felt like, that actually caused that proliferation, which was worldwide. And I cannot actually explain the success of the Garden City without Unwin. In other words, Howard isn't enough. For example, you see here, okay, this is the garden city take.
The garden city take is, okay, this is the bad old city. We're going to have a garden city, but this is still a monoculture, right? This is a monoculture.
What's required is actually... this. I think this drawing was actually done by Unwin under the direct influence of Howard, which is to say the more green, the better. We're going to actually remove that old infrastructure and give everybody not only a yard, yard, but we're going to give everybody a lot of playing fields. Fine.
Okay, the problem is that everybody's living in the same unit. What Unwin actually built and actually proposed in Town Planning and Practice, the full book, not just a polemic, is something that we studied here, which is currently there are six building types that are necessary from the apartment to this very small, from the apartment to the large house. Here they are. And actually, if you put them together, they actually are 12. units to the acre. This here is 30 units to the hectare, 12 to the acre.
This here is 12 units to the acre, which is 30 to the hectare. And in here, all of you, the British demographics are actually fulfilled. There are little apartments, big apartments, little terrace houses, big terrace houses, little cottages, big villas, etc. You get the whole demographic range, both age and and socioeconomic.
It's actually quite wonderful and it works at the same unit to the acre and this is the kind of coding if you had an aspiration if you had a Jerusalem if you had a city up on the hill if your planners ever had the confidence to say this is what we want this is what you would get instead of saying why don't you guess right or why don't you see what Boris thinks or what do you think what the neighbors think you know honestly the debate as I read it in the Guardian or the newspaper could not be dumber, you know, than it is now. It couldn't. Somebody has to take it back and make it rational and come up with things like this in which we happen to know that this works.
We happen to know that this corresponds to what the society needs and the builders can deliver. Okay, so let's take your county. Incredible county.
You know, the privilege of being north of London and you have everything you need to know in here you You have the historic cities like St. Albans, which are quite dense. You have the looser grain ones like Harpenden. You have all the garden cities you need. You have the half-forgotten Hamlet Hempstead, Newtown. I'm sorry, you have the two garden cities, just to begin with.
The two garden cities Howard was involved with. So this makes you the laboratory right off the bat. You have Welland.
You have Letchworth. You have Stevens, Newtown, which is as good as they come these days. Newtowns and then you have the not very good Newtowns. So you have six, right here, you have six case studies that need to be analyzed actually together so that you don't just say well I prefer this to that or I happen to actually like to do my shopping in St. Albans or whatever.
You know, whatever you're thinking that's causing confusion and fog, you don't need to go no further than actually part for sure. Okay, so let's take the variables that I identified earlier, dependence on center, complete community, quantity of open space, intensity of urbanization. And remember that the equilibrium that Howard wanted was here.
You stay within here. You stay within here and you're fine, right? And this is his ideal Jerusalem.
This is the perfect garden city, the Howard idea. And because everything is in balance, it all is zero. Okay, it's a perfect balance of zero.
Nothing's off. Now let's take... let's take let's compare it dependents on center complete community what you do is you get one standard increment of deviation over okay there's a little too much there's two increments of the deviation quantity of open space you urbanization perfect balance range of jobs range of housing a little off balance when you do this you can actually put numbers on it and you can see that it has a stand standard deviation of 11. By the way, I haven't kicked in the modern ones of energy and hydrology, okay?
So you get an equilibrium, and you say standard deviation 11 relative to the perfect ideal. Okay, if you say, well, ain't that weird? Well, that's what the economists do. That's exactly what the economists do. And by the way, you can apply numbers to this.
You can actually do jobs and housing. You can do acreage. You can do all this stuff.
You can actually put numbers to it. I didn't have the funding to put numbers to it. This is something that could be done very, very objectively. But actually, Letchworth only has a deviation of 11 from the ideal. And then you take Wellen up here.
We do the same thing. It has a deviation of 15. Wellen, you know, from what I know, know of the places, again, without doing all the metrics, is actually slightly less good than Letchworth, but very, very slightly. And then you take Stevenage, and Stevenage has a deviation, I believe, where I read there is 24. It has this many over-incre- by the way, sometimes the good stuff is oversupplied, you understand?
Sometimes you have too much affordable housing. Do you see what I'm saying? It's not about affordable housing as an absolute good.
It's affordable housing in- with market rate housing because that's what makes a healthy society. So you understand it's not equilibrium, it's not all about having all the shops in the world, it's about having the shops that you actually need in the correct measure. And so you get Stevenage actually having a deviation of 24, and then you go and have, for example, Stevenage compared to Stevenage at 24, and you have St. Albans that has a deviation of 23. And this is a bit of a shocker, isn't it?
I mean, St. Albans, isn't that so much better than Stevenage? Isn't that so much better? Well, you know what? Maybe not. Maybe it doesn't have enough affordable housing.
doesn't have enough jobs. Maybe Stevenage has many more jobs. And so you actually begin to look at these places objectively and begin to really understand what's in front of you so you can make decisions with confidence. But there's another aspect. How did St. Albans get to be the way it did?
This is the successional one. So here's well when the first generation, 1920 to 1950, when it was a pure Howardian, Purdom, all these guys, Garden City. Wellwood up to 1950 had a deviation of 13. Okay, then remember I was saying it goes by 30-year generations.
Then you have Wellwood's second generation, 1950 to 1980. Uh-oh, what happened? National government takes over. takes it over and shoves it full of social housing and doesn't care much about decent shops, etc., etc. And you start getting a deviation, 13, the deviation becomes 11. Actually, curiously, at least in my contention here, it actually gets a little better.
Some of the things that are off kilter become better. But what really the big difference is that the Second World War brings all the jobs. Okay, suddenly it has a jobs-housing balance. And then Thatcher comes in and changes and rebalances some.
things and the Thatcherite 80 to 2010 which is now you have a ranking of 15 okay so I'm sorry to say it's perhaps not as good what's happened is it's become too expensive what's happened to Welland it's become yes it's gotten its shops you know has a full complement of shops but it's not too expensive isn't it I mean any kind of social economic balance has been lost and so we look at the next 30 years, 2000 to 2040, and all I can do is posit the idea. ideal. Shouldn't Wellwyn actually strive to balance and achieve the ideal of zero? And that zero, by the way, happens to be the ecological ideal.
If you're thinking about where we're going in the 21st century, with all the problems of the world that cannot be solved because the climate change is a worldwide crisis. It can only be addressed locally. See, the problem with climate change is that it is our first worldwide ecological crisis. And if you've been anywhere in Asia and in the Indian subcontinent, you know that even if laws are passed, they're not going to behave.
Okay, the Chinese don't follow laws. Neither do the Indians. They're too clever for that.
They don't have a tradition of doing that. They're not going to behave. We plants if we, the Americans and the Brits, in Western Europe, pass this climate change change laws, we will behave, we will improve the percentage of impact on the climate, but the rest of the world ain't doing it. The Russians ain't doing it, the Indians ain't doing it, the Asians ain't doing it.
By the way, the new draconian laws that were just passed in California, you know, just a couple of months ago, you know what their impact on climate change is, the entire state of California? One half of one percent. If everything goes well in California, it will impact one half of 1% of the problem. So then you realize, uh-oh, this is beyond us.
But you can, at a local level, adapt to the situation. You can get a balance of food. You can actually get a full society. so that the young people and the old people who need each other, the wisdom and the energy, you can get the ordinary needs available locally. You can get the local food that you will need as things perhaps collapse elsewhere.
Everything about the ecological century that we have to confront is actually addressed by the equilibrium that the Garden City proposes. And it is a much deeper answer, actually, than what you find in the other rather more superficial of centuries. obsessions with, for example, windows that don't leak a couple of atoms of air, with triple glazing. And the obsessions, the zero energy house, whatever propaganda you think you're getting, is virtually useless, because it's going to have very little effect in the reality of the world, forgive me for saying so, but where you can have an effect, if you actually address your welling, and say, we're going to get this town ready for the 21st century, and it's going to have to do and it has everything to do with this original conception of power, and we would like to trend to zero.
I would say that the zero carbon is too partial, too incomplete a system, and what you actually need is a kind of other zero that doesn't yet have a name, but this is the kind of zero you should achieve. And it's the zero of Aristotelian equilibrium. It's the zero of virtue, which I'm not talking about here, but perhaps I go a little bit too long in the book. There are ways you can address this about where virtue goes.
There are different models. There's the town theory, in which the core is virtuous. This is what Boris is saying. This is what many of the architects are saying.
The only virtue is, in fact, density. The density, like London, that's the only model. And then you get the environmentalists who say, no, no, no, the density is hydrology. The virtue is hydrology. The virtue is more green.
The virtue is letting the water flow naturally. don't put any streams in tubes. Well, you can't build London without streams and tubes. Because too many of the streets have to cross. You can't get that density without building transit, with a very tightly woven network.
You can't build London without subways. What are subways? What does the underground do to streams?
Cuts them all up. All the streams in London are in pipes. And yet, by denaturing the land of London, you get the density which is itself a virtue.
So what happens is you get Okay. You get the town theory, which, as you know, Howard thought was partial and incomplete. Then you get the country theory, which, green, is all to the good. But Howard's town-country theory, okay, the town-country theory actually ranks very highly the intact countryside, and it ranks very highly the urban core. That's what's interesting about it.
And what it does is it takes the raw suburb of today the single family house actually correctly, correctly locates it as the less ethical of the positions. And then of course, since we're not going to eliminate the single family house, what we need to do is come up with much more ecological and compensatory ways of living in which we bring up the performance of the single family house through, for example, solar generation on the roof, recycling, growing food, recycling its own water and so forth. Remember that the house has some chance, the single-family house has some chance of ecological balance.
The high-rise doesn't. It doesn't have enough surface to generate solar. It cannot actually feed itself. But the house does.
So the idea of the modern garden city is to take the platform, the chassis that Howard gives you, and update it by taking the single-family house and actually completing it. in some ways compensates for its performance of occupying too much land and actually generating too many car trips. And say, you the house actually have enough roof to generate your own electricity, you have enough land to recycle, you have enough land to actually grow your own food, etc., etc.
And therefore you too have an ethical right to exist. But not as a builder subdivision. That does not have a right to exist.
The house in the builder subdivision is unethical. because all it does is it occupies unwarranted... amounts of land, and it generates inordinate amount of tailpipe emissions.
So it even takes that house, which is in some ways the British ideal, and actually recalibrates it. And that's the difference between the theory of towns, the theory of country, which is now tremendously in debate. These are the eco-village guys, this is Boris and its high-rises, this is Howard, and this is the future here. The two books that I mentioned, Howard is out of unwin, is not quite out of print, actually I was responding to him. ...for reprinting it in the States.
I've actually had this reprinted in the States and it's available, this book. But you have actually, do you remember the Urban Design Compendium by British Partnerships? English Partnerships?
This is an excellent textbook. Now, the coalition government, because this bureaucracy grew from 25 people, which is when I knew it, to 850, I think very correctly, the coalition government dismantled it. But unfortunately, it threw away the baby with the bathwater. You do have a textbook here called the Urban Design Compendium, which is the equivalent, the upgrade, of actually Raymond Nunwin, and it needs to be refurbished.
I have actually gotten permission to translate that book to Spanish, and it's now being used all over Latin America. It's the best textbook you have. And actually, keep the English partnerships out of it, but this will give you that urban design.
design. Remember how I said that Howard himself is not good enough unless you think. of him together with Unwin. In some ways this is your Unwin, that book, which is out of print. Now, what happens when you apply Unwin, here's Stevenage, what happens when you apply Unwin at the scale of urban design to Stevenage?
Because right now, the reason you can't build a new town, including a garden city in Hertfordshire, is that everybody thinks immediately for a new town. I I said, what? You're going to build a new town? All you can think of is Stevenage.
no confidence that Welland can be built. If somebody said, but it's going to be Letchworth, right? Don't worry. It's not going to be Stevenage. It's going to be Letchworth.
You know what? You'd get hot fat chance. We don't trust you.
We don't think that you guys know how to do it, even if you wanted to. And I would say that right now, that's the truth. I don't think your planning and architectural profession could or has the confidence to build Letchworth. So the resistance there is to the new towns.
And so what needs to happen is there needs to be a distancing. And one of the things when we did the Hartfordshire Charette, is we took this quasi-disaster called Stevenage, which statistically is not a disaster, but actually experientially it is. It's just not good enough. And we said, what happens if we took this and actually designed it according to Unwin?
And here it is, on the same place, the same rail line, the same ecological situation. And here it is, according to... And then we went through and we took it piece by piece.
What's the thoroughfare system like? And I won't impose this on you now, but in the book that we've written, we actually say, this is why it's a problem in Stevenage. This is why it would be good if it were a garden city. And then we take where the town centers are.
The town centers are all dead in Stevenage. The little neighborhood centers are dead. But what if they were in the right place on the right?
and then we say what about the sort of sort of quasi-miserable downtown center you have in Stevenage, which you put up with, but it's really relatively unbearable. What would happen if you designed it as a proper main street that actually connected very, very well, instead of being surrounded by parking lots? What would it be like on the right?
What would happen if the open space system were designed a certain way, properly? What would happen with your neighborhood centers, of which this is one, if it were designed properly? And what would happen with your horrendous cul-de-sacs, in Stevenage if they were designed as proper closes as they were in Welland and so forth.
You know what would happen? It would be a wonderful place. The same housing, the same investment, the same piece of land. What was missing is that the planners in the 50s took the statistics of Howard but actually imposed an aesthetic imported from Scandinavia and Germany.
It's essentially what happened and it was very badly done. and what you have is a failure of the level of urban design. And urban design is what Unwin did, what Unwin took care of. And so we take it like that, and the housing, this is what I call Scandinavian housing but with an extra degree of apologetics. And this is what Unwin would have done on the right.
Now, do you remember that a horrible diagram that kind of wedged that that that Howard did, that drawing that I did that looked like a witch. Well, you know, he really never published that. A lot of Howard's drawings weren't really presented. They were actually redrawn by the much more skillful Unwin. And so when Unwin had to explain the Garden City to people, including the Americans, when he...
You know, Unwin died in New York. He eventually emigrated, essentially. And he ended up in New York, and he was showing these things that had a tremendous effect in the United States. And here you see this center. and you see the neighborhoods and you see the outlying villages.
This is the kind of thing that was very compelling. And I said, well, what happens if we can't really build a garden city anymore? If there isn't the confidence in Britain to build a garden city?
And I think that there's a pretty good case that we're not going to get a whole garden city. But there are two models that are really, I think, quite possible. And one is the garden town, which has all of the theories. that were spoken about by Howard, but in a smaller scale.
Here you have the rail, and here you have the country. And I'm going to describe this a little. Here's the rail. These are the jobs. And this is the high street.
This is the school at the edge. And you can see how it kind of delaminates a little bit. It feathers out so that people can actually have big farms, but they can also have smaller farms. And it's very much about food production at the edge. One of the things that you can do these days...
is you can actually produce food without actually going into agribusiness by allowing people to actually be out in the suburbs to actually build, to actually grow the high-value produce. They're not going to do wheat, but they're going to do high-value. There are certain vegetables and so forth at restaurants and people will pay for, and those can usually be brought into the city because they're hand-tended.
It's the stuff that has to be done by tractors and and sprayed by airplanes that you attempt to keep away. And that's low-value agriculture, and once you do it massively, the high-value agriculture can be done closer in. And so there's a transect of agriculture here. By the way, here's the little farm that actually feeds it.
And then the other model is this one. This is the exact obverse. You see here how in this one, the green belt is on the outside.
But what happens if you do an urban neighborhood? Well, on the outside, or the boulevard, guards, right? The high streets, and the green is on the inside. If you look at any neighborhood in London, and the one I know the best, for example, is Notting Hill, you'll see that the outside is quite a high-density crust, which is where the buses run, etc., and the big shops are, and the big businesses, but inside it becomes gentler and gentler like a village.
The more you inside the neighborhood. It's an exact reverse of the town. The country town has a very high density at the middle on the high street, and then it feathers down into the countryside.
The urban neighborhood has a high density at the edges, and then it actually comes gently into the center, which is where the greens are. And so here's the obverse of that drawing, and you can see here the boulevard, right? And here you can see the green at the middle, which is where we have some of the, well, allotment gardens and also the schools.
So let's Let's take these apart, and this is the proposal for the new new garden city. This is what it's likely to be like. So, okay, so here you have the, this is the garden town, this is the garden neighborhood. In the garden town, you see the open space is all on the edge, right, as is the school.
Sometimes it actually crawls into the center, as it often does where you have churches and you have the graveyards that connect to the outside of the older churches, you know, and you can have some captured woodland, in the city In the urban neighborhood, you have the green in the middle, but mostly, which is the exact difference, but mostly you have the growing in hydroponics on the roofs of the parking garages and the workplaces. You have the really efficient food growing. And then you have the workplace.
So the workplace can actually be on the high street, or it can be around the station, or you can get the larger factories here. Generally, the high street is on this axis, and then you have a cross axis of an increase large workplace on the Garden Village. On the urban neighborhood, it's all on the edge.
The big businesses are on the edge, where the transit is and where the highway is. So again, it's the opposite. And then finally, you have the housing, and you have the wards, et cetera, here, and you have the housing here. The housing is not structural.
What's structural is where the jobs are and where the open space is. Now, these two models, either as bolt-ons in the case of of the urban neighborhood, or in terms of brownfield infill, these you can do. I don't think you're going to find a site anywhere near London large enough for a complete garden city of 32,000 dwellings, or a population of 32,000, which is what Howard did.
But you can come up with a constellation of towns and neighborhoods of a certain size that will add up, in fact, very closely to the ideal that will happen. Why do you not need a city in your life? Why is it enough to have a town?
The cities were weak in three, excuse me, the countryside was weak in three ways. It didn't have enough jobs, it didn't have enough culture, and you couldn't get enough dates, really is what happened. The internet has actually obviated all three.
You could do a lot of working at a distance, you can actually shop at a distance, and you can date apparently at a distance. And so one of the curious things about their latest developments... that's happened in our culture, and people are saying, is this good, is this bad, what do we know about this? It may be good, it may be bad, but it's very, very good for the garden town.
It's very good, because the hardest things to get actually now become available through telecommuting. This system that I spoke about, the transect, etc., will actually, is a taxonomic engine that can actually assess cities, towns, villages, and hamlets, the traditional ones. It can actually also assess congruent... Howard's Garden Cities, the traditional neighborhood development, which is the American system, the new town cell of the British New Towns and also Canadian New Towns, the neighborhood unit of the American 1920s, the what is this called? The livable neighborhoods.
I don't know who's calling them that. Maybe it's the Prince of Wales. But no, that Prince of Wales down here, the urban villages, you could do the Cartier, which is used in the continent, and you could use the transit-oriented development, which is all the rage in California.
What's interesting about all of these names, all of these names that cause a great deal of confusion and a lot of buzzing in the planning world, if you put them through the system, the analytical system of the Garden City, they actually become one. They're all good guys. They have different ranges, they have different ambitions, but they're all good guys.
You can actually compare them. You can learn from them. And then it very clearly actually also shows you what the bad guys are.
You know, yes, the builders, the builder estates, those are the bad guys. The ones that create... Towers for everyone.
We're only the very youngest people without children creating its own monoculture. That's also a bad guy And what I would hope that is with this bringing forth the Garden City Perfectly modernizing it stop talking about it as history and actually present it as really the fundamental unavoidable idea about what the New Jerusalem is or the paradigm if you prefer if you begin to speak this way the profession can gather its wits again and present intelligent options to the people so that people can decide. Thank you.