I was initially drawn to reading Otto Saumarez Smith's Boom Cities (link to openlibrary.org) because of the chapter on Liverpool's post-war redevelopment proposed (and partially implemented) by the Shankland Report.
The rest was an interesting wider history in how British towns and cities were reconfigured in thrall to the car, but also how grand redevelopment projects are pursued by councillors to supposedly halt de-industrial decline with new buildings. Rather depressing to see nothing has been learnt from decades of that not working, and we're still throwing tens of millions of pounds at projects that might result in buildings that might then house some businesses or shops that might then employ some people and give them a livelihood.
Anyway; here are my dog-eared pages from reading it.
Page 10
In arguing that modernism and preservation were entangled, Boom Cities provides a more nuanced protrayal of a subject that has often been treated with a demonising vehemence—exemplified by the crass cliché that planners did more damage to cities than the Luftwaffe.
Page 12
Modernism, which has been the key to unlocking this moment in all previous accounts, is here implicitly downgraded as an explanatory tool. Although much of the planning of the 1960s is clearly related to the international, historical, and theoretical cluster of ideas that comes under the title of modernism, it is also shot through with many features that are more commonly understood as postmodern.
Page 16
It was common to point out that the decentralizing and suburbanizing effects engendered by the automobile had overtaken the cholera and over-crowding engendered by railways as the primary ill of cities. Terence Bendixson pushed the comparison further, seeing Colin Buchanan's seminal Traffic in Towns as providing a role analagous to the reforming reports of the nineteenth century[...]
Page 18
The Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, certainly read, or misread, the report as a call for radical reconstruction:
It is fundamental to the whole report that it accepts the motor vehicle as a brilliant and beneficial invention. It is in no sense restricting the motor car. All it says is that we must use our motor cars to the maximum, and yet be sensible and keep some good environmental areas. We have to face the fact, whether we like it or not, that we have built our towns in entirely the wrong way for motor traffic. We want an entirely different type of town.
Page 38
Unlike his predecessor as Minister, Aneurin Bevan (a disciple of American urbanist Lewis Mumford), Macmillan displayed little curiosity about architectural aesthetics, and was criticized for being interested in quantity at the expense of quality. The one qualitative statement on architectural matters to be found in his diaries from this period deals with a trip to Sheffield and the gestating plans for the premier megastructural 'streets in the sky' estate, Park Hill: 'The architect seemed very good. Some new flats (on the hill) should be very good.'
Page 46
The bold scale of modernist solutions was a central element of what Tories took from modernism, as modernist planning would provide ever greater sites for profitable redevelopment. The engagement with modernism went further than this, though: it was used to give form to the future envisaged by the Conservatives through the mantras of prosperity and affluence. Modernism, despite its early connection with the socialism of the Bauhaus, is clearly as amenable to as broad a range of political symbolic meanings as any other style of architecture.
Page 54
Replacing this generic Victorian city was to be an archetypal modern one, with its central pedestrian precinct and shopping area, encircled by a bus and service road. Adjoining this central core is a ring of development for parking, offices, high-density housing (at the anti-suburban density of 100 persons per acre), and civic and entertainment zones. Encircling the whole inner area is an urban motorway in a loop. Here was a replicable vision for a Macmillanite urban utopia.
Page 55
Even the then unbuilt megastructural project St John's Precinct in Liverpool is included and commended for showing the possibility of redevelopment 'planned as essentially one great building in which all the different uses are inter-related and form part of the same architectural concept'. This was a project at the forefront of planning thought, and was praised in 1963 by Peter Hall as displaying a 'sophistication of the principle' of vertical segregation. It was also, perhaps better explaining its inclusion, the result of a public-private partnership between Liverpool's Conservative-controlled city council and Ravenseft Properties Ltd.
Page 61
For Leicester, the JUPG [Joint Urban Planning Group] advocated a public transport solution, and a type of rhetoric that had been largely absent from discussions about traffic in the early 1960s finally reached the agenda: 'A public transport solution would, incidentally, give a better service to the young, the old and many of the disabled. It must seriously be doubted whether a town which provides badly for these substantial groups can be called really civilised'.
Page 77
If Lancashire remained an area of 'old and decaying towns and of general dereliction, young people (including the vitally needed skilled workers and University graduates) would be attracted to other parts of the country, and industrialists would be unwilling to consider moving into Lancashire'. The shopping centre, it was envisioned, would provide the amenities desired for these two vital groups.
[...]
It is perplexing that the response towards solving, or even just to addressing, labour-market failure focused so much on programmes for the provision of consumer goods and an improved aesthetic environment. Perhaps the central reason that these ill-suited weapons were grasped to combat deindustrialzation was that, in a mixed economy, redevelopment was one of the few areas in which local authorities could rely on private investment. With Macmillan, or for that matter his successors, unable to countenance the level of dirigisme that would have been welcomed by the many councillors on the delegation, most vocally represented by Liverpool's Jack Braddock, redevelopment was the only area where the councillors could make a suitably dramatic show of tackling the issue.
Page 102
In 1963 Peter Hall was already praising Shankland's plan of September 1962 for the St. John's Precinct, suggesting that it showed a 'sophistication of the principle' of vertical segregation. It was boasted of the plan that if 'realised this would be one of the largest pedestrian precincts outside of Venice.'
Page 104
Shankland's rhetoric at Liverpool echoes the foundational belief behind the political planning philosophy of the early 1960s that continuous economic growth would provide the basis for uninterrupted social progress. The optimism was self-consciously purposive at Liverpool, and was part of a campaign to achieve what Shankland saw as his 'first job': banishing this 'smell of defeat' caused by forty years of economic decline.
Claims of being the biggest or first at something - check; economic growth as saviour - check; boosterism and fake-it-till-you-make-it winning out over the substance of doing the work - check. Sixty years on, and we're still trying the same playbook as if it didn't fail then.
Page 105
'For 20 years', The Times commented, 'the centre of Liverpool has been like the belly of some mangy stuffed animal in a Victorian museum. Great bald patches caused by bombing serve as temporary car parks [...]'
Page 113
The travails experience by Shankland's plans for Liverpool are too large a subject to do justice to here. The motorway achieved central government backing in 1965, but only parts were completed. It soon became apparent that financial optimism had been spectacularly misplaced. Areas of dereliction were as often the occasion for Shankland's attention as were caused by it. Nevertheless, with very little of the plan realised, and what was built by private capital being shoddy, the Liberal Party took power of Liverpool Council in 1973 on a wave of resentment over planning blight.
Page 122
It was hoped that the right kind of cities would provide a culturally rich environment which would act as a dam against the enormous changes in society that were sweeping through Britain due to rising affluence, consumerism, the motor car, and television. [Shankland's] plans aspired to preserve traditional urban communities, which 'people will not want to escape from—either by means of the motor car, the bottle or T.V.' Shankland's approach was informed by a politically aware outlook that was meliorist and modernizing, but was simultaneously fearful about the changes affecting British society.
Page 124
We were handling the difficult combination of a revolutionary architecture rooted in a new technology on the one hand, and on the other an historically unprecedented concern for the world we had inherited. For Brett there was, at least initially, no cognitive dissonance in attempting to hold on to both modernism and British traditions; indeed they were mutually reinforcing. Modernist solutions were seen by Brett as the only way to achieve other, more nuanced desiderata.
Page 136
The Architectural Review even eschews the radical implications behind the label SPUR [the Society for the Promotion of Urban Renewal], preferring instead 'the Environmentalists': '"rebuild", "renew," "re-create," are words I avoid in this context, since they imply varying degrees of condescension to places many of which are thick with character, guarded by the wry affection of many people, and short only on imaginative leadership.'
Page 140
Taking as his cue Buchanan's study of Norwich, Brett argued that for the half dozen or so historic cities which 'represent our version of the European urban tradition at its best' radials should stop before the core, 'ending normally in a ring of multi-storey car parks linked by some sort of inner circular road', while inside the core there should be a total ban on commuters' and visitors' cars. He suggested, as Konrad Smigielski had for Leicester, that an electric rickshaw service should be developed to serve 'elderly people and invalids and heavily laden shoppers'. This all pretty much foreshadows the approach Brett would apply at York four years later. The article is also interesting for warning of the risk of 'regeneration degenerating into eviction and class war', in the same year that Ruth Glass coined the term 'gentrification'.
Page 167
Worse than such aesthetic worries were fears about what was happening in city-centre redevelopment, that it just wasn't good enough, a widely felt sentiment. Crossman lamented, 'As I go round the country...I am getting used to being shown the most magnificent plans in the council offices and then feeling a sense of anti-climax when I walk outside and see the actual buildings going up.'
Page 169
To put it rather broadly, in the early 1960s city-centre plans had been created for the beneficiaries or future beneficiaries of affluence, people who, like the architects themselves, were envisaged as 'young professionals, likely to have a taste for Mediterranean holidays, French food and Scandinavian design'. This was linked to the Croslandite ideal that a more equitable and 'civilized' society could be built on the basis of increased economic growth. Planners focused on the needs of those emerging into affluence, with very little concept that some would be left behind. There was an element of wish fulfillment in all this, as it was exactly in those cities which were being left relatively behind in the move towards mass affluence that the planners most resoundingly celebrated the new world, so that Walter Bor could say of Liverpool, 'Car ownership is rising, travel is becoming more popular, new patterns of recreation are emerging.' Well yes, but significantly less than in the rest of England and on shaky foundations. Before what has been called the 'rediscovery of poverty' in the later 1960s, planning discourse mirrored political discourse in that it tended to ignore problems of poverty. There is a presumption that all would eventually share in the fruits of growth.
Page 171
Cycling, on the other hand, is treated blithely, if at all. Buchanan mentions techno-gizmos such as jetpacks, hovercraft, helicopters, and conveyor belts as 'possible substitutes for the motor car', but the bicycle was forgotten and the possibility of cycle tracks dismissed as 'very expensive, and probably impracticable'. Cycles receive similarly scant, on non-existent, treatment in the other planning manuals or overviews of the period. At Hook, it was felt that 'In view of the considerable possibility that non-powered bicycles will virtually disappear except for their use by children, only a limited system of independent cycle tracks is proposed.' Geoffrey Jellicoe wrote that cycling was 'an anachronism in the modern world'. This was all despite the fact that, in a survey of six towns near London in 1957, 35 per cent of the journeys to work were by bicycle, while even in the new town of Crawley, where no provision whatsoever had been made for cyclists, it was found that 25 per cent of journeys were made by this means.
By telling the story of an "evolved" Zuckerberg that's "unapologetic," the media whitewashes a man who has continually acted with disregard for society and exploited hundreds of millions of people in pursuit of eternal growth. By claiming he's "evolving" or "changing" or "growing" or anything like that, writers are actively working to forgive Zuckerberg, all without ever explaining what it is they're forgiving him for, because those analyses almost never happen.