Rainy, Grey-sky Thinking

When it comes to designing better ways for our cities and us to interact, it occurred to me just now that what we definitely don’t need is “blue sky thinking”. That sort of “start afresh”, “everything can be re-imagined” approach is what gave us Corbusier’s aesthetically-pleasing yet soul-less and aggressive in practice grand modernist projects - most evident in the slum clearances and war-damage reconstruction in the UK cities of the 60s.

What we need more of is almost the opposite - “rainy, grey sky thinking” perhaps. Thinking that embraces the constraints of the city-as-is and works out clever ways to reuse and refactor what already exists, and which replaces as little as possible.