The tenor of the conversation in the common rooms and bars around the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University must be pretty bleak, never mind in its lecture halls and laboratories. ‘The last thing I thought I would hear today was technological optimism,’ said Peter Guthrie at a conference last week, entitled Minimum or Maximum Cities, organised by Alastair Donald and Ye Zhang. The professor seemed genuinely surprised by an optimistic attitude to technological solutions to future energy supplies. This wouldn’t be worthy of note but for the fact that Guthrie is Professor of Engineering of Sustainable Development at one of the world’s most important universities. If he can say that he has no faith in humankind to consider future generations, when it comes to energy policy, we are certainly in a predicament.
It is in this context of pessimism that Blueprint’s Paper Cities exhibition was supposed to address. The utopian quality is all too clear in the series but I think even we have been surprised by how many visions it has helped record and give voice to. The discussions at Maximum or Minimum Cities makes one realise that these sketches are also social potentials, outlines of plans to be put into action. Following debates on society, transport and energy, the conference opened up into a Paper City crit. Architects Derek Walker, Karl Sharro and Darryl Chen gave three short presentations on their proposals. Looking at the plans by Derek Walker, first city planner to Milton Keynes, one realises how quickly cities can be built from sketched plans and how much a city is dictated to by the ideals that found it.
What is so astonishing about the majority of environmentalist rhetoric, or the rhetoric of sustainability is how it fundamentally rejects ideas of progress. Steve Melia, founder member of Car Free UK, speaking at The Agile City session, fundamentally rejected the idea of growth, economic or otherwise. Melia has cycled across North West Europe looking at car free cities and believes we have a lot to learn. One wishes he could travel a little further, say to the Middle East and India, and see what economic growth is doing for people in these countries. Cities can and will be produced from sketches and plans. Economic downturns in Dubai have prompted much moralising tut-tutting in the West as if making a place for people to live in is a sin, and debt restructuring is a moral consequence for building a city rather than a historical moment in the evolution of a place.
Of course criticising sustainabilty can become something of a crusade, largely because its tenets – anti-growth, anti-humansim – are such malign influences. Even if manmade climate change is a fact, I would argue, the approach of the sustainable lobby is the worst way of going about alleviating it. Let’s have clean transport and energy in socially integrated cities but lets make it for the people of that city rather than for a quasi-religious vision of the planet or, as is now increasingly common amongst the sustainability lobby, for a dystopian vision extrapolated from our own cynicism.
So fundamentally does the sustainable lobby attack a core principle of Western progressive thought – improving the world for our children – that their monopoly on the future has to be questioned. A major part of the thinking on sustainability is to go back to where we once were; an insistence that we unthink the industrial revolution. Where are our green utopias? Spencer de Grey from Foster + Partners spoke briefly in the session on energy about Masdar, and the subterranean personal transport system that may be used. Details about Masdar, though, remain an enigma, and it has already been talked down by its designers as ‘an experiment’ rather than a valid place to live in.
Joe Simpson of the Movement Bureau think tank, posited Chris Hardwick’s VeloCity as a possible vision of future transport infrastructure. Simpson has written elsewhere about an integrated sophisticated transport system orientated around new technology. Yet, as Alistair Donald made clear at the conference, the Dan Dare quality of such projects should not be apologised for but celebrated. We would agree. One of the important understandings that commissioning and discussing Paper Cities have led us to, is that visions, drawn or sketched in our case, but written or filmed in others, work. The extravagance of an idea is often its saving grace, as Karl Sharro’s sketch for Dubai suggests.
Of course we shouldn’t get obsessed by form. Asked what he thought of the additions to Milton Keynes since his plan completed, Derek Walker said, ‘shit happens’. He has a right to be diffident. The rigour of his plan for Milton Keynes cannot be assailed by a few architectural alterations. But his plan still began by visualising. By siting on a hill and drawing a plan. There is a vacuum for these and young architects, engineers and designers need to enter into this space. Because we need good positive plans like we never have before.
