dissemination of this information into the
populace, into that sort of popular culture.
They were people who weren’t urban designers,
agriculturalists or world economists but they
were reading these books because they actually
touched on the quality of life. This resulted in
a large number of people wanting to move to
communes; the 1973 Aquarius festival is based on
the idea of ‘back to earth, back to nature’, the 1976
Down to Earth festival and so on. They were all
channelling the things that were in those books.
I believe too much of it is being made of the
ecological studies, but not quite enough attention
is paid to Jane Jacobs’ very first book The Death
and Life of Great American Cities.
The city is an ecosystem and if we understand
that, we can understand a lot more about the
inputs and outputs of cities. But we are rapidly
heading towards the point where the world
will have 50 percent of people living in cities –
what will be the quality of life in those cities?
It used to be that it was the rare urban flaneur- the person who lived in Paris, or in Budapest
or London or New York who could walk the
streets and take in the culture of hundreds of
years around them. There were the restaurants,
the cafés, the barber shops, and the variety of
clothing shops that made that urban life rich.
I think we need to go back to that study of
the cities so my first book for your reading list
is The Death and Life of Great American Cities
by Jane Jacobs.
Many American cities have this hollowing
out of the centre; in Detroit, Pittsburgh and
Philadelphia to a certain extent, the centre of the
city no longer has a lot of residential population
with people having moved to the suburbs.
Detroit is interesting because there was a
physical fabric of a city there that could sustain
two million people. When it drops, there aren’t
a number of people there to take care of all the
buildings and things fall into disrepair. But
other opportunities arise – with some buildings
demolished people have actually established
community gardens and they are growing food.
So one of the outgrowths of Rachel Carson
and Jane Jacobs’ work is that perhaps we don’t
need big agribusiness, perhaps we don’t need
to grow fields of wheat, perhaps what you’re
doing is growing vegetables or fruit, and you’re
growing it locally. Also, because you can tend
it at a much higher rate, you don’t need the
pesticides. That leads to a different movement.
There was a café that opened up in New York
that said, ‘We only use local food’. This was ten
years ago and the beginning of the movement.
No food in this café comes from more than 100
miles away.
Those same cafés then started to have a fight
between them as to how narrow they could make
it – I think the narrowest one is now down to 300
yards because you can grow food on the roofs.
One of the things happening in New York now is
that abandoned warehouse buildings are being
used to grow food. Not least of which is of course
the knowledge that comes from growing under
those conditions, under the lights and the use
of water borne irrigation and fertilising through
hydroponics. This means there is a possibility to
reduce transportation and refrigeration.
One of the things with the spreading of the
cities in the post Second World War and post-
1960 period, you had these huge industrial
zoning areas where enormous warehouses and
buildings were built. They covered hectares of
space and were maintained at about minus four
degrees or at four degrees. They are essentially
giant refrigerators designed to store the food
that goes to the supermarkets.
This has such an energy demand in it – if
you look at the fertilisers and pesticides, the
fossil fuel inputs from the use of machinery
on the farm and then the transportation, the
storage in these vast cold stores, the delivery
to supermarkets and the refrigeration, it adds
up to a lot of energy; as much energy is used in
food as it is in the operations of those buildings.
That’s why some people have started talking
about vegetarianism and veganism, and less
meat, and local being a solution that attacks
those issues.
When I was teaching very young architecture
students – first and second year students –
and asking them to design a building without
much guidance, we had a program called ‘opus
musivum’, which usually means piecing the city- every student would have to design a building
and then you put all the different pieces
together and made a city.
So if you just let somebody design it, a huge
number of the students would fall into one of two
categories: the building will be designed from the
outside, often symmetrical, which is carried over
into classical architecture – the columns across
the front, the tympanum, the triangular piece on
top of the pediments and so on.
Men – always it was the men – they made it
big like a temple, didn’t matter what it was, it
was big like a temple and it was symmetrical
and quite often, it had no sides and back to it.
And then you’d find a building that would
be just a bunch of bits from the outside and
invariably women trying to solve the problem
of how you negotiate getting around the
building. The well-known Lever House in New
York, designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill - said to be the work of Gordon Bunshaft, the
main architect – has really striking interiors
designed by a woman called Natalie De Blois.
Is that the case then that women do the
interiors and men do the exteriors? Is it chicken-
and-egg because if you go to an interior design
school now, predominantly it is women; if you
go to the product days that are oriented towards
materials and interiors, vast numbers of the
readers will be women.
In his book The Triple Bottom Line, John
Elkington asks whether a cannibal eating with
forks makes it any more socially acceptable.
Anyway he possessed this idea that the economy
should be divided in three ways: one is to do
with money, one is to do with the environment
and one is to do with society and people; often
it’s called people, planet and profit, or the
economy, equity and the environment.
Why I think it’s interesting is that it’s very hard
to penetrate that stuff into this social negotiation.
If you’re a man skilled in the things about money,
the brief to do a building or the brief to do a city
or the brief to do an automobile or whatever it is,
is a fundamentally economic matter.
If you’re involved in childrearing or
childbirth, and your connection to the
health system is through childbirth, rearing
children, looking after them, looking after
their health, looking after their psychological
development and wellbeing and so on, and
that’s predominantly women’s work even if
much of it is stereotypical, then you have a view
of society, you don’t have a view as an economy
and I think that’s one of the things that has
been a talisman for how people view the city.
Do you view it as an economic element? Is it an
organism designed around exchange that can
be measured in the economy or is it also about
the social life that is in it and is also about the
quality, of the special quality, which I would say
is an environmental quality?
My experience is that most of the reading
that I do in that social and environmental
space is from women – from Naomi Klein
whose body of work is really impressive, to
social commentary like Joan Didion, to the way
in which the economy is being represented on
TV screens in many respects, the enquiry being
made about social issues, it’s always women
doing those discussions.
And it’s the broader view that comes from
very seasoned commentators like Geraldine
Brooks; my argument is that it is because of the
emotional engagement that you have to have
with the city around you – I think it’s higher
with women than it is with men.For the Full podcast interview
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