Mixing ecology and architecture

Press, 28 January 1988, Page 9

Mixing ecology and architecture

Alice Coleman’s views on city planning are ahead of their time, but she is being proved right, reports GLENYS ROBERTS.

I have often thought that if Prince Charles were a woman, nobody would think any of his views peculiar at all. This is not to cast doubt on his masculinity, only to applaud his common sense and vision. Of course depressing architecture, as we have been debating recently, has a depressing effect on people when they have to work and live in it. Of course there is comfort to be found in nature, which is where we all come from. I have been talking to one of the few women who form part of the Prince’s “kitchen cabinet.” That is the inner circle of experts with strong views on planning and the inner cities whom he has been known to summon to Highgrove for tea and a little sympathy. She is Dr Alice Coleman, reader of geography

at King’s College, London. When she expresses her views you think: "Of course — just what I’ve been saying.” Dr Coleman, an aca-demic-looking woman in her sixties, is not shy about her gifts of foresight. She started in the 1950 s by telling the Canadian city of Ontario what to do about their wasteland. They didn’t like being told at the time but, sure enough, they adopted her views. “It normally takes five years for me to be proved right,” she says. “This time, it seems to be taking only two.” In the last two years, she has quietly been made consultant to a number of boroughs with housing problems, including London’s Tower Hamlets and Southwark. It all started when they discovered her book “Utopia On Trial.” In it she

pinpoints the 16 precise factors which were making the prize-winning housing estates of the ’sixties literally lethal to their inhabitants. The factors include the walkways, the multiple entrances, the common grounds — but all contribute in some way to the general anonymity of the places. Since no one knows the identity of the people living in these concrete nonentities, they have no conscience about dropping litter in the open spaces or scrawling graffiti on the interminable corridors. No sooner are the graffiti obscured with a coat of paint at one end, than they appear again at the other. It’s like renovating the Forth Bridge. Crime soars because no one recognises whether or not intruders belong to the estates. Anonymity is a much graver factor than aesthetics, in Dr Coleman’s view. Given a little peace to make a piece of concrete their own, people may not be able to turn it into St Paul’s Cathedral — but it will have human character. Because some families are already establishing traditions in the estates, she does not recommend pulling down most of them. That would also cost too much. Instead she recommends building on them. Building? But what about all we have heard about the tinderbox situation of overcrowding? On many of the estates, she says, there is too much dangerous, purposeless space — “confused space,” they call it in business. She has calculated that as many as 350 suburban type houses with their own gardens could be built on the common land of estates. Gardens have been proved to lessen racial prejudice, and to teach children the confidence which will make them into good citizens. "A toddler needs to get away from his mother’s apron strings,” she says. “He goes for 30 seconds, then he goes for a minute." On the tenth floor of a housing estate, he can go nowhere. He ends up as an emotionally stunted teenager. At this point, he goes off to play in a communal playground on the estate which seems, to the planners, a marvellous solution. “It is not,” says Alice. “We have proved there is more crime on estates with playgrounds than

without. Children need their own territory, and to learn to respect other people. “If you can’t have private gardens, the next best thing is to fence round the communal one. Give it one entrance, then people treat it with respect.” Obvious, isn’t it? And no different from what they have been doing in London's smart garden squares for two centuries. In the past we knew these things instinctively but since the ’sixties, when the theoreticians took over, we have to have everything proved to us — or rather to them. We were doing much better when things just grew like Topsy, according to Dr Coleman, or obeyed market forces — to introduce a Thatcherian note. “Sociologically the most successful architectural form ever was the 1930 s suburban housing. “People bought or rented what they liked. This gave a clear message to the developers to build what sold. “They were not archi-tect-designed because until the mid-’3os architecture was not designated a profession. When it became one they had to be seen to do something. As did the planners.”

It was in 1960 that Dr Coleman and 3000 geography students started mapping England and Wales according to land usage. Over the years she found one surprising thing: the amount of land wasted in the inner cities. Meanwhile, their outer reaches were encroaching on precious farmland. The solution is to build on the wasted land and spare the greenery. Ecology and architecture work together — and these you will recognise as the Prince’s two obsessions as well as Dr Coleman’s. You will also recognise the third: The idea that there are more things in heaven and earth than rigid planning. If Alice Coleman had had her own way growing up in Broadstairs, in Kent, she would not be a geographer today but a classicist, which would have made her completely redundant in the ’eighties. She lives in suburban Dulwich in a house which she bought because it had a garage to accommodate her huge filing system, and no garden to distract her. So important is it to human beings to grow things, she now has apple trees on her balcony. As the guard changes at Buckingham Palace, no doubt we shall hear more of Dr Alice Coleman. — Copyright Duo

Anonymity encourages crime

Land wasted in inner cities