movement reflected a hopeful attitude in the face of adversity which was, as Kübler-Ross suggested, pervasive in other fields such as science and medicine:
And there were good reasons to beoptimistic. Startling breakthroughs inphysics, chemistry, engineering, and—tomost people most important—medicinewere occurring almost daily. Curesfor hitherto lethal conditions such aspneumonia, sepsis, kidney failure, and severetrauma had become commonplace. Diseasewas increasingly seen as a problem to besolved. The sense was that medical sciencemight soon be able to arrest aging and(subconsciously at least) possibly conquerdeath itself (Kübler-Ross, 1973).
This was the point at which many failures of modern planning were placed squarely upon modernist architects. Until this moment architects had been seen as infallible, able to solve all urban problems using modern architecture and urbanism, just as the best physicians, during this same period, had been seen as those who could forestall death using modern medical treatments.
Figure 17: Walter Gropius solar analysis for a variety of urban form arrangements redrawn by Tianyi Yang.
In this culture, the best doctors werethe ones who could always find anothertreatment to forestall death. In the 1950sand 1960s, doctors rarely admitted whentreatments weren’t working and commonlyfailed to tell patients when furthertreatments would do more harm than good.Physician culture epitomized the never-say-die stance (Kübler-Ross, 1973).
But in 1973, the critical social eye that was turned on these extremely confident physicians and their procedural ‘mistakes’, was also turned on Modernist architects. The absolute trust of those pushing the modernist agenda had eroded. Individualistic genius architects like those epitomised by the Howard Roark character in Ayn Rand’s 1943 classic novel The Fountainhead were no longer to be trusted in quite the same way as they once were, as all-knowing visionaries at the top of the decision-making tree.
Almost at the same time that cities were investigating consolidated urban growth, the concept of high-density living was also being questioned. Modernist housing tower blocks that responded to mass housing shortages were being blamed for several social problems (Gallagher, 2001). The end of the long post-war boom heralded the start of two decades of intermittent recession and rising unemployment. New social problems would fester in Modernist housing schemes. In Britain, since the 1956 Housing Act, councils had been paying a premium for construction of blocks of flats. The apartments became filled with the current underclass and were beset with social problems and crime.
Le Corbusier’s dream of concrete towers floating over lush landscapes was misread and reproduced ad nauseam without any of the pizzazz of his own built versions such as the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France. Instead of the green landscape rolling under the towers, the pilotis (columns) were filled in or became a landscape of car parking. A pivotal moment for these high-rise buildings occurred prior to 1973 in East London, when a structure known as Ronan Point partially collapsed due to a domestic natural gas explosion killing several occupants (Delatte Jr, 2009).
Contemporary atmosphere of loss
In the previous sections, we outlined three critical ‘healthy urbanism’ themes that occurred during historic moments within an atmosphere of optimism for an urban design future that was more connected, more beautiful, and healthier than what had come before.
The visionary example of Haussmann’s Paris, and the holistic approach of Ildefons Cerdà in Barcelona demonstrate urbanism coming of age. These urban designers were grappling with balancing issues of movement by considering transportation and network connectivity. They were studying aesthetic unity and visual composition by designing for the human experience and composing from the human perspective. They were also responding to a desire for improving public health through their development of urban design procedures responding to desires for access to daylight, airflow, and sewerage in growing cities.
When we think about the atmosphere of contemporary society’s urban concerns and wants, they appear somewhat more pessimistic than prior urban desires. The use of the grid expressed the ‘civilised’ nature of Roman society, perspectival urban compositions reflected cultural advancement, and the boulevards of Haussmann and chamfered grids of Cerdà were an expression of enlightened design defeating the disease and pestilence of the past. The focus of contemporary urban design is far less aspirational. We no longer talk about the future being better than it is now, we use terms like ‘sustainability’, that the best we can hope for is to sustain the lifestyle we currently have, and ‘resilience’, that we expect things are going to get horribly worse with a myriad of crises, and we hope that we can return to pre-crisis status quickly.
The driving force behind urban aspirations and desires now is based on perceived losses. The loss of cheap fuel due to peak oil; the loss of environmental stability due to climate change; the loss of time due to long commutes; the loss of social diversity due to planning regulation induced social segregation; the loss of health due to a worldwide obesity epidemic; as well as the continuing fear for a loss of amenity due to urbanisation and densification are all realities for which society needs to adjust and prepare.
In the following chapters, we will explore these loss-focused objectives and desires, as well as various responses to the suggested death of urbanism. We use the analogy of ‘coping with loss’, as the structure for our review of prevailing current and emerging urban design paradigms and their associated design techniques or ‘procedures’. We use Kübler-Ross’ concept of ‘five stages of grief’ from her book On Death and Dying, published in the pivotal year of 1973, with each chapter exploring a ‘stage of grief’ with its corresponding urban design paradigm.
In the First Stage: Denial chapter, we explore the coping mechanism of refusal to accept that the ‘diagnosis’ is correct, comparing terminal patient denial to advocates for business-as-usual urban ‘sprawl’ development, and some of the significant problems with this denial.
In the Second Stage: Anger chapter, we examine the placing of blame that can occur during difficult times of transition by examining anti-development community groups and attempt to tease out some of the underlying reasoning behind their anger.
In the Third Stage: Bargaining chapter, we move on to discuss the strong desire of terminal patients to want to go back to the way things were before they had been presented the bad news. We compare this yearning for the past with the revisionist New Urbanist design movement attempting to understand the embedded use of nostalgia and promises of ‘clean’ urban order.
In the Fourth Stage: Depression chapter, we study concepts of depression, starchitects, digital-procedural fetishism, and community co-design.
In the Fifth Stage: Acceptance chapter, we explore the idea of accepting our fate and making the most of the time left, presenting an optimistic manifesto that includes strategic densification, making speculative plans, proposing smarter community participation, and putting forward an integrated performance-based approach to urbanism.
* ‘Bogan’ is Australian and New Zealand slang term for describing a person whose speech, behaviour and appearance are considered uncouth or unsophisticated, often dedicated fans of 1980s heavy metal bands such as Mötley Crüe or AC/DC who epitomise the ‘boganesque’.
† The Burger King business name was already trademarked by a takeaway food shop in Adelaide when the franchise was first being established in Australia and was consequently renamed Hungry Jacks.
‡ A ‘groma’ or ‘surveyor’s cross’ was a primitive surveying device that used vertical staffs with cross members hanging
