The past decade has produced more construction in Britain than at any time
since the immediate postwar period, when the tower blocks and arterial roads
of the 1950s and 1960s sliced through cities and communities, giving
planning a bad name for ever after.
Today, Liverpool One, Cabot Circus in Bristol, Highcross in Leicester and what
promises to be the biggest of all, Stratford City in London, are just a few
of the landmark projects around the country. This is the architecture of
post-industrial new Labour, in which regeneration projects, large and small,
have taken over every town and city in Britain. But just as the centralised
planning of the industrial era failed to prove of lasting worth, the
consequences of many of these schemes are also disturbing.
What has passed almost without notice is that these places are also changing
our public life and culture, removing large parts of the city, including the
streets, from a genuinely public realm and handing them over to private
companies, which own and control the entire area, policing it with private
security. The consequence is the creation of a new environment characterised
by high security, “defensible” gated architecture and strict rules and
regulations governing behaviour.
The point of all these regulations and high security is, apparently, to make
places cleaner and safer and to address the problem of soaring fear of
crime, which is among the highest in Europe. Despite continual statistics
showing that crime, including violent crime, is falling, people don’t
believe it; 80 per of Britons fear that crime is on the up. My book, Ground
Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st-Century City, argues that it is this
new city, with its security, controls and ultimately undemocratic nature,
that is the problem rather than the solution, undermining trust between
people and increasing fear. It is also creating sterile, strangely similar
places devoid of local character, where even innocent activities such as
taking photographs are forbidden, not to mention handing out political
leaflets, busking without permission or selling The Big Issue.
During the 1980s, Canary Wharf and the Broadgate Centre, the two emerging
finance centres in East London, were almost the only high-security,
privately owned and privately controlled places that functioned like this.
They were also exceptional places, finance districts created in response to
the deregulation of the financial markets and the demands of the big banks
for large trading floors. Now, a generation later, what began specifically
to serve the needs of business has become the standard model for the
creation of every new place in towns and cities across the country.
Alongside the “big bang” architecture of Canary Wharf and Broadgate,
out-of-town shopping centres, such as Bluewater in Kent and Lakeside in
Essex, were the architectural signature of the 1980s, encouraged by Margaret
Thatcher’s loosening of the planning system, a policy that was later
reversed because of its damaging effect on high streets. Under new Labour,
to find a way around planning restrictions, shopping centres have moved
wholesale into city centres, creating open-air property complexes that also
own and control the streets, squares and open spaces of the city.
In their defence, supporters say that many people like these places and flock
to shop there. But many others do not like the sterile sameness. And many,
who do not wish to shop but merely want to wander about — the young, the
old, families with children, the less well-off — feel that these places are
not for them. Beggars and and the homeless are forcibly excluded by the
guards.
The real issue is that most people simply don’t know what is happening,
presuming that because the streets have always been public, as far as they
are aware, they will continue to be so. In fact, during the early 19th
century, before the advent of local government and local democracy, cities
such as London were owned by a small group of private landlords, mainly
dukes and earls. Their old estates include some of the finest Georgian and
early Victorian squares, but what we don’t see today are the private
security forces that were employed by the estates to keep out those who did
not belong there and the hundreds of gates, bars and posts.
After growing public outrage, which paralleled the rise in local democracy and
was reflected by two big parliamentary inquiries, control over the streets
was passed over to local authorities and gates removed. Since then it has
been common for local authorities to “adopt” the streets and public spaces
of the city, which means that whether or not they actually own them, they
control and run them. Now this process is being reversed, alongside a huge
shift in land ownership, away from public places and buildings in public
ownership.
While the centres of our cities are turning into secure enclaves, high
security is also becoming an ever bigger feature of the homes we live in.
Gated communities are generally associated with a stereotype of luxury
living, suited to oligarchs or premiership footballers, but in many parts of
the country the majority of all new housing — from starter homes to social
housing — is built in an off-street complex style, surrounded by gates. The
only research on the numbers of gated communities in the UK dates to 2003,
when there more than 1,000. Since then, the author of the study, which was
commissioned by the Government, told me a great many more have been built.
But although estate agents’ literature normally touts it as an “exclusive” and
“prestigious” option, the spread of gated living is not necessarily from
choice. Many people I interviewed told me how they hadn’t been looking to
live in a gated community and it was the home they chose rather than the
gates and security. In some areas, there is little else on the market. Yet,
when offered the added extra of gates and security most people see it as a
bonus. I found that the opposite is true as time after time I was told how
living surrounded by security counter- intuitively only makes us more
scared, by undermining our ability to deal with risk and drawing unnecessary
attention to dangers that are rarely there.
The paradox is that while more security is supposed to make us safer it
removes our personal and collective responsibility for our own safety,
replacing “natural surveillance” — the natural interaction between strangers
that keeps places safe — with a more authoritarian environment, which only
increases fear and dilutes trust. Fear and trust correlate directly with
happiness and this is a key reason why levels of unhappiness are double
those in continental Europe where the culture of security is far less
developed.
Denmark has a similar crime level to Britain, attributed to a binge-drinking
culture, urbanisation and a large population of young people, which both
countries have in common. That’s where the similarities end because,
according to the World Values Survey, Denmark is also the happiest country
in the world, with high levels of trust and low levels of fear. The
security-conscious, defensible enclaves taking over our cities and our homes
are also anathema.
In Britain, on the other hand, “drones” — the unmanned spyplanes used in Iraq
— already fly over parts of Liverpool and as Stratford City draws nearer to
completion, in time for the Olympics in 2012, it is likely that they will
also be part of the security regime there. It seems self-evident that the
presence of these “eyes in the sky” will cause far more fear than
reassurance.
But while Stratford City will go ahead, bailed out by the Government, the
property market model that fuelled the creation of these places has
collapsed. Local residents in cities from Wells to Lancaster who found
themselves unable to make their voices heard through consultation now find
the private schemes they opposed have simply stalled. Even the latest big
planning row, between the Prince of Wales and Richard Rogers over Chelsea
Barracks, seems to be favouring a more genuinely public realm. Criticism
claimed the Rogers scheme had the feel of a gated enclave. But the Prince’s
favoured architect, Quinlan Terry, is opposed to “defensible”
security-conscious architecture, favouring a more “permeable” approach, with
Francis Terry confirming to me that “if we were to master-plan Chelsea
barracks we would like the exterior to be public”.
At the same time, unexpected ideas from Europe about “shared space”, which has
much in common with “natural surveillance”, are taking off. And new models
for trusts in cities, which plough back profits into places for the benefits
of future generations and keep streets and public buildings in the public
realm, are being discussed.
When I began writing this book I thought its message would be a gloomy one.
Now I’m not so sure.
Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st-Century City is published by
Penguin, www.annaminton.com
