Perspectives of Urban Development
Harald Bodenschatz
Published in: architektur.aktuell 6.2003
The
specialist world is unanimous: we are experiencing a time, it is said, of
‘profound transformation’ – moving away from the industrial society, away from
the family, away from the age pyramid, away from a society with stable working
conditions,
away from a polarisation of ‘east’ and ‘west’, away from a society
characterised by local events. However, it is
far less clear where the journey is actually leading us: post-industrialisation,
away from a polarisation of ‘east’ and ‘west’, away from a society characterised
by local events. However, it is far less clear where the journey is actually
leading us: post-industrialisation,
more and more single people, over-ageing, a society of knowledge, globalisation
– these popular terms indicate the future without being able to clarify it in
detail. What does it mean for our cities? How and where will they have to change?
Urban Redevelopment As A Response To Social Change
The response at least of German urbanists to this still unpredictable social
change is called ‘urban redevelopment’. A term which, only a few years ago –
except when used in the context of ‘ecological urban redevelopment’ –still did
not have any particular significance, but which is today on everybody’s lips.An
astonishing career! The term was inspired by a state subsidy programme of the
same name: ‘Urban Redevelopment East’ (running since 2002), which – because it
was so well received – has now also been followed by ‘Urban Redevelopment West’.
The leitmotif for urban redevelopment is absolutely scintillating – as are all
the leitmotifs for urban development: the aim is to save or (more or less
critically) reconstruct the traditional city, the compact city or, as people in
Germany like to call it, the European city. The traditional city is less of an
analytical term than an urban development programme. To it are attributed such
characteristics as a relatively high density of buildings, a system of networked
public spaces, a social, functional and architectural mix, as well as a spatial
hierarchy with a city centre as the highlight. The actual European city is in
this sense the material interpretation of its respective unique history, which
it is important to preserve, adapt to new requirements or to reproduce. The
invocation of the traditional city is at the same time a denial of the city of
post-war modernism and the American city.
Yet what lies concealed behind the term ‘urban redevelopment’ in practice? Today,
the following three large-scale fields of action are intended: firstly, the
redevelopment of the centre, for a long time also known as ‘rejuvenation’;
secondly, the redevelopment of areas that are not being used and have become
wasteland, popularly also known as ‘conversion’; and thirdly, the redevelopment
of large-scale, monofunctional council housing estates which was formerly known
as ‘adjustment’.
At the centre of public interest is the redevelopment of the centres of the big
cities. There are already signs of where this will lead: the metropolitan centre
of the future will be the centre of a suburbanised urban region. Yet not as one
fragment among others, but rather as a new kind of centre, one in which
suburbanites feel at home. There they will be able to find the unique buildings
urgently needed by the less exciting design of the suburban landscape, but also
a cleverly thought-out range of high culture, entertainment and rare goods. The
new centre is a place of constructed history, on which the faceless suburban
landscape is dependent, a destination for tourism, and not only for the
continually growing worldwide long-distance tourism, but above all also for
suburban tourism on a local scale. In the new centre are congregated select
institutions for the production of knowledge, decision-making and creativity.
And there is even room and a home for those people who like to live there,
including the elderly.
This immediately outlines the urban development programme for redeveloping city
centres: the public space is reconquered for pedestrians and made more
attractive or redesigned. Spectacular new complexes for entertainment and the
arts are built or implanted within historical buildings. There is a better mix
of utilisation, above all in the central location of attractive residential
space for higher-earners. The centre hums 24-hours a day (the ‘round-the-clock
metropolis’) and the city orients itself – wherever possible – to the water,
even of it is only a brackish and not particularly sweetly-smelling canal. The
urban greenery is extended and qualified. Finally, the heritage of urban
development is carefully preserved and enriched with historicised
reconstructions. In addition, there is the attraction of new buildings, which
symbolise future perspectives, whether in a deadly serious manner or with more
joy.
The second major theme of urban redevelopment concerns ‘conversion’. Inside, at
the edge of and outside the inner cities, huge areas have become wasteland over
the past decades. These include areas formerly used by the railways, industry,
trade, the military, trade fairs and airports. How can these be reutilised?
Through an extension of the traditional city of through wholly new structures?
Urban redevelopment has recently acquired a third significance, above all in
Germany: the adaptation of the large-scale residential estates of industrialised,
mass council housing to altered needs. ‘Urban Redevelopment East’ serves in the
first place to demolish those ‘slab block buildings’ which have lost their
residents. Urban redevelopment here means ‘rebuilding’, i.e. taking down
residential buildings that no longer meet a demand. Optically, urban
redevelopment is responding to the dramatic loss of residents, to the ‘shrinking
city’. The rebuilding and urban development integration of former mass
residential housing estates are perhaps the most difficult challenge for
European cities, above all (but not only) in eastern Europe.
Urban Redevelopment – Third Phase Of European Urban Renewal
The current urban redevelopment process can only be understood if one studies
its development. Whereas urban renewal up to the start of the 1970s was still
understood and practised as reconstruction in the sense of a radical,
car-friendly redesign, tertiarisation and thinning-out of inner cities as they
had been before, this concept (‘demolition and reconstruction’) entered a crisis
in the 1970s and was replaced by a type of urban renewal that was more concerned
with preservation, both architecturally and socially. For the first phase, the
demolition and reconstruction process, areas of renewal such as the Gorbals in
Glasgow, or the reconstruction area of Wedding-Brunnenstrasse in West Berlin;
for the second phase, the conservational, ‘cautious’ or ‘soft’ urban renewal,
the historical centres of Bologna and Cracow, as well as urban expansion areas
from the period before the First World War, for example those in Vienna and
Berlin. The extremely successful European Year of the Preservation of Monuments
in 1975 marked the high-point of this radical change of leitmotif.
Around 1980 it became possible to discern a third phase: urban renewal design
based on new construction, conversion and renewal, and this was later
characterised as urban redevelopment. Urban redevelopment concerns the more or
less hard adaptation of the design of existing cities to changed circumstances –
namely, in both shrinking and growing urban regions. The transition from
conservational urban renewal to urban redevelopment went hand in hand with the
reforming of the ranks of those involved in urban development, as well as a
redefinition of losers and winners. Among the ‘losers’ were urban citizens of
lower financial means, among the ‘winners’ the middle-income classes and private
investors. After all, the social orientation of European urban development
changed radically during the 1980s: it was no longer resistance against the
ousting of the poorer classes from the inner city (a central theme of the 1970s)
that was in the foreground, but rather the struggle to enable the higher-income
classes to either stay or to return. The middle-classes were courted by the
sirens of urban redevelopment – as residents, consumers and visitors. This
transformation was expressed in new alliances and interests, the artistic
architect celebrated his comeback at the cost of the participation architect and
urban planner. In addition, there was a directional loss of governmental
controlling power in favour of new forms of public and private partnership.
Cult Events, Cult Locations, Cult Books And Prophets Of Urban Redevelopment
As in any phase of urban renewal, urban redevelopment, too, has its own great
themes, persons and places. As a spectacularly produced start, one might take
the Architectural Biennial in Venice in 1980, the motto of which – La presenza
del passato – was programmatic. Great events such as the International
Architecture Exhibition in West-Berlin, the Olympiad in Barcelona and the world
exhibition in Lisbon demanded the reorientation of European urban development.
Furthermore, the programme of having cultural capitals in Europe was and still
is an important medium for urban redevelopment.
If the Architectural Biennial in Venice was the overture, the urban
redevelopment of Barcelona was the decisive breakthrough. The reacquisition of
public spaces that had been claimed by car traffic, the orientation of the city
towards the water, large-scale arts complexes for the rejuvenation of
dilapidated areas, mixed utilisation, in particular the redevelopment and new
development of residential housing for the middle class, and not least a new and
more traditionalist respect for history, coupled with neo-modernist gestures of
demonstrative future ability – these were the key subjects of urban
redevelopment and since then they have dominated specialist discussion not only
in Europe but also in North and South America. The other cult locations of urban
redevelopment in the 1980s likewise paid homage to this new programme: Paris
with its grands projets (for example, the Grand Louvre project) in a carefully
preserved traditional city; Salzburg with its self-proclaimed ‘Project for a
European City’ and carefully adapted new buildings; and London, with the
large-scale complexes around Liverpool Street station. Even beyond the Atlantic
new courses were being set: the property obtained from the excavation of the
World Trade Center gave New York a new urban area, which the urban development
in the USA would significantly influence: Battery Park City in Downtown
Manhattan.
In the 1990s there followed further, well-received projects of city centre
redevelopment. One needs only to remember Lyon and the extensive redesign of its
square and its newly-built arts temple, Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, the
rejuvenation of Temple Bar in Dublin, the Fünf Höfe in Munich, the new city hall
precinct in Innsbruck, the redesign of public space on the occasion of Holy Year
in Rome and last but not least the redevelopment of Berlin, for example the
reconfiguration of Pariser, Leipziger and Potsdamer Platz. In London urban
redevelopment accelerated in the vicinity of the big stations, but also in
Paternoster Square north of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Historicist reconstructions
were implemented in Moscow and planned in Berlin.
Although Barcelona had already opened up the subject of the re-utilisation of
wasteland, this question was actually worked out down to the last detail in
another city: in London, the conversion of Docklands began in 1984 and was the
greatest conversion project in Europe, and it is very advanced even today. The
area of Canary Wharf, which now competes with the City of London, is the
best-known product of this mega-conversion of a dockland area into a
post-industrial urban district. Docklands confronted the European specialist
world with a new phenomenon which has, in the meantime, become quite normal: the
increasing lack of public funding for urban development. Conversion is, above
all, also private urban development, although it is not only that: the new Parc
de la Villette in Paris was a milestone of publicly directed reutilisation of an
under-used inner city property. It was at the same time a symbol for the
increasing weight of landscape planning measures in urban redevelopment.
In the 1990s the significance of conversion projects continued to increased.
Reference need only be made the redesign of, for example, the dockland areas in
Rotterdam (Kop van Zuid), Cardiff, Genoa, Lisbon, Vancouver and Buenos Aires, or
to the large-scale plan for a HafenCity in Hamburg. In an exemplary project in
Tübinger Südstadt a former barracks was transformed into an area with mixed
utilisation under the direction of public works. One of the biggest German
conversion projects involving a military area was in Potsdam, while it was
possible to accelerate the redevelopment of Bornstedter Feld through a Federal
Gardens show. Finally, the rejuvenation of the unused south bank of the Thames
in London between Westminster and Tower Bridge was also a sweeping success.
The approach to the great complexes of council housing has so far not created
any comparable showplaces. Although even in the 1980s there were numerous
attempts to stabilise the precarious urban development and social conditions on
large-scale French, British, Scandinavian and German estates. In the German
specialist world the ‘adjustments’ of the Märkischen Viertel in Berlin and
Kirchdorf Süd in Hamburg received a lot of attention. In 1990s the
demolition-oriented redevelopment of the large-scale Bijlmermeer estate in
Amsterdam caused an international sensation. However, the real challenge came
after the fall of the Iron Curtain in former Socialist Europe: the mass estates
of industrialised residential housing lost their appeal, making redevelopment
inevitable. The competition ‘Urban Redevelopment East’ in the new Federal German
provinces has already publicised several projects for rebuilding the ‘slab block
estates’, for example in Leinefelde, Cottbus, Hoyerswerda or Schwedt. And even
the later ‘Urban Redevelopment West’ is able to present a spectacular example:
the rebuilding of the large-scale Osterholz-Tenever estate in Bremen.
As in every phase of urban development, urban redevelopment has its popular and
less popular prophets. In England they include Prince Charles and Richard
Rogers, in Italy Pier Luigi Cervellati, in Spain Oriol Bohigas, in Denmark Jan
Gehl, in Holland Rem Koolhaas, in Germany Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, Andreas
Feldtkeller and Hans Stimmann, as well as – stubbornly against every national
localisation – the open-minded thinker Léon Krier. Articles and books by these
prophets are either highly regarded or condemned, some people even read them and
they are at least often quoted. Examples include: A Vision of Britain (HRH The
Prince of Wales, 1989), Cities for a Small Planet (Richard Rogers, 1997),
Architektur: Freiheit oder Fatalismus (Léon Krier, 1998), Städtebau: Vielfalt
und Integration (Andreas Feldtkeller, 2001).
A New Subject: Redevelopment Of The Urban Region
Zwischenstadt (‘intermediate city’) is a term of cultural warfare, which has
been brought into the discussion by the German urban planner Thomas Sieverts.
The intermediate city is Sieverts’ name for the spaces between the cities,
spaces which often are termed suburbia, places of over-development. It is to the
credit of Thomas Sieverts that he has pointed out the neglect of the Thames
suburbia in the specialist urban discussion. Isn’t it completely unworldly, says
Sieverts, to pay homage to the compact European city and yet at the same time to
condemn the development of the suburban periphery? Isn’t the qualification of
the suburban periphery the real challenge of the urban development of tomorrow?
The debate which this book has triggered clearly shows how little we actually
know about suburbia in Germany. In contrast to the situation in USA, England and
Holland, only very isolated studies have been made here into the emergence and
contradictions of suburban development.
With these latest debates about the intermediate city or suburbanisation, a
fourth phase of urban renewal can be discerned, which might be able to endow
urban redevelopment with a new dimension: orientation to the whole urban region
and transcendence of a more confining view that focuses only on the inner city,
conversion areas, large-scale estates or areas of suburban over-development.
Viewed in perspective, the aim would be to show solidarity for redevelopment of
the whole urban region. However, the quarrel about what that actually means and
where the priorities should lie has still not begun properly. IBA Emscher Park
in the Ruhrgebiet and the long-term project entitled Industrielle Gartenreich
(‘Industrial Gardenland’) in Sachsen-Anhalt may be regarded as the first
examples in this direction.
Where this debate might lead programmatically or practically can be shown by
taking a look across the Atlantic: in the USA there unfolded as early as the
1990s a broad urban development movement against over-development or ‘urban
sprawl’ and in favour of the rejuvenation of the inner cities. At least
programmatically, the contradiction between the defenders of the ‘compact city’
and the propagandists of the intermediate city has been resolved. The book The
Regional City by Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton (2001) is a manifesto of the
US American Anti-Sprawl Movement. Its aim is not the qualification of downtown
or suburbia, but rather the qualification of downtown and suburbia as part of a
comprehensive concept of redevelopment of the urban region.
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