Architecture and civic pride
Ken Hollings explores the shifting boundaries of private and public space
Go to any town in the UK and ask for directions and the chances are, the landmarks the local inhabitants refer to will not be the war memorial, library or town hall, but a chain store, national franchise or some recognisable shop design. Brand names and logos constitute a common language today, intelligible throughout most of the country. They offer an illusion of familiarity in an otherwise strange environment. No one owes them any specific allegiance or feels attached to their individuality or character – they’re simply there. But if all cities contain the same brands or services, what’s to differentiate one from another?
When we speak of ‘civic pride’ today, we’re usually referring to the strong feeling of identification we might have for a specific location: a sense of belonging that exists at both an individual and a collective level. If the term seems a little old-fashioned, maybe that’s because it is.
Monuments and malls
Bull Ring Shopping Centre, Birmingham in 1964
John McCann/RIBA Library Photographs Collection
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Victorian city planners helped take the edge off the Industrial Revolution with a range of municipal building projects which included parks, public fountains, monuments and commemorative statues. Every town hall and railway station had its decorative flowerbeds or war memorial nearby. These established a common space – a set of shared landmarks and thoroughfares in a changing landscape. It’s hard to feel the same way, over a century later, about the latest shopping precinct, manufacturer's outlet mall or industrial park.
Perhaps that’s because there’s no longer anything of an intermediate scale to link us with our environment. The coming of the large urban shopping centres, such as those at Elephant and Castle in London and the Bull Ring in Birmingham, aggressively altered our communal spaces forever. ‘The Bull Ring is perfectly all right if one wants an army fortification within the city centre,’ complained one Tory councillor shortly after its official opening. ‘As a trading area, it is a flop.’
Behind closed doors
At the opposite end of the political spectrum, social scientist Professor Phil Cohen, who has studied the changes in London’s East End for nearly four decades, observed that the effect of such schemes was to ‘destroy the function of the street, the local pub, the corner shop, as articulations of communal space’. In their place was the bleak, unmediated tension between what he described as ‘the privatised space of the family unit, stacked one on top of each other in total isolation’, and the public space outside the front door, now devoid of the ‘informal social controls generated by the neighbourhood’.
These days we tend to take more pride in our homes than in our immediate environment. The growing number of DIY warehouses and giant home decoration depots along the feeder roads and edges of our cities bear eloquent testimony to the fact that our sense of belonging begins and ends at our own front doors.
No communal territory
Increased mobility has exacerbated this attitude. Between 1960 and 1970 the number of people who owned cars in Britain more than doubled, from 5.7 million to 11.8 million. That number has continued to climb steeply ever since, resulting in an expanding road system and larger, busier motorways.
We beautify our houses but litter the streets in which they sit with our cast-offs
Sparkpics
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Owning a car means we can now travel from our home to the nearest hypermarket and back again without ever feeling that we have left our own personal space. Meanwhile public space becomes emptier and more threatening. As a result, we no longer know how to behave in the ‘outside world’ because we have no precise idea of where it is located or what its boundaries are. In this atmosphere, it's not surprising that a riot broke out during a sale at a crowded furniture superstore in London early in 2005, or that people are now content to dump discarded sofas, fridges, TV sets and computers in the street to make space for their latest purchases.
Unseen structures
A city’s skyline may still be revitalised by some radical new building, pulling public space back into focus around us, together with our sense of belonging to it. However, a new architecture has also come into being, which, although completely invisible, will alter our relationship with our immediate environment forever. An unseen, constantly evolving structure of mobile phone networks, wireless nodes and satellite uplinks has meant not only greater personal mobility but also a wider range of communication.
High-speed broadband connections ensure that we can stay in real-time contact with people anywhere on the planet 24 hours a day – and the Global Positioning System (GPS) built into your mobile phone or mounted on your car dashboard, may mean that you never have to ask anyone for directions in a strange town again. But what will happen to our sense of belonging when the terms ‘local and ‘global’ have become interchangeable?