The past, present and sustainable future of cities and their docklands
I come from another port city, Rotterdam, which is also confronting big changes, but in London the changes which took place in the 1980s and 1990s were just the beginning of a kind of change for which London can be considered the pioneer. In port cities all over the world, there is now the question of how to re-convert dock-lands into urban areas, but the London Docklands area is the biggest and this is one reason why it has always been of interest to me. It has dramatic size and represents dramatic developments. When port-related industries moved at once to Tilbury, it left an enormous area abandoned, and prompted an enormous question: what the hell to do with it?
There are two very important questions which play a role wherever in the world you are confronted with urban reconstruction, and which are presented in dockland areas in an extreme way. First, there is the question of how the public realm is defined, when the city develops in relation to globalisation, where the city is connected to worldwide networks, and in another way is constructed in relation to the local community and culture – city as community. From the 16th or 17th centuries, you could say that this has been a dominant question in urbanisation as such. It is not a question confined to dockland areas, but these areas present the question explicitly.
A second question immediately interwoven with the first is the question of the development of urbanisation and the territory. This too is represented in an extreme way by dockland areas, because of the very vulnerable position of such cities as the boundary between the land and the water. Most of the dockland areas in port cities are situated in complex delta areas, such as the Thames region, and the country of Holland as a whole.
More than 70 per cent of the population in urban areas lives in deltas, so the delta is obviously a very attractive prospect for urbanisation. At the same time, the delta presents complex questions concerning how to find a balance between land and water, how to deal with the water problem, and how to deal with this intersection of the worldwide network and local community. The history of urbanisation is constantly concerned with finding the right balance between taking profit from economic dynamics and at the same time controlling these dynamics. Cities are established in deltas because here they expect to earn something from fertile ground, from fishing but from the 15th century onwards above all from trade. However, if you do not do anything about this complexity you can be confronted with big problems. But if you control too much, you lose the complexity and the dynamic itself.
This balancing act is to be found in all phases of port cities. In every phase of modernisation the city and the port have sought a new balance. In the current phase, at the beginning of the 21st century, the port is moving out of the city. A lot of people put this down to scale, and the increasing difficulties associated with the type of activities of industrial ports. This is true, but there is always something else playing a role, which has to do with the question of the relation between the city as global and the city as local.
From the beginning of classical city development, there were two fundamentally different opinions about the desirable relationship between city and port. Plato argues strongly that the city should not be connected to the port. The eupolis, the good city, as described by Plato, should be the domain of public life, and not should not be affected by anything that has to do with the market and with trade. So the agora, the main area of public debate, should not be connected either to the market place or to the port area. Accordingly, citizens should be free to debate with each other in an open atmosphere, without outside influences.
In Rome, Seneca, as an advisor to the emperor, had a completely different view. He argued that the development of the port of Ostia should be interwoven with the development of the city of Rome, so as to make Ostia one of the most important public spaces of the city, thereby enabling the citizens to orient themselves to the world through the port. For Seneca the port was the centre through which it is possible to orient yourself towards what is happening in the world. To see the ships coming in and out, and the different kinds of people – Seneca stated that an open democracy must be knowledgeable about such things.
The struggle between these two opinions continued throughout the Renaissance, when modern urbanisation began to take place. There were cities which took Plato’s line, and other cities which followed Seneca. A confusion was added in the 18th and especially in the 19th centuries when the port came to regarded not only as interesting but as a danger to the stable community of the city. The influence of the strange people on the ships, with their different customs and other way of life, were more and more considered a danger to the moral life of the city.
During the early 19th century, you can see these contrary opinions manifest in the development of modern port cities. For example, Genova in Italy was a city with a beautiful square in front of the port, where the premises of the merchants and the city hall as centre of public life were built. In the 19th century this square was blocked by the construction of a very big warehouse designed to keep pace with the growing scale of the port industry. The warehouse was considered a disaster by the Genovese, who wanted to see the port and keep in touch with what happened in it. They solved the problem by building a promenade on the roof of this large warehouse, so you could say that the public square was moved to the rooftop of this new building between the city itself and the port. It illustrates a very deep wish to maintain contact between city and port.
The opposite approach is exemplified in the early 19th century development of London. St Katherine’s Dock and later on the West and East India Docks and the Royal Docks, were built outside the city and were also isolated from the city by the surrounding walls, and by the very typology of the docks which were closed not only against the tides and the seawater but also sealed against the outside world. This was understandable given the expensive goods in the warehouses and the thieves who would have stolen them, but, more than that, in London the port and everything concerned with it was regarded as a dangerous element which might harm the comfortable life of the city – a city which served as the capital of a worldwide nation and which required a stable public life.
This second approach became more and more dominant in the Western world. In the 19th century London was a forerunner of what came to be the dominant approach, namely, the strict separation of port and city rather than their interweaving. This has had a lot to do with what came after in the 20th century, the question of how to make the city into a stable community and the interweaving of architecture, urbanism and social sciences in the attempt to achieve this. So that instead of urbanism as a question of civil engineering, a technical question, it became especially from the 1930s and 1940s a kind of social engineering. Building the city was regarded as building society, and you can see this in the drawings of city plans which were made in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In Europe and in the United States of America there were all kinds of experiments to establish how we can make the city as far as possible into a social community.
Two of the most important monuments to this modernistic approach to development, very much based on the idea that to make the city is to make society, are Van Eesteren’s Amsterdam Extension plan (1934) and Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan (1946). Both take it that it is possible to control the city and with it the urban society as a whole. In both, you can see that they succeeded to a large degree, but docklands areas were regarded as very hard to control, and in a lot of drawings they were pushed outside the drawing as a kind of white, blind spot.
This is also what happened in Rotterdam after the Second World War when the city was reconstructed following heavy bombing. Rotterdam city centre was regarded internationally as really modern, not just because of the style of the buildings but especially because of the idea of making society by making the city. Rotterdam’s modern city centre was a metaphor for an open, transparent society, with open buildings completely separate from the industrial port which was developed also in the 1950s and 1960s but outside the city, with a very strong border – a water barrier – between the city and the port which extended for 40 kilometres to the sea front.
This idea of controlling the city as a whole and fixing the final structure of the city in a kind of blueprint – now we know how the city should be and we’ll make it that way for ever – this idea had a rather short life. Already, in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, we see that society and territory were changing far more dramatically than had been supposed. The port itself and the port economy changed likewise; and the form of the city also. The idea that we could fix the city soon seemed impossible.
The port seems to acquire more autonomous character, instead of just being the local port, and at this time, of course. This results in the question of the reconversion of docklands. Increasing mobility, migration, developing more individual lifestyle s, are examples of developments which were not dictated by centralised, state authorities but by societal developments which had a strong influence on the life of the city. One of the manifestations of this has been the ‘regionalization’ of the urban process itself. For instance in Italy around Milan, there is now the citta diffusa, the diffuse city, where it is clear that the city is no longer a distinct, built element in a green landscape; rather the difference between urbanisation and the landscape becomes less clear as the two are more closely interwoven on a regional scale. In Northern Italy this has happened in a most extreme way, but we see it all over the Western world.
Economies which were previously based locally, are becoming more and more independent of the local scale. a lso the port economy is not linked anymore to one, local economic culture of merchants such as those who lived in London and had strong ties to London’s Docklands. At the cusp of the 21st century, ports are composed of port companies who operate internationally. Meanwhile there is no longer the need for a single, huge port area as in the case of Rotterdam or London Docklands. Modern port areas, especially in south-east Asia, and also on the west coast of the USA, are compositions of all kinds of different terminals and fragments on a regional scale. There is something like a port authority, which is there to provide coherence, but port areas are more and more organised on a regional scale, and often they are very close to other urban areas.
Because of the modernisation of port areas, the question of the reconversion of London Docklands first arose in the 1970s and early 1980s. As also occurred in Rotterdam, the port areas from the 19th century and before were vacated by port companies, thereby raising the question of what to do with them. In this period, port areas were used for all kinds of different goals. Yes, there is a general tendency towards reconversion, but there is an enormous spectrum of approaches and problems which city authorities wanted to solve by reconverting port areas. For example, in New York there was the problem that Lower Manhattan had become only a business district, completely dead in the evenings and at weekends, which made it more difficult to keep alive the role of the area as a world-leading business district. So there was a strong demand for new types of urban life, especially luxury housing, restaurants, cafes, theatres and so on; and this was the emphasis of development.
In Baltimore, there was something completely different. This was a former industrial city with an almost completely abandoned city centre. After the steel industry moved out in the 1960s, Baltimore was virtually a ghost city. Here the authorities developed a strategy for a theme park in the former port area to attract tourists and put Baltimore back on the map.
In Rotterdam the development of abandoned port areas took place at the same time as problems emerged with the 19th century housing surrounding the city centre. Thus there was a big demand for new social housing, and the first generation of port area reconversion was focussed on social housing.
Sometimes authorities tried to build in a sense of complexity and dynamism reminiscent of the old port function. But projects along these lines can be considered as forced and artificial. Again, Baltimore is an example. At first sight, the project seemed to be successful, but after four or five years the city discovered that it had to renew the theme park again and again in order to continue to attract visitors so that they would keep coming back. Baltimore really shows the ups and downs of such developments, and, after the first success of the 1980s it went down in the 1990s, and now there are new investments and developments in progress.
So the task of the 21st century port city needs to be thought of on a regional level, which means intelligent water management and land use planning characterised by elasticity, flexibility, mixed-use, and by giving space to different scales. This revisits once more the question of port and city, and in urbanised territory on a regional scale, there are new connections being made between urbanisation and port development. An interesting example is the area around the city of Seattle. The city is in a bay which is also a very important base for lobsters, mussels and fish, so there is a strict policy on the environmental consequences of development. At the same time it is one of the most important ports on the west coast of the USA. But they have managed to develop the port functions in the middle of all kinds of public parks. People are jogging and fishing around the port terminals which are themselves spread around the bay in which the city is located.
The second example is the city of Barcelona, where they succeeded in thinking about infrastructure as something which is not only about transport but also as something that can give a new dimension to the city’s public domain. When it was left by the port companies, the meaning of the old port as entrance to the city was replaced. A new ring road was made around the city which also crosses the old port, and the road was designed in such a way that it now supports the port area in its function as one of the most important public areas of the city.
It is important to combine the question of the public realm in the port/city relationship with the relation between urbanisation and the specific character of the territory as a vulnerable area between land and water. This characteristic is recognisable in Holland even more than in London. Almost all the Netherlands is a kind of intermediate zone between the mainland and the sea: it is a delta of the big Western European rivers. This intermediate zone was originally characterised by elasticity. The coastline was elastic and so are the rivers, and there was a balance between retaining surface water in the ground, water storage in lakes or river basins, and the removal of water to the sea.
It seems to be crazy for people to live in this area because the soil quality is so bad, much of it peat ground which is soft and impossible to build on unless you put 25m pillars into the ground. Much of the ground level of the Dutch landscape is below sea level, the peat ground having sunk because of drainage. This causes difficulties, most clearly expressed when land is flooded and disappears into the sea.
The story of Holland is of the Dutch people struggling to develop defences against the sea, by fixing and strengthening the coast, by building dykes, by dredging, and by containing and narrowing the rivers which is partly a defensive measure but also transforms the rivers into a transport infrastructure. Taken together these measures have created the Dutch landscape which is really one, big hydraulic construction. This also means that the Dutch city can be considered as a smart, hydraulic construction, where the drainage and defence system against the water is also the main structure of the city and the port. It means also that the original elasticity of the water-system changed into a rather rigid system of fixed coastlines and riverbanks, and controlled drainage in the polders.
This much is clear from the city of Amsterdam as idealised in drawings by Simon Stefflin, a famous engineer of the 16th century and an adviser to the House of Orange, whose model was etched into the minds of anyone concerned with city development in the 17th and 18th centuries. The components of the Dutch city are water components: they are related to dredging, water defences, and also to shipping and port functions. So the Dutch city operates as a multi-functional water system which is simultaneously a port system and also an important element of public life, with canals as important features of this.
The Dutch example forms a special chapter in the interweaving of port and city life. But in Holland you can also see that the separation of city and port came about in parallel to the general development of technology, and the decreasing need to keep the water in the city itself. First, water lost its function as the main transport infrastructure. Previously, transport in cities and between cities was over water; everyone in the city had a boat, and all the transport of goods also took place by water. With the introduction of first the train and then the car, water was superseded. In Utrecht, for example, one of the main canals became a main road, and it was thought that the water problem could be solved completely by underground drainage systems. From the early 19th century to the late 20th century there occurred a transformation whereby water, which had been the central, structuring element, sank more and more out of sight. This occurred not only in cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam, but also in the creation of a new regional-scale metropolis in which water does not any longer play a visible role.
Yet already this is changing again, because of increasing problems with water itself – the climate is changing, we expect more rainfall and the sea levels are rising. This is what we discovered in the 1990s when more floods occurred and constituted a real danger for significant parts of Holland. So it means we need a new approach to water management. We also need a new approach to the coast, so that instead of simply strong coastal defences we should have greater elasticity; the same is true of rivers; and in the polis, the city, we should return to paying more attention to retaining and storing water instead of only emphasising its removal.
Out of this comes a lot of experiments in pursuit of a new deal with water, based on the acceptance that water should be again an important element in the urban environment, and combining the ability to survive climate change with new types of urban living. One such experiment is the new type of floating houses, as developed in the province of Limburg, where the need to broaden the river has been combined with the wishes of a lot of people to live on or near it. Not only on this local scale but also at regional level, water can be used to create a new coherence in places which have developed in a fragmented way. Thus over the last four of five years a lot of plans have been drawn up in which water can create a new spatial coherence, where water is not only an element on the map but can acquire a significant role in recreation.
On coastal defences, one new approach is to construct an extension of the coast, and extend it four or five kilometres into the sea, thereby creating a new landscape. This has already been started. So too has the strategy of creating a new series of islands as a barrier in front of the coast, but which can also be used for recreation, tourism or even housing. These are not just academic studies but practical plans which have been taken on and costed by national planning officers.
Back at the local level, cities are taking the water question more and more into consideration. For Rotterdam, the port area is no longer important just for the port itself or as an attractive zone to live, but also as regards the wider question of water management. Thus one of the big reconversion areas developed in the 1990s tried to keep the water question under consideration by differentiating between zones in front and behind the dykes. The current question for the recently-started reconstruction of ‘ City-Ports’, an 18 000 hectare area of the industrial port, an area comparable to London Docklands in the early 1980s, is how to combine the need for new water management with the economic considerations arising from 850 small enterprises, 20 000 jobs and 2000 inhabitants, and how to do this at a manageable, controllable rate.
I want to conclude by putting forward a number of principles which are important in considering simultaneously the economic importance of ports, the cultural influence of the port on the development of the city, and the problems of water management and territorial /environmental concerns:
Professor is the author of City and Port, and co-author of The Dutch Water Cities. This text is taken from second, annual public lecture of the London East Research Institute, given by Professor Meyer at the Docklands Museum in June 2005.
© 2004·06
Here in the new quarters of Amsterdam was the aesthetic culmination of five centuries of collective effort in commanding water and making land. Order has spread from polders to city. Nothing so thoroughly and uniformly good as Amsterdam had previously made its way into city design, on the same scale, anywhere.
Lewis Mumford
Canary Wharf – It will look like Venice, but work like New York
Billboard 1987
In their vulgarity and their insensitivity to place and to each other, the buildings of the [Docklands] Enterprise Zone epitomise Thatcher’s Britain in all its philistinism and selfishness.
Peter Davey, Architectural Review
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