Rising East Online

Debate: The Nature and Future of Cities

As reported by Rebecca Bell

James Heartfield:

I don’t think we will be living in cities in the future. Most of us are not living in them now, we already live somewhere else. Five per cent of the UK population live in rural areas; nine per cent of us live in the urban core; 43 per cent live in the suburbs – this is where growing numbers of people are living.

There is also a remarkable change in land use. We are not using so much land to farm because farming has become very effective: it gets more food out of less land; and we are retreating from agriculture. We are vacating that land.

We now use 10 per cent of our income on feeding ourselves, 25 per cent on entertainment. This is the reverse of the picture in the 1950s, when more than a third of personal income went on food.

Agriculture is now more efficient with time and space. Much more land is going free - we can do anything we want to in it. Yet we are turning it back into wilderness. This is history in reverse. All those years our ancestors took to conquer the world and we are retreating; we are going to give it back to the wilderness. Ten per cent of Britain is already National Park.

Mobility is another big change in our relationship with nature. We move about so much more than our parents and grandparents did. We move all the time and we are changing our relationship to place. Take my brother, who moved to Southampton and commutes to London. Bear in mind there are a lot of people working in London that live in Brighton and Oxford and Cambridge. But London is not one place any more, and wherever/whatever it is, it is changing. Now we say Walthamstow is London; 20 years ago it wasn’t London, it was Essex. We change categories and hang onto the word.

It’s so yesterday but the biggest transformation in urban design is still the car. And now the biggest demographic change is women driving cars. Twenty-five years ago, this was overwhelmingly a male preserve, but the biggest growth is women driving, which changes relationship to place. The truth is it has changed us all in relation to place, and in relation to who we are: we commute now.

These changes are such that we no longer need to have the countryside as a separate place. A century ago William Morris dreamed of overcoming the antagonism between town and county by making the country more like the town and the town more like the country. There is a lot of land available, and we can use it to encourage people to move out of London.

Sir Terry Farrell:

We all have an urban future if we can get to grips with the quality of urban design and urban environment. I am a great believer in cities as the most creative work of art that we have ever come up with. I am a great believer in the environment, I think it is quite extraordinary that you can get cities that contain nature or relate to nature, and I like the ways in which we always do relate things.

We all recognise Royal Parks in London. These parks were deliberately built as trapped countryside so that the monarchs could chase deer. And they are trapped countryside, and still are: this is what’s really special about London. This trapped countryside, these pieces of landscape have made us closer to nature. I love the idea of nature inside the city. It is an inspiration to the city itself.

Nature outside the city can be inspirational too. The idea of national parks is that when you live in Manchester or Newcastle, where I was born and grew up, you can live in the urban state, you can go shopping and do all this, and on your doorstep is a piece of countryside or the wilderness, so that you can have canoes in your back garden.

In Manchester a lot of people can go rock climbing and that is their experience of heading out Manchester. I feel strongly that London does not have that experience. The issue of London compared to other cities is its relation to the great landscapes of national parks. The nearest national park to London is the Norfolk broads. If you try driving there, it is actually quicker to get to the Peak District or Wales.

There is the same number of people living in Hong Kong as in London, but London’s sprawl is quite different. If you live in Hong Kong, you take a 20- minute taxi ride out, and you are in the most extraordinary rural area. What’s more the urban area really works, the tube system really works.

Cities are the most wonderful places. What I enjoy most about technology is that it enables you to manage the cities as a positive future. The reality is there are six billion people living in the world, half of them are now living in cities, and cites are the growing thing The big issue is not the cars, the trains or the aeroplanes, it is about how we all live together, how do we all make it work, and how do we all control the planet. How do we all live in harmony and create better spaces that make cities a worthwhile place to be in?

James Heartfield, cultural critic, and Sir Terry Farrell, architect, were speaking at ‘Nature vs. Technology’, a talk in the Future Cities series at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

Report by Rebecca Bell, Journalism/Creative Writing undergraduate

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