Planning - Trust Annual Report 1968
To explain the dilemma of city planning today, we must understand its deep roots in the past and particularly the Utopias of the past. From the increasingly accurate tools of art history we now discover that mediaeval planning was by no means accidental. Cities grew slowly, perhaps, but with precise intention, answering to climatic and social conditions. The rectilinear Roman City of Winchester made itself more easily defensible and turned itself into a series of relatively windproof warrens, in a climate less stable than that of their Mediterranean prototypes.
This process continued, with adaptations to suit the way of life in each century, until the nineteenth century, which was the first to face the problems of mass production and consumption, but lacking the elements necessary to ensure dispersal of the population. The steam engine and railway were essentially concentrating devices. By the end of the century this limitation of railway transport led to the over concentration of people in factories and dwellings.
This led to the idea of the garden city of Ebenezer Howard and other reformers who desired to make an hygienic Utopia to combat the terrible slums of the period. In the 1920's Le Corbusier in France developed these ideas still further, but no one at that time could see the effect of motor cars on our cities. His ideas of new cities, however, still hold good in the main essentials. Le Corbusier saw that planning should be based on the principle of the separation of the four functions —living, working, recreation and transport. A quick look at Winchester shows how these principles have come about, achieved as much by unconscious growth as deliberate planning.
The workers have been decanted from their crowded little terrace houses to council estates on the periphery. The workshops have become factories and are packed off to Winnall, while the City centre is turned over to the multiple store and the office block. The ubiquitous motor car links them all together and the roads also have to bear the double burden of local communication and through traffic.
When a new town has been planned on the above four principles they have been economic successes, but too often architectural disasters, because the application of the plan has lacked the one factor which would give it artistic coherence imaginative planning and design. The piecemeal development of each site by multiple firms dooms the system to an ineffectual and unco-ordinated assemblage.
There is enough of this kind of development in the country today to make us realise that Winchester already has what most new towns want—a great deal that is beautiful and valuable Further demolitions in Winchester must be halted as far as possible, and the new planning acts and the powers of the corporation must be vigorously upheld.