Beyond the picturesque and sensorial allure of the town consisting of lively high streets, local shops and cafes, leafy streets and on a ‘human scale’, my kind of town is first and foremost a city.
A town’s qualification as a city is not predicated on its size but, as Lewis Mumford wrote, is a ‘point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community.’ Thus this place of concentration for politics and expression, as an embodiment of our collective aspirations, must be immediately visible and definable. It must be distinguished for what it is not: suburbia. The city today, defined under these terms, can no longer be a complete whole on the metropolitan scale. It can however be understood as an autonomous fragment where everything associated with the idea of the public or common resides. As such, the city should first and foremost be a space for all, free from the dictates and narrow interest of the market.
This city is composed of an architecture, not merely of building structures. It is a city interested in its architecture and architectures that are dedicated to the making of a city. It is not made up of architectural novelty, dreamed up to lubricate marketing machineries. As an autonomous fragment that is collective in nature, its physical structure – its form and types – must share a common grammar towards a collective architecture.
This architectural grammar as convention is one that is tempered by time, passed from generation to generation that nevertheless remains open to further and future interpretation. This grammar cannot be based on style as it should appeal to both our visual sensory and intellectual faculties. It is certainly not a style that can be imposed by force or under the cloak of patronage or commerce. It should be governed by reason and beauty, not by an irrational market and exuberant architects. It is typical, for what is typical is common to all. Through this, the city as an architecture is one that is comprehensible, accessible and agreeable to all.
The city (made of its citizens) must have an unequivocal say in the architecture that it it builds, with procedures in place to reject the architectures it objects or defend the architectures it champions. It must be clear that this city rejects nimbyism. It does not support an uninformed conservatism. Neither does it accept the unquestioning positivism of ‘progress’ for the sake of the new. It allows change but favours consolidations over growth. It conserves resources and makes the most from the least.
A city is an accretion of the achievements and struggles of its citizens in built form. This must be made visible in an architecture that acts as an inclusive framework. It maintains and guarantees the coexistence of difference while subscribing to shared universal values. It is not relativist nor is it xenophobic. It is a place that allows one to move among equals, free of the barriers of hereditary, class or race. My kind of town is a city, London, not solely for what it is but what it can be.
Christopher Lee is co-founder of Serie Architects, whose current projects include an urban core in Hangzhou and Shandong calligraphy museum in China and an ashram township in India. He is co-director of the AA’s Projective Cities programme and a doctoral candidate at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam.
AT219 June 2011 p104
