What is the future of cities? Why is it important to invest into cities? What changes should we make in our investment policies in cities? Twelve leading European thinkers about cities answer these three questions.This interview: Sir Peter Hall. ReUrbA’s Ellen Weerman and ErasmusPC’s and Stipo’s Hans Karssenberg interviewed him at his house in London.
Londoner
Polycentricity
Relative decline of cities
Sir Peter even dares to claim that Europe is witnessing the relative decline of its cities. “It’s all about the growth of places that are located in the network of links around the larger cities. This is particularly clear in England. London is an extremely successful global city surrounded by a mega-city region, with 19 million people crowded into a small area.
What happens outside this area? A very small number of ‘core cities’ – such as Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle – are relatively successful at the moment. But around these cities, the urban regions with old industrial places are getting smaller. The typical smaller towns in South-East England are booming; the typical equivalent in the North is declining. They don’t have a strong, service-based economy.”
New geography
Sir Peter believes that European cities are facing the challenge of coping with this new geography. It is a new economic geography, a new social geography and a new demographic geography, with an ethnic component.
“The other challenge can be found in social preferences or lifestyles, the way people live. In that sense, we are all very well off in most Western European countries. With the exception of language, our social mores are very similar. There is age segregation in all of these countries. Young people move to the cities for their studies, their first jobs and the excitement. But what happens once they want to have children?”
The third challenge relates to culture. “Large numbers of cultures and lifestyles are moving into cities like London. It is striking that immigrants and native-born people are moving in from everywhere in similar numbers. Cities have high natural growth rates, even though we used to think that they were going to die.”
Cities offer advantages
Peter Hall thinks we have to keep investing in cities because cities offer major advantages. They are in fact quite old-fashioned but they are being expressed in new ways. He refers to Robert Murray Haig who, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (1926), explains how Lower Manhattan worked on the basis of face-to-face contact. “So governments should be investing large amounts in cities but it would be even better if they asked private investors to do so. The crucial question here remains: how much money, what kind of money, what kind of projects, and what are the desired effects?”
“We need to understand the real underlying potential of each city. There are places where you can do things now, and places where you can do things in ten years time and not now,” he explains. “This is a very subtle question. The criteria are distance from the city centre, the communications patterns and the views of investors about the best place to put money into.”
Cultural component
“In the last twenty years, a lot of investment has gone into physical elements: transport and housing,” continues Sir Peter. But, he emphasises: “You can’t just carry on building. There comes a time when you have to switch to the economic component, to a more social infrastructure.” So he advises cities to take a good look at the cultural component. “In England, lottery money has been spent in enormous amounts on new museums, large and small. Just take Manchester, where the new Lowey Centre has been built, with Liebeskind’s Imperial War Museum right next door. It’s been quite a success. In Newcastle, there is the Sage next to the Baltic.”
Sir Peter believes that the main problem is that we are not reaching a section of the people. “There are segments in society we appear to be losing. A number of groups of immigrants have done very well, others not.” Nevertheless, he is optimistic in some ways. “The most isolated groups in the United Kingdom are Pakistanis and immigrants from Bangladesh. They live in the worst places and are stuck in unemployment. Their daughters are doing very well but their boys have a harder time. That’s where the real need is.”
In the long term, Sir Peter believes that diversity will prove to be an advantage. “It will result in mixing, in a kind of clash of cultures. And that is positive; it will lead to something exciting. But a lot of work will be needed before we can pluck the fruits.”
Sir Peter Hall is Professor of Planning and Regeneration at The Bartlett, University College London and President of the Town and Country Planning Association. He was Special Advisor on Strategic Planning to the British government (1991-94) and a member of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Urban Task Force (1998-1999). His major published work is Cities and Civilisation, in which he argues that ‘golden ages’ of human culture such as 5th Century B.C. Greece and Elizabethan England were the results of urban expansion (Athens and London) that was produced by some form of centralised plan.
This publication was enabled by ReUrbA2, Provincie Zuid-Holland and the Interreg IIIB programme of the European Union:
Downloads / links
- ErasmusPC article on ReUrbA’s Statement for Strong Cities
- Danuta Hübner EU Commission Website
- View the compilation of quotes from the interviews on film
- View EU commissioner Danuta Huebner’s welcoming response to the Statement for Strong Cities on film
