| buy book | NON-PLAN: ESSAYS ON FREEDOM, PARTICIPATION AND CHANGE IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM Edited by Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler. Oxford: Architectural Press. 2000 Average-length book, long title; but maybe justifiable, because into 235 text pages are crammed 18 separate essays, telling you everything you ever wanted to know about Non-Plan – and then some. First, though, what’s all the fuss about? This fact: long ago in the mists of time, four of us – Paul Barker, Reyner Banham, Cedric Price and I – got together to launch a frontal attack on the British planning system. Our composite essay, ‘Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom’, was published in the magazine New Society on 20 March 1969. It caused a sensation of a kind, for reasons that the essays dissect. As Paul Barker explains in the opening contribution, New Society was a magazine that gave houseroom to all kinds of uncomfortable ideas – especially those that put some kind of time bomb under conventional mainstream opinion. And the world, or a part of the world, was waiting for us. Archigram had already developed its ideas of instant plug-in throwaway cities. Cedric Price carried their notions into our maverick group. Reyner Banham was just completing his book about Los Angeles, celebrating the iconoclastic architectures he had so long admired. Here were ideas that Banham shared with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, whose Learning from Las Vegas was still three years away. I too had argued in New Society that LA represented a new kind of city, a harbinger of the future that we had to understand. Melvin Webber had come on sabbatical from Berkeley to London and had given the same message to Richard Llewelyn Davies and John Weeks and Walter Bor, who were working on the masterplan for Milton Keynes – which The Times dubbed, on its appearance, as LA, Bucks. So the early essays in this new book – from Cedric Price, Ben Franks, and Colin Ward – revive the long-forgotten article, dissect it and criticize it. Ben Franks argues that we had more in common with the New Right than the New Left, and that’s strictly true – but only in a narrow sense: as Colin Ward shows, our affinity was not only with theorists like von Hayek, the guru whom Margaret Thatcher worshipped, but also with anarchist planners like John Turner, who made a fundamental and huge contribution to Third World planning at just that time. Right and left met around the back of the stage; conventional labels just didn’t work well any more. Nor, I would argue, do they now. In the developing world, which model is the right one? Singapore, which bulldozed informal settlements and replaced them with architect-designed tower blocks along new underground lines? Or Caracas and São Paulo and Santiago, which simply chose to look the other way while the squatters built their homes? The answer depends on your preferences, even your prejudices. But how do you classify Singapore? Left, right, or a mixture impossible to classify conventionally? In any event, a good debate here, worth running all over again 30 years on. But the rest of the book is essentially a set of essays on all kinds of things, mainly by architects but with a leavening of other specialists, some (like Simon Sadler on the social vision of Non-Planning, or Ian Horton on the conservation movement in British planning, or Jonathan Hughes on what happened afterwards) relating reasonably to the main theme, others (like John Beck on Buckminster Fuller) to related topics, and yet others (like Clara Greed on feminist planning) only in the sense that everything finally relates to everything. Greed asserts that zoning is a male device to put down women, which is an interesting thesis until you think that some of these women might be even more put down by the carcinogenic fumes from a next-door factory; Malcolm Miles, in the very next essay, argues that good Islamic planning tucks women away in interior islands of peacefulness. It depends on your viewpoint. But the wrong kind of planning can do you harm, as can the wrong kind of Non-Plan. Thirty years is a longish time. In important respects, Britain in 2000 is more like the America of the 1960s than we could have dreamt: a high-affluence, mass-consumption, mass-mobility society. We got roadside civilization, vast regional shopping malls, suburbs for the great majority. But they don’t look or feel quite like most of their American counterparts (though more like their land-starved Californian counterparts); and we don’t have a Las Vegas to learn from, so our architecture lacks the exuberance of the American west, to which Reyner Banham paid pilgrimage. And meanwhile, in the new urbanism, America has re-invented the traditional small town and the nineteenth-century railroad suburb: Poundbury, Maryland. This book celebrates a vision that might have been – and, in the Docklands enterprise zone, almost was. But that in a way is another story. PETER HALL |