Anglo-Saxon Los Angeles

[escotregen]

With the ongoing debate on transportation (Crossrail, Paisley link, M74 etc.) I thought that there was a useful obit in todays Guardian for Melvin Webber – the man who designed the car-way called Milton Keynes. Some extracts:

Critics of car-friendly Milton Keynes sometimes claim that Professor Melvin Webber, who has died aged 86, single-handedly ensured that 34 square miles of Buckinghamshire became an Anglo-Saxon Los Angeles. The record is not clear, but there is no doubt that Webber's arguments about freedom of choice and ease of movement were extremely influential.
He and Richard Llewelyn-Davies, the Labour peer and leader of the Milton Keynes planning team (who died in 1981), were both convinced that, in designing a future city, as much as possible should be left undetermined. These convictions led eventually, and after much debate, to the rejection of a plan based on public transport. In this, Milton Keynes, designated a new town 40 years ago in January 1967, would have been built as a series of high density neighbourhoods strung, like a string of pearls, along a monorail.
Modern living, as Webber himself lived it at Berkeley, was all about spacious suburban houses, telephoning colleagues all over the US, and effortless driving on the spanking new freeways that crisscrossed Los Angeles and the Bay area. The awkward truth which Webber put his finger on is that for millions of people, life is about a home in the suburbs and driving a car.
As Webber wrote in Order in Diversity: "By now almost everyone knows that low density developments on the growing edge of the metropolis are a form of 'cancerous growth', scornfully dubbed with the most denunciatory of our new lexicon's titles, 'urban sprawl', 'scatterisation', 'subtopia', and now 'slurbs' - a pattern of development that 'threatens our national heritage of open space'..." Yet, as sociologist Herbert Gans was to show in his book The Levittowners, an account of the "ways of life and politics in a new suburban community", the people who live in the "sprawl" like it.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries...003043,00.html

[legslikeaspider]

It may be true that people living in the sprawl 'like it' - that's why they move there. Webber certainly pinpointed the attraction of suburbia: people want to live 'in a nice wee house, with a front and back garden'. I must say though, that I'm sure this is a desire born out of fashion rather than of deep seated human nature.

I'm not sure that in the Glasgow conurbation, that we have urban sprawl problems to the extent that exists in American cities (if people want to see suburbanisation at its worst, come with me to the burbs of DC in 6 weeks time) although I've certainly seen it in places - the Mains Estate in Milngavie springs to mind as does much of East Kildbride. These places, I imagine, are very pleasant to live in provided you have access to a car but are a total pisser to navigate on foot and facilitate social isolation amongst those without independent access to private transport - particularly teenagers and elderly people. In fact, there is now substantial evidence to suggest that this method of low density, suburban planning is a contributing factor to the rising rate of teenage depression and suicide in the united states.

If anyone is interested in reading more on this topic, then a good place to start is by looking at the work of Howard Frumkin, the Director of the U.S. National Center for Environmental Health, a prominent critic of the sort of urban planning espoused by Webber. He recently gave a lecture in Glasgow and you can find a summary and transcript of this lecture here:

http://www.gcph.co.uk/seminar/series/seminar2.htm

[legslikeaspider]

double post. bugger...