Commuting is Dead, is the City Next? (Part 1)
Part 1: Origins of the Commuter City.
Part 2: Social costs and failed experiments.
Part 3: Combined-Use development and the Multi-Cellular City
In 2017 I gave a lecture for New London Architecture where I proposed that the modern version of the city with offices in the centre, residential districts at the periphery, and people traveling back and forth each day, would be redundant within twenty years. I argued that cities would have to reinvent themselves around integrated communities where people both lived and worked, and cities that failed to do so would swiftly see their status fall.
The audience of architects, developers and government officials clapped politely but they probably thought my prediction was far-fetched. Three years later, as we begin to grapple with the consequences of the corona pandemic, the end of the commuter city is being taken a lot more seriously.
The fact is, through the whole of human history until the mid eighteenth century, people have mostly lived and worked in the same place. This has been true across all sections of society. The cottage where an agricultural worker’s family lived often housed their livestock too, and was the locus of productive activities such as spinning and weaving. At the other end of the spectrum, a royal palace was the focal point of an administrative bureaucracy and functioned as a conference centre for diplomatic and political meetings, not just the monarch’s family home.
In this respect the creation of the factory as a building purely for work, in the early stages of the industrial revolution, was a startlingly radical innovation. It stemmed from the realisation that a mechanical system could vastly amplify the work of a handful of people, but this machinery required a specific kind of structure, and had to be located next to a suitable power source (originally, a fast-flowing stream).
This new pattern of buildings designed to support an industrial process, separate from residential functions, quickly spread beyond manufacturing. By the early nineteenth century “clerking halls” had appeared in London, with rows of desks occupied by clerical workers performing bureaucratic functions. The fly-wheels and drive-shafts of the cotton mills were gone but the regimented, mechanical layout was the same. This remains the pattern of today’s offices. In my 2017 lecture I juxtaposed an 1890s photograph of a clerking halls with a 2010s photo of UBS’ largest trading floor. Despite the 120 year gap, they are uncomfortably similar.
With the switch from water-power to steam, factories could be located just about anywhere. This meant a factory could be placed in a city centre, close to the workers it required. The downside of this arrangement was that by the 1850s the great industrial cities were appallingly polluted, with dire consequences for public health. There was a growing chorus of voices calling for change.
Among them was the urban theorist Ebenezer Howard, whose “Garden City” model was one of the first to propose a complete separation of commercial and residential activities into single-function districts. Howard presented his model as a return to a pre-industrial way of life, emphasised through the architectural aesthetics of the arts and crafts movement. But in fact this separation of working and living districts was as radical a step as the invention of the factory, with no basis in traditional cities. Nonetheless, in the face of industrial cities that were becoming uninhabitable, Howard’s ideas had huge appeal.
In the 1920s Howard’s model was taken a step further by Le Corbusier in his “Ville Radieuse” concept. Le Corbusier replaced the Garden City’s folksy arts and crafts aesthetics with a dramatic modernist style involving steel, concrete and lots of automobiles. The division of the city into single-function districts from the Garden City model remained.
Howard and Le Corbusier are the godparents of today’s urban planning. Their ideas continue to define what gets built in which location, and how transport infrastructure is designed. As a result, their ideas shape the lives of everyone who lives in a city. The problem is, the function-separated city and the commuting pattern it necessitates are completely at odds with human behaviour. This reality has been starkly exposed by the corona pandemic.
In this article I’ve sketched out how we arrived at the commuter city. Next month the second part will look at the human side-effects of the commuter city and the first faltering steps to reintegrate living and working. Finally, the third part will explore what the next version of the city will look like, and the pivotal role entrepreneurs and workspaces can play in the transition.
Read Part 2: Social costs and failed experiments.
The Trampery is a London-based social enterprise that delivers workspaces and accelerator programmes for entrepreneurs. The Trampery is committed to playing a role in the shift towards a more balanced form of capitalism, supporting entrepreneurs, startups and scaleups who pursue social and environmental benefits alongside profit. Learn more here.
