Commuting is Dead, is the City Next? (part 2)
Part 1: Origins of the Commuter City.
Part 2: Social costs and failed experiments.
Part 3: Combined-Use development and the Multi-Cellular City
Despite a century of individualism, we remain social creatures. Humans have spent 190,000 of our 200,000 years on Earth in hunter-gatherer communities, typically with no more than fifty members. Most people today retain a deep-seated yearning for regular experiences of community. We like to encounter familiar people through the day, with whom our relationships evolve over time.
Unfortunately, the commuter city was never designed to meet this human need for long-term community. Someone might find themselves living in an area where they know only one or two of their neighbours, working every day in an office in a different area where they get to know only a handful of colleagues, then moving house and changing job every few years. It’s not possible to build deep, long-lasting communities under these conditions.
The consequence of this lack of community is chronic loneliness. Surveys routinely find that half or more of city dwellers regularly experience loneliness. The UK government now identifies loneliness as an “epidemic” and has even appointed a Minister for Loneliness. In Tokyo, a thriving industry has grown over the past decade to rent you a “friend” when you have no company. Meanwhile, research has highlighted links between loneliness and increased risk of health problems, including heart disease.
Alongside these personal costs, the absence of strong community also carries hefty economic costs. Already by the 1950s, forward-thinking analysts were pointing to the hidden costs of organising a city around discrete households instead of extended families and strongly-linked communities. Michael Young and Peter Willmot’s best-selling “Family and Kinship in East London” (1957) vividly unpicks the informal webs of mutual support via which people help each other to cope with everyday needs, such as childcare and periods of sickness. They predicted that if people could no longer draw on a strong surrounding community to provide such support, the state would be forced to foot the bill for a variety of social services to fill in the gap.
So it proved to be. For half a century, governments invested huge sums in social services to paper over the cracks in the commuter city. But in recent decades, as social care budgets have been slashed, the real costs of weak urban communities have become abundantly clear.
One of the most striking phenomena of the past forty years is the way artists have driven the evolution of large cities, which has no obvious historic precedent. In the 1980s, after decades of falling inner-city populations as people drifted out to greener suburbs, artists started moving in and recolonising the inner-city neighbourhoods. This colonisation didn’t occur uniformly across the city. It was always concentrated in a few specific districts.
Innumerable cities around the world have witnessed the same sequence. Artists move into a neighbourhood where property costs are low. They patch up buildings and adapt them to their needs. When enough people have moved in someone opens a cafe, followed by a bar and a gallery. A new stratum of creative professionals such as graphic designers and architects, slightly wealthier than the artists, starts moving in. A couple of nightclubs open. People start travelling in from elsewhere in the city to visit the bars, clubs and galleries. A magazine runs a feature on nightlife in the newly revived area, probably including photos of graffiti and people wearing bizarre clothes. Entrepreneurs and software engineers start to move in, slightly wealthier than the creative professionals. An estate agent opens an office.
At this point, a few adventurous bankers, an order of magnitude wealthier than the existing inhabitants, purchases ramshackle flats and refurbish them as chic lofts. More estate agents open offices. A property developer buys a block and redevelops it as high-density housing. In the meantime rents double, triple. More and more of the original artists, creative professionals and entrepreneurs find they can no longer afford to stay. People begin moving to a new district, and the cycle starts again.
This cycle of “gentrification” is widely recognised and documented. However, there’s a tendency to evaluate it purely as an economic phenomenon, focusing on the cost of real estate. This obscures a deeper significance which is arguably more important in understanding what the post-commuter city will look like. The key question is what motivates these artists, creative professionals and entrepreneurs. Is it just low property prices? This is certainly an enabling factor, but it’s not their only motivation.
The people who compose these recolonisation movements specifically seek to be part of an urban community. They want to live and work in the same neighbourhood, amongst other people who make the same choice. They want to bump into people they know when they walk down the street or drop into a cafe. They want to be part of a complex web of mutual support, where people help out in moments of need. Looked at in this light, it’s clear that artists and creative professionals have already spent the last forty years rejecting the commuter city and creating alternatives. If we want to understand what the next version of the city looks like, a lot of the clues are in these communities.
Already by the 1990s cities were waking up to the cultural and economic significance of these pioneer groups, and seeking to help them avoid being displaced. New kinds of “live/work” planning designation were introduced in an early attempt to create neighbourhoods where people both lived and worked. This version of live/work set out to build apartments with an extra room, that would function as a studio or workshop. However, almost everywhere that live/work was implemented, the experiment was a disaster.
Far from breaking the gentrification cycle, the new model actually accelerated it. Once a live/work building was full of artists and creative professionals, it immediately became a magnet for wealthier people seeking a buzzy location. To get their hands on an apartment people would happily fill in forms confirming their passion for screen-printing, even if in reality they commuted every day for a job in a TV company the other side of town. The fatal weakness of live/work was the impossibility of policing it. Almost everywhere it ended up as housing for affluent bohemians with little or no work taking place in the studios. By the end of the 1990s cities were abandoning the model.
In parallel with the live/work experiment, a second planning trend was also nibbling at the edges of single-function zoning. Starting in the 1990s a new “mixed-use” category began to gain currency. Initially, it was used for historic urban districts which already had a mixture of housing and businesses. But before long planners began to apply it to new housing developments too.
Through the mixed-use regime, planners hoped to achieve several goals. They wanted to reduce dependence on car use, by providing shops and cafes within walking distance of new housing. They were also keen that housing schemes should include a scattering of offices, having learned the hard way that residential developments which were deserted during the day became hotbeds for crime.
That was the planners’ perspective. However on the other side of the equation, property developers generally just wanted to build and sell as much housing as possible. They didn’t mind including a few shops and cafes, since that helped them sell the apartments. But developers had no interest whatever in the planners’ other ambitions.
Because of these mismatched goals, mixed-use was doomed. Planners could insist that developers include a certain quantum of office space as a condition for building housing. But developers simply stuck the office space in the least attractive bit of their scheme, without any concern whether it would ever be used. Developers wrote off the cost of the unwanted offices as a tax that had to be paid in order to build the hugely profitable housing. As a result, today’s cities are littered with thousands of mixed-use schemes that incorporate office or retail spaces which nobody wants, and which sit empty for years on end.
In next month’s third (and final) instalment I’ll explore what the post-commuter city will look like, what planners and developers should be doing to realise it, and the pivotal role workspaces and entrepreneurs might play in the transition.
Read Part 3: Combined-Use development and the Multi-Cellular City
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.
