Smart Cities, sustainable cities, unaffordable cities, extreme cities: Guardian Cities features stories and studies about cities of all sorts, and about how designers are shaping them.
Launched last month, Guardian Cities is an online section of the newspaper devoted entirely to cities. That’s good news not just for architects and urbanists but for all designers whose work connects with urban issues in any way.
As you’d expect, the site makes good use of the possibility to group online articles according to subject. For example, an article that reveals how ‘commuters have lower life satisfaction and a lower sense that their daily activities are worthwhile’, originally published in the Work & Careers section, appears on Guardian Cities, where it will no doubt interest everybody involved in planning or design in the field of transport.
Myriad of questions
Introducing the new site, the Guardian’s architecture and design critic Oliver Wainwright poses a myriad of questions that currently exercise the minds of urban thinkers, whether they are politicians, planners, property developers or designers.
Among other things, Wainwright asks: What happens to cities subject to conflict and natural disaster, industrial meltdown and financial collapse? Is there more to the city experience than eating and shopping? Is counter-terrorist planning making our cities’ citizens safer or more paranoid? Are our future cities places of inclusion and exchange, or merely tools for consolidating division and inequality?
The answers to all these questions are of course determined in part by design, but the Guardian wouldn’t be the Guardian if it didn’t dismiss the hype that often surrounds design and instead offer a more critical angle. A case in point is Owen Hatherley’s article entitled ‘High Lines and park life, why more green isn’t always greener for cities’. He spares no reputations in questioning the current fad of turning old industrial sites into urban woodland.
Decadent project
Hatherley quotes a scathing attack by James Howard Kunstler of The New Urbanists on the widely acclaimed High Line* in New York (image above) , who describes it as a decadent project and a ‘weed-filled 1.5 mile-long stretch of abandoned elevated railroad’ where ‘mistakes are artfully multiplied and layered’. MVRDV’s speculative Pig City proposal doesn’t fare any better. It is held up not as a creative solution to the problem of food shortages in the city, but as a parody of a hig-hrise of stacked gardens proposed by Le Corbusier back in the 1920s.
Guardian Cities looks set to become a wonderful resource about the city in all its manifestations. And with writers like Wainwright and Hatherley involved, it will offer designers a much-needed reality check now and again.
* Check landscape designer Piet Oudolf’s talk at WDCD12 about his design for the High Line