Let’s seize this chance of a bright green urban future
The Victorians knew that our cities needed “green lungs” to allow them to breathe, and enclosed some of the grand parks in Britain’s urban areas that are so precious today. As Colin Drury, our northern correspondent, reports, many of our old cities are now undergoing a green regeneration to match that 19thcentury ambition. This is evidence of a welcome change in the assumptions of urban planning.
The decline of many city centres and high streets has been a visible change for many decades now, often associated with ugly concrete shopping centres that depress the soul. Now Stocktonon-Tees is planning to demolish the bleak Castlegate shopping centre and replace it with a park three times the size of Trafalgar Square.
This seems to run counter to basic economics: that central business districts need high-value retail and office space to bring in the people and the bustle to make a place thrive. But there is more to life than pounds per square foot, and the customers and workers who are drawn to city centres need beauty too, and the value of green spaces is hard to price.
Now is the time for imaginative city planners to seize their chance. Urban land use is changing fast, and the shock of lockdowns will act as a catalyst for trends that were already under way. The move to online shopping is transforming high streets. Too many politicians respond with deep conservatism, trying to slow down and reverse the change, demanding higher taxes on online retail and pointless initiatives to “save our high streets”.
While online retail businesses ought to be taxed fairly, it ought to be recognised that these changes are happening because they are greatly in the interest of consumers. That means we need to go with the grain of change to high streets, which means more emphasis on their social role as meeting places, for eating, drinking, entertainment and hanging out. Green spaces are important as destinations in themselves but also as part of making “going into town” a pleasant experience.
Inevitably, the changing high street means converting some shops into flats: there is nothing wrong with that. The big unknown after the pandemic is how much office space is going to be turned into residential accommodation too, if more working from home becomes a permanent feature of whitecollar life. But whatever happens, there is a case in many places such as Stockton-on-Tees for demolishing bad modern architecture and creating new green spaces.
This could be a glimpse of a bright green urban future, in which high-density homes – many of them perhaps in tower blocks originally built as offices – are combined with shops, businesses and green spaces, all of them walkable, cyclable and served by public transport rather than built around cars and car parks.
If this is the shape of urban planning in the future, we could make progress in meeting the demand for new homes while improving mental health and making city living more environmentally sustainable.
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