CARLOS MATOS

Welcome to New Town

Introduction

Today, It might seem difficult today to imagine places like Harlow, Stevenage or Basildon as anything progressive; quite the opposite, these post-war New Towns are generally considered dull, if not depressing and a failure of idealised socialism. Criticised for not having strong identities, and becoming the suburbs they were aiming to ward, in their time, the New Towns where a response to the insolubility of city's problems, but the lack of precedent in dealing with the unprecedented problems of a social experiment caused it to fail.

Many of these towns developed under the New Towns Act of 1946 now portray an interrupted condition, as they have stopped being imagined and begun to be poorly planned with attempts to remodel, update or maintain that have only served to patch their decaying estate.

Nevertheless their short lives of collapsed prosperity can be thought as a sort of adolescence; as they now, like London at the time, demand attention to be rethought.

The project would focus on the reforming of Stevenage New Town, more specifically its Town Centre. First, because is a town that suffered the deficiencies of a generalized solution developed in England after World-War II, one that acted upon the urgent necessities of bombarded Londoners but had no mercy with people of the existing town. And secondly, because its state of abandonment still preserves, in a forgotten appearance, the ideological foundations that generated it and that will serve the future generations of the town.

Stevenage New Town

In 1944, the Abercrombie Plan for the regeneration of London proposed eight existing towns outside the greenbelt to host the New Towns that would decentralize and halt the city's expansion. Of these towns Stevenage would be the first test ground.

Abercrombie's plan promoted an approach to urbanism with applied notions of the garden city; the new model was also based on the ease of movement of the motor car, the separation of pedestrian circulation and road traffic, and the allocation of housing, commerce and industry into dedicated estates.

The vision of life in New Towns was doubtless appealing to the overcrowded Londoners living in neighbourhoods scattered with bombsites. The lack of green space that was the inevitable consequence of the pressure for land in the old cities and had been overtaken by industry, made the parks and gardens of the new towns ideal places to relocate. A life in a New Town compared to the one lived in war-turned London seemed an obvious choice. Employers liked the chance to expand and created jobs that attracted the aspiring working-class; while architects and planners were eager to be involved in forging a new and better society from the ruins of the old.

By the end of the 1960s the population of New Towns in the UK numbered more than 700'000. At this time the modern Stevenage was blooming and had reached its anticipated expansion faster than expected; in little more than a decade the 5,000 village became a New Town with a growing population of 60,000. Both the new comers and the originally discontent villagers where now experiencing all the advantages of modern life.

West of the rail tracks, industry was allocated due to connectivity. The living area was designated to the east and was divided into neighbourhoods of low density housing set to articulate the union between countryside and town. And between working and living areas was the Town Centre.

Designed over time by architect and planner Leonard Vincent, this conglomeration of low rise modern buildings was meant to be the face of optimism that kept attracting people to live in the New Towns. His vision expressed the values of a new civic architecture; resembling pioneering schemes such as Lijbaan in Rotterdam and the Shopping Malls that began to dot the American suburbia, Stevenage Town Centre prioritize pedestrian circulation by attempting its complete segregation from traffic.

The Town Centre would accommodate the diversity required for a new heterogeneous society; yet although it allocated office spaces and housing within, it was mainly conceived as a place for leisure and recreation as described the architect:

'Near the shopping area will be places of entertainment, community buildings, public houses, clubs, cafes and gardens, so that the town centre a hub of activity by day while the shops are open and retains its vitality in the evening to become the main amusement centre for the people of Stevenage'

- Leonard Vincent, 1949

New Town Flaws

Contrary to Vincent's optimistic vision many objected the New Town project, as it was considered to be heavily based on architects and planners assumptions at a time where things where changing so fast it would have been hard to predict that the actual aspirations for the people who lived there would, however, change with each generation. The New Town model was founded on an age that still expected stability.

'Each generation feels a new dissatisfaction and conceives of a new idea of order, The Garden City Movement has mothered the New Towns and now, the careful provision of amenities, has reached it ultimate anticlimax.'

- Peter Smithson, 1955

The Smithsons concern with the quality of the architecture reflected the view of many that the result of the countryside and town union was merely suburban housing estates isolated from each other by functionless green space and large-scale road systems, dessert grass borders and a concrete sterile suburban atmosphere.

The poor building quality caused by rapid and industrialized methods of construction made the town a bland field of repeated standardized typologies. In this sense, social planning and social development are altogether different. It is one thing to project the area of land to be zoned for residential use on given housing density assumptions; or to calculate the sewage treatment capacity required for a given population. It is quite another to plan the social environment in which a new community might flourish.

Like many of the New Towns Stevenage grew rapidly over a short period of time and new urban plans that reassessed the possibilities of expansion and development of the town were undertaken in 4 further occasions, but although the town's progress was eminent at first, it was the speed and lack of experience in governance and administration departments made the project reach its limits in the mid 70's.

The towns with the greatest employment diversity were more able to adapt to shocks. Unfortunately Stevenage was quite the opposite, as it was heavily dependent on the aerospace sector; and when its population exceeded the job opportunities of the industry, growth stopped dramatically as so did construction and the jobs involved; people in Stevenage began to commute back to the city for work; and although the car was majorly integrated in the New Town project, the increase in use exceeded the expectations. This demanded more space that could only be taken from the garden, at that time the car and the TV had displaced the garden as the dominant male interest, this meant that people could be entertained in their own homes and that they could go anywhere whenever they wanted. This way community life in the Town Centre was extinct.