Demand for housing was very high during the 1960s. Governments throughout Europe became convinced that high density housing, of the type described from the 1920s to the 1950s by le Corbusier and other architects as suitable for the 'masses', was the answer to providing new housing quickly. Many of the developments that resulted (in the main large slab blocks, with some tower blocks interspersed with 3/4 storey housing for the slightly better off) were initially liked by their new inhabitants. However almost without exception, the schemes became associated with a range of social problems over time. This led in many instances to a mass exodus of the more stable families and the better off to what were regarded by them as more appropriate surroundings for their residential life.
The high-rise housing of the 1960s differs greatly from that being built today - in particular it tends to be associated with wide open spaces between the buildings. During the 1960s greenspace was recognised as a valuable attribute of any area of a city and government-approved standards of provision for different types of greenspace were a major component of the planning process (for example, the British new towns). However, greenspace was only understood by planners and designers in two ways. It was either:
- the spaces left over after buildings were erected or infrastructure laid out - the Dutch even today call it 'kijkgroen' (green to look at), or
- those areas of land supporting specific active recreational activities.
Those involved as greenspace designers at that time saw their role as making the area 'look good' and the architects, who for want of any other guidance reproduced the designs of the le Corbusier school (albeit in a modified form), reproduced the 'parkland' settings shown in the architects' drawings of the 1920s to 1950s. The present 'parkway' road systems found in many of the larger 1960s estates all over Europe come directly from such images. The designers of such large=scale estates (for example, Overvecht, The Netherlands, houses over 30,000 people) were indeed spectacularly successful in creating the 'Housing in a sea of parkland' image. The only problem was that this design style was not suitable as a support for ordinary daily human existence. (Parkland as an original design style was invented as a setting for large buildings, but only for a single large building inhabited by a few of the very rich, their servants and hangers on, for people who led a very 'controlled' social life. It was never intended as a style which could create a setting for the daily home life of 30,000 people with all their disparate social needs.) It was a landscape style which saw people passing through or looking down on greenspace, not using it as 'their place', not enjoying being in it.
This limited understanding of the role of open spaces (the green and the hard-surfaced) in housing developments, which existed throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, was exacerbated in its social impacts by being linked to stringent governmental guidance in the UK at least on the quantity of open space to be provided per thousand new inhabitants. The prevalent idea at the time about appropriate design style linked to these space standards does much to explain the vast hectares of open space in such schemes.
The end result has been that much of this space is hardly used and is often regarded as alienating and sometimes even frightening by the local inhabitants. Recent user surveys have shown clearly that those same inhabitants tend not to want to lose any of the open unbuilt land adjacent to their homes - they value its presence and potential 'specialness' highly. What they do want though is that the space should work better to support what they want to be able to do outside and near their dwellings (see Overvecht case study - summary of local people's identification of key issues in the regeneration of the external areas of the estate).
Research since the 1960s has shown that local people find the 'outdoors' of such housing areas as unsatisfactory settings for their daily life (Clare Cooper Marcus and Wendy Sarkissian, 1987). Local greenspace can be seen in the research to influence strongly:
- how local inhabitants experience their home environment
- how satisfied they are with it as a place in which to live.
Source: http://www.thesteelvalleyproject.info/green/Places/residential/high-rise.htm
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