The History and Future of Places – Part 12: The persistent influence of modernism in the post-modern

Every historical period leaves a legacy for the places of the future – in the form of both practices and attitudes that linger on. What I have described as the Modern Era, which lasted from about 1900 to 1970, was a period both of radical innovation in ways of making places, and a time of rapid population growth when the population of North America grew by about 150 million. Britain 18 million, France by 9 million, Italy by 22 million, the world by 2.1 billion. This has left a huge place inheritance that has four enduring manifestations.

First, most of the places created in the Modern Era still exist and are actively used – which is to say street patterns, institutions, parks, schools, apartment buildings, suburbs, new towns, airports, expressways. Places destroyed in the two world wars were largely rebuilt. The only notable exception is social housing complexes of modernist apartments that have been demolished because they proved to be more or less unliveable.

Secondly, and especially following World War 2, the making of most of those places involved comprehensive planning. The academic planner Leonie Saundercock has described this process as based in simplistic assumptions about objectivity and rationalism. According to Jane Jacobs, these assumptions contributed to urban renewal and “desegregated sortings” where the elements of places are pulled apart into categories of land use. Partly because of these criticisms, the hard-rationalist edges of planning have softened, but the general practice nevertheless persists. It has been written into legislation and manifests in the official plans that municipalities everywhere prepare in order to guide development and anticipate growth and change.

Thirdly, the modernist style of architecture conceived in the early decades of the 20th century continues to prevail. It uses concrete, glass and metal to create undecorated, angular buildings, and has been widely used in the decades of growth and reconstruction following WW2. The designs are now sleeker, the shapes more complex, the buildings often taller and larger, but their modernist genealogy is unmistakeable. They mark the landscape of prosperous, growing cities everywhere.

Fourthly, motor vehicles and the paraphernalia associated with them, continue to play the key role in how places are made. The popular enthusiasm for motor vehicles that began with the mass production of the Ford Model T in 1908 has not diminished. Motor vehicles require asphalt surfaces, highways and motorways designed for speed, streetlights, service stations, parking lots, garages traffic signals and roundabouts, and drive-to shopping centres. These continue to be dominant elements of placemaking.

It is a frequently expressed hope of urban planners that cars will decline in popularity and large areas of cities will be pedestrianised. Indeed, that has happened at a local level across the world. But the fact is that motor vehicle use has increased at a faster rate than the global population. In 1970 there were 250 million motor vehicles in the world, in 2016 there were 1.32 billion; the number of vehicles quintupled as the global population doubled. The same disparity applies even in Europe. In 2014 the population of the European Union was 507 million and there were 284 million motor vehicles. In 2018 the population was 512 million and there were 308 million motor vehicles. 5 million more people but 24 million more vehicles.

A recent audit of investments in public and active transportation infrastructure showed that schemes initiated across the EU in 2014 have had no significant impact on private car usage. I am not enthusiastic about this. The machine-friendly characteristics of places first became apparent a century ago, with the first mass produced motor vehicles. Not only have they endured, they show few signs of vanishing in the near future.