Fragments of a Wilderness City
A Polemic by Bryan Avery

Once upon a time there were just two very basic, but deeply significant environments for man. There was the wilderness, that frightening, unknown, unknowable world outside; and there was the home. Be it a cave or a town, the home was the only safe haven from man's fears and for millennia the safe haven defined the town.

Safe behind its stockade, the home-town freed its people to nurture the intellectual talents that had hitherto been a liability and thus began the long process towards a cohesive and mutually beneficial social structure which would eventually allow a level of prosperity to develop in the towns impossible to imagine in the wilderness. At its simplest, the relationship between the wilderness and the town was symbiotic with the town depending upon the wilderness for its raw materials, and the wilderness depending upon the town for its customers. The trade between the two created wealth for them both. Thus for centuries the structure of the countryside was governed by the distance a pack animal might manage to take produce to a town, and the size of the town depended on the size and wealth of the countryside within its thrall.

But, as the towns prospered, so the wilderness was driven back and gradually transformed into that quasi-natural world of field and farm that we now call countryside.

This was the stasis reached in England by the 18th century. It was an extraordinary subtle and complex structure of ownerships and mutually beneficial sound husbandry. Little by little as the population expanded and new techniques permitted the cultivation of hitherto unprofitable land, it transformed the entire topography of the United Kingdom into a managed landscape. This was the 'old England' of the poets, the 'garden England' we so much revere to this day. It is still embodied within us as the ideal pastoral landscape of our national imagination.

Its death knell was the Industrial Revolution. Pastoral wealth was suddenly eclipsed by industrial wealth. The countryside was denuded of labour, mechanisation took command, and New Towns sprang up for industrial purposes entirely unconnected with the rural economy. The local interdependencies upon which so much of the landscape of the past had depended were broken. Mechanised transportation and communication systems at first linked towns locally, then nationally, and then within a century, the economies even of the villages were linked globally. The result was not so much a cerebral 'global village' or even the small-scale software driven utopian vision of a decentralised and pastoral cottage industry - but a 'global metropolis'.

Ninety three percent of the UK's population now already live officially in towns and when the farmers depart and the townsfolk move in, the countryside quickly becomes only another name for a town. And the farmers have been departing. Forced out by competitive world markets, it is said that the net worth of farming in the UK today has sunk to a little more than half that of the ready-made sandwich industry.

However, whilst the UK has had almost two hundred years to adjust to this process; in the countries of the developing world the changes have been cataclysmic. Life in the wilderness was hard; nature was unforgiving; but people newly freed from the dawn to dusk tyranny of the land soon found that their age old skills and habits were unwanted in the towns, and in looking back at what they had lost, found that the towns meanwhile had taken and redefined the wilderness as a countryside in its own image. There was now no safe haven. That deep bond between the wild places where man is not the master and the safe havens of our towns had been broken.

Moreover, that exhausting but satisfying physicality of the natural world of which, until an minute or two ago in geological time, man was so much a part - that world of myth and legend, of heroic feats, dark forests and fearsome encounters that still resides in the dark recesses of our minds is such a stubborn part of our culture that it cannot be ignored. We have no adequate words to describe this. The terms 'Environmental' and 'Ecological' suggest little of the real torment that afflicts us, for there are deep structures to man's existence which bind him to the natural world and, for all our delight in the cerebral aspects of our art, until we can also forge some rapprochements with these, our lives will forever be in tension.

The trouble is, the towns are voracious competitors with the natural world and forever getting bigger. London, one of the first to industrialise now has over seven million people and is some forty miles across. It holds economic sway over a region with a population of probably as many again- and is still growing. But London is made small by comparison with some others. Around the world there are already several towns of twenty million and some are forecast to grow to fifty million or more.

How are we to define such structures? Simply calling them cities, conurbations or metropolitan regions isn't helpful because at root such structures are not safe havens and people within them do not feel attached to a singular and familiar place nor do they feel secure within them.

Where then did it all go wrong? Where the wilderness paths lead through the defensive gates to the social spaces at the town's was an admirable model for a town for as long as it was constrained in size by its walls; but as soon as the walls had been breached and development had accreted beyond them, it generated a density of traffic between the perimeter and the centre which couldn't be accommodated by the old pathway structures. Nor could the increased density of uses in the centre be accommodated in the older buildings and spaces already built there. They had all to be modified or rebuilt.

Thus the pressure for change began and the whole structure of the modern town has evolved as a dynamic, never-ending system of infrastructural change. With this comes upheaval, danger and the dependency upon systems we cannot comprehend and which are as uncertain as the vagaries of nature we had left the wilderness to escape. It is no surprise therefore that, if we can afford it, our 'escape' now is to the suburbs and beyond, to the countryside - or better, to a continental countryside where the pressure from the towns may not yet have been so keenly felt. We are still looking, of course, for our own individual safe havens and no matter how futile it may appear, the need to do so is very strong within us.

Consider, even within towns themselves we prefer to identify the places where we live as small, semi-autonomous units, not as the constituent parts of a greater urban whole. We give such units names and a defining character and we fiercely defend it. Moreover, the more detached the unit, and the more independently cellular it can become, the higher it's perceived value. In this we are re-tracing the patterns of habitation of the wilderness. We frequently refer to the urban cells as villages. We still hold annual country fairs with sheep shearing and hay making in that most urbanised of London boroughs, Lambeth; and two hundred years after their foundation, we still hold village fetes in the great London squares.

It has often been concluded from this that we in England have never been very good at creating truly urban environments, at least not in the 'continental hard paved social city' sense, but our contribution has been arguably the more significant - the creation of the suburban garden, public parks and garden cities, all attempts, like our famous fondness for pets, at keeping man in touch with nature. As urban aesthetes we may not value this but we have nonetheless created here in the UK, a paradigm for urban living which accords with deep instincts.

But what of the wilderness itself - that necessary natural counterpoint to the town?

Once, not so long ago, within living memory, when cars were not so readily available, it was not uncommon for the average person's experience of the world to be limited to perhaps a few square miles. The train and coach might connect to the town, but the hinterland, the wilderness itself, was impenetrable except on horseback or on foot. Beyond five or ten miles, knowledge was confined to rumour, not experience, and for as long as such places existed only in the imagination they remained objects of mystery and wonder. The wilderness was still the great frontier in microcosm, between what was known and what remained uncertain and for as long as this existed the landscape had an epic scale quite unrelated to its size and our delight in it could never be exhausted.

But, easy access has now brought a density of use to the wilderness with which it cannot cope, supplanting remoteness and tranquillity with congestion and bustle, bringing danger and destruction and beauty spots worn thin by over use. City dwellers come for recreation. They bring to the wild places their micro-lights, hang gliders and Pitts specials; they take to the paths with mountain bikes and motorbikes and quads; they fill the forests with the sounds of picnics and paintball parties. Is it any wonder then that the perception of the wilderness has changed and that people still questing their right to fulfilment from the proximity of nature must travel ever further afield, destroying in their frustration the very thing they seek? Transmuted into 'countryside' the wilderness is already an endangered experience.

So, preserve and conserve the wilderness and countryside? Yes of course, but question first the value of a husk of a hamlet used only by wearied weekenders. Ask what the countryside is, what it means to us and what we would like it to be. We could conclude that we have it all wrong. We could find that, with the break-up of the historic estates, the land husbandry ways of the past are over and, with the advent of the agri-business tenant manager, the countryside can no longer be entrusted to country folk. Certainly the countryside and all in it are now in service to the towns and the towns' values are prevailing.

Consider, roads trod out in medieval times now widened, straightened and levelled; distinctive features, blind bends, narrow bridges and tunnelled hedgerows all now subsumed within a common standard set by the townsfolk's engineers for suburban safe passage. The villages have been held to ransom by the highways men. Little hope here for the rural idyll.

We should be resisting, be saying 'hold on, this isn't the countryside we came for'; this is not the connection we seek with the slow changing natural rhythms of the seasonal order of things; This is not the 'long green delirium like a vision of paradise' that Nan Fairbrother, author of 'New Lives New Landscapes' told us of in her childhood expeditions from the post war Coventry slums.

We should insist that the countryside should be, must be, beautiful, but also a little bit dangerous; that its by-ways should quagmire, have sheep barring passage and be ever so slightly smelly. Our bicycles, motorcycles and cars can cope - curiously, are designed to cope to judge from the advertisements, but even if were we to go one step further and to insist upon a return to the full and unexpurgated rural idyll of our dreams (and we could so easily if we so wished), we could ask for peace and tranquillity again in our countryside, and then declassify the lanes, dig them up and pot-hole them. That would slow things down a little and we could dispense then with the speed humps, white lines, signposts and lights.

Not that we need be inconvenienced, for we could then demand drive-by-wire suspensions, satellite navigators and four-wheel drives for all our cars. We could ask for non-rusting bodies and easy-clean wheels too. We should not be intimidated by the technical or financial difficulties. After all, if one automotive nation (Germany) can manufacture cars which require the rest of the world to provide millimetre-precise cambering on its roads for them to perform to specification and if another automotive nation (the United States) can insist that as its cars need catalytic converters because of an environmental problem in Los Angeles we must pay hugely for one too- why then cannot we ask for such a car here? We (almost) already have it. It sits, docile and unextended, in the supermarket car park.

Consider too, of 345,000 km of roads in Britain, nearly 300,000 km are minor roads, and uniquely in the world, the vast majority of these are tarmacadammed to a high surface standard permitting universally high average speeds. Why?

Imagine then a countryside in which the high speed roads do still exist but only as limited access de-restricted expressways between the major towns and most of the rest of the highway system is left to regress to the condition it was in before the Model T Ford, the original boneshaker, required something a little smoother to run on. Something like the New Forest perhaps, where two-way roads have been pot-holed on both sides such that on-coming cars are forced to a centre-of-the-road confrontation or go off-road to pass. It has slowed speeds dramatically. It also brings back something of the original skill and delight of motoring - as an experience in itself and not as a means to an end. We could, with such an approach, begin to restore the natural rhythms of the countryside so that we may again experience its pleasurable essence and stop just cutting through it in our cars in a vain search for ever more distant distractions.

We might also demand that our villages be made into autonomous economic units using fresh local produce, not refrigerated deliveries from town. Our homes could also be provided with walk-in cold stores and, with teleshopping for staples delivered weekly by van, the local market could again become the social focus of a region. This countryside of ours is too small to be opened up to full gaze from car windows at sixty miles per hour. With the hedgerows gone, its intimacy and privacy has been violated. Its character exists solely in its tiny scale and its labyrinthine mystery is proportional only to its inaccessibility. A wilderness which is inhabited becomes countryside and inhabited countryside soon becomes only another name for a town.

We have an opportunity now: Under the pressures of the changing global economy, farmland is coming out of production and we should grasp the opportunity, mechanise more inventively, decentralise, and use 'just in time' seasonal production methods to make efficient the small fields and meadows of a new garden England - and return the rest to nature.

The structure of the landscape with its 'figure and ground' pattern of fields and meadows defined by hedgerows and coppices, provides in effect a township-like structure of walls and rooms - a green labyrinth, within which a multitude of the township's recreational functions could be concentrated. This might leave the rest of the countryside to be re-forested and returned as a truly wild wilderness from which we need never again feel the need to escape. We might even imagine a return of the wolf and bear to lowland England. That would spice things up a little. We could then re-shape the landscape to our dreams. All we need to do is say how poetically we wish to live.

But we are, in a sense, still toying with this issue. The towns remain the problem. For as long as we fail to structure their growth the wilderness will always be under threat, and ultimately the countryside too.

We need therefore to make our towns very much denser than they are today. There is no escaping the fact that land is a finite commodity and we must use it sparingly. We should double at least the present densities. We need to develope lift-access medium rise back-to-back mixed-use developments of combined workspace and residential units. These would cut commuting, create huge energy savings and be especially attractive to the new generation of singletons and retirees. For the latter a private lift access direct to each flat, once considered an unaffordable luxury as electric windows in cars once were too, will become a necessity.

The towns must be kind to families too. It is the high cost/ low space standard equation, together with the noise, lack of privacy and the unreliability and fearfulness of the transport systems that is driving families out. We need to design our town houses and flats more generously; with good acoustics, play spaces and privacy which in effect, means that we need to break the land cost spiral caused by the economic attraction of the town centre and break therefore with the centripetal plan.

The only way to do this is to create a multiplicity of centres wherein there is a choice of desirable options each of a comparable attractiveness. Such centres would thus be like the cells of a larger organism in which each cell (which would equate to a town) would be condensed and made more urban by restraining it within new town walls. It is a notable fact that almost all of the world's most cherished urban environments have been constrained in some way, usually by a natural circumstance of geography or by a man-made defensive wall.

The 'walls' in this case would in fact be raised roads, viaducts which would contain below them the main shopping and commercial districts and made back-to-back perhaps with housing too. The walls are thus permeable to pedestrians at ground level and, to maximise the development potential, the perimeter of each cell would be built to the highest densities. This would free the centre to become the cultural and socio-political heart of the community. The spaces there would be tranquil and of public scale.

The entire town could then be pedestrianised except for emergency services and access, so at each gateway there might be an expandable parking 'silo' beyond which private cars would not normally go. The town is thus made small, to a scale that suits the pedestrian - a half hours' walk across- in a complete inversion of the Garden City plan.

Within such a proposal, urban growth would occur not by adding land-hungry, low-density developments to the edges of existing centres, but by constraining these to their existing size such that the residents would be obliged to be inventive to increase the density and when this has been exhausted then new autonomous townships would be founded each kept separate from its neighbour by landscaped public parkland open to all. Such townships could have their own political and economic structures and would thus have their own identity and character. However, interlinked one with another by rapid expressways and public transit systems, they would together constitute a major metropolitan region in which each township could support specialised city-scale facilities.

This cell-like network would be more responsive to growth and change, and would be less disruptive to the whole when the economy of one cell burgeoned or foundered. It creates, too, a real sense of place, an urbane urban environment in close contact with the natural world; a place small enough to relate to, yet with all the facilities that a modern metropolis can offer.

Such a city would have cells of different characters much as Soho, Covent Garden, the City of London, Belgravia and so on comprise London itself except that each cell would be separated by a mildly tamed wilderness, a public parkland, a cordon sanitaire, to protect its individuality. The cells, being autonomous can even die without the need to cauterise the city. If the cells of such a city could be made desirable, in the way that say small market towns are desirable, it might thereby release pressure upon the countryside and the countryside can then revert to its original status, as the necessary wilderness in counterpoint to the town.

This may seem utopian, but it could well become a necessity. We are already finding it difficult to support a growing social infrastructure from a declining tax base. We have a progressively aging population yet we seem curiously unwilling to extrapolate from the demographic changes taking place and to re-configure our environment accordingly. And yet if we are to believe the statistics, there are some 2.4m less young adults in the population and 1.2m more in their early sixties and eighties than in the 1980s. We have seen how the young adults and their purchasing powers helped shape the physical environment of our cities in the 1980s and we should expect no less a change as the elderly take over.

But make no mistake. The elderly are not what they used to be. With retirement more common at 50 and a life expectancy in good health to the age of 75 or 80, they are not the helpless souls we imagined in our youth: They are still at the peak of their powers, and with a choice of how and where to live. They are not even constrained to these shores.

Maybe therefore we should forget for a moment our urban design conventions, and look instead at ourselves, our origins, and the economic and demographic changes taking place and let these be our inspiration.

Illustrated here in microcosm we have a miniaturasised Wilderness City on a plot destined otherwise for the conventional suburban dream - individual villas on half an acre of land. Instead we have the plot as village, a community set in its own small wilderness with quiet, traffic free, internal public spaces for social encounters, and dwellings with spacious ground floor family rooms and roof top gardens. Each plot has a lift-accessed tower for the more private areas - the bedrooms, studies and viewing loggias - and thus the elderly or infirm will have no steps to climb and can seek help next door when needed. The house is a safe haven, a place for poetic isolation or for social exchange and the towers are both refuges and watch-towers.

The 'wilderness' here is as wild as we can make it - a managed coppice which could be harvested for materials and fuel and would provide protected habitats for wild flora and fauna. It would be big enough for fox and badger perhaps, and small deer too, but the wolves would have to wait until a few more such settlements could be built. The lake between the two 'villages' is intended as a vestigial 'sea' or 'moat' whereby to set up an oppositional tension between the two communities and thus to create, over time, a strong sense of identity and character for each. One can imagine the children of these communities coming together here for ice-skating in the winter and for picnics and boating in the summer. More prosaically the lake would collect the run-off rainwater from the two settlements and thus provide a fresh water reservoir and a source of fresh fish.

Our forebears would have understood this. It connects directly to the deeper underlying rhythms of life on this planet - and we disregard these at our peril.

"Once upon a time there were just very basic, but deeply significant environments for man. There was the wilderness, that frightening, unknown, unknowable world outside, and there was the home. Be it a cave or a town, the home was the only safe haven from man's fears and for millennia the safe haven has defined the town."

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