Cities for Humans

You get the best first impression of Poundbury on a bright summer’s afternoon, when the air is heavy with heat and the light begins to turn gold. You’re in Dorset, a rural county on the south coast of England, close enough to the sea for the light to have that maritime clarity. Driving from Lyme Regis toward the county town of Dorchester over chalk downs touched with soft curving shadows, you come over the hill at the top of the Bride Valley. Ahead of you is a city on a hill, like a part of Tuscany. Towers, classical glories, windows flashing the sun back at you. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in England.

Before you dive into it (and you should, if ever you find yourself in this enchanting part of the West Country), I want to show you business as usual, in a housing estate on the edge of Dorchester itself. As you circle round the new town to come in from the east, the last road you meet before Poundbury is a residential street called Cambridge Road, built in the 1960s. The houses are semi-detached, typical local authority architecture, probably quite well built, but entirely functional: boxes with holes cut in them. They look the same at the back as at the front, and you can see neither very well, because the houses are set a good twenty or thirty feet back from the road, behind drives or front gardens (which in England, as in America, are spaces in which few people spend much time).

Standing on the pavement, you’re in the middle of an open space. The house-fronts are almost a hundred feet apart. Their low front walls and hedges give neither shelter nor enclosure. It’s not the windswept nowhere around the base of your average tower-block, but you’re still an insignificant person in a big expanse. The houses don’t relate to you, or to one another, only to a grid. There’s no sense of intimacy, of belonging, of place. As you go a little farther, Elizabeth Place, the community open space, is no more than a big square of grass with roads all around it.

If we go ahead now, westward and uphill, beyond a street tree, we come to a neat row of bollards. Beyond them is a place that incarnates an entirely different vision of human flourishing. That’s why we’re here. That’s where any consideration of urbanism needs to begin: in the way places look and feel to the embodied, specific human being who’s surrounded by these buildings, dwelling in this place.

We’re at the edge of Pummery Square, the first open space built in the new town of Poundbury. The entire square is about as wide as Cambridge Road was, and it’s about the size of a small Roman piazza such as Madonna dei Monti, off of which my parents lived for a few years. All around the square are buildings of the sort you’d find in a Georgian market town: gentle, unassuming, harmonious, continuous. They’re built of mellow brick, each a little different, but they all belong together. If I weren’t drawing your attention to them, you wouldn’t look at them. They’re what urban designers call “fabric”: The parts are meant to blend seamlessly into a whole. Behind us is a Co-op supermarket, hidden behind a low colonnade. There are street trees, benches, an imposing pub, some shops. The only building in the whole square that draws the eye is the market hall on the right, with its steep Northern European roof.

Pummery Square feels comfortable and intimate in a way you probably won’t even notice. No part of it is too big, too exposed. The street trees create a smaller square inside the square. The buildings are three stories: large enough to enclose, not so large as to loom. (On Madonna dei Monti, they’re four or five stories, and still don’t loom.) Because nothing here is trying to draw your eye, your senses can relax. You can pay attention to the things that actually concern you in your life, rather than the things that concerned an architect while he was designing it. Nor are you being funneled toward places where you can be parted from your money. You feel as if you were in a spacious outdoor room, where you could stop and pass the time of day with an acquaintance.

Due for completion in 2025, Poundbury is the first traditional town to be built in England in centuries. A vision conceived by King Charles III while he was still Prince of Wales, it was realized in the face of furious opposition. The man who designed and built it for him is the Luxembourgeois masterplanner Léon Krier. The man whose personality and design principles underlie Cambridge Road, Elizabeth Place, and almost every other public space built since 1920 is the Swiss-French Modernist Corbusier. Corbusier’s ideas are part of how we build, how we design, how we train architects. They’re embedded in buildings and streets all over the world. They affect us in ways we don’t even notice. And they’re profoundly inimical not only to human flourishing, but to the very idea of a public realm inhabited by flesh-and-blood human beings.

Of the iconic Modernists (Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson), Corbusier was the only one to concern himself primarily with whole cities rather than individual buildings. He built a few notable smaller structures—the Villa Savoie and the pilgrim chapel at Ronchamps—but he was greatly interested in the larger scale and consequently had a wider reach. Only one entire city was ever built under his direction, Chandigarh in northern India, but a number were built by his pupils, and very nearly the entire twentieth-century enterprise of “urban renewal” was undertaken under the influence of one of his most widely circulated works, the “Athens Charter.” He presented this manifesto as the conclusions of a congress of modernists held in 1933, but it seems in fact to have been a summary of what Corbusier felt the congress ought to have concluded.

The distinction matters. Corbusier had no patience for reality as it is manifested in the architectural realm. As one historian notes, “experience rarely changed his preconceptions; reality rarely changed his myths.” His proposals are indifferent to site, topography, climate, economics, history.Most infamously, he proposed the destruction of Paris and its replacement by a grid of motorways and tower-blocks, a transformation far more drastic than Albert Speer’s plans to remodel Berlin as the capital of Hitler’s “Greater German Reich.” Chandigarh, built in the 1950s, makes no concessions to the searing summer heat or the economic realities of India. Street traders are the lifeblood of Indian cities, and one of the few ways for the very poor to earn a living. Corbusier decreed that they weren’t allowed in Chandigarh, and the city authorities have spent decades harassing them in faithful adherence to the great man’s vision.

The second of Corbusier’s great preoccupations was the machine. He called a house “a machine for living in,” and his designs are full of elements borrowed from grain elevators, ocean liners, and biplanes. Machines were the ideal to which, in his vision, everything else—architecture, urbanism, people—must aspire. He all but worshipped the car. His cities are designed first and foremost for cars, for he believed that “a city made for speed is made for success.” He understood cars in a way he never seems to have understood humans. He lovingly attended to their needs, to their convenience, to the spaces and widths they required in order to move at different speeds. Pedestrians and cyclists were entirely incidental. In Chandigarh, bicycles weren’t even considered, and had to be grandfathered into the neat hierarchy of roads designed around the one Indian in a thousand who owned a car.

A third preoccupation, very much shaped by the second, was distance. In a Corbusian city, everything is very far apart. The Athens Charter took the idea of single-use zoning, first articulated by the tidy-minded English social reformer Ebenezer Howard around 1900, and made it into Holy Writ. A human life could be divided into different functions—home, work, leisure, and so on—which were to be strictly segregated into districts, like for like. In some ways, as with so much of what the Modernists did, zoning was a necessary corrective to the industrial squalor of cities in which workers lived next to vast infernal factories belching out toxic fumes. But Corbusier absolutized the idea, and hisrigid interpretation of it was the basis on which all subsequent sprawl has been realized, a world in which we move from capsule to capsule: home to car to office to restaurant, and home again, encountering our fellow citizens as little as possible along the way.

Corbusier’s love of distance turns up at street level too, as we saw on Cambridge Road. His ideal was to cram people into boxes piled one on top of the other like battery hens and leave all the surrounding space open. The isolated tower-blocks that disfigure the British landscape are his creations. So, too, at one remove, is Cambridge Road. Ordinary streets built on his planning principles are too wide, too exposed for anyone to want to linger, chat, or gather. His obsession with lifting buildings off the ground on slender columns called pilotis, an out-of-context borrowing from ocean liners, further removed any sense of containment at ground level, creating dank, dangerous wastelands.

Corbusier loathed the street, the square, anywhere that people could congregate. He referred to Paris’s cafés as “a fungus that eats up the pavements.” His attitudes permeated urban planning for decades and remain implicit in most development decisions. In the 1950s Jane Jacobs found that his disciples, when confronted with a lively streetscape in which people were talking, children playing, and residents sitting on their stoops, would respond by parroting the mantra “We have to get these people off the streets.”

His personality, far from being irrelevant to his architecture, is integral to it. Corbusier was no hypocrite. His Utopia was a Jacobin one, like that of the “sea-green incorruptible” Robespierre: the total reordering of life along rational principles. His ideal was deeply held, powerfully expressed, and never deviated from. He possessed crystalline clarity of purpose, an unshakable faith in a better world. But it was a world like the mountain peaks he loved, a place in which no ordinary mortal can actually exist. A recent French reassessment refers to his “cold vision of the world.”

In architecture schools he was long regarded with almost cultic awe, as a man to be studied, followed, and imitated. Reading Towards an Architecture during my brief stint at architecture school, I received beams of delight for praising his writing, and pained grimaces when I pointed out that the horror of his Promised Land strikes you on reflection, when you set the rhetoric beside the reality of the buildings and cities he has inspired.

Léon Krier, like virtually all architects of his generation, began with a great admiration for Corbusier. He spent a school prize on a complete set of Corbusier’s works and still refers to him frequently. Krier’s writing style, punchy and declarative, making arguments with the force of hammer blows, is very much in the same vein as Corbusier’s. Yet his architectural ideals diverged from Corbusier’s early on and developed, as he himself did, in a very different direction.

The mind behind Poundbury is a colorful presence. In a field whose practitioners, desperate not to be bourgeois, dress like Steve Jobs, he wears immaculate three-piece suits and trilbies. His mane of white hair is distinctly leonine, his gestures animated: Not for him the contained, stripped-down aesthetics of the machine. He likes to communicate in drawings, cartoons, and caricatures. They convey much (and vividly) in a few vigorous strokes of the pen. Also not for him the convoluted, often meaningless language of the architectural academy. His gifts are visual and spatial, and he puts them to good use, turning words into pictures while his colleagues do the opposite. Like the great modernists and predecessors such as Wren and Vanburgh, he is both artist and intellectual, but he has broken with the modernists and earned their ire. His most heinous crime: He has refused to limit himself to the thin gruel of architectural ideas developed since 1920.

Krier’s vision first took shape from a childhood spent in Luxembourg City. By an accident of topography, the older quarters of the city are not contiguous, as in Rome or Paris, but separated by canyons linked by bridges, with the result that each has grown to be largely self-sufficient. He lived in one such quarter, amid gracious classical architecture and nineteenth-century parks. Everything he needed could be found within a child’s walking distance, often through green spaces. Quietly, unknowingly, he received a bone-deep experience of urbanism at its most livable and humane: an experience he lived in his body as well as saw with his eyes. Luxembourg City provided him with a yardstick against which future experiences and architectural ideals could be measured. To make places that, in their varied ways, would be as well suited to human flourishing as Luxembourg City became his life’s work.

He spent a year at architecture school in Stuttgart. There, High Modernism reigned supreme, the delicacy of some of its early buildings replaced by an admiration for brute concrete, partly inspired by Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The places Krier knew and loved were bourgeois, part of the supposedly discredited past, done with. Their appointments with the bulldozers were only a matter of time. In the early 1970s, he was appalled to discover that his childhood green spaces had been marked for conversion to car parks, and he joined the fight to save them.

Dissatisfied with Modernism, Krier left architecture school after only a year and went to London to work on urban design projects for James Stirling, then the world’s leading architect. As with Corbusier, his relationship to Stirling was a mixture of personal respect and professional dissent. Stirling’s office was being asked to build vast housing projects, entire urban districts, with no understanding of the complexity involved. As Krier says, “They had no theory.”

The lack of philosophical underpinning was by design. Obsessed, like Robespierre and Pol Pot, with the idea of starting from zero, Corbusier and his fellow Modernists made little attempt to engage past thinkers. To do so would have been to betray the revolutionary principles of the movement. Modernism’s enduring appeal derives from the strength of its ideals, its promise of a secular paradise that, like communism, has proved impervious to all failures in reality. It survives on its potential, on those brief shining moments when each building or development is new and perfect, the glass clean, the concrete fresh, and the ravages of time and disorder have yet to make their appearance.

Even as he turned to classical urbanism, young Krier faced a problem: Before the modern era there had been in fact very little urbanist theory of any sort. Pre-industrial cities had simply grown by a process akin to cell division, new quarters developing as the population expanded. The limitations of a world without cars or mass transit dictated similar forms, even for planned settlements. The urban logic of medieval European towns such as Salisbury (founded in 1220) or Cordes-sur-Ciel (1222) is indistinguishable from that of their Roman or pre-Roman neighbors.

Krier drew on his experience of these historic European cities, especially his childhood in Luxembourg City, to develop an alternative theory of urbanism, developed in his best-known book, Architecture: Choice or Fate (later expanded and republished as The Architecture of Community). He rejected single-use zoning, considering it “programmed functional monotony,” which constantly pressured urban centers to build ever upwards, suburbs to sprawl ever outwards.Instead, he based his vision on the “organic order” of historic cities. In these settings, adjacent buildings have varied uses. One finds public buildings, houses, shops, and apartment buildings all together. In any part of a city, from a street to a district, there is a mixture of uses, more or less grand, more or less formal. For Krier, “the symbolic richness of true urban architecture is based on the proximity of and dialogue between the greatest possible variety of public and private uses.”

In practical terms, Krier’s approach creates a city in which the groceries you need aren’t a long trek or a traffic jam away, in which it doesn’t take an hour or two to get to school or to work. Everything from a loaf of bread to a box of nails is within a short stroll. Eating out doesn’t require you to pass up the pleasure of a drink, because there will be restaurants within walking distance. You meet your neighbors often enough to get to know them. Corbusier sought to split us into parts; Krier is trying to put us back together again.

He described his ideal as the “15-minute city,” a place in which everything you need on a daily basis can be found within a 15-minute walk. This ideal describes every city you visit on holiday: Rome, Florence, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and the archetypal small towns of Europe and New England. The term “15-minute city” has become controversial since being invoked in Oxford’s heavy-handed attack on car use. But Krier’s original concept is much more humane, seeking to reduce the need for cars rather than limit the use of them by diktat.

When designing the public spaces of Poundbury, Krier drew inspiration from a rare precursor in urbanist theory, the Austrian Camillo Sitte. In the 1880s, Sitte was preoccupied with the colossal empty spaces being built in European cities, a tendency toward inhuman scale that predates Corbusier by two centuries and suggests a world ready for his doctrines. In a clumsy effort to give prominence to monuments and major public buildings, planners surrounded them with bare, windswept plazas. The area around the Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome is a good example. Hundreds of buildings, a dozen streets and small plazas, were cleared to build an enormous folly with no obvious use or relationship to the rest of the city, fronted by an over-large piazza where nobody lingers. In a city full of life, the area round the Vittoriano is an urban dead zone.

Sitte pointed out that squares in medieval and Renaissance cities are much tighter, and their monuments are often enclosed by urban fabric on two or three sides. Cathedrals such as S. Maria del Fiore or York Minster are far more imposing when glimpsed down a narrow street than if they were surrounded by open space, and indeed this is how they were designed to be seen: by the ordinary Christian approaching on foot. The impact of such masterpieces becomes far greater for the contrast in height and scale with the surrounding buildings.

Indeed, urban architecture before the Baroque was all about relationship. Buildings relate to one another so that people may do the same, and public spaces tended to converge on those forms and scales that proved most congenial, such as the Mediterranean staple of a colonnaded square anchored by a church or temple. Research using modern biomonitoring and eye-tracking software has confirmed what classical architects knew all along: We prefer to be at the edge of open spaces, not in the middle, and we prefer ornament to blankness.

At Poundbury, Krier built these relational public spaces on a variety of scales, from small piazzette fronted by half a dozen houses, up to the pièce de résistance at the top of the hill, Queen Mother Square. This is an altogether grander space, framed by handsome classical buildings—the most European square in England. Sitting outside the Duchess of Cornwall pub with a drink on a summer’s evening, you could easily imagine yourself in France. All that is missing—something Poundbury lacks as a whole, through no fault of Krier’s—is proper public buildings.

Yet this absence is also a feature of a Corbusian world. The civic realm in any modern city, whether Rome, Chandigarh, or Dorchester, is no longer a place of public assembly, as it was in the classical era or the medieval. If you go into a town hall, you’ll be met by someone enquiring which department you wish to visit. If you try to go into a parliament building, you must have a ticket or an appointment, and go through a scanner. If you try to go into an office or ministry, you’ll be turned away. With the exception of public town hall meetings, you enter an official building only as a petitioner or a tourist, not as a member of the body politic. Real power rests in the vast office-hives, building after building after slab of building, which thickly surround the monuments of democracy. No less than thickly clustered commercial office buildings, these hives have a deadening effect on a city, segregating it by function as Corbusier specified.

Krier also had to deal with a challenge that Sitte never faced: the car. Today, everyone needs a car and wants to keep it close to home. Cars take up more space than people do. Ambulances and fire engines take up even more. In the United States, projects built on humane lines have met bitter opposition from fire departments and traffic engineers, who want vehicles to be able to go as fast as possible in as straight a line as possible. In Celebration, Florida, a town designed on traditional principles, the fire department demanded that the town cut down its street trees and ban on-street parking, the very measures intended to make life pleasant for pedestrians in the city center.

Krier had to allow room for both cars and people, without the one crowding out the other. His solution was to keep the streets narrow and often pedestrianized, and to keep parking in functional courts behind the houses. A different solution, employed by Christopher Alexander, is to thread a parallel network of pedestrian walkways between the houses, like those surviving in small English towns such as Bruton or Tisbury. Yet another approach, when existing street patterns are hard to alter, is to develop the inside of large city blocks with smaller houses around a public green or court. Even with traditional American urban spacing, building houses with front porches is an excellent way to foster informal interactions, as explored by Patrick Deneen in his essay “A Republic of Front Porches.”

Poundbury evoked outraged howls of “Old-fashioned!” and “Pastiche!” from the architectural establishment, which recognized in Léon Krier and Prince Charles an existential threat to its Modernist ideology: a gifted architect with a compelling alternative, backed by an influential patron. Krier’s vision is a radical challenge to a thoroughly inhumane status quo, an attempt to rebuild the public square one street at a time. The public square is not only the famous places of public decision-making, but all the places in which we meet one another as whole individuals, not defined by our function or the mask we’re currently wearing. Poundbury’s design fosters meetings, encounters, and face-to-face interactions among people whose lives are lived on the same piece of soil.

On another hilltop, halfway round the world, Krier drew up the masterplan for the new town of Cayalá. In this location, he is adapting to completely different circumstances. Poundbury extends a sleepy, pleasant county town in the soft English countryside. Cayalá, on the outskirts of Guatemala City, extends the crime-ridden capital of a country bruised by decades of civil war. Separated by two miles of unlovely sprawl from the blocky skyscrapers at the city’s heart, Cayalá is built in a triumphant Spanish classicism, a contemporary response to the half-ruined Baroque glories of Guatemala’s old capital Antigua.

Traditional Iberian architecture is one of the world’s most successful vernaculars, capable of being adapted to any hot climate. Thick walls, hooded windows, painted stucco, and clay tiles cope well with tropical heat and age gracefully to the point of ruin and beyond. Stucco can cover stone, rubble, clay, earth, or concrete, giving visual unity to buildings grand and lowly. High ceilings keep interiors cool. Ornamentation is concentrated around doors and windows, allowing a small amount of elaboration to go a long way.

Called in by a pair of Notre Dame–trained Guatemalan architects, Maria Sanchéz and Pedro Godoy, in this enterprise Krier has used all of these features and more to make a town that suits its context perfectly. Many of the elements he pioneered at Poundbury are still there—spaces designed primarily for people, relatively narrow streets—but at Cayalá Krier was allowed to build a proper main street, flanked by colonnades to give shelter from the tropical sun. A church takes pride of place, simple inside except for a towering gilt altarpiece. People gather and linger on the steps outside the Azaria pavilion, just as they do on the Spanish Steps in Rome. The winding streets, which encourage cars to drive slowly and carefully, are possible because the family that developed Cayalá still owns the land and didn’t have to comply with the Corbusian standards written into civic regulations.

In one crucial way, Cayalá is a more suitable canvas for the classically minded Krier than is Poundbury. Guatemala, unlike rural England, is a culture in which people naturally spill out of doors during the evenings. Unfortunately, much of Guatemala City is too dangerous for them to do so. As a result, most of the upscale neighborhoods are entirely gated—but not Cayalá. Although some of its residential courts have gates, because wealthy Guatemalans prefer not to be woken at gunpoint, Krier, Sanchéz, and Godoy convinced the sponsoring family to leave the streets open to everybody. In the evenings, they fill up, not only with residents but with people from the surrounding districts, following the age-old rhythms of their Spanish culture. They wander along, window-shopping, talking, sitting on steps, at ease with one another. Far from being a private enclave, Cayalá sets out to provide common ground, a public realm in which rich and poor can mix.

Such a realm can be sustained only when the wealthy and powerful feel secure enough to walk the same streets as everyone else, without withdrawing into guarded compounds or creating controlled enclaves. In Guatemala, the government and city authorities are currently unable to provide this kind of safety, so security in Cayalá has to be privately provided: a reality overlooked by those who criticize it as a gated place of privilege. Cayalá is a compromise between Guatemala City as it is and as it might be, a compromise that attempts to move the needle in the right direction. Its classical forms and well crafted public spaces aren’t solutions for Guatemala’s long strife, but like Poundbury they are designed to set people at ease and foster the best civic atmosphere that is possible in this place, at this time.

Cayalá owes its existence to Poundbury, and so, happily, do a host of other projects. In architecture, ideals take on great power when they are realized in buildings that are loved and admired by those who live and work in them. The New Urbanist movement, heavily influenced by Krier’s ideas and work, is flourishing. Founded by husband and wife team Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (Duany being another architect whose childhood, this time in Barcelona, gave him an instinctive primer in good urbanism), the movement has perhaps had more success in America than in Europe. The underlying federal structure in the United States allows more freedom both to existing cities seeking to transform themselves, and to new towns on fresh sites. Britain is heavily centralized, and the people who work in those blank office buildings have huge power to meddle in things they don’t understand, a besetting problem in the modern age. Even with support from a handful of key people, Krier faced numerous bureaucratic obstacles at Poundbury, from needlessly slow approvals for buildings to the refusal to allow the town a proper high street. Fortunately, more recent traditional-style new towns, from Tornagrain in the Scottish Highlands to Sherford in Devon, have faced fewer obstacles, thanks to Poundbury’s success.

Poundbury is important because, along with Seaside, Florida (a Duany project), it was a first attempt to offer a viable alternative to Corbusian urbanism. Krier showed that it is possible to build whole new towns in which people feel at home, and to allow for cars without deifying them. Poundbury has prospered, its economic opportunities and quality of life drawing praise even from some of its early opponents, such as the Guardian. Home prices are consistently above average, indeed problematically so. Again, we encounter the criticism of “elitism,” which is often levelled at New Urbanism, as if making places that people will pay more to live in were a reason not to build them at all, rather than to build far more of them.

Poundbury contains more than the legal minimum of affordable housing, and it is indistinguishable from the housing available on the free market, rather than—as is usually the case—being a mean ghetto on the busiest road, obvious in its poor position and cheap construction. For all Corbusier’s theoretical altruism, his actual treatment of the poorest sectors of society was hostile. At Chandigarh, he made no provision for the construction workers. In Paris, partly inspired by health concerns, he sought to move the poorest inhabitants from the middle of his cities to the edge, creating banlieues where inevitably they are less well connected to the rest of the body politic, are farther from potential employment, and have fewer opportunities.

Léon Krier is trying to restore to us a world in which the perennial goods of human existence aren’t the prerogative of a lucky few, in which urban life doesn’t need to be a battle against alienation and loneliness, and in which loving your neighbors doesn’t begin with an uphill struggle just to get to know them. Like their classical and medieval precursors, his cities are designed to be experienced by ordinary human beings, to be walked through, sheltered by, and belonged to. Rejecting the sterility of twentieth-century urbanism, he offers an alternative rooted not in abstract ideals and views from nowhere but in enduring, embodied principles of human flourishing. Poundbury was the first green shoot of spring. It is no longer the only one.

Anselm Audley writes from Salisbury, England.

Image by Léon Krier, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.