(the title owes itself to Danny Kleinman’s entertaining Backgammon essay “Vision Laughs at Counting”)
THE LAUGHING
England, one of the most densely populated territories on the planet, has a “housing crisis” (HC) and yet its cities are by European standards (although not American or Australian) very low-density being mostly comprised of houses rather than apartment blocks.
The cheapest but environmentally and aesthetically worst way of solving this HC would be to further expand our existing OBeCities and build a few token “new cities” on cheaply-purchsed virgin land, if there is such a thing as cheap land in England. This, then, is how the HC is going to be addressed.
In theory the most sensible way of solving the housing problem would be to demolish most of our existing cities and rebuild them in a much denser fashion, whilst taking care to preserve any historic cores worthy of preserving, Bear in mind that even a doubling of city density would only bring us into line with France, a country more than 4x the size of England. But, unless the Chinese take over, the idea of bulldozing entire suburbs, never mind entire cities, is a political and economic impossibility. The task would be much easier if most houses were owned by the local authorities (“council houses”) or by commercial institutions like investments trusts, etc., but they are not – instead they are mostly “owner-occupied”. And this brings up the thorny issue of compensation which, at the present inflated market rates, would be a vast sum.
Unless we do something as radical as this – which of course won’t happen – then we must face the prospect of building over vast swathes of countryside, as was done between the wars. (ref. England & the Octopus) But not only do we have a lot less countryside now than back then, as well as the ubiquitous little box houses and their service roads, we have also covered huge tracts of woodland, meadow, and farmland with thousands of miles of wide motorways, convoluted “spaghetti junctions”, 4 lane divided highways, hundreds of by-passes, thousands of roundabouts, and countless out-of-town shopping centres with their vast parking areas, etc, etc – all of which have eaten up vast chunks of our supposedly cherished English countryside.
And what is our clever governments highly imaginative solution to the “housing crisis”? They propose more sprawling land-chomping developments like the “new city” recently proposed for a huge green fields site between Coventry and Birmingham. In other words “Milton Keynes version 2”.
In the words of Margaret Thatcher I say to this foolishly unimaginative plan – “No, NO, NO..! and NO again…!
THE VISION
This dilemma calls for a new kind of city, composed of self-contained “communities” that are totally unlike any structure that exists today.
(as I shall explain later, there are in fact many “cities” in existence that share some of the features of Deltapolis. Its just that we don’t think of them as “cities”).