Urban Design Library

How to play the environment game

Urban Design Library #6
Theo Crosby

Planning is rarely found on the walls of an art gallery. But from April to June 1973, Theo Crosby’s exposition of how we make our built environment was drawing 500-600 visitors a day to London’s Hayward Gallery.

The exhibition, designed by Crosby’s newly founded genre-busting practice Pentagram, featured ‘regulation avant-garde trappings like video tape machines for the visitors to play with’. But How to play the environment game was more than an art show. For Crosby it was a strictly popular project, and he went about restructuring his brief from the Arts Council to reach the widest audience.

A condensed version of the exhibition was sent to tour suburbia in a van, accompanied by guest speakers including Sir John Summerson. Most significantly, Crosby rebalanced the £20,000 budget away from the gallery space and towards the catalogue, a heavily subsidised Penguin pocketbook described as ‘the complete protest textbook: a 260-page crash course for environment street fighters’.

Also designed by Pentagram, the book is packed with activist black and white collages, cartoons, infographics, and aerial photographs. An open-ended set of instructions, it describes how the environment game is played out through complex interplays, conflicts of interest and compromises. Crosby invites the reader to join in the game.

We learn the game theory, and how it is (or isn’t) applied in practice. The tightest history of town planning so far skips from Ancient Athens to the Athens Charter in twenty-five pages. Cameo contributions from ‘urbanauts’ including Archizoom, Archigram and Buckminster Fuller offer technological utopias. Meanwhile the reality of recent post-war comprehensive planning suffers scathing criticism for its inhuman scale, lack of identity, and reliance on the car.

We learn the rules of the game, and the need to question them. Crosby condemns a system of controls that produces Croydon by default, and traces its legislative origins in nineteenth century reform. We see the unintended side-effects of different forms of taxation on urban development. The book incites us to exercise and explore our legal rights; ‘a society that accepts the workings of its bureaucracy without protest deserves to be strangled with red tape.’

We also learn how to bend the rules. A profile of infamous developer Harry Hyams analyses his shrewd tactics to extract capital value from empty buildings. Another section on monopolies in the building materials industry resulted in the London Brick Company forcing Penguin to withdraw the publication over price-fixing allegations. My own copy still has the offending sentence blanked out with a sticker.

Taken together, the dissonant voices and conflicting agendas that Crosby assembles present a planning system that ‘is a remarkable instrument, though it produces some terrible melodies… We find the process bewildering and regret most of its results.’

Crosby uses the book as a vehicle to voice his own regrets about the products of the planning system. In hindsight, these signal the course of urban development for the next few decades. We see out-of-town hypermarkets drawing trade from town centres and the continual erosion of high streets all over the country by chain stores replacing local traders. Houses are described as generally minimal in size and quality, with systems of tenure tailored to produce the maximum of social division. Development is based entirely on short-term economies and short-term profits, with increasingly powerful property developers and pension funds changing the shape and scale of the environment for the rest of society.

It was obvious in 1973 that these were destructive paths. ‘One doesn't need a big computer to reveal that there must be limits in the foreseeable future to most of today's particular forms of material-crunching growth… things cannot go on as they are for much longer.’ Yet they have. Almost 40 years on, and Crosby’s concerns are depressingly topical, particularly given the claim that ‘in the next thirty years we will build almost as much as has been built in all history until today.’

If the issues are clear from the book, so are the reasons for our inability to tackle them. Where Crosby’s questions remain just as relevant, the solutions he puts forward seem relatively retro. These are a schizophrenic mix of radical socialist utopias based on a belief in technology, and commonsense truisms founded in tradition. In the megastructures proposed by Paolo Soleri and Archigram we see an extrovert acceptance of new technology that reached a cul-de-sac in the hi-tech movement. In Crosby’s own call to rediscover ‘a complex language of ornament, a means of communication’ through signs, symbols and necessary monuments we see the seeds of postmodernism. Learning from Las Vegas had been published the year before.

How to play the environment game marked a watershed in Crosby’s beliefs. Having been involved in The Festival of Britain and CIAM in the early 1950s, Crosby attended Independent Group meetings at the ICA and organized the seminal exhibition This is Tomorrow in 1956. In the 1960s he acted as the hidden hand behind a young wave of progressive architects as technical editor of AD magazine and head of Taylor Woodrow’s experimental Design Group.

If Crosby had been known up until this point as an advocate of the new, the second half of his career seemed to be spent in defence of the old. Crosby championed craftsmanship, co-founded the Arts & Architecture Society in 1982, and become an influential advisor to the Prince of Wales. After a shortlived spell as Head of Architecture at the RCA where students rejected his conservative approach, his career returned once again to the South Bank where his long-running campaign for the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe using traditional methods and materials was posthumously realised.

But there were constants in Crosby’s disparate career. He consistently sought to blur disciplinary boundaries, challenge establishment attitudes, and force the architecture and planning professions to engage with the popular. Setting aside stylistic preferences and outdated solutions, I think it is this last populist aspect that makes How to play the environment game still important today. Then, as now, the planning system is a social product; ‘our buildings and cities reflect only too accurately the complex tissue of our culture, of our social attitudes.’ Crosby contends that changing the way we make our built environment relies on changing the public’s expectations of their surroundings, and enabling their participation in the process. As David Knight wrote earlier this year, ‘Planning must be made popular: something people understand, like and do.’

The numerous headlines on the Coalition’s reforms to the planning system suggest that planning matters and involvement are important. To avoid asking the same old questions of our built environment in forty years, we might start with an exhibition of the first products of Localism in the Hayward Gallery.

URBAN DESIGN 124 Autumn 2012 Publication Urban Design Group

As featured in URBAN DESIGN 124 Autumn 2012

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Read On

Jacobs J (2004) | Dark Age Ahead | Random House

Provoost M (Ed) (2008) | WiMBY! Hoogvliet: Future Past and Present of a New Town | NAI Publishers

Ankers S, Kaiserman D, Shepley C (2010) | Grotton Revisited: Planning in Crisis? | Routledge

How to play the environment game Publication Urban Design Group
Publisher
Penguin
Published
1973
Reviewed By
Finn Williams, founder of Common Office and urban designer at Croydon Council