Beyond building

In short, the European city finds itself at a turning point. However tempting it may be to contemplate the feverish growth of cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America, or even the steady expansion of North American cities, and however eager some designers are to detect metropolitan conditions in Europe as well, the reality of the European city is different. There are a few dozen cities with a million or more inhabitants, but the great bulk of cities are medium-sized or small. And not likely to get very much bigger. The only way to look bigger, is to juggle the figures, as politicians, policymakers and planners do by sweeping several municipalities together and pretending that they form a 'metropolitan region', with occasionally pathetic results. As if Geneva and Lausanne together form the poles of a metropolis in the south-west of Switzerland. As if four or five medium-sized cities in the western half of the Netherlands and all the towns and villages around them together constitute a Delta-metropolis.

The reality of the European city is that it has reached its upper limit. Growth has come to an end, which has less to do with the city's popularity or capacity to absorb, than with the simple demographic fact that even with immigration, the population of Europe is scarcely rising at all. Moreover, the percentage of the population living in an urban environment is already so high that there is only limited scope for a drift to the cities.

One of the key concerns during the past two centuries was how the city could accommodate an increase in people, activities, traffic and buildings. Now that growth is a thing of the past, attention will inevitably shift from quantity to quality. Instead of expansion, the consolidation of the city as it now is, must be our starting point. It is going to require a major reversal in thinking to swap the paradigm of growth equals progress and the assumption of continuing growth, for an approach aimed at discovering the advantages of shrinkage and changelessness. That mind-shift is now starting to emerge, thanks to projects like Philipp Oswalt's Shrinking Cities, which shows that far from being all gloom and doom, shrinkage is full of potential: 'Shrinking cities are often the starting points for cultural innovation. Whether in music, art, or architecture, in literature, photography, or film – a wide variety of new developments in popular and high culture emerge from these urban crisis sites. These are often part of novel cultures of everyday life based equally on the potentials and the difficulties of these sites. They often thereby make an essential contribution to redefining identities and mental milieus and thus offer important approaches for conceiving models of action.' What Shrinking Cities also makes clear is that fluctuations in urban populations are not confined to Europe and that they have also occurred in the past (sometimes involuntarily as a result of wars or natural disasters), but that during the past two centuries the trend, at least in Europe, was mostly upwards as part of a general increase in population. Now the trend is in the other direction in an age when the overall population in Europe is also in decline.

For architects this will lead not just to a substantially different task, but equally inevitably to a substantially different approach to the task. The demand for yet more cubic metres will be at least partly replaced by rehabilitation, modernization and revaluation of what is already there. The fact that the population is not growing does not mean that there will be no more construction, for the trend towards more square metres per person will continue for as long as prosperity permits. The average number of square metres per person in Western Europe is thirty to forty; in large parts of Central Europe it is no more than half that. Economic growth will lead to an increase in that figure but in the long run it will be possible to satisfy part of the desire for more square metres through demographic shrinkage.

That the decline or even disappearance of growth can have positive effects is obvious. If there is less need for new construction, we may see the end of one of the most reviled manifestations of urban growth: sprawl. Combined with high oil prices, which will be a salutary brake on car use, this may lead to a shift from expansion of the urban area to consolidation and intensification of the existing city. That in turn might produce a substantial shift from a quantitative to a qualitative design task.

The end of growth might also help bring about to a u-turn on the ecological front. Construction and demolition consume vast amounts of energy and natural raw materials and produce a lot of greenhouse gases and waste. From an ethical standpoint, Europeans, whose ecological footprint is more than four times the global average, should certainly take a step backwards, not just by making the existing building stock more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, but also by substantially reducing their construction activities. Such a decrease would contribute greatly towards achieving the European Commission's target of 20% less greenhouse gases in 2020 compared to 1990. That less construction might be the most logical conclusion of ecological and demographic trends seems obvious, but it is still denied by property developers and local authorities who are unable or unwilling to extricate themselves from the automatic reflex of growth and expansion, and who will continue to build as long as the money is there or can be borrowed, on the assumption that supply can create demand.

The European population has all but stopped growing. Prognoses differ, but population growth is not much more than one-quarter of a per cent and is variously predicted to start decreasing as from now or within a few years. Likewise the average European city. Only a few countries still register a clearly discernible drift towards the city. In some places the population growth of a particular city is higher than that for the country as a whole. Apart from a few genuine exceptions like Tirana, which has doubled in size since 1990 from 300,000 to 600,000, the growth of most European cities is decidedly underwhelming. Among the cities that have so far bucked the trend are Limerick and Galway in Ireland, Montpellier and Cayenne in France and several Spanish cities, including Murcia, Palma de Mallorca and Las Palmas, all of which have experienced significant growth of two to five per cent over five years. Then there are cities that grew by about one per cent between 1996 and 2001, such as Opole and Warsaw in Poland, Lefkosia on Cyprus, Varna in Bulgaria. For the rest, stagnation or shrinkage is the order of the day according to last year’s The State of European Cities Report, which is based on the European Urban Audit. The first full-scale European Urban Audit took place in 2003 for the EU15 and in 2004 for the ten new member states plus Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. Offsetting the growth cities are a substantial number of shrinking cities, such as Riga, Tartu, Kaunas, Frankfurt an der Oder, Porto and Olzlyn, and cities that hover around zero per cent, like Vienna, Prague and Ljubljana.

One of the conclusions of The State of European Cities Report is that one-third of the 257 European cities analysed are more or less stable while a further one-third are shrinking. In only one-third of Europe’s cities is there limited growth, but the growth rate is a far cry from the dynamism that characterized European cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

No one would deny that an ageing population has different needs than a young one and that this may well constitute a reason to build, but given the enormous impact that construction and demolition have on the environment it is no more than logical to raise question marks over the simplistic automatism with which, for example, post-war residential areas are being razed and replaced by new buildings, all on the pretext of changing needs. Such question marks have been raised by, among others, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, who have studied the possibilities for regenerating the large French housing complexes of the 1960s and ’70s, a theme they explored in their book Plus: Large Scale Housing Development (2007), which gives examples of alternatives to demolition and new-build: ‘In France an important public program is being mounted to deconstruct the high-rise housing estates from the 1960s and 70s (demolition/reconstruction on a one-to-one basis), thus expressing a strong will to transform the image of the city. At the same time an important deficit is observed of public housing, one which would, on the contrary, call for an increase and an acceleration in building terms. In this context, we consider that demolition is aberrant and that transformation would permit one to respond to needs in a more economic, more effective and more qualitative way. While today the high-rise estates present housing conditions that are more often than not unsatisfactory and inadequate, we are nevertheless convinced that a potential for quality remains associated with them.’ Of all the various forms of recycling, the recycling of entire buildings is the most rigorous. Extending the lifespan of buildings which are nowadays hard put to last more than a couple of decades, is absolutely necessary in order to put a cap on waste.

The transformation of existing buildings proposed by Lacaton and Vassal offers not only a strategy for dealing with the much-maligned modernist housing estates built in the first decades after the Second World War, which are currently being demolished all over Europe, but also pointers to a worthier way of dealing with the countless historical monuments for which no other purpose can be found than a museological one. Monuments are all too often seen as buildings that cannot be added to or subtracted from without compromising their historical value, a view that amounts to total isolation. If monuments, too, were seen as historical artefacts on which it is possible to build in a respectful manner, which is precisely what happened down the centuries before the rise of the heritage commission, this valuable cultural patrimony could be put to good use. Without being overly dramatic, it can be stated that a new age is dawning in Europe, an age in which the customary answers proffered by architecture and urban design will need to be drastically revised in light of the fact that the questions have changed so significantly.