The conundrum of the Third Magnet: Michael Hebbert casts an eye to the future for signs of further experiments in realising Howard's 'Third Magnet'.

DIAGRAM NO. 1 of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform is famously epigrammatic. (1) In Routledge's 2003 full-colour facsimile, Ebenezer Howard's three magnets look as red and solid as if he had just picked them up from the ironmonger's counter in Stoke Newington High Street. (2) That vivid physical imagery gives energy to its text. 'Town' and 'Country' are the fields of force generated by the positive and negative polarities down each side of their horseshoes.

'Town-Country', the Third Magnet, is as enigmatic as epigrammatic. Ebenezer Howard has split the town and country magnets down the middle and joined their positive halves together. He claims to have forged a supermagnet with all the urban and rural advantages and none of the drawbacks.

It is the work of a fearless lateral thinker, the single-minded independent inventor who redesigned the type-alignment mechanism on Remington's QWERTY keyboard in his own home workshop.

As we know from Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde and The Time Machine, these late Victorian home experiments were liable go wrong. The oxymoronic third gadget might turn out to be demagnetised. Worse, it could switch into a double negative. Perhaps all three outcomes have occurred since the publication of Tomorrow some wonderful experiments in town-country design, some blandly neutral suburbia, and not a few new towns from hell.

For the past 100 years this journal has kept a watching brief on the continuing experiment of the Third Magnet, tracking the controversies, exposing the shams, and updating the design from Town-Country, to Garden City, to New Town, to Sustainable Community. In the early days of the TCPA it was a question of fending off the speculators who marketed a street of semis as a garden city on the strength of a handful of ornamental cherries along the pavement (nowadays CNU--the Congress for the new Urbanism--has to do just the same with suburban promoters who think a vinyl front porch and picket fence make 'New Urbanism').

During the great build-out of the new towns, F.J. Osborn's vigorous editorials and commentaries and David Eversley's sharply-written 'Semi-Detached Views' offered a constant check against architectural pretension and bureaucratic compromise in the state-sponsored decentralisation programme. Over the past two decades the journal has worked persistently to push town and country planning onto an sounder basis of environmental sustainability. One of the milestones was the 1998 publication of Sociable Cities, in which T&CP regulars Peter Hall and Colin Ward redid the 'Three Magnets' diagram for the century of global warming, household fission, automobile dependency, EU agricultural surplus, and urban loft living. (3)

Unlike the Government's draft PPS1: Creating Sustainable Communities, with its question-begging four-part definition of sustainability, (4) Hall and Ward tried to keep it tangible and unambiguous. To mop up development pressure in the outer South East of England they proposed a series of compact country towns along railway lines and bus routes. The design concept matched Peter Calthorpe's vision of The Next American Metropolis--a constellation of transit-oriented-developments and pedestrian pockets. (5) The double-positives of this Third Magnet were pedestrian-friendly urbanism with global access, sustainability with stakeholdership, quality of life with social inclusion, and express metro/light rail with 'no need for car'.

That was in 1998, when prospects for integrated land use and transport planning seemed rosy under New Labour, the motorist lobby was dormant, and 4x4 vehicles were mostly used by people with gumboots in the back. It looks too innocent now. Today's metallic-sheened, fat-tyred land-cruisers suggest a psychological turn towards a more unsociable Town-Country concept--the vehicle as fortress to roam landscapes of fear. Politicians reciprocate that fear. Car advertisers like to place the gas-guzzling product in brutal streets and barren wildernesses. Their double-negative version of the Third Magnet is politically potent and it looks horribly prophetic for the new century.

This journal was launched as a campaigning instrument, to argue evidence and win hearts and minds. In the age of the SUV it has its work cut out. Without trying to predict to-morrow's salient issues I want to highlight three of the more significant aspects of the sustainable community design effort.

The first is road layout and the view from the steering wheel. Traffic circulation is the least-altered aspect of the town-building process. (6) Despite fringe improvements highway engineering remains locked in the 1960s mindset of free-flow vehicle movement, hierarchical separation of through from local traffic, and the geometric standards of the 1994 Design Manual for Roads and Bridges and the 1977 Design Bulletin 32. (7) Meanwhile residential layout has moved a long way, thanks to PPG3: Housing, positive national design guidance, and the real shift of consumer preferences towards more enclosed and joined-up types of urban space. The incongruity between the standards for highways and urban design is producing bizarre new environments in which clumps of compact development sprout up on the spurs of distributor roads like cocktail cherries on a melon. At the entry to home-zones, traffic-calming bends and bumps mark the transitions from 50 mph to 20 mph design speeds. Subtopia masquerading as urbanism is giving 'sustainable communities' a bad name. (8)

As for the actual buildings, a new town's newness ought to create scope for innovative design and tenure. Where are they? Five years ago the Urban Task Force's verdict was that Britain lags badly behind her neighbours in terms of everyday quality in new building. (9) Of course there are wonderful exceptions, but from the train window viewpoint the verdict holds. CABE (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) needs all the support it can get in its continuing efforts to help town-builders find their way out the dead-ends of neo-Georgian, Tudorbethan, and pseudovernacular pastiche.

As for innovative tenure, the TCPA's original reformist vision of collective freehold and community capture of betterment has dwindled down to section 106 negotiations over provision and maintenance of the landscape buffers along the distribution roads. Apart from the Lightmoor project, authority has kept a deaf ear to this journal's (i.e. Colin Ward's) tenacious advocacy of small-scale ownership and self-build. (10)

The Government's large-scale development initiatives through housing market renewal areas (HMRAs) and the Sustainable Communities Plan seem to be locked into a neo-corporatist model of land assembly and unified delivery. Those issues of subdivision and small-lot development urgently need bringing onto the core agenda for sustainable development in the UK, as they are in France and Germany. (11) The environmental and social arguments are clear, even if Peter Hall and Colin Ward stretched credulity when they offered, in Sociable Cities, the political prize of a grand coalition of innumerable self-builders and organic market gardeners breaking the NIMBY grip on middle England. (12)

The biggest conundrum in the design of the Town-Country magnet is one that Howard and Unwin would recognise--how to incorporate nature. Too much grass spells prairie planning and car-dependency. Too little implies mean streets, asthma, and town cramming. The pedestrian-friendly city needs high-density and compact land uses for travel-reduction. The resource-friendly city needs low-density for sustainable drainage, high BREEAM values, and garden-based food production and recycling. The city of biodiversity needs vegetated areas to be linked together in networks and chains of habitats. (13) The humanly liveable city needs them to be separated and contained into a public realm of discrete urban space. (14) These are fundamental contradictions.

Squaring them could seem an impossible design challenge. But there are already many useful design precedents in the Town Magnet--enclosed but interlinked gardens, street trees and parks, balconies and roof terraces, formerly polluted river and canal belts now adventitiously reverted into corridors of biodiversity. Older streets, where they survive, are naturally traffic-calmed by the tightness of their corner radii and carriageway widths. Much of the pre-modern building stock has at least the potential of upgrading and retrofitting for long life, loose fit and low energy consumption.

Indeed the Urban Task Force's vision of a sustainable urban neighbourhood looks pretty much like Ebenezer Howard's abominated Stoke Newington. (15) New Urbanists have got it right: the best place to find typologies for the century ahead is to dig backwards.

Talking of which, I've just gone back to check the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, and it seems that Howard was right. A ferromagnetic bar can have two positive tips. So that Third Magnet is a viable metaphor, perhaps. Even if not, it will still remain a magnetic image for town and country planners searching for the concept of a habitat that is good for real people and for Gala too.

Note

(1) P. Hall: Cities of To-Morrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, Third Edition, p.31

(2) E. Howard: To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Original Edition with Commentary by Peter Hall, Dennis Hardy & Colin Ward. Routledge, London, 2003

(3) P. Hall and C. Ward: Sodable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1998, p.104

(4) The four aims are on pp.9-12 in the ODPM's Consultation Paper on Planning Policy Statement 1, Creating Sustainable Communities. Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, London, 2004

(5) P. Calthorpe: The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1993

(6) M. Hebbert: 'Engineering, urbanism and the struggle for street design'. Journal of Urban Design, 2005, 10 (1), Feb.

(7) See the case studies in Paving the Way. Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, London, 2002

(8) J. Glancey: 'Taking the yellow-brick road to subtopia'. Guardian, 30 Jul. 2003

(9) Towards an Urban Renaissance. Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, London 1999, p.83

(10) 'Do-it-yourself new towns'. In, Sociable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, (3) pp.191-8

(11) For the most famous example, the Vauban quarter in Freiburg, see http://www.vauban.de/info/abstract.html

(12) 'Self-sustaining coalitions'. In, Sociable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, (3) pp.206-7

(13) See contributions by Nick Dodd and David Alexander to the 'Planning for biodiversity' theme in Town & Country Planning, 2004, 73, Oct.

(14) M. Haler and A. Reijndorp: In Search of New Public Domain. NAI Publishers, Amsterdam, 2001

(15) See Towards an Urban Renaissance, (3) p.66

Michael Hebbert is Professor of Town Planning at the University of Manchester.

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Author:	Hebbert, Michael
Publication:	Town and Country Planning
Date:	Dec 1, 2004
Words:	1683
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