As the Farrell Centre launches its Ideal City project, director Owen Hopkins explores the vital roles of architecture and planning in creating a city that we all feel part of.
What is an ideal city? It’s a question that’s occupied architects and planners for centuries. Over that time, answers have ranged from the classically symmetrical compositions of the Renaissance and the morally ordered workers’ towns of the nineteenth century, to the elevated motorways and gleaming modernist buildings of the 1960s, as was the case in Newcastle and Tyneside, and the techno-futuristic visions of today’s Silicon Valley ‘tech bros’.
While these examples vary wildly, the quest for an ideal city is always reflective of some kind of dissatisfaction with the city as it is, and a consequent striving not just for improvement, but for some kind of perfection. Perhaps because of this, rarely do visions for ideal towns or cities actually get built, at least not in their entirety. And of those that do get realised, rarer still are those that actually come close to their builders’ aspirations.
“These days the search for an ideal city focuses less on proposition less radical urban transformations than on what actually exists.”
These days the search for an ideal city tends to focus less on propositions for radical urban transformations than on what actually exists. There are now many measures used to assess whether a city constitutes some kind of ideal, with a city’s ‘liveability’ the one that arguably comes closest.
Each year the Economist Intelligence Unit publishes the so-called Global Liveability Index which assesses cities across the world according to various criteria: from education and healthcare to culture and law and order. Recent years have seen Vienna and Copenhagen locked in a battle for top spot, with Swiss, Australian and Canadian cities generally taking the spaces below.
The similarity of these cities – medium-sized, wealthy, located in mostly Western countries – suggests that the criteria used to measure liveability are at the very least loaded in favour of particular kinds of urban living. And, of course, such assessments are inherently unable to capture subjective lived experience.
“An ideal city is not something you can capture or distill, but an aspiration, an urging, a promise.”
Liveability only gets us so far in trying to pin down the ideal city. In any case, an ideal city is not something you can capture or distill, but an aspiration, an urging, a promise; it is something that can never reached, and for that reason is endlessly inspiring. That said, one should be mindful, as alluded to earlier, that many – maybe even the majority – of the ‘grand projects’ dreamt up by architects and planners to make cities more ideal have ultimately proved misguided.
Countless examples spring to mind: from nineteenth-century demolitions of medieval fabric (and the subsequent ongoing destruction of much of what replaced it), to the saccharine nostalgia of 1980s ‘New Urbanism’. Yet, even the least successful of these projects are at root driven by the fundamental desire to improve the city and to leave a place better than it was found, aspirations that are integral to the disciplines of architecture and planning.
Yet, one would be forgiven for not recognising this in most of the development that passes for architecture and planning today. Once tools of positive societal change, architecture and planning have for the most part long since been subsumed into the development industry.
“We need to reclaim architecture and planning’s fundamental role in creating better, more equal and more inclusive worlds.”
But amid the many challenges cities now face – growing inequality, a rapidly heating planet, diminishing biodiversity, the legacies and resent realities of colonisation, unbridled technological change – we need, once again, to reclaim architecture and planning’s fundamental role in creating better, more equal and more inclusive worlds.
What does this mean for Newcastle and Tyneside? It’s a conurbation that’s been subject to architecture and planning at their best – think of Grainger Town, the Byker Estate and the Quayside regeneration of the 1990s and 2000s – but also their worst – out of town shopping warehouses, poor quality housing, overdevelopment in some areas and lack of investment in others.
While its impacts are by definition always local, the built environment is shaped by decisions made nationally. Over the last fifteen years the main driver of urban change has arguably been less planning policy and more the austerity and massive real terms cuts to their budgets that local government has been subjected to. As a result, many local authorities have understandably become desperate for investment whatever the cost, with developments often waved through the planning process with limited consideration of their design quality and whether they are right for the site or city as a whole.
Development is vital to creating vibrant and prosperous cities, but when architecture and planning are reduced to being instruments of investment and growth then quality always suffers and we’re left with buildings that, at best, contribute little to the city, and, at worst, are actively damaging. Even on its own terms, it’s a model that fails to deliver, with economic rewards ever more concentrated and developments contributing little to the city as a whole.
“It’s not enough to build housing if it’s not accessible to everyone.”
Recent decades have made clear that it is not enough for a city to be economically dynamic if economic opportunity is not open to all. It’s not enough for a city to be sustainable if it doesn’t respect, value and nurture biodiversity for the benefit of people and planet. It’s not enough to build housing if it’s not accessible to everyone; housing should not be a means of economic development, but an individual and collective right.
It may seem naive to be talking of an ‘ideal city’ when so many lack basic necessities and right now we are seeing cities across the world reduced to rubble. Why focus on what might be ideal when any improvement is worthwhile? But for too long we have accepted mediocre as the best we can aim for and suffered the ever increasing erosion of the things – from public space to civic infrastructure – that make our cites fundamentally collective endeavours.
The irony is there are plenty of ideal buildings and developments already out there, whether in our own city or elsewhere. The question is, how do we get more of them? The answer is by finding ways to unlock the ambition, energy and sheer optimism that’s inherent in the disciplines of architecture and planning and which has been suppressed for too long. If we need any evidence for this then we just need look around us: empowering architects and planners, and enabling them to work for the public good, is the key to ensuring the city works for everyone – to creating a city worth dreaming of.
Owen Hopkins is Director of the Farrell Centre and is co-curator of the British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.