KR3N.
VOLUME 1: Growing Between The Cracks
HUNDRED MILE CITY
Peter Barber
"We have 170,000 homeless people in London, one of the richest cities the world has ever known. 200 families are losing their homes every day, according to shelter, this began with the Thatcher housing act that brought in Right to Buy, which has lost us two million social units in the intervening fifty years, two million. In 1977, 50% of people in this country lived in social housing, it was an incredible achievement by the post war generation, who were building 100-150 thousand houses every year, in the aftermath of the second world war when this country was broke. We could afford to do it then, we seem not to be able to do it now, and there are three things that need to happen. We need to end the right to buy, which sort of undermines everything, everything that everybody is trying to do. The second, is we need to have rent controls in the private sector, so that people can afford to live in these properties. And the third thing is, the main thing is, we need to have a massive social housing program, and we need to return to a situation as we were after the second world war, where we were producing alot of social housing; 100-150 thousand units every year. If we did those three things, they could be started tomorrow, we could end the housing crisis tomorrow.
If the GLA is to be believed, now I think that one has to question the figures, but even if they are close to being right, we need close to another two million houses in this city in the next 15 years or so, so the question is, where are they going to go.
I think we should be looking towards suburbia."
01: Peter Barber - The True History of the 100 Mile City
Build a street based, linear city a hundred miles long, 200 metres wide and 4 storeys high. Wrap it round London. Give it little factories, schools, houses and shops laid out in terraces along intimately scaled streets and around squares. Make it a dense, intense edge to London, a confident purposeful boundary fronting a revitalised productive countryside. Hundred Mile City is a linear Barceloneta, a circular Rome, a stretched Porto. Suburbia reprogrammed, hybridized, compressed. Catalytic urbanism en flique. Ride the Hundred Mile high speed orbital monorail, souped up sky fly Circle Line – the loose ends and frayed edges of London’s transport system, its isolated city edge train and bus termini instantly, meaningfully, usefully connected with circus ride technology (Bexley to Brentford in 40 minutes) super-functional, superfast and super fun. And, in time, watch our city grow inwards, spreading like a wildfire through wasteful, anti-social, car choked suburbia. Eastwards from Richmond, west across the Newham Marshes, up from Eltham, across the hills of Greenwich and the empty green swards and golf courses of Enfield. Metro land consolidated, back filled, integrated and urbanised. London for 40 million people. A kind of inside- out plan Voisin...Ville Radieuse, Blighty style.
01: Peter Barber - The True History of the 100 Mile City
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