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How the design of our cities is making the care crisis worse [1]
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Date: 2023-07
My experience over the last decade is that wandering around new developments in urban England increasingly feels like walking around Belfast. Barbed wire, CCTV cameras and suspicion cut our communities apart. It’s no wonder we have a care crisis.
But it’s not just securitisation. In urban areas, much of the space that would historically have allowed neighbours to meet is now given over to cars. In 1971, 52% of households in the UK had at least one car. Now, it’s 78%. There are now 33 million registered vehicles in Britain, compared to 19 million in 1980.
When communities are built around cars, space to meet is replaced with space to park. Shops and services are built for people to drive to them, meaning they don’t meet on the pavement and chat – which is largely how we get to know our neighbours.
“In London, you’re now getting developments built with no parking spaces, apart from a couple for disabled people,” says Harper. “But in the rest of the country, the idea that you have slightly fewer cars, or even cars not by your front door, is very hard. It shows how dominant the car lobby is in our architecture.”
Ultimately, we have to choose between building communities centred on care, or building communities centred on cars. Too often, we stump for the latter.
Finally, says Harper, the crisis in care for people is partly a product of a failure to care for our buildings. Often, older estates – like London’s post-war social housing or Scotland’s tenements – were built with community in mind. But those communities have been ripped apart because the buildings weren’t looked after, whether by councils or other landlords, and ended up being demolished.
“Even now we know how damaging it is, there is quite a big lobby for knocking them down and replacing them with trash,” says Harper. We’re rapidly losing “a kind of architecture which promotes communality and mutual aid”.
The starting point, Harper says, “is: stop knocking everything down”.
Three years ago, I wrote for openDemocracy about my experience of depression, the broad social factors that contribute to the mental health crisis, and how to organise against them.
Over the past three years – since we had a child, since my in-laws moved nearer us, since we became much more rooted in our local community – the misery has seeped away. It’s been replaced by a sense of fulfilment, of happiness.
As humans, caring for each other is what we do best. Along with creativity, it’s what we’ll have left once we automate everything else. But just as we need time to care – time not spent working, or stuck in traffic jams – we need space. And building spaces that foster community is essential.
We’ve got another baby due in September, and I can’t wait to introduce them to the neighbours.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/care-crisis-urban-design-cars-tenement-security-communal-space/
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