Reflections following the horror in London

Faced with an outcome which leaves fifty people dead on the streets of London, there is little urban planners can say that does not seem trite, obvious or impotent. Less than twenty four hours before the terrorist attacks, the whole UK was celebrating the success of London’s bid to stage the 2012 Olympic Games. Ironically, the issue of "designing out" terrorism in the proposed Olympic Village was amongst the key issue being discussed in the media. But faced with an immediate terrifying and lethal example, what can be done?

Of course it is technically possible to design relatively "secure" cities but who would want to live in them. Imagine life with constant scanning and the cold starkness of a bomb-proof built environment.

At the risk of being trite, yesterdays bombings in London do prompt planners to review the key issues in city making.

Urban terrorism is the most profound expression of alienation. Whatever else we might say about the perpetrators of inhuman acts such as those of yesterday, we can, with certainty, say that they share nothing with their host community. The reasons for this alienation are as much global as local. However, in recent years planners have been looking again at the relationship between design and sustainable community.

We have already travelled a long way from Melvin Webbers notion that the traditional neighbourhood is defunct in the age of information and private transportation. But we still keep defaulting to the idea that community and nighbourhood is about things – a sort of tick box of neighbourhood planning.

The British new town planners were fond of building communities on the basis of one part balance of socio-economic balance, one part local facilities and one part local greenery. More recently, the new urbanists have replaced the old new town tick boxes with a fresh matrix. But it is still about things and not people.

Long ago, the marvellous Wilmott and Young, Family and Kinship in East London (1957), began to alert us to the fact that community building was first and foremost about people and their relations with other people and not things and shapes.

For those who have lost their lives doing nothing more than sitting on a bus or train, it is all too late and certainly trite.. And the real answers have more to do with Glen Eagles than the future planning of places like Milton Keynes. But after the funerals there is still the work of city making. So let us at least, reflect on how we should best proceed for the future.