New York and London dig deep into resilience resources

Friday 27 November 2020

Editor, NLQ and New London Weekly

New York and London dig deep into resilience resources

The High Line, New York

London and New York will dig deep into their resources of resilience and may emerge with more adaptive reuse and a new generation of ‘roomier’, healthier buildings that are ‘more like a mitten than a glove’. But cities may also undergo a period of ‘exhalation’ with people working in ‘soft hubs’ between the CBD and the home, and a new focus on the suburbs given an enduring ‘folk memory’ of the profound impact that Covid has had – and on the way we do things in future.

Those were some of the main points to emerge from a fascinating NLYON session last week – in which key thinkers from New York and London exchanged views over how each city has developed over the last decades and is likely to in the ones to come.

New York has been hit by crises in the last decade, said Benjamin Prosky, executive Director, Centre for Architecture AIA NY, such as 2012’s Hurricane Sandy following on from recession showing how climate can ‘overwhelm’ the city, but leading to new zoning to prevent flooding. New York rebounded from that and became more tourist-friendly and safer. But when September 11 happened it was ‘pronounced doomed’, only to return with families moving back from the suburbs and building boomed. Today, though, public housing has ‘fallen into crisis’ through being too dependent on federal aim under Donald Trump, and the city’s transit system is ‘on life support’.

Kohn Pedersen Fox president James von Klemperer said that as Descartes reminded us in the 17th century: ‘if we focus too much on the hope that comes after crisis then we will become complacent’. Events like earthquakes and wars have shaped many of our cities but it was worth remembering that immediately following September 11 we were thinking about the end of the high-rise building and decentralisation of the business district, but the opposite happened over time.

The ‘phenomenon’ of New York’s Hudson Yards project today affirms the importance of mixed use, said von Klemperer, and more super tall buildings have been built in New York City in the last 15 years than in any other city in the world. Further, we can prognosticate about how ‘sticky’ some of the issues raised by Covid turn out to be, but at least advances in vaccines allow for optimism. ‘There is some light at the end of the tunnel, and we hope there’s not a tunnel at the end of the light’. Whatever crises emerge it will be our urban cultures and knowledge-based economies of technology of biotech and more – especially in New York and London working together – that will bring a new hope for the future’.

During a Q&A discussion von Klemperer added that current times were perhaps a ‘heyday’ in terms of problem-solving and recapturing the value in old buildings but that we have to start to think about other parts of the metropolitan area. And that buildings will be ‘roomier’ in future as a result of the pandemic, becoming more the ‘mitten’ rather than the ‘glove’.

Yolande Barnes, Chair, Bartlett Real Estate Institute said that we have been living through an urban renaissance and have come to think that this is the normal way cities should work. They have been ‘inhaling’ in terms of thinks like power, money, population and cultural capital, and before Covid we had started to go through the fourth industrial revolution and digitalisation. But cities like New York and London were already starting to ‘breathe out’, said Barnes, leaving ‘particles’ over a quite wide area way beyond the five boroughs or 32, in the latter’s case, with residents being pushed out due to affordability issues. In the UK this has begun being to places like Bristol, Glasgow and also other small cities and towns, and Covid has accelerated that.

‘If the epidemic has taught us anything it is that it’s brought home to almost every householder just how important neighbourhood is’, said Barnes. Both London and New York are losing populations, Barnes added, and the notion that the centre will continue to grow is ‘fundamentally problematic’, with the potential instead to create ‘soft hubs’ in intermediate spaces between the CBD and people’s local neighbourhoods. ‘Consequently, I think our task in future will be to urbanise the suburbs’, she said.

In a Q&A session Barnes added that planners who are willing to create more sui generis uses and allow for highly flexible, almost hospitality-like management and leasing of space ‘could really fast forward into the 21st century’, casting off the shackles of homogenous, single use. ‘We have to change our siloed late 20th century practises into something very much more agile, dynamic and nuanced as we go forward’, she said. ‘I'm not quite saying “tear up the London Plan”, but I think there's a very good case for having a post Covid overhaul of it’.

Other speakers included Howard Slatkin, Deputy Executive Director for Strategic Planning, NYC Department of City Planning who felt that challenges of the near future will be from tight budgets and revenue shortfalls, and thus the need to tide over infrastructure and institutions. ‘The future of New York City is very bright if we can navigate the short term’, he said. In the recent US elections, however, ‘it was clear that one of the candidates cared for cities and the other had it in for them’. ‘That’s really shocking’. Kim Yao, principal of Architecture Research Office showed the thinking behind the Visualise NYC 2021 project towards making a better, greener, equitable and more liveable city. And Giles French, External Affairs Director, Innovation & Growth, City of London Corporation, said that although this had been an extraordinary and, in many ways, a ‘tragic’ year for both London and New York, business had been resilient and adaptable and the City is ‘very much of the view that the office is not dead’. This was principally because of the agglomeration effect of being near clients and competitors and bringing people together for innovation and collaboration. Digital communication is fine, but is a ‘diminishing return’ because it fails in terms of allowing for the meeting of new clients. The trick will be to provide safe, secure and pleasant urban environments that convince people to travel in to meet with colleagues. ‘I don’t want to sound flippant; the last months have been significant but they haven’t unravelled thousands of years of human evolution’, said French. ‘People like meeting one another and they like working together to create things’

Finally, the panel was asked for one thing that should be top priority in the run up to mayoral elections in both cities next year, with answers ranging from climate action to repurposing the suburbs, fixing Penn Station to affordability of housing and restoring the tax base for the long term good.

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David Taylor

Editor, NLQ and New London Weekly