LTNs: the plot against our cities
Welcome to the model modern neighbourhood. The High Street is gridlocked all day with stationary traffic chugging out fumes. Children scurry along it to their local school, flinching at the sporadic honking of horns. Shop owners look out over the scene, counting smaller and smaller returns. No-one comes to eat or drink on the model High Street. Previously thriving local businesses cut their losses and up sticks. The model High Street has a bank branch, a post office and a few boarded-up fronts.
But just five minutes away, in the model neighbourhood, peace reigns. The traffic is a mere thrum emanating from beyond the horizon. Where the side streets meet the High Street, little bollards, flower pots and seating areas box them off. Neighbours stop to chat in the middle of the road, kids cycle up and down. But move along a couple of blocks and one side street looks rather different. Cars jammed up, mounting pavements to make way for trucks. Air thickened with fumes, children nowhere to be seen. Its inhabitants look harried as they leave their houses – unlike their compatriots around the block.
The modern model neighbourhood is a “Low Traffic Neighbourhood” and it is the future of our cities. Endorsed by the government as a route to greening our urban centres and greeted with fervour by the new middle class, who like living in the city only in so far as it allows them to access good coffee and artisanal cheese, but resent its grit, its grime, its inherent dynamism and the proximity of the ‘precariat’ classes, who are now cast, post-pandemic, in the role of “disease reservoirs”.
Go almost anywhere in London and you will encounter the same phenomenon. Tranquil suburban-style roads fenced off by bollards, hedged off by main streets that have become either rat runs or gridlocked, depending on how much traffic is flowing along them. The old system of neighbourhoods, which grew up naturally – with high streets, side streets and closes flowing into each other in the continual thrum of city life – has been hollowed out.
Instead, we have new structures that aspire to the grandest designs of Le Corbusier and the post-war planners. For the Le Corbusier vision of the “Radiant City”, a city of parks dotted with high towers, we have skyscrapers built around transport hubs leading directly into the city’s financial centre, most visibly in Lewisham, Vauxhall and Stratford.
In the model neighbourhood, Tom and Barbara finally get to live their dream of The Good Life, this time within the city. Life is suddenly pre-lapsarian in quality, innocent – the Industrial Revolution might never have taken place.
Look more closely and all is not well nearby. There are high towers that don’t look quite so swish any more – viewed by many as ‘problem estates’, dominated by social pathologies. But tread softly here, because you tread on the dreams of long-dead men and women.
Indeed, LTNs are the latest chapter in a century of attacks by the planners on the very concept of city life. In her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the American city theorist Jane Jacobs identified planners as opponents of the “bad old city” (“The great city [to them] was Megalopolis, Tyrannopolis, Nekropolis: a monstrosity, a tyranny, a living death. It must go”).
In (understandable) reaction to the great Victorian slums, where people once lived cheek by jowl, many post-war planners saw nothing more than a chaos, a great heaving morass of disease, poverty and sin. The slum inhabitants were to be resettled – and so they were: into large boxes of flats, set amid little patches of parkland. The aim was laudable, but its execution also destroyed much that was good in the life of the old city, even as it (still) failed to eliminate poverty.
The wealthier inhabitants of the model modern neighbourhood do not seem to think much about their older, poorer neighbours – for they no longer seem to think of themselves as city-dwellers at all. They live in a radius demarcated by little journeys, at the most around fifteen minutes long. Their car lies disused; the whole family cycles now. But this new model modern neighbourhood is deprived of the very features that make cities worth living in: as Jacobs artfully put it, the “overlapping and interweaving” of life.
This greatest asset of cities, Jacobs argued, is that, as living organisms left to their own devices, urban centres facilitate the conditions for a constant flow of life, of ideas, of many meetings, the foundation of its security, its wellbeing, and its prosperity. Want to bring down street crime? Have a busy high street with thriving shops manned by concerned proprietors.
LTNs do indeed operate partly on that assumption. Is a constant flow of traffic really good for the high street? But the planned neighbourhood is not a living organism – it responds only as a marionette to the wishes, however well-intentioned, of the puppeteer: skewed by a broad class bias that asserts its right to security and cultural and political segregation above all else.
LTNs are also presented, by their proponents, as a route to meeting our “climate objectives”, according to the literature from Ealing Council. In the long term, the climate crisis can only be combatted properly by drawing on all the qualities and reserves of the human character: city-dwellers and suburbanites, townspeople and villagers, farmers and fishermen. “Climate objectives”, when motivated simply in the pursuit of marginalising one of those historical forms of life at the expense of another are no longer fit to be called high ideals, but are in character almost sectarian, a sign of the hardening of men’s hearts.
Suburbia writ large will not save the planet. And the implementation of divisive schemes like LTNs may well serve to diminish the reserves of solidarity we will all have to draw on in the coming fight over the climate, and the political concessions we may all have to make in the face of its increasing volatility.