Upfront: The urban apocalypse

As someone with kids, I am terrified for the future. The big moment will come when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report [due in April] meets the United Nations’ Challenge of the Slums report produced four years ago. That is when climatic and environmental issues combine with the lack of investment in cities.

Cities are humanity’s art. The only way we can survive environmental change is by living in cities, but we have no urban design knowledge. It is amazing how few books there are on the anthropology of a place. I’m not sure that the last generation of architects in Europe have progressed from Le Corbusier in understanding the micro-sociology of buildings and space. In wealthier societies, there has been a backlash against suburbs and people are more pro-urbanism. But that is an ersatz urbanism of homogeneous shopping malls. It is not the urbanism of Baudelaire, of Walt Whitman.

The only way to square the contradiction between environmental sustainability and people’s right to a decent way of living is through public space. The early 20th-century Russian constructivists had the concept of providing minimal sanitary housing and luxurious public spaces such as cinemas. That remains sensible, but it cannot be imposed.

The United Nations should, however, outlaw second homes by charter. You go to so many places and they are full of second homes and the only employment for local people is gardening. Second homes have had the impact of the bubonic plague.

In regeneration, any move you make to improve a neighbourhood displaces the people who live there. In California, the working class is being pushed away from the coast inland to the desert. In a global sense, all the places with landscape, with history, can be capitalised. The working classes end up with the shit space and the indistinguishable space. That’s happening everywhere. Kids are shooting each other everywhere. The macro-problem is employment and masculinity having value in society. But there is an interesting contradiction: street gangs are fiercely local and a lot of their qualities can be positive, but it is local patriotism gone berserk.

In the UK it is vital to retrieve the dreams and traditions of the design of cities and rediscover the traditions of the Arts and Crafts movement and Marx. In that tradition, there is wonderful social housing that seeks a balance of community.

I fantasise about getting someone, the RIBA or MIT maybe, to set up a community thesaurus on the internet, an Alexandrian library of urban solutions, of design ideas, so that if you are a low-income community and you want to know how to do something, you can pick up 50 ideas. Every city should have an area where you can experiment with urbanism. It is important to establish a site that gives people access to ideas about creating the fabric of neighbourhoods.