Scotland's New Urbanism: in theory and practice
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Date
27/06/2015Author
Hunter, Stacey
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Abstract
What form is taken by the architecture and planning movement known as the New
Urbanism in Scotland? To answer this, and offer an original contribution to
knowledge, the thesis takes as its starting point a survey of New Urbanism and
moves to connect it to how New Urbanism is understood and practised in
contemporary Scottish urbanism. In it, I argue that New Urbanism does not pay
attention to the complexities of the recent spatial-social history of places and adds to
the semantic confusion of new places generally. The thesis is a historical-spatial
study concerned with the transfer of knowledge between New Urbanist theories and
practice and how they have been received and reconfigured transnationally. The
thesis is organised into four parts. It begins with a literature review that is a
metahistoric account of the movement paying close attention to the symbiotic
relationship of the U.S. and Anglo-European procedures and charting the theoretical
basis and key figures, events and canonical developments. The scale narrows its
focus throughout the thesis in a linear fashion, moving in chapter three to a close
reading and review of Scottish governmental policy documents and associated
literature produced since 2001. The aim here is to chart patterns in the official
approaches that illuminate a tendency towards the New Urbanist procedure. I posit
that government support for New Urbanism demonstrates an institutional preference
for growth over social equity. I argue that the emergent New Urbanism in Scotland is
representative of a perceived lack of community aligned with the privileging of
upper middle-class tastes and lifestyles which are held as the dominant
representation of cultural life (S. Zukin, 2009). Simultaneously, a move towards neo-traditional
planning and architecture is also a politically sanctioned strategy for
economic growth that prioritises growth in housing over environmental or ecological
sustainability.
Two site studies document the emerging New Urbanism in Scotland by analysing
two different approaches. The site studies deal with one built example and one
masterplan located in Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire respectively. Separated into two
sections they can be read as comparative studies which account for two distinct
manifestations of Scottish New Urbanism; a modified Anglo-European version
promoted by the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community and an ‘imported’ US
version typically led by established urban designers DPZ (or Urban Design
Associates), with both broadly receiving government support. The purpose of the
research is to contribute to a better understanding of the movement’s origins and
subsequent recontextualisation in a specifically Scottish condition. This is arguably
relevant not only to contemporary Scottish urbanism but to general scholarship on
the organisation and politics of space.