“What is a city?” demands New York’s mid-century activist Jane Jacobs in David Hare’s new play, Straight Line Crazy. “What should it be?”

Fast-forward 70 years from the era of Robert Moses that Hare evokes, and suddenly everyone is designing futuristic eco-cities. Nearly all of them, from Norman Foster’s Amaravati in India to BIG’s BiodiverCity in Malaysia, rely on control.

Consider Saudi Arabia’s proposed development, The Line. The brainchild of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and designed by United States-based Morphosis Architects, it is intended to pivot the country into a green and oil-less future. The Line – the most dramatic element of a larger project, Neom – is a 50-storey, double-slab mirror-glass “city” of nine million that slices unswerving through the desert for 170 dead-straight kilometres inland from the Red Sea.

Jacobs’ question is immediately called to mind. Can anything so terrifyingly regimented be called a city? Or is this just more straight-line lunacy? After a century of largely disastrous, top-down, carboniferous city-building, have we learnt nothing?

The relentless geometry is merely a clue to the power structure beneath. Power is key – not just the kind of city it shapes, but who wields it. As Hare’s Jacobs goes on to demand: “Why do we live in groups? What do we want from cities? And who decides?”

Over the decades Jacobs became increasingly effective as Moses’s antagonist, her questions raining like arrows against his implacable self-belief. What do people want? Who decides? Moses’s answer: Me, of course. I decide. They want what I give them.

For half a century, from 1924 to 1975, Robert Moses occupied a dozen of New York’s top planning posts, often concurrently. He used these extraordinary powers to drive hundreds of kilometres of motorway through and across the city he loved, demolishing tens of thousands of homes. Yet he never stopped believing that this was a miracle he bestowed upon the people, freeing them “from ugliness and squalor” and getting them to the beach.

The Line offers a direct analogy. Prince Mohammed bin Salman calls it “a civilisational revolution that puts humans first … a city that delivers new wonders for the world”. And the images are seductive enough. Views between The Line’s parallel walls show a broad, lush slot of layered gardens, vast aerial plazas and projecting glassy rhomboids, all stacked skyward. A central transit system connects one end to the other in 20 minutes and there’s more abundant planting on the roof. There’s even a faux waterfall, beside which the humans are tiny in scale.

Yet the idyllic picnicky quality is surely an illusion. Even if the central slot is 140 metres wide – making the mirrored buildings either side just 30 metres deep – its defining walls are almost four times that high. Light filtering to the bottom will be minimal at best – more prehistoric canyon than Elysian field. As to the architecture, nothing about its jagged, glassy embrace invites dissent, disobedience or even choice.

As a vision of “civilisational revolution”, especially from a country where human rights protesters are still routinely jailed, led by a prince suspected of sanctioning the murder of dissenting journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Istanbul embassy, it’s all rather chilling.

And there’s the rub. We are hive creatures, sure – but hive creatures tormented and redeemed by dreams of free will. We crave both the safety of the swarm and the exhilaration of the solo flight. Our cities must reflect this. Most critically, public spaces must be truly public, open to all and actively nurturing difference and eccentricity.

The best cities, even those set out on a simple grid, are enablers not enforcers. They offer option and enticement as much as constraint, negative spaces as well as positive. A good city enables gathering, but it accommodates melancholy and refusal as readily as shared celebration and joy. Above all, it must offer a sense of freedom. Within the bounds of etiquette and law, the city should liberate your truest self.

The Line’s website, as if anticipating such critique, proffers a fly-through vid in which a ponytailed and T-shirt-and-jeans-clad girl leaps, jogs and soars through the central space, trailing fingers through ponds and floating, weightless, into the celestial beyond. This is bizarre in a country where women, although now allowed to drive, can still be jailed for disobeying a male relative.

But there is a deeper conundrum too. History shows that some of the most glorious cities (think Paris, think Rome) have emerged from thoroughly oppressive regimes. Conversely, there’s scant evidence that democracy can produce an urban fabric that’s even vaguely likeable, much less an adequate response to climate change. If it’s zero-carbon we need, a command economy can be far more expeditious than anything needing majority support.

Neom bills itself as an “accelerator of human progress”. But how progressive is it, exactly? Already it is accused of radical elitism. The proposed flying cars, robotic servants and glow-in-the-dark beaches and vast floating gin palaces are marred by claims of displacement, persecution and murder from members of the 20,000-strong Huwaitat tribe who traditionally occupy the desert site.

All of which only makes democracy’s task more urgent. It’s not simple. Because democracy is desire-based we must create not only the physical forms and systems of sustainable cities but also the metaphysical qualities – beauty and choice, intricacy and walkability, social inclusion and genuine citizen engagement – to make them objects of desire.

Telosa, a city for, initially, 50,000 proposed at some yet-undetermined desert locale in America, seems, at first glance, both less formally radical and more socially acute. Designed by Bjarke Ingels of the aptly named BIG architects, and funded by e-commerce billionaire Marc Lore, it is based on the familiar suburb-and-tower model that combines Ebenezer Howard’s 1902 Garden Cities of Tomorrow with Le Corbusier’s tower-based The City of Tomorrow (1929) to give a density similar to San Francisco’s.

In line with every eco-city cliché, Telosa – pictured as a spreading low-rise mat punctuated by bulging eruptions of organically shaped towers – claims a “mission and vision oriented to put people first”. But there is a difference here. Describing itself as “open, fair, inclusive”, Telosa centres on “equitism”, where all land is owned by a “community endowment focused on improving … life for all citizens”.

It sounds great, until you realise that such a community endowment is essentially what is meant by government. You realise, too, that this model has been tried, in Canberra circa 1945, and ends up no less controlling than anything else – in Canberra’s case, it was control-by-road-engineer.

So it comes back to Jacobs’ question: who decides? Like Norman Foster, and even Morphosis, Bjarke Ingels is a fine architect, despite his global celebrity status. Ingels has produced some astonishing and good-hearted buildings, like his recent affordable spiral housing in Aarhus. But a city is not an artefact.

Design is important, yes. But the very idea of a masterplanned city – indeed, the very word – betrays the patriarchy beneath the skin. And the fact that BIG can seriously propose not merely a city but a master-planned planet Earth shows just how little we’ve evolved from control-by-male-primate. It is time we saw that as a problem, not the solution.

What, then, is the answer? To survive and undo climate change with civilisation in any way intact, we must somehow combine design solutions, which are inevitably top-down (implying control), with genuine participation. There are many ways to do this – limit building size to enable citizen builders, encourage co-ops, supply land, and educate and engage the populace instead of excluding and pacifying them. But our efforts to listen and respond to people, and to nature, must be genuine and they must be immediate. If we are to fly free as well as stay safe, we must meet top-down with bottom-up, then equalise these forces to sit side by side.

Share this article