Review

Miles Glendinning and David Page, Clone City, Crisis and Renewal in Contemporary Scottish Architecture, Polygon, Edinburgh, 1999, ISBN 0 7486 6255 3 (paperback), 236 pages, £ 11.99

This book is an ambitious one. It calls on all of us to reclaim architecture for democracy. Instead of simply "accepting what is handed to us" (p. 7), we should reflect upon and control the cities we inhabit. This book is also a powerful one. Its title is one of its most arresting metaphors. "Clone City" refers to the mind-boggling diversity of suburban neighbourhoods popping up around Scotland´s central belt which, though all different and individually branded, nonetheless look the same. Clone City powerfully describes an urban development which lacks any coherence (developments can appear anywhere) but is, at the same time, characterised by commodified homogenisation. The book acts as a powerful eye opener attacking the mindless market-driven proliferation of "separate brick boxes" (p. 102) which is the reality of (sub-) urban development in Scotland today.
The authors, an architectural historian and an architect respectively, are masters of the broad stroke. They summarise the history of Scottish architecture in a few engaging pages. But they are also acutely aware of the importance of detail; they supply superbly researched examples to back up their case when appropriate. Beautiful aerial pictures are used to good effect. Though sometimes dated, they are so stunning that they make the book worth having even if one has no intention of reading it.
That said, this book leaves a lot to be desired. Its prose is hyperbolic and difficult to penetrate. It is highly readable - for experts only. For a book that attempts to initiate a democratic debate on Scottish architecture (which goes beyond the endless arguments surrounding the building of the Scottish Parliament itself), its language is simply inappropriate. Terms such as Fordism, Taylorism, Functionalism or even Progress litter the argument with little explanation. Some terms, such as Capitalism, are used very vaguely; some, like Postmodernism, are defined in a manner which will seem non-sensical to anyone not familiar with the cannon of writing on Postmodern Architecture.
The erudite attack on Clone City is the real strength of this book. The solutions it offers are disappointing in the context of the hard-hitting nature of this attack. Not that the alternatives the authors argue for fail to make sense. There clearly is a need for more effective regional planning in Scotland (especially after local government reorganisation in 1996 abolished regional councils). There is a case for considering the central belt as one big urban mass - as Patrick Geddes's "Clydeforth". The authors' plea to actively embrace planning for Clydeforth in order to fight urban fragmentation is worthy of debate. Their call to rethink and, at times, move the Green Belt is, while controversial, also coherent. At times, the Green Belt does indeed lead to leap-froging, to people moving even further away from the city they commute to. The idea to develop New Towns to absorb excessive populations is an old-hat, however, and has, for England, at least, been made much more forcefully by Sir Peter Hall and Colin Ward in their seminal Sociable Cities (Wiley, London, 1998).
None of these suggestions are original, then. Worse, many seem half-baked and not up to meeting the challenge of Clone City. After attacking Clone City sprawl, the authors still urge us to accept and even embrace suburban development. They praise car-dependent and aesthetically disastrous edge-of-town developments such as Edinburgh Park (which David Page had a hand in as an architect). Meanwhile, their call for more public transport is welcome but, at the same time, a naive common place. Better public transport alone will not deliver more desirable and sustainable neighbourhoods (just look at Paris!). And the history of planning is littered with visionaries such as Geddes or Howard (whom the authors cite approvingly) demanding public-transport based New Towns and, in practice, achieving car-dependent East Kilbrides. What reason do Glenndinning and Page have, one wonders, to assume that their New Town proposals will fare any better in the harsh, market-driven world which they themselves describe?
Despite these shortcomings, however, this book has to welcomed in its boldness. If it manages to rekindle a debate on Scottish urban life; if it helps us to realise that cities are not places we merely inhabit, but places we must collectively shape, this book deserves our unqualified praise.

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