Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale - AD Primer

1On Scale and Size

‘Dunwich with its towers and many thousand souls, has dissolved into water, sand and thin air.’

WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995¹

Cities grow by nature; few are stable, and some shrink. London doubled in size between 1918 and 1939 but shrank from the 1950s to the 1970s. The population of Paris has tripled in the century from 1910 to 2010 while its land area has increased by 25 times. Doha’s population has multiplied a hundred-fold in the last 70 years. Rome shrank from a city of over a million 2,000 years ago to a town of a mere six thousand, 500 years later. The small village of Dunwich in East Anglia, which is now famous only for its fish and chips and has a population of 120 souls, was once ‘one of the most important ports in Europe in the Middle Ages. There were more than fifty churches, monasteries and convents, and hospitals here; there were shipyards and fortifications and a fisheries and a merchant fleet of eighty vessels; and there were dozens of windmills. All of it has gone under, quite literally, and is now below the sea, beneath alluvial sand and gravel, over an area of two or three square miles.’²

This chapter asks two questions, both from the point of view of the few who are designing and the many who are experiencing cities. Firstly, on the assumption that there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer as to how large a city should be (either its physical area or its population), are there successful ways, healthy ways, that it can be structured ...