It’s not about compact cities

Abstract

While the compact city has become a major element for sustainable urban development and one of the most controversially discussed issues in contemporary urban studies, I argue that compactness has been a central element of various models of urban development for over 100 years. When we talk about a ‘renewed agenda’ for the compact city, we need to consider how historic settlement patterns, shaped by specific socio-historical conditions and ideas of compactness are re-structured through the contemporary conception of the compact city. My main argument is that the compact city in its current conception is mainly treating symptoms of unsustainable urban development but does not go deep enough to change existing patterns of uneven social geographies. By integrating the compact city with Henri Lefebvre’s conception of centrality I discuss four socio–material relations to demonstrate how centrality affects the social unevenness of spatial development and can lead us towards an understanding of compact cities as multi-scalar fields of relations today.

Is it an indicator for the failure of geographers, planners, and sociologists in particular, and for politics and society in general that we have to talk about a ‘renewed agenda’ of and for the compact city? While the compact city has become a hegemonic concept in urban development over the past 20 years, as this contribution discusses, I would argue that various morphological forms of compactness have been a central element of urban planning for over 100 years. So where does the need for a renewed agenda originate – and what about it is renewed, exactly? Are we discussing compactness as a reaction to the unsustainable, single-family-home-induced urban sprawl that characterized so much of this same 100-year time span? Or have different historic models of compact cities, derived from a specific configuration of societal ideals and their embeddedness in socio-political transformations, been at fault for this development?

Haarstad et al.'s (2023) critique of the contemporary growth-oriented, socially uneven, and container-space-like conception of the compact city is a timely reminder for fields like human geography and planning to question the prevailing hegemony of the compact city discourse and its materialization in the built environment. I, therefore, concur with Haarstad et al. that the understanding of compact cities needs to be embedded in relational and multi-scalar processes, in order to appropriately critique and change the trajectory of the compact city. However, we must be concise in our judgement of the injustices of the compact city, and precise in the use of existing concepts aiming to unmask the societal relations that give reason to the injustices of the compact city. Academic literature has thankfully produced a number of entry points into this critique – many of which are named by Haarstad et al.

In reflecting on this discourse, I will first briefly discuss different historical models of compactness, and also assess its contemporary relationship with ‘sustainability’. Thereafter I connect the compact city to Henri Lefebvre's concept of centrality as a critical resource for urban life. I will then utilize four specific socio-material relations to demonstrate how centrality affects the social unevenness of spatial development and can lead us toward an understanding of compact cities as multi-scalar fields of relations today.

Compact cities as a problem-solving and amplifying container space

The compact city has been framed as a central element of sustainable urbanism over the past several decades (Krueger et al., 2019: 25) and it is defined by the OECD (2012: 1), one of its main promoters, by three main characteristics: ‘dense and proximate development patterns, urban areas linked by public transport systems and accessibility to local services and jobs’. At this point, I raise the question of what compactness in different urban development models that have been developed as specific answers to socio-spatial problems over the last 100 years, means.

Even though Ebenezer Howard's Garden City has been criticized for promoting urban sprawl, the lower levels of densities he proposed were an answer to the living conditions of the urban poor during 19th-century industrialization. Howard in effect promoted rail-bound inter-urban linkages, neighborhoods that offer housing and working possibilities to socially mixed populations as well as urban containment through green belts (Howard, 2015; Sharifi, 2016: 4). As another example, the compactness of the bourgeois city of the 19th century was the inspiration for the urban development model Urbanität durch Dichte (urbanity through density) in western Germany in the 1960s. Density and multiplicity of building styles, a mixture of functions, the polarization of public and private spaces as well and a hierarchy of public spaces and streets were the main ingredients of this model to counter the monofunctional urban developments of the 1950s. Planning practice, however, was unable to implement these ideas into realization (Krämer, 2007: 106–8; Siebel, 2018: 2756).

As these two examples show: densities of built form, dwellings, functions, and people have been variables within different compact city models since the origins of contemporary planning strategies; these variables were adjusted to frame each model as an answer to specific socio-spatial problems associated with the existing structure of the built environment. Furthermore, each model was discursively demarcated from an undesirable status quo, asserting the ‘new’ compact city as a desirable morphology with which to overcome these existing problems.

Today the compact city has been framed as the problem-solver par excellence from a sustainable urbanism perspective. 23 years ago, Burton (2000: 1969) wrote that ‘the claimed advantages of the compact city have been well-documented – they include: conservation of countryside; less need to travel by car, thus reduced fuel emissions; support for public transport and walking and cycling; better access to services and facilities; more efficient utility and infrastructure provision; and revitalization and regeneration of inner urban areas’. However, Burton (2000) simultaneously questioned whether or not the compact city leads to just cities. More recent literature continually notes many negative side effects of compact city developments such as displacement, rising housing prices, and ‘green gentrification’ (Cavicchia and Cucca, 2020; Debrunner et al., 2020; Quastel et al., 2012; Rice et al., 2020).

In a paradoxical twist of fate, the compact city does not lead to a more sustainable future, but amplifies problems of unjust socio-spatial development. Tunström (2019: 55) concludes that within compact city development, the ‘social’ is associated with superficially treating symptoms of these uneven developments: ‘e.g., solving segregation by mixing tenure forms, solving the lack of social capital by area-based community projects or solving the democratic deficit by participatory experiments’. This illustrates that just as we need to treat sustainability as a relational concept on a city and regional (Miller and Mössner, 2020) as well as on a global scale, we cannot think of the compact city as a spatial container. Only if we move beyond this thinking, can we understand the socio-spatial injustices that are produced by the compact city as a hegemonic concept in planning – and that are reproduced in compact cities as living spaces.

Compact citie’s relationship with a centrality

While I agree with the critiques presented by Haarstad et al., I question their conceptual fuzziness. They offer a wide array of possible entry points to the debate, but they do not clearly state their primary conceptual grounding. In response, I suggest engaging with the multi-scalar and relational understanding of urbanization that Henri Lefebvre and proceeding generations of scholars have developed. The compact city might appear to have much in common with Lefebvre's notion of centrality, with its focus on social, morphological, and functional density, since centralities form through the accumulation of people, goods, services, symbols, or knowledge (Schmid, 2010: 177). However, while density is just a measure and the compact city is, at the moment, conceptualized as a physical (and social) container, centrality arranges a field of relations that can be described by terms such as exchange, proximity, convergence, congregation, encounter, and information (Schmid, 2010: 178).

Centrality's most powerful expression lies in ‘the concentration of powers: the decision’ (Kipfer et al., 2008: 291). Just as decisions are imbued with the power relations of the decision-makers and decision-takers, the formation of centralities depends on and are constituted by peripheries and peripheralizations (Howe, 2022: 3; Kipfer et al., 2008: 292) and hence are grounded in ‘exclusionary, exploitative, dispossessive, and authoritarian modes of governance that form around and beyond the areas of concentrated urbanization’ (Gündoğan, 2021: 62). It could be argued then, the decisions about compact cities are not made for the people living there, but over the people living and going to live there. Lefebvre himself was highly conscious of these developments when he referred to ‘workers and surplus population’ being ‘banished’ to ‘satellite cities’ (Kipfer et al., 2008: 292).

Centrality hence is a critical resource (Schmid, 2010: 190), not only for compact cities to become spaces of encounter, congregation, and exchange, but even more for the production of compact cities. It is necessary to more closely examine who decides about the production of compact cities, under which socio-historical conditions; which compact cities are discursively and materially elevated over others; the planning-political hegemonies that are used to produce compact cities; and which people are affected by this production. Bringing the compact city into conversation with Lefebvre's conception of centrality allows us to turn from the compact city as a physical container of various densities towards an understanding of the compact city as embedded in uneven socio-spatial and decision-making structures, across multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Such a scientific endeavor would, of course, require more resources than this essay can provide, but I will briefly introduce two existing settlements that are characterized by different forms of compactness, to offer a glimpse into four socio–material relations that I deem of critical importance for fully apprehending the socio-spatial injustices of the compact city. While both examples represent different models of development in the western Austrian province of Vorarlberg, both aimed to create dwelling space for migrant worker populations and are currently owned by non-profit housing companies. First, the Südtirolersiedlung (south Tyrolian settlement) in the town of Bludenz was planned and partly built during the rule of the National Socialists in Austria and reflects what could be termed an Alpinist garden-city architecture. Second, the Paspels housing blocks in the market village of Rankweil consist mainly of three 12-storey housing towers that can be related to the ‘urbanity through density style’ of the 1960s. Even though their built form as well as historical contexts differ highly, these two models of compaction share at least four socio-material relations when considered through the lens of centrality.

First, compact cities have often been developed to provide affordable housing to laborers and their families. This paternalistic idea masks the fact that many workers were victims of active and passive dispossession and forced migration. Even though in both the Südtirolersiedlung as well as the Siedlung Paspels, future inhabitants chose to move to Austria, their decisions were predisposed for them. During the beginning of the 1940s, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini resolved to relocate the German-speaking population of South Tyrol to western Austria, by threatening to either move there or else relinquish their German identities and names, and completely Italianize. Several thousand South Tyrolians thus settled in western Austria, most of them into one of the newly-built Südtirolersiedlungen, including the one in Bludenz. In the case of Paspels, the whole neighborhood was built with the sole purpose of providing guest workers from Turkey and former Yugoslavia with cheap accommodations next to a large textile factory. Once again, the decision was not between equal options; people were implicitly forced to choose migration, in order to support their families – or else fight against the industrialization of the agricultural sector in their home countries.

Second, while migrant workers were a welcome addition to the depleted labor market in Austria, their social integration was not a political intention. In many instances and for many decades, people living in these settlements were neglected by the municipal administrations. Even though South Tyrolians had the same native language and religion as the population of western Austria, they were stigmatized at their workplaces and daily lives, and did not even receive support from the municipality for community activities until the 1980s. While the people living in the Südtirolersiedlung had the ‘luxury’ of relatively stable accommodation, the guest workers in Paspels lived in highly precarious conditions, completely at the mercy of their employers. The company rented all the apartments of the non-profit housing organization and then, in turn, only leased them to their employees. This meant that, if workers lost their jobs in the factory due to any reason, from economic restructuring to personal illness, they lost their apartment within one month. This practice only changed in 2006, when the municipality assumed the leasing of the apartments.

Third, compact cities are usually defined by a mix of different programmatic functions. If and for how long this mix exists is embedded in broader socio-economic developments as well as political support. Depletion of social infrastructures, as is currently experienced in both of the examples presented, leads to a reduction in possibilities for exchange, congregation, and encounter and hence precludes the basis for the emergence of centrality from forming at all. Until the 1990s the Südtirolersiedlung in Bludenz had a fair share of small service and retail shops, which are completely eroded today, through the emergence of large-scale supermarket and service hubs while politics focuses on inner-city revitalization. In Paspels, such amenities in effect never existed, as they were never in the interest of the company that controlled nearly every aspect of life for the people living there. In 2008 the company even allowed the rental contract for a community room to expire. Until now, no suitable replacement has been declared.

Fourth, with housing prices rising due to the convergence of many political and economic factors, both the Südtirolersiedlung and the Siedlung Paspels are gaining political interest. This is also due to the fact that both now require investment into the structure of the buildings as well as their surrounding infrastructure and environment. Neighborhood development processes were started in both cases, with a focus on increasing their livability and climate resilience. The power structures these processes are embedded in are highly uneven. The Südtirolersiedlung could be straightforward; however, financing a refurbishment of the settlement is highly complicated. A rise in rent for the tenants seems unavoidable. In Paspels, the situation is even more complex. There, the development of the neighborhood was subordinated to the economic development of the two neighboring companies. Planning seems to be reduced to a return to patriarchal forms of ‘caring’, in which the role of the residents is being relegated to participants in participatory processes, which is particularly superficial in the face of these highly uneven power structures.

Conclusion and outlook

In this essay, I argued that Lefebvre's concept of centrality can become a point of reference with which to embed the discourse of the compact city in a relational and multi-scalar framework. Second, it can be used to investigate the systematic disadvantages of existing living spaces. Finally, it embodies the critique of the existing hegemonies of the compact city. Socio-material relations such as forced migration, politico-administrative neglection, infrastructural depletion, and patriarchic forms of regeneration can offer first insights into the value of integrating the compact city with Lefebvre's concept of centrality. These four socio–material relations are influenced by processes and decisions at multiple spatial scales and illustrate the relational character of two historical ‘compact city’ examples.

On the one hand, centrality can help us investigate the uneven power structures compact cities are embedded in and locate the profiteers of their production. On the other hand, the conceptualization of centrality as a critical resource is central to empowering residents vis-à-vis these uneven power structures and the socio–material relations in which they are embedded. The right to the city is primarily a right to centrality (Schmid, 2010: 188) and in this sense, just and socially sustainable compact cities cannot be conceived as spatially bounded containers, in which specific social problems such as displacement arise and need to be treated. Rather, they are fields of relations on multiple scales that are embedded into a deeply uneven urban fabric. Existing practices in planning that are aligned with such a container-like conception of the compact city need to be questioned by scholars, as well as the planners involved in these processes in the real world. Consequently, new concepts of planning and working for compact cities that challenge existing hegemonies must be developed and tested.