2.7
The Geometry of Moving Bodies
The idea that towns and cities should be rebuilt along scientific lines, although widely held by British architects and planners during the mid twentieth century,1 was by no means universally supported. The following account explores the nature of a disagreement between Sheffield City Council’s technical officers in the 1940s. At its heart was a dispute about whether the positive sciences should underpin reconstruction efforts, or whether other ideas based on the subjective experience of space had validity. This dispute tells us much about the diverse ways in which movement is conceptualised in architecture and planning. Specifically, in the examples below, we will see how, in urban planning, movement through the city can be considered in terms of the pedestrian’s experience, but it can also be considered in terms of mathematics, particularly in terms of Newtonian mechanics and statistics.
The limitations of science
Better to understand the nature of the dispute between Sheffield’s planners, we might consider Edmund Husserl’s critique of the positive sciences. In his final (unfinished) book, The Crisis of European Sciences, which was written between 1934 and 1937 and published posthumously,2 Husserl attempted to show that the scientific attitude is a product of history, by charting the emergence of ideals of objectivity and rationalism in European philosophy.3 He admired the achievements of science, but was concerned that the world as described by the sciences does not reflect our actual experience. Galileo was identified by Husserl as the originator of the modern scientific approach to nature, and he wrote of ‘Galileo’s mathematization of nature’.4 Galileo’s innovation was to conceive of the world as ‘a mathematical manifold’,5 as if nature’s secrets were written in a mathematical code that could be deciphered through scientific investigation. Husserl observed that the ‘mathematization of nature’ had continued into modern times, so that ‘numerical magnitudes and general formulae’ became the centre of interest in all ‘natural scientific inquiry’.6 For Husserl, Galileo was ‘at once a discovering and a concealing genius’.7 On the one hand, Galileo discovered ‘mathematical nature’ and ‘the methodical idea’.8 On the other, this ‘mathematical nature’ can ‘be interpreted only in terms of the formulae’.9 Nature, as described through mathematical formulae, does not reflect our actual experience of the world.
Husserl distinguished between ‘morphological essences’, for which there can be exemplars (such as ‘cat’ or ‘government’) but which are not defined in mathematical terms, and ‘exact essences’, which are ideals that can be only approximated in reality and which are mathematical (such as straight lines and perfect circles).10 As exact essences are ideals, they are not given to perception but are conceived in the mind. For worldly phenomena to be made the subject of scientific enquiry, they must be described in ‘exact’ terms, that is, in terms of precise measurements or statistics. This necessarily requires some degree of translation from the morphological to the exact, in a process that Husserl called ‘idealisation’,11 and means that all aspects of the world that cannot be quantified are beyond the scope of scientific enquiry. Consequently, the world as described by modern science is unlike the world as experienced, in that it consists of idealised forms of reality, devoid of all morphological essences. However, as Husserl noted, all too often the descriptions of the world put forward by the sciences are purported to be ‘the true world’.12 The limitations of the scientific approach are unacknow -ledged, and the gap between the world as described by science and the world as experienced is forgotten. Husserl referred to this as: ‘the surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable – our everyday life-world’.13
Husserl wanted to counter this error by providing an account of the sciences that placed them in the broader context of everyday lived experience, in which the scientific viewpoint is incorporated as just one possibility among many. As will be demonstrated below, Husserl’s critique of the sciences helps us to understand the possible source of the dispute between Sheffield’s technical officers that started in 1942. Some of those involved in the dispute seemingly prioritised mathematical descriptions of the world over subjective experience.
Urban planning in Sheffield prior to 1942
The two planning schemes at the centre of the dispute between Sheffield’s planners had a complicated genesis.14 Sheffield started as a small market town, before industrial development caused it to expand rapidly from the eighteenth century. By the early twentieth century, the city centre consisted largely of densely populated housing intermingled with polluting workshops. Concerns that overcrowded and insanitary conditions would have an adverse effect on people’s health prompted a number of initiatives, including the appointment, in 1936, of Sheffield’s first planning officer, Clifford Craven.15 Among his first tasks was to draw up a planning scheme for the city centre to address the perceived need to separate housing from industry, and to ease traffic congestion, which was becoming a problem as car ownership increased.16 A draft version of this planning scheme was complete by September 1939,17 but the outbreak of the Second World War in the same month temporarily brought planning activities in the city to a halt.18 Craven was sent into the armed forces, and his staff were reassigned to Air Raid Precaution work, leaving only the chief assistant to handle any urgent work.19 Town planning only became a priority again following a severe enemy air raid on the city in December 1940, which caused extensive damage to Sheffield’s centre.20 Within weeks, the city council was inundated with applications for permission to rebuild,21 and it was decided that Craven was needed back in his post as planning officer on a full-time basis.22
The Diagonal Road Scheme
Although damage to Sheffield was not as severe as in parts of London, questions were raised within the city council as to whether the bombing had invalidated Craven’s planning scheme. The council looked to national government for guidance, and, in April 1941, the city was visited by the Ministry of Health’s chief town planning inspector, George Pepler. He asked the city council to consider whether the bombing had created the opportunity to create a better town, and reiterated the sentiments of Lord Reith, minister of works and buildings, to ‘plan boldly but not recklessly’.23 It soon became apparent that Craven was reluctant to make major changes to his planning scheme.24 The amended plan, submitted to the council in late 1941, featured only minor revisions, intended to take advantage of the bomb damage.25 It became difficult for Craven to maintain this position when, in March 1942, efforts to revise the scheme were formalised with the creation of a Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, as an offshoot of the city council’s town planning committee.26 Further pressure came later that year when, in the absence of any visionary new proposals from Craven, the city architect, William Davies, submitted his own proposal to the city council.27
Davies’s proposal, known as the Diagonal Road Scheme, envisaged a new boulevard cutting diagonally across the existing street grid, from the city’s main railway station to the Moorhead shopping district (Figure 2.7.1). A new, 350-foot diameter ‘circus’ was to mark the termination of the new road at the Moorhead. Another new road led from the Moorhead circus to the existing City Hall, aligned with the centre of City Hall’s classical façade. The scheme proposed new buildings, including law courts, a technical college and municipal offices. Essentially Beaux Arts in style, the Diagonal Road Scheme featured formal devices such as axial ordering, regularly shaped spaces and use of symmetry. The aim was to create a sequence of spaces to form ‘a dignified and direct approach, of easy gradient’, from the bus and railway stations to the city centre, thereby enhancing the pedestrian’s experience of moving through the city.28 The formal devices employed were intended to be appreciable by a person ‘on the ground’; Davies emphasised the importance of the vistas to be created, particularly that of the City Hall from the Moorhead circus.
Figure 2.7.1 The Diagonal Road Scheme
Source: Sheffield will look like this when re-planned, Sheffield Star, 20 October 1942, p. 3. © Sheffield City Council