THE STATION NOT THE AIRPORT.

A renaissance in rail travel promises to enhance the structure and life of the city, making yesterday's predictions that we should model the urban fabric on the airport look increasingly ridiculous and perversely anti-human.

In that ponderous, over-designed and environmentally destructive book, S, M, L, XL, Rem Koolhaas talks about the Generic City, which is liberated from the captivity of center, from the straitjacket of identity ... it is nothing but a reflection of present need and present ability. It is the city without history. It is big enough for everybody. It is easy, it does not need maintenance. If it gets too small it just expands. If it gets old it just self-destructs and renews. It is equally exciting -- or unexciting everywhere. It is "superficial" -- like a Hollywood studio lot, it can produce a new identity every Monday morning' [1].

Koolhaas's insouciant vision is rather cheering at first sight: it could be great fun (if rather unsettling) if the city was capable of changing its appearance and atmosphere overnight. Apart from anything else, flash architects like Koolhaas would get lots of work (no wonder that his tome has been so very popular with students).

But the Generic City is far from being as amusing, responsive, self-regenerating or cheap as Koolhaas says. As everyone knows, the horrendous slums of the apparently booming cities of the YUS and some parts of Asia, those of the decayed industrial areas of Europe, are not going to look different next Monday morning. The global economy many be responsible for the generic City (as indeed it is for Rem Koolhaas). But the new economy has not got the political organization, nor the will, nor the monetary resources to transform these places overnight (if at all). Koolhaas might argue that this doesn't matter because 'the Generic City is sedated ... This pervasive lack of urgency and insistance acts like a potent drug; it induces a hallucination of the normal. [2] Perhaps the poor can find just enough to dull the dreadfulness by using drugs, drinking or drooling over the electronic media. Equally, the culture of the Generic City and the global economy is indifferent to the future of the planet. While cities do not r egenerate with the spontaneity that Koolhaas suggests, they certainly spread, and as they do, they consume ever more natural resources. The process cannot go on at either a human or environmental level.

The huge and humanly destructive drain on resources implied by the global economy has been attacked by Vandana Shiva as a 'war against nature and the poor', and a mechanism for 'stealing livelihoods from the poor to feed the powerful' (notably the shareholders of global corporations). [3] Of course, architects, designers and planners cannot alter the world economic system. But they can help to mitigate its effects by example, and hope to change the climate of opinion which allows the unrestrained rule of the markets. More importantly, the uncorrected progress of the present dominant system will lead to collapse of the ecology as we know it. (Gaia will always adapt, and if human beings do not try to understand, they will simply be shrugged off as an irrelevant species, suitable only for slow and probably very painful extinction.)

Nowhere is though more desperately needed than in transport. Koolhaas, and many another, has drawn strong parallels between the amorphousness and lack of place in the modern city and the modern airport. "Is the contemporary city -- like the contemporary airport "all the same"? Is it possible to theorise this convergence? And if so, to what ultimate convergence is it aspiring ... what if we are witnessing a global liberalization movement "down with character"! What is left after identity is stripped? The Generic?'

While Koolhaas celebrates such tendencies with tenderness, bizarre syntax and almost masturbatory glee, any sensible person realizes that the exemplar of modern cities must be the railway station rather than the airport and the car park. We must stop devouring the earth's surface with such avidity; we must encourage means of travelling which are not so energy expensive as the aeroplane; we have to integrate transport and the city so that densities can be increased, land-take reduced, and natural resources conserved.

Nowadays, national travel in the most advanced countries like Germany, France and Scandinavia is often more convenient and quick by rail rather than air. A huge investment in infrastructure has been necessary, but results are clear in terms of both GDP per person and the quality of cities and countrysides.

Not only do railways help to produce decent environments, conserve resources and energy but their stations can be important elements of the city. There is a welcome renaissance in railway architecture. Even in the US, the country which is supposed to be least fond of rail travel, there are dramatic developments intended to return the station to its key role in the public realm: Grand Central in New York has been restored to its former glory (AR May 1999) and is now an extraordinarily busy and lively place, clean, luminous and sparkling. Plans for Penn station in the same city promise equally well (AR September 1999). In Europe, there is scarcely any great city which has not renewed or rebuilt its main stations. Many cities have also invested in new metro systems, ranging from the rail track for Hanover's Expo this summer (AR December 1999) to the extension to the Jubilee Line in London (p46). The latter promises to make great differences to the economic and public life of south and south-east London, areas cu riously previously distant from the rest of the capital, mentally if not physically. It also promises to help rejuvenate the urban fabric. Roland Paoletti, chief architects who have created a remarkable series of places which add to existing good areas and could form foci for renewal of run-down ones.

All this is very far from Koolhaas's Generic City with its decentred nature and instant changes of costume. Centres seem to be strengthening, not falling apart, and good public transport is one of the main agents in this consolidation. Nowadays, most people both fly and drive, but just as very few of us would regard the multi-storey car park as a paradigm for urban architecture, it seems ridiculous to choose airports as patterns for urban growth ... and rather old fashioned too, the Koolhaas book is five years old now, and seems so. Its crude and would-be trendy prescriptions have the flavour of yesterday's future at a time when society, architecture and planning are becoming more and more aware of human and ecological priorities.

(1.) Koolhaas, Rem and Bruce Mau, S.M.L.XL. Montacelli Press, New York, 1995, pp 1249-1250.

(2.) Idem.

(3,4.) Shiva Mandana, Reith Lecture delivered from New Delhion BBC Rarlio 1, 10 May 2000.

(5.) Opcit, p12-18.