The future of cities: the AR's recent London conference on masterplanning and the character of cities provided much food for thought.

Ever since council planning officers decided to segue their occupation (once a second-string activity of architects) into the loftier and less taxing realm of policing local visual issues, architects have had a difficult time of it. Now some of these architects have started to retake the fortress by developing the role of masterplanner. Note that it is now one word, perhaps in a move to differentiate it from the activities of the above planning officials. Interestingly, of the 250 people who packed the RIBA Florence Hall in late February this year as few as perhaps a dozen were self-declared planning officers, the rest architects or developers. Interesting because the day, sponsored by EDAW and under the special aegis of the AR, was called Masterplanning and the European City.

AR editor Paul Finch, who chaired the day, had invited a distinguished and modestly controversial line-up. The heavies included Richard Reid who took Camillo Sitte's City Planning According to Artistic Principles as his text--a valuable counter to conventional propositions about the city according to the principles of bean counting. Meinhard von Gerkan, who has done a lot of work on European inner city brownfield sites such as railway yards, pondered the friendliness or otherwise of traffic and transportation, and EDAW Europe's Jason Prior spoke of the regeneration of Northern cities such as Manchester and Blackpool, and some of the issues behind the Olympic Games site on which he is currently working. That affable Dane, Jan Gehl said that masterplanning had to start with a view of what kind of life people wanted in a city and Sjoerd Soeters and Christoph Ingenhoven showed some of their recent city work. The big combatants were Stefan Behnisch and OMA's Reinier de Graaf against old PoMoistas Demitri Porphyrios and Leon Krier.

Krier had just read James Kunstler's The Long Emergency whose subtitle 'What's going to happen when we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?' explains what the book is about. Krier's exegesis was that a return to traditional modes was inevitable: 'It is not what I desire but what will happen'. This was a tad rhetorical because of course this was what Krier always advocates--it was just that the end of cheap energy would require architects to end their obsession with 'the excesses of excessive vertical sprawl'--which Krier illustrated with a cheap crack: an outline of the Gherkin fully erect and then with a limp top. He said, 'We go on claiming that the City [of London] needs more skyscrapers. It is hypocritical or stupid or ignorant.'

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Krier was in fine waspish form. The consequence of Kunstler's long emergency would be that 'we will go back to small cities and buildings made from the materials of the locality'. Stefan Behnisch, who had spoken eloquently on the specific topic of sustainability, professed himself bewildered because the quotidian reality is that, the big cities are becoming even bigger--especially in Asia. Returning attention to Europe, OMA's position was that the time of CIAM-style manifestos was long over. De Graaf said that masterplanning in the West was actually much to do with 'accommodating the city's decline'--something which was, he said 'kind of weird'. He worried about the sanitising of the public realm; the effective privatisation of some public spaces brought about by their redesign; the constant CCTV surveillance. He suggested 'in order to save the city we have to destroy the city'. Maybe here was an unexpected convergence with the Krier Porphyrios line.