What goes up, must come down.

In a recent debate, Groundlines v Skylines, hosted by London-based land planning consultants. Lovejoy, 90 key industry members met to discuss the relationship between the City of London's skyline and its often forgotten groundlines. Despite being held at the top of Foster's 30 St Mary Axe, within one of the most prominent and spectacular vantage points in the city, the key question was as clear as the strictly privatized view was revealing; should our cities be designed from the top, down, or from the bottom, up? Chaired by Lovejoys' David Black-wood Murray, four witnesses made their cases:

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Planner: Peter Rees--City Corporation

With his back turned to Canary Wharf, Peter Rees welcomed delegates to cloud nine. His cloud nine, 150m above the City that he helped shape. As City Planning Officer for the Corporation of London since 1987, directing the Department of Planning & Transportation and supervising the preparation and approval of planning policies, Rees has had first hand experience negotiating with developers on many major City planning applications. Proud of what has been achieved, the City exodus he claimed has seen an about-turn. While historically people grew tired of the City, and went east--first to the soulless, charmless Canary Wharf, and then further afield, 'Bangalore, even Shanghai'--now the City is being revived. People want to move in, and with process industries fleeing--'let them go'--space is now being freed up to make room for a new form of creativity. Recalling the genesis of Lloyd's of London, which apparently emerged from the coffee-house culture of its day, Rees emphasized the need to make places where the exchange of ideas between people could once more become the force that drives the City, calling for the public realm to rise up, to retrofit the reclaimed residual spaces, allowing groundlines to produce new public places, served by overflow offices.

Developer: Bob de Barr--Land Securities

Bob de Barr's self-declared role in this debate was to bring the discussion back down to earth, and to remind us of the fundamental issues; shareholder returns and the need to respond to commercial demands. Responsible in part for several public developments, such as Birmingham's revamped Bull Ring (Outrage, AR October 2003) and Bristol's emerging city gateway project, de Barr's questions focused on how we could accurately measure success within the public realm: can good design ever actually create demand? How do you accurately quantify value and quality beyond simply measuring foot-fall and the money taken through tills? And once the ribbon is cut, who should pay for the ongoing management of these so-called public realm developments? Good design, he concluded could only create demand if integration and adjacencies combine to significantly raise investment appeal.

User: Jay Merrick--The Independent

As architectural correspondent for The Independent newspaper, Jay Merrick elected to speak on behalf of city users; those people who, with their feet firmly on the ground, want to know where they are. People who, when they are looking up to the sky through increasingly tall streets, want to feel that they belong. Not suggesting any specific approach to development, his concerns focused on understanding how architecture acts on people, and how they act on it. Do people really scrutinize their environment? Do the tens of thousands of people who walk across London Bridge every day appreciate their surroundings, or are they preoccupied with money, pensions, cars and holidays? Are they aware of how spaces create alienation? 'perhaps', he suggested, 'architecture doesn't matter'. Asking how should towers meet the ground, Merrick stated that towers and transport hubs are more than plugs and sockets. Is it any wonder that so many buildings fail to engage with the street when they are as hermetic at the base as they are in the sky?

Architect: Rafael Vinoly

Vinoly, unsurprisingly, was quick to talk about scale, stating graciously that the City didn't have any genuine skyscrapers. London, in comparison to America, and Vinoly's New York base, is a long way from having what Merrick referred to as Super-Towers. The concern should therefore be made more specific to the context. Towers, he explained, regardless of their height had to act as a trinity: as artistic objects to be contemplated, as urban mechanisms that successfully plug into their city context, and as self-contained systems that are sustainable and functional in themselves. Even the iconic Chrysler building had only two out of three, being he stated, practically unviable for the past 65 years. Vinoly's advice to the City would be therefore to invest in its infrastructure. If it was to ever realize its apparent ambition to become truly high-rise and high-density, it would need to think ahead, recalling the example set by New York's sewer system built, he said, 120 times larger than necessary.

Land security/sky security

In the frustratingly short following discussion that failed to mature into a discernible debate--it came as little surprise that the comments focused on the public realm as the critical issue. Leaving aside the many pertinent issues regarding icons and the skyline (such as Robert Tavernor's essay, AR April 2004), where the image of the city as a picturesque phenomenon is often held in abstract isolation, it is now time to consider how towers relate to the city's sustained evolution on the street. In today's city, a protected view through a hedge somewhere in Richmond Park hardly seems relevant to a tower's impact on its local neighbourhood. So, while clusters are resolving themselves around strategic view corridors, rather than necessarily being where they meaningfully relate to what's on the ground, are people in the city prepared to fight as hard as Richmond's Royal Parks posse to improve the quality of their public realm? Or is the right to roam through beautiful public places solely a parkland pastime?

As astutely noted by Rab Bennetts (Bennetts Associates), the city's rush to reach for the sky seems to reflect an emerging condition of urban insecurity, as building high minimizes developer's responsibility to the public realm. Echoing de Barrs' recognition of the difficulty to measure quality in the public realm, building towers offers a mechanism to develop big impact buildings with little integration with the dreaded public realm below. But, the inverse should actually be the case. Is there not a positive way for groundlines and skylines to work together? Towers are not just iconic objects--all shock and awe. Like any building, towers must be rooted in their locale, and the effort that goes into the consideration of the skyline should also be applied to the design and integration on the groundline. Could there be an urban crock of gold at the end of every tower? Instead of being brought in as cynical anchor schemes to sex-up rotten developments, towers should only be built in places where beacons are deserved. Places where people would like to be drawn to. Perhaps, even, from the distant Richmond Hill?