Jacques Tati

I was watching a Jacques Tati film last night, filmed in 1949 it was about a travelling show coming to a small French village.

Although there were a few cars and motorbikes featured, it was clear that in those days the roads belonged to far slower means of transportation. A cart could be held up by some ducks, or an old woman with a goat. The natural king of the road was the bicycle, speedy yet adaptable, with the cyclist able to chat and interact with those around him. The amount of livestock on the roads was surprising to a modern eye, as was the amount of property that was simply accessible or on the street.

One of my theories when I was studying prehistory was that once you got portable wealth, then you got more wars. Basically if all your neighbours had was a load of berries or was too heavy to carry, then there was not much point in trying to steal it. However once people started to herd animals, then the practicalities of stealing become much more straightforward.

So in the 1949 world without ready access to vehicles, there was little opportunity to get far enough from wherever you stole something for it to be practical.

Similarly because whenever you moved around you were still in the community, still able to speak to people or other travellers, people interacted more often and in a richer fashion.

Planners now talk about public space, but in the 1949 village most space was public in a way that relatively little space is now.

Public space only really makes sense when people are pedestrians.

However the irony is that although the bulk of our towns and cities are still laid out to the street-plan that was designed for when travel was predominantly not much quicker than walking pace, the transport routes have been taken over by vehicles that actually travel much faster and which do not allow any interaction with passers by. So modern vehicles have taken over roads that are just not set out for them.

Thinking about cars, what does a car want to do when it gets to a city, it wants to park. But roads go straight into cities, they don't respond to what motorists want to do.

If cities are designed for cars then they look like some American cities, huge spread out blocks that are too large to walk round, and sparse in detail in interest. Or like industrial estates with no pavements and nothing to see.

We have a model of urban design that is based on conflicting aims that we are not acknowledging. We need to step away from the motorist based view of planning to one that offers a richer array of options and ways of living.