Michael Moynihan: Why are we convinced that the city of the future has to be green?

The book, which is well worth your time, ranges over assumptions about the modern urban experience. Some of those assumptions don’t emerge unscathed, by the way.

“We’ve known since the mid-19th century that there’s something about the city that produces mental health problems,” he said.

“When people were put in what were then called lunatic asylums in America around that time it was found that if they grew up in cities or moved to cities that they were more likely to have those problems. That view’s held up for decades.

“I was interested in that subject — and in the fact that some people felt they knew what the solution to that problem was, the problem being that there wasn’t enough nature in the city, so you had to provide contact with nature. Walking in the park, going to the woods at the weekend, and so on.”

To me, that was interesting because it was obviously not true.

Isn’t it? Fitzgerald differentiated between solutions and benefits when it comes to the power of nature: “The relationship between nature and mental health is real.

“It’s not huge, the effects are nowhere near as big as they should be for the attention we pay to it, but they’re not nothing either.

“Lots of people get solace from nature, which is good. But you’re not going to solve an urban mental health crisis through trees and parks as opposed to tackling housing, inequality, and so on.”

Fitzgerald went on to field a natural follow-up question: how and why did we convince ourselves that the city of the future had to be green?

In interrogating the idea that there are certain physical spaces that are bad for us and certain spaces which are good, he found the symbolic associations with nature “worrying”. Why?

“A lot of us have a sense that there’s something about contemporary cities which is not working.

“For some people that means we need to think about transformation of the city, but for others, an increasing number maybe, there’s an idea of ‘maybe we were better off before the city ever existed’, there’s a romantic nostalgia for a premodern form of existence.

“My worry would be that what looks like a nostalgia for an older physical form — that we should live in medieval-style hamlets or Georgian-style houses — is also a nostalgia for an older form of social organisation, one that’s more hierarchical, more unequal.

“That’s what I think we’re trafficking in when it comes to nature, an older form of social organisation. 

"For the book I visited Poundbury, King Charles’ toy town — it’s a strange place, quite beautiful in many ways, but it also led me to think that we should examine what people like Charles think is natural in social organisation, which could give us a clue to what’s at stake.”

Interesting, because he then went backwards to look at possible future solutions.

“I think we’ve convinced ourselves that much of what was built in the 20th century was bad — that tower blocks are bad, for instance.

“I think we’ve forgotten an important fact about such buildings, that they lifted people out of the most dire living conditions."

But in Ireland — and Britain in particular — those spaces were deliberately neglected. 

"They were residualised, which means that what were supposed to be spaces for anyone became spaces for the poorest of the poor. 

"That was a problem first of all, then they were neglected on top of that, and then we were able to convince ourselves there was something inherently wrong with the tower — that it was problematic.

“What people really object to is the kind of social organisation which produces the tower: a society that isn’t interested in social housing or lifting people out of poverty, and the political ideology which is trafficked in, as though that were an architectural preference.

“I think we should revisit the 20th century and remind ourselves what modernists in that century thought they were doing.”

Not all of that is applicable now (as Fitzgerald pointed out: “They were able to carry out huge projects in the 20th century because of the war, and rebuilding was necessary”). But a clearer understanding of some of the supposed villains would help.

“In the book, I deal a lot with Le Corbusier, who was an oddball and maybe even a bit of a fascist, and who is associated now with towers, such as his plan to knock most of Paris to put in all these towers.

“But people forget that part of his plan was to create space at ground level. That was for greenery and vegetable patches and other social uses.

“Now the idea was mad, and probably bad, but it’s no harm to point out that what people in the 20th century were doing may not be what we now tell ourselves about that time, that it was about knocking everything and creating a Fritz Lang Metropolis-type city.

“It was much more mundane — and much more ecological — than that.”

What about the new towns idea? One has been proposed a few miles north of Cork city for a couple of decades, after all. Even those proposals can have an ideological colouring, however.

“Britain built new towns in the forties and fifties, and often did so in daring architectural styles, with masses of social housing lifting huge numbers of people out of terrible conditions into a whole new mode of urban life.

“It’s interesting that Keir Starmer recently said he wanted more new towns but wanted them built in a Georgian style — which to me is a dog-whistle suggesting they won’t be like those towns built in the forties and fifties, but something that’s much more middle class instead.”

And the future? Fitzgerald went both micro and macro. 

“Environmental neuroscience allows for brain images to be taken as people interact with space. 

"That will give us a clue about how physical forms affect us, not just in terms of mental health but biologically.

“It’s early days for that science but it’s real and it’s here. You can see some of it in office design and the preference for natural material and light and so on, so it’s affecting people’s lives.

“On a broader scale ... in Ireland we’ve done big bold things here — Tallaght, for instance — but there have also been ideological preferences.

“One of those preferences is that the market will provide, basically, but the market is not going to provide what’s necessary for the next few decades.”

We can see the proof of that around us every day. Will we see it in the city of the future?

• The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow by Des Fitzgerald is available now