My holiday reading: a work of startling prescience

August is a time to slow down and reflect. Lying on the beach or by a pool, in a garden or a park, transports you away from the hubbub of work and offers you the opportunity to think things through or to have flights of fancy. Equally, it can give you the chance to listen to that podcast or read that book you’ve long been meaning to.

Being wary of the busman’s holiday, I normally steer clear of architectural subject matter. But I may make an exception later this month when it comes to the late anarchist writer Colin Ward, author of the 1978 book The Child in the City. I was a child, or at least a baby, when this book was released so I’m keenly aware that it’s old.

But as AJ columnist Cristina Monteiro attests, it’s a work of startling prescience in advocating for children’s rights when it comes to how we design and plan our towns and cities. It’s somehow both depressing and hopeful that arguments such as these are still being made in 2024, most recently in Dinah Bornat’s Blueprints for Change feature published in the AJ in May.

The advantage of reading The Child in the City today, or indeed the other Ward book recommended by Monteiro, Talking to Architects, is our ability to judge them following a significant passage of time. Just like revisiting a building several decades after it was completed, one can finally assess the wisdom of the author in the round.

Just how well did they understand things? How well did they anticipate the future? How well did they understand the people their creation was intended for? Only the very best creations, of course, are handed the accolade of ‘prescient’ later down the line.

It’s a theme that also shines through former AJ editor Rory Olcayto’s eye-opening profile on the octogenarian architecture and social policy researcher Jane Darke. As Olcayto observes, her activist writings and lectures have flown under the radar, yet she has ‘quietly yet profoundly influenced the architecture and planning professions for decades’.

How telling that, of the six London council estates she studied in the 1970s, Darke’s favourite was the now widely-celebrated Dawson’s Heights, the brainchild of Kate Macintosh, winner of this year’s AJ100 Contribution to the Profession award.

I was lucky enough to accompany Jane and her husband Roy on their visit to a rainy Robin Hood Gardens for the photoshoot earlier in the month. I asked whether her insightful term ‘primary generator’ – how architects often conceive a basic aim or concept early on that underpins subsequent design development, like ‘Streets in the Sky’ – was meant as a criticism. It turned out it was not. Despite its quirkiness, the primary generator was in her eyes, a valid creative approach.

But how much better would all of this social housing have turned out if every architect had applied to their primary generator the same level of interest, rigour, and humanity shown by Darke in her work?

The August edition of the AJ is out now. Subscribers can read the digital edition here, or copies of the printed magazine can be purchased here. An AJ subscription is better value – click here to view our packages