How city planners ruined cities

Hi all,

I have exciting personal news: a book agent has offered to represent me. I’m waiting until the end of October for a few other agents to respond, but it does mean that at least one other human wants to help me get How Buskers Changed the World published.

Also, an old schoolfriend of mine is a developer, musician and music producer who’s thinking about building a streaming platform. His idea is to pay out orders of magnitude more than the current streaming platforms while also raising money for charity. I offered to send out an initial survey, to see whether musicians (and listeners) might be interested in such a thing:

Survey for musicians

Survey for listeners

A few weeks ago I went back to London for my aunt’s 80th birthday. The next day I went to Sheffield to attend a conference, which gave me a golden opportunity.

Rupert Engledow is our man in the UK who fulfils BuskPay orders. Despite the fact that we’ve been working together for years, Rupert and I had never actually met in person. So, I decided to stop off in York on my way to Sheffield, in order to terrify him into fulfilling orders on time (if you ever bought sign from us and it arrived late, it’s definitely, 100%, absolutely his fault and not mine).

Rupert and his band, Hyde Family Jam, were out “pitching” that morning — holding onto a good pitch for a few hours until there were enough people around to entertain. He’s a charismatic, somewhat wild-haired man, full of energy and obviously a showman. We chatted, ran to a music shop together to buy a replacement for a faulty XLR cable, and then I watched their show.

It was beautiful. The band were comprised of an accordionist, double-bassist, guitarist and Rupert on violin, performing a mix of popular tunes, including several girl power pop songs. That sounds like the kind of music some guys might choose to do ironically, but not these four. Every one of them wholeheartedly put their body and soul into each verse and chorus.

This created the impression (at least to me, and I assume for the audience around me as well) that we were watching passionate artists, there to touch our hearts, rather than just to entertain. The result, of course, was that they built a pretty good crowd, one that over the course of their four-song sets.

I looked around and did a little maths. During one set, lasting just 20 minutes, I counted 51 people taking photos/videos, not including me. And this is the backdrop they recorded:

Every single one of the photos and videos taken a Hyde Family Jam’s show would have “Make It York” and “Visit York” in the background. For the two hours that Hyde Family Jam busked on that pitch, the tourism office behind them was almost-empty. In front of the audience, hundreds of tourists who might share their recordings in their family WhatsApp group, or to their Instagram stories.

The city wasn’t just getting free publicity. I also witnessed 3 elderly people watching in wheelchairs and 2 kids with visible disabilities. This made me consider the limitations of my article on the value of a busker to a city. There, I’d focused on more obvious things like “tourism spend” and “cultural branding”. But there’s another area in which buskers provide a financial benefit, one that I completely missed.

Make it York—a “destination management organisation” that’s wholly owned by the City of York—awarded a number of ‘cultural wellbeing’ grants back in 2023. On their website, they make it clear that this isn’t a pure expense, and that there are real financial benefits for such a scheme:

Hyde Family Jam’s free art therapy sessions could potentially provide York with savings on healthcare costs. I checked in with Robbie Ho, a fantastic researcher from Hong Kong who’s done at least seven studies on street performance over the last few years, to ask him what other benefits buskers might have to their communities.

He noted that “if street art is a medicine, it takes effect only if people actually take it,” meaning that “genuine engagement” with the street show is necessary to fully impact an audience’s wellbeing. Those impacts, he said, could include:

That last one is perhaps busking’s most important feature, given the knock-on benefits of sociability. We’re living through an unprecedented time of loneliness and division, with all their accompanying social harms. Yes, this is a product of our digital ecosystems, but it’s also a product of the modern city.

To explain, I’m going to take you through a (very) short history of how cities are built and designed

For those of you who’ve not visited York before and have no idea what I’m talking about, I’d like to pull your attention to the right-most part of that photo above, where you can see people walking along a pedestrianised street. York has steadily increased the number of “footstreets” it has throughout York’s medieval city centre, as shown on this map:

On the train from London to York I happened to be reading the 1971 book Life Between Buildings, by the Danish architect Jan Gehl. His core idea was that quality of life in a city depends on what happens outside, and how city planning and building architecture is paramount for enabling (or preventing) human activities like walking, lingering, talking, observing and generally interacting.

In a chapter titled “Outdoor activities and architectural trends”, he argues that for centuries urbanism has been going in the wrong direction. From around 500-1500 AD cities were not “planned”, they were shaped by residents during the city-building processes that might take hundreds of years. These self-evolved cities provided what people valued most: walkability and the chance to congregate in small squares, something that’s still enjoyed by residents of Medieval towns today.

During the Renaissance, professional planners developed theories about how cities ought to be, no longer thinking of cities as a tool but as a chance to show off. Visual aspects became more important, as did considerations like defence, transportation, processions and grandiosity. Just look at the ridiculously unnatural layout of Palmanova, Italy, designed by the Renaissance architect Vincenzo Scamozzi in 1593:

That’s certainly an interesting shape from above, but Scamozzi’s vanity project was built 200 years before the first hot air balloon flight, and 400 years before the first drone camera.

Very little thought went into how people would actually use the town. Every street is 14 metres wide and they lead to a central piazza that’s 30,000 square meters — twice as large as the Piazza del Campo, in a city that’s 1/10th of the population. The square is certainly pretty to look at, but Jan makes the argument that it’s far too large to be useful as a meeting place.

The next important development in city planning came in the early 20th century, under the name “functionalism”, the idea that ‘form’ (design) should follow ‘function’ (utility). This sounds like a sensible idea: you should design cities and buildings to serve their practical use. For ideal dwellings, this meant light, sun, air, ventilation and access to green spaces. Who could argue with that?

However, functionalists ignored the fact that streets and squares had always been the places where people gathered and interacted. Instead, they planned residential areas surrounded by grass, with cars bringing inhabitants from basement garages at home, via main roads, directly to basement garages at offices at the other end.

My personal experience of this is the council houses across the street from where I grew up in London. They are surrounded by grass and trees, with large rocks that are big enough to sit on. And yet, that entire space is unused by anybody other than a handful of squirrels. It even remained empty during covid lockdowns. Not even kids use that space to play in: they all go to a nearby park.

Centuries of mismanagement, bad assumptions, egotism and abstract philosophy have led to a tragic reduction in opportunities for city dwellers to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, replaced by lifeless open spaces bisected by roads.

Cities can’t undo the last five hundred years. But, they can—and must—encourage togetherness, especially in an age of digital bubbles and polarisation. Increasingly, cities are getting the message that walkable city centres are a necessity, as they provide us with the excuse to gather and enjoy each others’ company.

Buskers give people that excuse. In other words, cities need buskers just as much as buskers need cities.

I’m sorry it’s been a while since I last wrote one of these emails! A mixture of travel, burnout and other work priorities. I also just discovered that my parents took me to see a counsellor when I was in my teens, who suggested my chronic disorganisation might be evidence of a deeper problem, which I’d completely forgotten.

We’ll be resuming normal service next week!

Nick