As the car and city divorce, so it should look to the village
City and car are symbiotic expressions of our modern world, yet cities are losing their love for the car — ‘village-centric’ car design could break the ‘city-slicker’ car design hegemony
Cars and cities are historically entwined, coalescing as the single most visible manifestation of late industrial society, and are still today’s best shorthand design expression for the newest man-made stuff that isn’t pocket sized tech. But the city needs the car like a smoker needs a cigarette, mass transit and micro-mobility are enabling cities to walk towards car-free, and many urban societies are increasingly wanting this too. Today the car is mid-divorce with the city.
Meanwhile the lexicon of automotive design remains wedded to the impeccably machine-made, exquisitely hewn product — much like the vernacular of most contemporary city architecture. They share a lexicon of uninterrupted sheer surfaces, super-tight panel gaps, and large-scale graphical breaks to their monolithic forms, instead of the apertures or off-sets or small-scale reliefs of older buildings and car designs. Modern city-centre buildings are now near ubiquitously clad in glass tightly abutting a little concrete and metal, just as cars have their glass flush to adjacent metal fuselage with flush detail elements and aperture-less grilles. This modernist story of sleekness has arrived progressively since the dawn of the car and the modern city, and it is seductive — and there is nothing wrong with it either— but might there not now be a growing set of reasons for another story?
As the city divorces the car, as the sleek monolithic design idiom peaks, so too we see another underlying driver behind a shift in what a central car design narrative might be: Underneath the belly of the growth of the mega-city is the growth of its sprawling suburbia (or the ‘edge-city’) and of large towns — all places where people more often have off-street parking, and unbeatable forms of car ‘user-ship’. And beyond these large-scale conurbations are small towns and villages that are ever more viable with the tip towards location agnostic ‘knowledge working’ underpinned by technological advances of the last decade. These non-city places are places where cars are used differently and have different contexts to their uses: longer drives, on occasionally narrow roads, where multiple tasks may occur on one journey, and space for parking is not much of an issue; driven faster, owned for longer, invariably ‘part-of-the-family’, and more essential to their users. These reasons, and many more, might shape different types of car design and shifts in priorities for design functionality, and pose an opportunity for a ‘village-car’ to find a new aesthetic too. And beyond this slightly unrecognised non-city lifestyle, huge tracts of society are embracing the outdoors and countryside like never before — the aspiration for metropolis and ‘city’ that has been a mainstay for generations now has a growing counterpoint.
With rare exception, over a short distance, a view in a village will comprise a mash-up of many different natural and designed elements. Whilst standing in a city may afford a visually rich vista, it will be less diverse and with less if any of the natural environment that pervades our villages’ views. This rich, fragmented, mix of man-made and nature that is the headlines of a ‘village aesthetic’ might be reflected in a new form of car design that eschews the smooth glass and metal monoliths of today for newer polylithic design directions — directions that speak more than one language, that do not meld all elements into the whole, that enable multiple ‘islands’ within their wider frame of the car to have their own voice or message — car designs that speak more of village, and less of the city, and that might start a new story of car design.
And outside of the archetypal European village, there are many more people living in villages in regions that are still off-the-radar for most car companies. Whilst there are cities and mega-cities in China and India and Africa, the majority of people in these regions dwell in smaller communities that could have a very different relationship with the car, and in turn benefit from a very different type of car design and aesthetic.
The village-car for them may not be owned by an individual but instead by a local community. The village car for them would likely never be for commuting, but may form a vital connection to the closest hospital and school. The village car for them might be something each villager takes pride in looking after and leaving their mark on, and it might be that its most common day-to-day use is as a battery to iron out a lumpy electricity supply from a local grid at night time. The village car might be a means to decouple dependency on hand-me-down ICE powered tuk-tuks and taxis and mini-busses, and strand as a symbol of a community’s contemporary outlook. The village car could be many, many things that step far beyond the narrow band of today’s city-centric car design typologies and vernacular. And it might be the beginning of the next story of car design.