Contrasts in urban redevelopment: Catastrophic and gradualistic approaches Author(s): Peter J. LARKHAM Source: Urbani Izziv, No. 16/17, PRENOVA (oktober 1991 / October 1991), pp. 76-83 Published by: Urbanistični inštitut Republike Slovenije Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44180577 Accessed: 11-10-2018 08:40 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms This article is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Urbanistični inštitut Republike Slovenije is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Urbani Izziv This content downloaded from 194.249.154.2 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 08:40:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms št. 16, 17/1991 Peter J. LARKHAM Contrasts in urban redevelopment: Catastrophic and gradualistic approaches Introduction The aim of this paper is to set con- sideration of the processes and forms of urban redevelopment in a wider historical and morphological context rather than to present another detailed case study of urban redevelopment of which many now exist In particular, an answer is sought to the question of whether or not any constraints operate on the redevelopment process, or whether it may proceed by antecedent condi- tions of physical form. First what is the background to ur- ban renewal? The simple answer is that individual buildings, urban in- frastructures, and therefore entire urban quarters, age and decay. Bourne highlighted the idea that it is the age of the building stock, coupled with changes in function and eco- nomic influence trough time, that ead to change in the urban land- scape. 'The stock of buildings in a city represents an aging and declin- ing asset. Thus, not only is the present struc- ture increasingly unsuited for the demands placed upon it by the mar- ket, it is becoming physically less suited through age and abuse, as reflected in declining values and ra- tes of investment return (1). Most building fabric change is brought about, by obsolescence, an indirect function of ageing. Obsolescence is not a simple condition, and is caused by many factors. Five types of ob- solescence have been identified that may affect any building or area. Ille- se include structural, functional and economic - the most important ca- tegories - together with rental and community obsolescence (2). Con- sidering structural obsolescence, it is important to recognise that many modern buildings are usually desig- ned for short lifespans: houses for some 60 years, with shops and of- fices having slightly shorter de- signed lives. In Western economies, this is for financial, rather than stru- ctural, reasons. All buildings require constant investment to ensure ade- quate maintenance of a sound stru- cture and to enable to building to be fully used. As building age, their materials decay. If not repaired, this continued deterioration will bring the structure below tile performance levels acceptable by even marginal users, and the structure will con- tinue to decline until abandoned and demolished for renewal. Alternative- ly, when performance begins to dec- line below tolerable levels, the pro- perty will be demolished and the site immediately redeveloped (Figure 1). This concept of ageing and obsoles- cence underlies all urban renewal. In theory, the answer is that all physical change in urban areas should be constrained. Many coun- tries have legal restrictions that, at the simplest, zone acceptable land uses, and at the most complex, de- termine acceptable aesthetic criteria for new schemes. Such legal restric- tions have a lengthy history. In Bri- tain, there is the precedent of the development restrictions of the 1670s following the Great Fire of London: by no means the earliest restrictions, but the best codified. There were considerable restrictions on the speculative development of planned squares in the mayor Geor- gian urban estates; a code of Build- ing Regulations was introduced during the Victorian period, and the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act further constraints virtually all development in Britain today. A mo- re concrete theory, based on me- ticulous observations in numerous towns, was formulated by M.R.G. Conzen a German-born geographer Figure 1 : Structural obsolescence (adapted from P.Cowan : Studies in the growth, change and ageing of buildings, Transactions of the Bartlett Society, 1 (1963)). Renewal and theory Structural deterioration Major rebuilding Initial - petormance r I Acceptât»- 1 performance levels ' ' M tenance/repair ^ 1 ' 3 ? i'V.? ! ' ® < 1 ' O ^ ' v ^ X I N ^ O ¡ '> ü. ¡ X o W i ' ^ ; O I X i LU i " Q 1 Z 1 . TIME 76 This content downloaded from 194.249.154.2 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 08:40:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms URBANI IZZIV št: 16, 17/1991 who also trained as a town planner. He divided the townscape, for ana- lytical purposes, into town plan, building forms and land use. His subdivision of the town plan into streets and their arrangement into a street system, plots and their ag- gregation into street blocks, and buildings (or more precisely their blocks-plans) has become a stand- ard way of reducing the complexity of reality to more manageable pro- portions. The street system, plot pattern and building arrangement can be seen as a hierarchy with, for example, street systems delineating and containing plot patterns. The town plan con- tains, and forms a morphological 'frame' for, land and building use; which in turn determine the building fabric, The town plan is veiy conser- vative, resisting major change under most circumstances; building fabric is slightly less conservative. Thus, in their rather slow response to chang- ing functional requirements, Con- zen argues that these two features tend to reflect the patterns of past land ownership and capital invest- ment They therefore present a gre- ater range and quantity of "tradi- tional" (i.e.-pre- c.1850) forms, and contribute substantially to the his- toricity of townscape. Land use responds more easily to changing functional impulses, and its influ- ence on the historical townscape is, therefore, more negative (3). Al- though some land use requirements can be accommodated in adapted older buildings, changing land re- quirements often involve the consid- erable replacement of traditional buildings in the central business di- strict (CBD) by more modern build- ings and, during the twentieth century, provision of new vehicular accesses to, and car-parks in, the town centre. This concept of a morphological fra- me, composed primarily of streets and plot boundaries, being resistant to change and thus constraining the scale and form of urban redevelop- ment, must be examined closely. One major assumption of this con- cept stands out. This is the assump- tion of "gradualism": the idea that change proceeds slowly, and at a u iform pace. Ulis is, perhaps, un- derstandable given that much of Co zen's minutely-detailed field- work was undertaken during the 1 940s and 1 950s. The towns that he studied were small market towns, often of planned mediaeval origin, often having undergone relatively lit- tle change in the Victorian period, and exemplified by Ludlow. Only his work in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne departed from these small- town concerns, and virtually all field work was carried out before the lifting of wartime restrictions on building materials and the conse- quent post-war building boom. The concepts formulated under these conditions have come to dominate much of British urban morphology (4). The nature and amount of change Three decades of intensive urban renewal have passed in Britain since Conzen"s first studies, and a variety of other towns have received detailed examination. Sufficient information is available to allow the concept of the morphological frame, and its role in guiding redevelopment through several centuries, to be reassessed. Figure 2: Amount of change in main street of Solihull UK (from P. J. Larkhanx , Changing conservation areas in the English Midlands , op. cit.) 100% recycled paper 100% recikliran papir aus 100% Altpapier 77 This content downloaded from 194.249.154.2 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 08:40:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CSJËD št 16, 17/1991 First, how gradual is urban rede- velopment? In one case, during a timespan of only sixteen years , a large number of individual changes can be proposed and carried out, for example in the main street of Solihull, a small market town (Fig- ure 2). Many such changes are individually small and unexceptionable, but ne- vertheless they represent an insi- dious and inevitable accumulation of change that alters the character and appearance of any town. Yet, without exception, all of the pro- posed changes in this example are constrained by the morphological frame. Most changes affect only one plot - in the Solihull case these are altered and truncated, but are ne- vertheless still recognisably medi- aeval burgages. Only one develop- ment proposed an amalgamation of plots, and part of this entailed reten- tion of the front facades of the major buildings. This example, in a small countiy town similar to Ludlow, shows the validity of the concept of the morphological frame under nor- mal circumstances, when redeve- lopment proposals are piecemeal, put forward by a wide variety of individual developers (5). This is the expected pattern of change in the English town, and it can be ex- trapolated back to the early twen- tieth century at least, and usually into the mid-nineteenth century when detailed building record begin. This relatively slow rate of change explains the survival into the mo- dern townscape of major elements dating from the mediaeval period or earlier. Redevelopment is not, however, al- ways piecemeal or gradualist The impetus for redevelopment is in- stead often catastrophic, and maybe facilitated by a veritable catastrophe, such as the Great Fire of London in 1666. In this case, the complete de- struction of the city centre provided the opportunity to build anew, solv- ing two major problems of the old city. These were first the squalid living conditions in the old, over- hanging, timber - framed houses, having inadequate drainage and wa- ter supply; and secondly the inade- quacy of the street network, in both wid tli (because of mediaeval and la- ter encroachments) and surface, to cope with the increasing amount of trafile. Ideas were in hand before the Fire to assist in solving these pro- blems, but any measures would have taken many years to carry out, and would have been prohibitively expensive during a period of war. The Fire offered the opportunity for complete replanning. Christopher Wern produced probably the best- known plan. The scale of his proposed changes is immediately apparent: the plan is constrained only by the extent of the area of destruction, the location of the waterfront and the need for the new street network to need for the new street network to meet existing streets. Activity among the would-be planners was great, with several competing comprehensive renewal schemes proposed (6). Yet there was much resistance to t iis scale of change. Property owners did resist changes to their property boundaries, as delineated by a post-Fire survey; many simply wished to build anew. None of the many Utopian schemes were adop- ted. They were not, as had been thought, killed by "the obsUnate averseness of a great part of the citizens to alter their old properties, and to recede from building their houses again on their old founda- tions..." (7); this scale of scheme was simply seen as impractical. Instead, development followed very similar street lines to those existing prior to the Fire, although some improve- ments were made: churches were rebuilt in situ, and intangible boun- daries such as parishes remained. The success of the post-Fire period was in delimiting the sizes of houses, and insisting on standards of ma- terials, construction, lighting and space. By these means, overhanging timbered houses were replaced by uniform brick frontages. This is an example of the destrucüon of a mor- phological frame, but its virtual re- construction along old lines. Urban fires, some large-scale and cata- strophic, were common prior to the nineteenth century, and these fre- quency and scale of devastation pro- duced a variety of consequences for urban form (8). The reconstruction of Paris in the nineteenth century, under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann, is a con- trasting example of the success of the catastrophic change. Again, as in London, some efforts were made to ameliorate conditions before the period of catastrophic change. A Royal Edict of 1783, for example, established minimum widths for new streets and heights for new buil- dings. Such piecemeal efforts were unsuccessful. Under the Imperial plan, grandiose new boulevards, parks and gardens were carved through the pre-existing urban structure, fronted by new buildings, both civic and private, in a uniform monumental Second Empire style (9). The morphological frame of streets and plots was largely ignored. Zola evokes the image of Hauss- mann's "wounding slashes through the veins of a living city, wounds that spurt gold and give sustenance to a hundred thousand navvies and bricklayers" (10). This scale of chan- ge was made possible not by dis- aster, but by a style of government sufficiently powerful and autocratic both to conceive and carry out work on such a scale; and finding in Haussmann one able to do so through the slipperiest of financial means. Examples of nineteenth - century renewal in Britain In Britain, the mid- to late-nine- teenth centuiy was a period of in- creasing concern for public health, focused on the squalid labourers' slums remaining in what were now inner urban areas, following the ra- pid utward expansion of the In- dustrial Revolution. The Artisans Dwellings Act of 1985, an extension to earlier legislation, provided the impetus for many large-scale chan- ges. It added to slum clearance pro- visio s the power for local au- thorities to purchase, property com- pulsorily, to pay compensation to landowners, and to widen a clearan- ce area to enable co-ordinated re- building schemes to take place. However, since the Act was only per- missive, rather than compelling ac- tion, the incentive to demolish and leave a site vacant was strong. "The 78 This content downloaded from 194.249.154.2 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 08:40:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms URBANI izzrv C^aKT) št. 16, 17/1991 chief effect of lhe Act was to channel substantial compensation payments into the pockets of slum landlords, towards whom all such legislation seems to have been heavi- ly biased" (11). Substantial urban redevelopments did, however, occur under the provision of this Act In Wolverhampton, for example, numerous old timber- framed slum dwellings existed in the town centre. The social and environmental condi- tions were extremely poor. Hie 1 877 scheme proposed the clearance and renewal of 846 properties, which in- cluded 632 occupied houses of which 408 were old and in poor condition, while 54 were ruined and unfit for habitation. Although size- able areas of the slums were cleared, the existing narrow and winding streets were substantially straigh- tened and widened, and new build- ings constructed to front them, the housing situation was made consid- erable worse as many more houses were demolished than were rebuilt (12). Figures 3 and 4 show Lichfield Street clearance area before and after redevelopment: the street wi- dening and straightening, new plot patterns, and the creation of entirely new streets are clearly visible. In morphological terms, the pre-exist- ing plot pattern was entirely des- troyed and the street system was considerably altered, although the basic line of the Mediaeval street remained; now a major route to- wards the railway station. In Birmingham, Joseph Chamber- lain used to provisions of the Act to schedule a redevelopment area of 93 acres in the vicinity of Lichfield Street: an area "of narrow streets, houses without back doors or win- dows, confined yards, the impos- sibility, in many instances, of pro- viding sufficient privy accommoda- tion; houses and shopping so di- lapidated as to be in imminent danger of falling, and incapable of proper repair" (13). The cost to the City Council of the land purchase totalled nearly L2.4 million. A new street was cut through the existing framework of streets and plots, lined with gran- diose commercial and civic buildings in high Victorian style. The result of this major scheme was Corporation Street, "a great street, as broad as a Parisian boulevard from New Street to the Aston Road" (14), not artisan housing, as the 1875 Act intended. This is common to the schemes in both Birmingham and Wolverhamp- ton. Urban change during the twentieth century The gradualist process of piecemeal change continued in British towns during the early twentieth centiiry. Development was constrained both by the First World War and the De- pression of the 1920s and early 1930s. Few major schemes were be- gun, although some councils began Figure 3: Lichfield Street area, Wolverhampton, before renewal in the 1870s. Figure 1: Lichfield Street area, Wolverhampton, after renewal. 100% recycled paper 100% recikliran papir aus 100% Altpapier 79 This content downloaded from 194.249.154.2 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 08:40:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Št. 16, 17/1991 street- widening schemes, resulting in new buildings being constructed along the widened streets. Queen Street, Wolverhampton, was wi- dened in the late 1920s, resulting in a new block of similarly-styled shops and a department store; street wi- dening in Northampton produced similar new rows of shops (15). How- ever, in most cases the earlier plot boundaries appear to have been re- used, the plots merely being trun- cated at the front by the road-wi- dening, rather than, as is more usual, being truncated at the rear. Such developments were evidently constrained by the morphological frame; it would also seem likely that many property owners retained their plots fronting such streets, and me- rely redeveloped in situ. Although a larger scale of develop- ment was evident during the in- creased prosperity of the mid- to late- 1930s, all such activity was cur- tailed by the Second World War. When the wartime restrictions on building material availability were lilted in the mid-1950s, it became apparent the urban redevelopments were occurring on a much larger scale. Town centres. Whitehand em- phasises that, for the town centres of Northampton and Watford in the later 1930s and from the 1950s on- wards, many more developments were of larger scale, wider than the traditional mediaeval burgage width of some 10 meters, and thus involv- ing plot amalgamations (16). The first impetus for such a scale of change was catastrophic, namely the considerable amount of wartime bomb damage. Great areas of town centres were either destroyed, or so badly damaged as to require com- plete reconstruction. In some cases, as eventually occurred during the rebuilding of London in the 1670s, old street lines were destroyed, albeit with some widening and straigten- ing. Thomas Sharp, a prominent town planner, produced plans for the rebuilding of Exeter - badly da- maged in the "Baedeker Raids" - and Oxford. His language is overtly sym- pathetic to the context of the historic city, although his plans are less so. He was, however, consciously at- tempting to integrate the new twen- tieth-century phenomenon, the mo- tor vehicle, into historic towns. His perspective sketches clearly show rows of bland, flat- roofed buildings of evident Modern influence lining his new and rebuilt streets (17). In many cases, however, redevelop- ment took the form of 'precincts', where trafile was segregated from service vehicles and pedestrians. So- me grandiose schemes were propo- sed, such as for Bristol, where roofed structures" would separate all traffic below from all pedestrian activity above (18). Appropriate materials and constili ction techniques now existed to make such schemes tech- nically feasible. Those that were ac- tually built tended to be less extra- vagant, but no less extensive, such as the new Covenüy town centre. At the same time, extensive renewal projects proposed the demolition of large areas of slum housing - often nineteenth-century terraces - and their replacement with modem housing, lliis housing, often as high-rise blocks, had greater pro- vision of amenities but, over the last thirty years, has been showii to be largely of poor construction; some blocks have already been demoli- shed. Hie second major impetus for chan- ge in inter- and post-war Britain was the rise of the highway engineer. The importance of highway improve- ments as an incentive for large-scale urban change has already been me- ntioned, with the example of London in the 1660s. Hie increasing popu- larity of the private car was quickly leading to much congestion in town centres and, again as in pre- Fire London, streets were inadequate, and parking facilities scarcely ex- isted. These problems could be sol- ved by the construction of ling roads, tightly drawn around town centres, to divert through traffic. Ex- tensive multi-storey car parks also became a feature of most town- centre retail redevelopments. At this Figure 5: Analysis of post-war change in part of Birmingham city centre. 80 This content downloaded from 194.249.154.2 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 08:40:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms URBANI IZZIV C££]Ē3D št. 16, 17/1991 linie, the senior officials responsible for planning in many lidian areas were not trained town planners: many were engineers, and a consid- erable number were highway engi- neers. The influence of Herbert Manzoni on central Birmingham is typical in all but scale. He planned a high-speed network of radial roads, linked by three ring roads. "One of the advantages of this system was that in inner districts, road con- struction would help to demolish the slums... By the later 1930s some 8,000 slum houses had already been demolished as a programme existed for the removal of most of the re- minder (some 32,000 dwellings) by the later 1940s" (19). The new ring roads smashed through the existing framework of streets and plots with little though for any consideration beyond the immediate alleviation of traffic congestion. These schemes were extensive in both space and time, with Wolverhampton's ring road, for example, taking over twen- ty years to complete. An analysis of part of central Birmingham in the post-war period reveals the spatial impact of the new Inner Ring Road and the plot redevelopments asso- ciated with it (Figure 5). This leads to some consideration of who is undertaking such changes. A general, trend during the present century, observed in a number of towns, has been the replacement of individuals and local linns as de- velopers and designers by linns from outside the town in question. Figure 6 demonstrates this trend for five town centres, ranging from free- standing county towns such as Nor- thampton to London dormitoiy towns such as Wembley. Many of these external agents háve been the major retail and service chains building for their own occupation, although the insurance companies and property companies building speculatively are also of consider- able importance, particularly in the post-war period. Parallel with these trends is the effect of the growing concentration of development acti- vity nationally in the hands of major firms operating nationwide. These trends have a number of im- plications. It is argued that, up to the inter- war period, building owners, architects and even builders were mostly either resident locally or had a significant interest, such as a branch of their business, in a town where they proposed a new building. The environments in which they took decisions had much in common with those of the residents and users of the services of those towns (20). Arguably, they had a greater sym- pathy for local stylistic idiom, the "spirit of place", and this is reflected in the size and style of their build- ings. By the 1960s, however, many property owners were absentee. Ar- chitects had little knowledge of the towns in which they were commis- sioned to design buildings, and even builders tended to be from outside the town. These changes coincided with the increased use of powers of c mpulsory purchase by local au- thorities, who seemed in some cases to be acting as land assembly agents for speculative developers. Ill ey also . : # LOCAL i.i : INITIATORS • • • • • ••••••• •• • • • • •• ••• •• • • •• • • ••• •• •• •••••• • ••• •• • • • ••• •• •• •••••• • • • • •••••••• •• •••• • (« ••••••••• ••••••• I <>>• ••••••••••••••••••••• HI •• I .j EXTERNAL : : i: . . . : initiators • • ••••• • • • • • ••• •• ••• • • • •• • • ••• •• ••• • • •• •• • • ••• •••• •••••• • •• •• • *••• • •••• •••• •••••••••*•••• • • •••• • • • •••• ••••• •••••••••••••• • •••••• • • • ••• * ••••• • • ••••••••••••••••••••• • ••••••• • « » ••••••••••••••• < : LOCAL : < i . : . ARCHITECTS •••• ••• • ••• • • • • • •• •••••• •••••• •• • • • •• •• •••••• • •••••• • • ••• If»«» : external : . :. . ARCHITECTS • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • ••••••• • • • • t ••• •• • •• • • •• •• • ••• ••• •• ••• • • •• • •• • • •••• •••• •••••••• •• •• • •• • • •• •••• •••• ••••••••••• ••••• •••• • •• • ••••• ••••• ••••••••••• ••••• •••••• #• •••••• ••••••• » ••••••+••••••»«•••••••••••••••• 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 Figure 6 : Changing agents of urban change : comparison of local and external origins in five town centres , 1920 - 1983 (P. J. Larkham and M. Freeman , A re-examinalion of reasons for using building styles , The Local Historian 18 (1988)). 100% recycled paper 100% recikliran papir aus 100% Atipapier 81 This content downloaded from 194.249.154.2 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 08:40:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms št. 16, 17/1991 coincided with the ascendancy of the Modern movement in architecture (or at least the debased International Style variant), with its rejection of historical styles and decoration, and vernacular forms. As an example, it has been shown that the 'instituti- onal patrons of architecture', prin- cipally property companies, insu- rance companies and pension funds, have adopted a particular style of development This is charac- terised by an emphasis on new on new buildings rather than old ones, which reinforces the move towards a more restricted range of uses in town centres; a desire for large projects rather than small ones, with a con- sequent decrease in the number of available routes through the area concerned; the repetition of stand- ard, adaptable building designs; an emphasis on tall, free-standing buildings; and a separation of build- ings from their street setting by zones of open space, often filled with planted barriers (21). In short, this style is Modern. Smaller developers have never required the economies of scale and other benefits that the Modern style gave to the large 'institutional' developers. To summarise the differences in perspectives of agents in the inter- and post-war periods, "it seems in- escapable that boardroom decisions taken in the metropolis (or regional centre) against a background Of na- tional-scale operations would pro- duce different results in the town-, cape from those taken by local in- dividuals with a field of vision ending abruptly at the edge of their town's sphere of influence" (22). Put crude- ly, local agents tend to redevelop at scales and styles in conformity with the morphological frame: it could be said that rarely do they have the financial resources for larger sche- mes. External agents are less sym- pathetic, their redevelopments are much more extensive, and they have more ready access to finance for property development During the past two decades there has been a slump in construction following the 1973 oil crisis, and the rise of the conversation ethic has been noticeable. Both have led to smaller- scale schemes. With the in- creasing prosperity of recent years, conservation, and its regard for urban history and the existing pat- tern of development has been over- taken by another boom of large-scale redevelopment proposals. In many cases, these schemes are part of the so-called 'third-wave' of innovation in retailing, and form part of the struggle to revitalise town centres to compete with the giant edge- out-of- tow shopping centres. The present proposals for Birmingham's Bull Ring are typical of this new wave of la ger-scale schemes. Here, much of the historical evidence for the me- diaeval town was destroyed in the immediate post-war period with the construction of the Ring Road, Bull Ring shopping centre, and coach tation. The remaining evident, al- though much altered, burgage linea- ments were swallowed by the Pavilions shopping centre, which opened in 1987. In the same year, the London and Edinburgh Trust acquired the lease of the Bull Ring area, and proposed a redevelopment scheme. One giant building would straddle the ring road, stretching from New Street to Moor Street rail- way stations. It would contain of- fices, large car-park, 174 shops and four ifiajor stores (23). Arguably, this has little impact upon the morpho- Figure 7 : Alternative schemefor redevelopment of Birmingham Bull Ring : proposed by Birmingham for People , 1 989. Reproduced by. permission. 82 This content downloaded from 194.249.154.2 on Thu, 11 Oct 2018 08:40:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms URBANI IZZIV št. 16, 17/1991 logical frame since, following the ex- tensive redevelopments of the 1950s and 1960s, nothing but the odd street alignment femains. The