An (almost coherent) look at urban planning, conservatism and libertarianism

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A few days ago I wrote a piece about urban planning arguing that we are overplanned – we have lost the momentum of urban evolution replacing it instead with the utopian dreams of whichever planner or architect currently rules the roost. Despite the driving, dog-eat-dog libertarianism of Ayn Rand, I can think of no better example of the sort than Howard Roark – arrogant, unpleasant, all-knowing and dismissive of “lesser men”.

Despite this, I remain unconvinced by planning – or rather by the ideology of planning. And, as someone at heart a libertarian, I faced a degree of confusion about what may or may not be the proper role of planning. It pleased me therefore to find a real debate about planning from a conservative perspective – something other than the pale nimby-ism that typifies the debate in England. And moreover heads to the heart of what we might mean by conservatism – is it a tea party, a revivalist meeting or a return to the managed decline of “butskellism”?

Here is Andrew Sullivan:

"…ideology has infiltrated everything, it has saturated public and private, it has invaded even something sacred like religious faith, in which the mysteries of existence have been distilled in writing or even understanding the churches into a battle between “liberals” and “conservatives.”

People accuse me of pedantry or semantics in insisting that all of this – on the right and the left – is in fact a sign of the death of conservatism as a temperament or a politics, rather than its revival. But I have been arguing this for more than a decade. Conservatism, if it means anything, is a resistance to ideology and the world of ideas ideology represents, whether that ideology is a function of the left or the right."

Planning is important because it lies right at the centre of what distinguishes the ideological left and right. For sure there are confusions in this but it remains the case that the left view the use of state-directed, planned interventions as both essential and morally right. Sullivan looks back to a time when conservatism was not about ideology – there was no structure or form to what we believed. And we liked it that way. There was no great Gladstonian vision to what Tories believed, no better world that would come about from the righteous actions of government.

This is partly the Conservatism of Dizzy – raising the condition of the working man – and partly the scepticism of the Cecils. But at its core is the ideas of Burke and the small battalions – the idea that it is not great men who deliver change or make a better world but ordinary folk, in small places doing things together because they want to.

Above all what distinguishes the conservative from the libertarian is a sense of place. An idea of community. And the belief that things are worth keeping because they are there and we like them. Conservatives do not wander into the urban planning room with the “something must be done” slogan on their t-shirts. This idea – what can be called “Burkean” conservatism is what the ideologists of left and right are killing. And for some the consequences of planning are culpable in the murder of conservatism.

"…but one important and oft-overlooked one is this modern American landscape of sprawl and steel, of suburbs and hour-long commutes, of strip-malls and vast concrete scissures. The distance created by sprawl is both a material and spiritual one. Something is lost when we tear apart the natural, organic community and replace it with long lines of indistinct houses, well-groomed lawns, and endless stretches of highway. The very wrong sort of ‘individualism’ which so infests the modern American left and right is spawned from such distances."

Crucially, we believe that planners cannot know what constitutes a community and therefore cannot design that perfect community. For most of our places what’s needed isn’t grand design but a little tweaking. The equivalent of a coat of paint and some new wallpaper rather than a wholesale redecoration. What Andrew Sullivan was saying – and what I hope informs a little of what our choice will be in May – is that while planning has failed us (and will continue to fail us), what we must rediscover is how to let small places make their own choices unencumbered by central planning. And if those choices are mistaken, those communities know it was their choice that was wrong not the imposed solution of some politician planner or developer.

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