Markets, ownership and the politics of place

I have spent the past couple of days at a Symposium on Place-making and Culture - two days that have been educational and eye-opening. And I say this both positively and negatively.

On the positive side there is a real recognition that places aren't manufactured - indeed that attempts to manufacture great places are often a failure. Linked to this is the concern that our planning system - a rigidly moderated collection of rules, regulations and guidance notes - acts to stifle the creativity and originality of community efforts to create place. Yet sadly, nobody present questioned either the need for a rule-bound planning system or suggested that the term "place-making intervention" is profoundly undemocratic.

Instead we had a species of naive Marxism - the "triple challenge of peak oil, climate change and financial collapse" explained as indicative of the "crisis of late capitalism". This latter is a term I hadn't heard expressed seriously since the early 1980s - perhaps indicating how the debate about economic recovery will play out. Academics from the social sciences and arts seem charmed by the pseudo-economics of the New Economics Foundation and its associated brand of cuddly Marxism. And central to this world view is the search for an "alternative definition of value" - I have heard in the past two days people advocate land nationalisation and the proposal for a 'social valuation of land'.

Now I'm happy that most of this will remain safely contained - mostly harmlessly - within social science departments of newer universities and in the wackier fringes of arts practice. But I am a little worried that no-one is prepared to make the case for private ownership and the free market. Presenters and contributors all started from the view point that there is a "paradigm shift" away from free markets (a statement I find almost entirely without meaning yet glibly accepted by these modern day pseudo-Marxists).

Great places are great places because of the accumulated actions of individuals who 'intervene' in that place - by being traders or customer of traders, by commissioning architects and designers, by being those so commissioned, by renting an office there, by walking round admiring the buzz, by painting a wall, by busking on the corner...by a myriad of private actions taken without reference to public authorities and often, in truth, performed in the teeth of opposition by those public authorities that banter on so smugly about place-making.

And at the heart of all this is ownership - private ownership. People who own something tend to care for it, will police the actions of those who make use of it and seek most of the time to maintain and improve that something. Public space - by not being owned - is only cared for through the medium of those public authorities who want to control and direct our lives and activities. The authorities who don't like buskers, peddlers and street traders. The authorities who ban signs, who seek rents and taxes from private actors and who wish to stigmatise pleasure and enjoyment.

So step one in "making" great places is for governments and planners to shove out of the way. Step two is to promote the private ownership of space. And step three is to allow the market to do what it does best - create new activities, attract customers, create excitement and generate the value that makes for a great place.

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