Places aren't made by government, they're shaped by enterprising, creative people

The places we love (and indeed the places we don't love but which are loved by others) are shaped by hundreds of influences. Most important, of course, it is shaped by what Kipling called "mere uncounted folk, of whose life and death is none report or lamentation". These are the men who built the houses, the carts and horses guided along tracks and by-ways that became our roads, the farmers, cattlemen and shepherds who set the fields and styled our landscapes. And amidst all these are the people who wanted it to look good, who did little things of beauty, planted gardens, erected memorials and raised churches. In our towns those people built little walls and fences, tended allotments, carved their love into features of homes and built the pavements, roads, sewers and bridges.

Our world is shaped by what we do not made by the actions of planners. Yet such people - planners, directors, councillors - persist in believing that places are, in some way, made by their actions: by the instructions of the benign state without which all would be untidy, unsafe, chaotic, crazed. Here, in a modern mash-up of this hubris is Local Government Association along with assorted plan fans:

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), Local Government Association (LGA) and Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) have launched Future Place: a joint, two-phase initiative which will unlock place-making potential at local level through quality in design, future thinking, and knowledge sharing.

The programme has been designed to promote best practice and the potential of innovative delivery, design and funding models, cross-sector collaborations capacity building, and knowledge sharing at a local level.

At the heart of this 'two-phase initiative' is the idea that places are made bu architects, planners, housing officers and town clerks - here is this delusion encapsulated:

...we invite local authorities to put in writing their overarching vision (emerging or finalised) for an area and how they are currently working across their programmes to deliver the wider ambitions of the local authority by creating great places

Here these grand organisations are asking for local councils to peer into the future's mists and craft a magical vision that "Future Place-Makers" can then deliver. We are reminded that planners, architects and government prefer the directed and ordered not the organic and creative. For all that such folk talk about Jane Jacobs or Saul Alinsky, planners and urban designers real love is Baron Haussman who destroyed thousands of homes to allow a straight road into Paris for the government's cannons and horsemen. For sure these days there's a nod to liberty and organic development through the canard of community consultation but governments with their planners and officials still believe they know best.

The problem is that places made by government - council estates, America's 'projects, the worst of France's banlieue and that hideous East European 'Stalinist baroque' - are failures because those planners, architects (like the dreadful Le Corbusier who wanted to knock down France's old towns and replace them with tower blocks) and government officials think they know better then real people what real people want. These are people who don't understand that things are where they are because that's where they are and that moving them somewhere else destroys them however lovingly you craft exciting designs.

The task of planners isn't to lead on place but rather to support the real shapers of places - entrepreneurs, artists, flaneurs, seekers for the new and different. Instead of drawing up visions filled with coloured arrows, creative quarters and anchor institutions, these future place makers should be more modest - present a space for the real creatives, the actual place shapers, to weave the magic once again. Government's job is not to make places but to help people who love where they live to shape those places.

...